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Friday, September 26, 2008

New Rules


I've got a silly little idea here in progress, or maybe not so silly; see what you think.


Instead of electing a person to office, we require that a candidate answer questions on record for today’s issues.


Come election time, you don’t vote for candidates, instead you are presented with the questions and the answers the candidates chose to make. You get to read the same questions and choose which of the answers you prefer. The candidate with the most answers reflecting your positions gets your vote. You get a printout telling you who you ended up voting for.


This is how it would work: at the local level, political activists, media, and even the candidates themselves create questions, and then the candidates HAVE TO respond to those questions each in kind, and only those questions.


No running off on a tangent to extricate him or herself from having to answer.


Kind of like a debate, but on paper. A record. There could be hundreds of questions to start. The final questions themselves that would end up on the ballot could be voted on as part of the primaries. Including “write-in” questions [subject of course to a minimum support level before it had to be addressed].


This would give the candidates a chance to judge what the electorate actually gave a shit about, and better prepare themselves to answer to them come election time.


Say...50 questions total. To make it easier to choose what questions the runner has to answer, we need some rules first. First, we create a rule that eliminates all “wedge” (50/50) questions because, since they split, they cancel each other out and are a waste of time to use as voting criteria. We’ll set the rule to eliminate any question received with an even split within 5%. Next we eliminate any question that 95% of the people agree on already since the candidate is already going to go that way anyway. Remember: we want questions that the politicians DON’T talk about, so we can get a feel for what they are going to do once they get in office.


So if the questions for the election were chosen by popular vote, screened as a minimum by the two rules above, imagine what would NOT end up on the final questionnaire:

  • Flag burning questions.
  • Gays in the military
  • Gay marriage
  • Abortion
  • Assisted Suicide
  • Global Terrorism
  • Personal Religious Affiliation
  • Crime (as in “Are you for or against crime?”) Politicians love this one; they’ll talk all day about being against crime. Why? Who’s ‘for’ crime?
  • Ad Nausem.


Every item the candidates like to waste time talking about – since poll analyzers know it won’t effect the outcome of the election – releases them from having to talk about issues that the voter might actually have an opinion on – and thus accidentally sink their own campaigns.

And this new rule: if it’s on either the 50/50 or the 95 list after the primary results are in, it would be verboten to discuss publicly thereafter during the campaign. A reporter could ask the candidate for his position on say, abortion, and the candidate would have to reply, “I’m sorry, that question has been stricken and I’m not allowed to address it at this time.” Before that they can yammer about it as much as they like, but after the primaries, the subjects they could discuss could not be on the banned subject list. That would leave real questions forced upon the candidates to answer to such as:

  • English as a required language for citizenship in the US.
  • Energy Policies
  • Pollution Plans
  • Parenting rights for fathers
  • Iraq
  • Taxpayer financed corporate bailouts
  • Higher education access
  • Universal health care
  • Availability of drug subscriptions from outside the US
  • Suspension of Habeas Corpus at U.S. facilities beyond the continental U.S.
  • Public sex education
  • Stem cell research grant money
  • Immigration
  • Marijuana sentencing laws
  • Et al.


This would actually work in the candidates favor because they would have a people’s referendum right in hand when they got in office. --Less guessing whether their votes were going to harm them in the next election. And…


It would work for the people too, because if an incumbent was on record regularly voting against the issues that got him in, then it would be easier for a challenger to publicly parade that record in the next election and get the incumbent voted OUT.


I know this idea is not perfect but hell, under this system, even I could get elected.


Whatduhyathink?