Fixing a broken system

[unixronin]

For those who haven't seen it yet, this essay on reforming the US political system makes a hell of a lot of sense.

Some of the author's key points:

• Absolute term limits for ALL high elected offices -- eight years in the House, the Senate, and/or the Oval Office, combined, and term limits for political appointees as well.  It's public service; it shouldn't be a lifetime career.
• No more lesser of two evils -- put a binding "None of the above" on ALL ballot choices, including for the Presidency.  If "None of the above" gets more votes than any candidate, nobody is elected for that office, and there has to be a new election for it with all new candidates.
• Shorter election seasons -- You get 60 days to get your message across, instead of spending two years of your first term working on getting elected for the second.
• Shorter congressional sessions -- Congress should sit for only 60 days at a time, then go home, "because nobody's life, liberty or property is safe when Congress is in session."
• Representative Congressional pay -- the pay you get as Congressman, Senator or President is the median income for the constituency you represent.  You say you represent average Americans?  Learn to live like one.

Comments

[johnkzin.livejournal.com]

I'd also like to see the priority/preference based ballot (you don't vote for candidate X, you rank all of the candidates; at first your vote gets counted for your highest rank candidate ... if that candidate is the lowest then your vote gets re-cast for your 2nd favorite, and so on, until you've got 1 candidate with all of the votes; but it also means that special-topic candidates get a direct rating for how important their platform was to the voters, so that the winner knows what special platforms are actually important; it also means that voting for a 3rd party as your top pick isn't a throw-away vote ... just put your idealism vote at #1, and your practical vote at #2).

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yup, you won't hear any disagreement from me on that. "First past the post, winner takes all" is in most regards the worst of all possible voting systems. There are MANY good preference-based or ranking systems, and all of them are better than the current US system. Some of them are complex in terms of actual result determination, such as the Single Transferrable Vote system selected by Ireland and its multiple recounts ... but, hey, computers are HOW cheap these days?