thoughts on election day (not about candidates)

[cellio]

Voting reforms I would like to see (unlikely as they may be):

1. No "vote straight party" options. The right to vote is important and was hard-won; it is not too much to require that you actually vote for candidates.

2. All voting is write-in. If you can't bother to learn, or write down, some approximation of the names of your chosen candidates, why are you voting for them? All reasonable permutations of spelling accepted (to be determined in advance for each candidate). Nice side bonus: it might reduce negative campaigning, which repeats the opposition candidate's name all over the place...

3. No handing out of campaign literature at the polls. Signs are fine (at distances specified by law), but no hand-outs that subvert #2 and create a waste problem.

The goal of all three: a more-informed electorate. When asked who you voted for you should be able to say something more specific than "the Democrat". It might take a little longer to vote and a little longer to count the results, but isn't it worth it?

And finally:

4. Ranked voting, so that people can vote for perceived dark horses without feeling they've implicitly voted for the greater evil among the front-runners. (You see this all the time -- "I'd like to vote for X, but the bad guy is ahead so I need to vote for the less-bad guy who could actually win instead". So other parties get few votes and the cycle continues.) There are merits to both the Worldcon-style "Australian ballot" (do Australians actually vote that way?), where you keep eliminating the lowest vote-getters until a majority emerges, and point tallies, where top position is worth N points, next on N-1, and so on, and most points wins. Either scheme is better than what we do now.

Now that would be an enpowered electorate!

Comments

[tangerinpenguin.livejournal.com]

Maybe it would be sufficient to remove parties from the ballot?

This is not an absolutely accurate description of Washington state ballots, but it echoes xiphias' experience: for most races, the candidates may (but are not required to) list a "party preference" but the state actively tries to avoid anything that smacks of treating the voters as members of a fixed party. Like, say, registering your party affiliation. This has a couple of immediate implications: in the prior major election, many Republican candidates listed their preferences as "GOP" or ducked the question altogether to avoid being associated with the Republican brand at a time when it was electoral poison.

The other implication is that party primaries collapse below the national level (where it can't be avoided - we don't get to tell Obama and McCain that we just don't do it that way). At the state and local level, we have "jungle primaries" where everyone gets tossed in the same pot, and the candidates with the two largest pluralities move on the the general election regardless of party. This gets us around the problem where the primary is the de facto election in places where one party dominates, but that also means that parties who don't make that filter are shut out of the debate during the general (which can be part of moving toward acceptance even when you lose in the short term) and the whole mechanism means it becomes significantly harder for the party machinery to curate "their own" nomination since candidates can list whatever they want.