Necessary electoral reforms for the USA

The U.S. needs the following electoral reforms:

Unicameral legislatures (abolish the senates) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicameralism

Party-list proportional representation for legislative elections - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party-list_proportional_representation

Instant runoff voting for executive elections (mayor, governor, president) -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting

Election of the president solely by the popular vote (abolish the Electoral College).


That is all.

The Green party's platform actually includes all four of those: http://www.gp.org/issue/voting.pdf

Too bad it will never happen.

Unicameral legislatures (abolish the senates)
Or return the Senate to the politicking of State-elected representatives (by their legislatures; you know, no 17th amendment) so that we look more like a Republic again.  I never understood the point of having two houses directly elected by the same source, even if it is the citizens of the said state.

Instant runoff voting for executive elections
We'll talk about this after we work on the current implementations of voting fraud and ambiguity.  Forget hanging chads, imagine the nightmare that could occur when multiple votes for the same position come into play.

Election of the President solely by the popular vote (abolish the Electoral College).
I would merely rebalance the electoral college thus that it represented State votes for the federal Executive position and was somehow factored into the popular vote so as to remain competitive but not overbearing.  Tied back to restoring the Senate to its roots.

>>3

Faggot detected

Don't forget vote by mail! Currently done only in Washington and Oregon:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absentee_ballot#United_States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Early_voting_US_states.svg

I don't think voting is the issue right now... why don't you talk about gay rights instead?

I agree with the OP, but if I had to rank those reforms in order of most effectiveness, I would say it is:

1) proportional representation (party-list)
2) unicameralism
3) IRV
4) abolishing the Electoral College

reapealing the 17th would work better IMO than unicameralism, because unicameralism is a rubberstamp for the whims of the moment. 

not a good thing when the two dominant whims are:
1.  I wantz my welfarz an all kinds of other shit
2.  I payz too much in teh taxes.

Basicly we want to live off of national credit which is completely unsustainable.  By having the senate chosen indirectly, it seems that the Senate would be less prone to do stupid things just because they are popular. 

My other reform would be that anyone getting welfare loses thier vote until 6 months after they get off welfare.  That way, there's not so many people jumping up and down because they're welfare has new retrictions.

I agree with bicameral legislature.

People need opportunity for declaration of intent though government couldn't change easy.

Oops, "government couldn't be changed easy."

How about some national initiatives or referendums? The EU has them with their new Lisbon Treaty: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Citizens%27_Initiative

I agree OP.

;_;

>>11

No and double no.  That's simply going to make a bad situation worse.  We're already spending ourselves broke, why make it easier to do so?  Direct democracy has never worked -- that's why we're a republic. 

What we need are grownups in chrage who will have the guts to say no to a popular idea that also happens to be a really really bad idea.  Direct democracy prevents such a thing from happening.

>>14
Agreed.

>>1
The day the U.S. gets proportional representation will be the day they convert to metric.

>>14
Likewise we shouldn't restrict intelligent educated citizens from saying no to incompetent or amoral politicians, direct democracy is a way to do this and as a society becomes more conscious there should be a trend in this direction.

What we need is limited direct democracy which prevents abuse by ignorant trailer/ghetto trash while allowing the nation's business leaders and scientists to pitch in should they feel the need.

>>16
Soon then?

>>18
LOL

>>17

Maybe they should give people with an IQ over 110 two votes ... or prevent people scoring on an IQ test less than 90 from voting.  But the second one iz rasizt.

OP should just move to any country in the EU (except for the UK). Problem solved.

>>20

That sounds good, but maybe it should just be an amount of influence based on your intelligence, Id suggest something like your iq/100 cubed for exponential difference.

an iq of 130 would give 1.3x1.3x1.3 = 2.19
an iq of 80 would give 0.8x0.8x0.8 = 0.512

approx four times the influence for a difference in IQ like this.

>>22

I like it.  But maybe people on welfare shouldn't be voting either.

>>4
Why is >>3 a faggot? Because he has a better idea? The douchebags from the progressive era really fucked us over by passing the Seventeenth Amendment, you know. There's a very good reason why state legislatures chose Senators instead of citizens.

I "like" how the conversation turned Social Darwinian with little provocation.  Perhaps we should start counting certain groups of individuals as 3/5s of a person again? that worked so well the first time.

_{I mean no disrespect to those people who had to resign themselves to accepting the 3/5s compromise for sake of forming a country during the Continental Congress.}

>>25
I personally believe that the US should have did what the British Empire had done and bought all the slaves from the confederate states, it would have cost less and wouldn't result in such a bloody massacre that tore the nation apart for five years.

Though we still probably would have had a war anyway, as Lincoln was quite the Federalist and had no intention of the breakup of the Union whatsoever.

At least the Continental Congress at the same time put in the Constitution that importation of slaves from outside the country would be prohibited effective in 1808, so it was a step forward.

Proportional representation would be the biggest game changer.

