How to Fix the US Presidential Election Process

In just 4 easy steps!

Are you as tired of the campaign bombardment as I am? I mean seriously, we've been dealing with this for almost two years now! I just want it to be safe to watch TV or turn on the radio again with out being assailed by negative campaign ads!

And to make matters worse, it's hard to get really excited about voting because with the two party, electoral college system it doesn't really feel like our individual votes actually count.

In an effort to open a conversation about how to improve the situation, I'd like to offer 4 things that I would do to fix our presidential election process here in the US if I were King of the World* (an office that would probably be appointed rather than elected).

1) Shorten the Campaign Season

The campaign season needs to be limited to a much shorter time span, like 6 months (the Canadians get it done in just 2 months!). So much time, energy and money is wasted during our long presidential campaign season. It only takes so long to get to know where a candidate stands of the issues, and with so much extra airtime to fill it almost always turn negative. It's become a complete media circus that only seems to achieve the result of riling up the radical ends and driving the moderate voters away from the process through sheer annoyance.

Having a shorter campaign season would force the candidates (and hopefully the media) to focus on why they are qualified instead of leaving them enough time to start making up ridiculous reasons why the other candidates are not qualified. I believe this would promote a more intelligent discussion, and help prevent the campaigns from turning sour.

2) Get Rid of the Electoral College System

The Electoral College system was put in place by the founding fathers to solve the problem of having a largely ignorant populace, and also partly because communication was slow and difficult back then making it hard to educate the populace on the candidates and the issues. Today we enjoy communication that's extremely cheap and bordering on almost too instantaneous, and while I won't say that there aren't still some pretty ignorant people around, for the most part the population is much better educated. The time has come to elect our presidents based on the popular vote like a true democracy. Electing people to elect the president for us isn't really a democracy anyhow, it's a republic.

3) Change to an Approval Voting System (This is the big one so hang on!)

The US currently uses the plurality voting system, which basically means that each person gets to vote for only one candidate per office in an election (not that it matters much since we also have the electoral college system for our presidential elections, see above). The plurality system sounds very nice and patriotic; "One Person, One Vote" and all that. But it also has some significant problems, the two biggest of which being that it strongly promotes the use of negative campaigning, and it's also very susceptible to letting a less popular candidate win. I'll explain...

When each person can only vote for one candidate it forces the candidates to fight for that one vote. It's very difficult to convince people that are already tending toward your opponent to switch their vote over to you, no matter how much positive spin you throw on yourself. But it's relatively easy to convince those people not to vote at all through the use of negative campaigning. Think about what percentage of political ads you see that are designed to make you not want to vote for an opposing candidate versus the number that are designed to make you want to vote for a candidate. Now imagine how that translates into the percentage of campaign dollars spent trying to get you to vote versus not vote. Pretty disheartening, huh? But they do it because it's very, very effective.

The way the plurality voting system can end up electing lesser popular candidates is through splitting the vote. This happens if you have two or more very popular, but also very similar, candidates plus at least one that's less popular. The vast majority of voters might prefer the two popular candidates, but if half of them votes for one and half of them votes for the other, neither candidate will get enough votes to beat the less popular candidate that has less divided supporters. An example of this can be seen in the most recent republican primary where both Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney were widely regarded to be more likely to win the Republican nomination than John McCain, but John McCain won out, partly because Huckabee and Romney split the "faith based" voters (among other reasons). This is why, for the presidential election especially, it's preferred to have only two main candidates, so that a split is less likely to happen. This has the effect of concentrating the vast majority of power into just two parties (and I doubt too many people would disagree that both the Republican and Democratic parties have far too much political power these days).

An approval voting system is a system where instead of having a ballot where it lists all the candidates and you only get to vote for one of them, you get to vote once each for every candidate that you feel is qualified for the job. The votes for each candidate are tallied up and the one with the most votes wins. While it is somewhat more likely that you could end up with a tie that would require a tie-braking election, the tie would always be between the most popular candidates.

The approval voting system also has several other neat side effects: It discourages negative campaigning (candidates want to convince you to also vote for them instead of not vote for someone else). The results would provide a more accurate picture of the political values held by the population (because they would be free to also vote for independent, reform, or even socialist candidates if they were so inclined). It better distributes political power (because there would then be room for more than just two parties). It encourages a more intelligent election dialog (because it allows for a spectrum of views to be discussed as valid options instead of boiling issues down to black-or-white, hot-button talking points). The simple design would be fairly easy to switch to (because even if a voter didn't understand that the method had changed and only voted for one candidate it would still count as a valid vote).

And the list of positive effects goes on from there. But it's unlikely that this system will ever be adopted because the parties in power prefer to keep their power, and the plurality system is easier to game.

4) Always Have a Paper Trail

I'm not against electronic voting systems. I think they have a lot of potential to make elections much more efficient. But electronic voting is too easy to cheat with, and there should always be a paper trail that can be followed manually if any funny business is suspected. The machine should print out two receipts; one that it gives to the voter and one that it keeps in a securedballot box. The one that goes into the ballot box should be reviewable by the voter before it gets dropped in.

The way to tell if there's been any cheating is fairly easy by looking at the exit polls; if the exit polls are off the election results by more than about 2% then there needs to be an investigation. But you can't do an investigation unless there is some sort of hard copy to refer back to.

Conclusion

So those are my ideas for election reform. Please let me know in the comments what your ideas for fixing the system are, I'm genuinely interested to know!

And please remember my name next time you vote for King of the World.

* I was happy keeping my mouth shut about this, but then I told Dustin and he said I had to blog about it. So this blogs for you, Dustin.