[spoiler]indeed[spoiler/]

>>1
Everybody knows this. The question is how will you get it implemented?

>>29
By posting on 4chan of course.

>>30
I'd rather not. I'm happy here @ world4ch.

Would these reforms really change anything?

>>32
Hell yes.

>>32
Yes. They'd make things much worse, because then government would cater to the whims of the majority every time some flu virus scare was happening or a moral panic was going on.

I also agree with the other gentlemen on repealing the Seventeenth Amendment.

>>34
Seriously what is with you fucking faggots who think an unelected senate is better? The whole idea behind the senate is to give the smaller (in terms of population) states more say. If we had a unicameral legislature, the 5 most populous states could pass whatever the hell they wanted.

That's what the Senate is for: balancing the power between the big and small states. Wyoming (pop. 550,000) has 2 senators and so does California (pop. 37,000,000). That's the senate's purpose.

Having an elected senate at least gives accountability to the voters. You can have a senator like Obama or someone like John McFuckhead from Arizona, but at least the voters get to choose. As bad as the senate is, an unelected senate is even worse.

>>35
>If we had a unicameral legislature, the 5 most populous states could pass whatever the hell they wanted.

How is this wrong? If 80% of voters vote for something it should happen. It shouldn't matter if those voters all live in one state or even a small section of one state. Elections and voting is done according to population, not to land area. Fuck the senate.

>>35
Seriously what is with you fucking faggots who think an unelected senate is better?
What is with you faggots who think having an elected Senate is good? Who cater to the whims of the people that elected them (which is actually suppose to be the intention of the House, not the Senate), special interests, and whatnot.
The whole idea behind the senate is to give the smaller (in terms of population) states more say.
Exactly, however the Seventeen weakened that power by (wait for it), not having the Senators chosen by STATE legislators!
If we had a unicameral legislature, the 5 most populous states could pass whatever the hell they wanted.
Exactly why there was a compromise between the Virginia Plan and the New Jersey Plan, the latter which purposed a unicameral legislature, and if that passed instead, I'm sure we'd all be cursing William Patterson right now.
Having an elected senate at least gives accountability to the voters.
Having a popularly elected Senate has the government cater to the whims of short-term public scare bullshit like the latest flu nonsense or something like that. The House is suppose to be directly accountable to their voters, by taking away the ability of the individual state legislatures (who are even held more accountable to the voters in their states respectively) to appoint Senators, you just took away Senators being completely accountable to the states they're suppose to represent. Good job shooting the voter in the foot without them even realizing it.

Besides, why should I have a doucebag Senator from my state vote on some bullshit bill that'll benefit another from 1,000 miles away? Good luck trying to get a hold of him. At least in the pre-Seventeenth days I could have bitched at my state legislature to have him get his act together in the Senate, since he's directly accountable to them and thus me, via proxy.

Not to mention they don't have to campaign and ass kiss using millions of dollars of wasted money, which could be better spent toward something of real value. Plus, it's already bad enough that they're the red carpet crowd and completely disconnected from the common person, it'll probably give them less of a feeling that being a Senator is prestigious.

I also see it as another check of balance of power, as it's easy enough to corrupt the Senate and most of the House, I imagine it would take much more power and influence to do that fifty more times over to corrupt all the state legislatures.

>>35
Very well, then we'll swap rules for the House of Representatives and Senate, just because you're unhappy with it: the House is elected to by the state legislatures instead.

I am not arguing for it on a structure of "betterness" because you can't.  Politics can't make arguments in terms of "betterness" and even "equity" escapes its precision.  As soon as you start taking such abstract concepts such as that into account, you've already lost.  I make the argument for one of the perception of balance.  Democracy on its own doesn't work effectively; there are too many whimful voices and far too many demagogues.  A Republic on its own doesn't work effectively; the voice of the people does not remain as timely or as audible.  That's the reason they were assembled into a bicameral governing body in the first place, where one house of the Congress represented the people of the Union and the other the States of Union, meanwhile states can internally handle their own affairs.  In this way, the health and direction of the political geography and the demography visceral to the whole requires compromise between those who legislate and those who allow themselves to be legislated on three interconnected levels - the people to the states, the people to the federal, and the states to the federal.  There is discourse between all important factions.

When Senators and Congress(wo)men get up on a podium, who do they refer to as the target of their duty?  Their "constituents."  They're talking about the people.  Between the Congress(wo)man and the Senator of the same State, they mean the same people; but what about the State itself, it's own well-being independent of the people at times? its voice of decision in the government has been diluted.

>>36
You have failed United States politics completely, possibly forever.  We have no consolation prize for you but thank you for playing.
I'll assume somehow that you've never had a civics class and, therefore, never heard phrases "tyranny of the majority" and "tyranny of the minority?"

>>37
>>38
hurp derp

>>38
>"tyranny of the majority" and "tyranny of the minority?"

The judiciary branch of government (courts) are supposed to handle this, not the legislative.