Not sure if I;ve posted the whole list to you before or not, but here ya go:
VOTE VOTING
Election integrity should be EASY...
- Condense voting into a single weekend-ish. Polls are open 24/7 Thurs morning at 0600 until Sat night at 2200. That gives everyone almost three full days to vote, weekdays and weekend, morning, day, and night. No excuse to not have time. (Possibly condense to Fri06 through Sat22, if above is too long.)
- Indelible purple ink. Everyone dips a finger/hand/nose in it when you get your ballot. People with a purple ink hand can’t vote. (Already did, duh!)
- Obviously, IDs are required. If a mostly ghetto place like India can do it for billions of people, we certainly can!
- No gimmicks like motor voter, same-day registration, provisional ballots, harvesting, etc. You vote on voting weekend, unless you qualify for either exemption below: [Possible other exceptions for elderly/medical issues? But then too easy to be abused by people that don’t truly need, or filled out by care workers instead. Hm. I think better to not have these exceptions, but open to arguments/methods otherwise. - here’s an idea: only those legally disabled (80% VA or higher / equivalent) are eligible for the med absentee.]
= Early/absentee voting is ONLY for military personnel and government civilians, who are assigned overseas. (CONUS mil / other Fed is required to give soldiers/employees time to vote.) Ballots are to be sent to these people (who can request it online/phone/etc) NLT one month prior to voting weekend. (Arriving to them at that time, not being sent!) Include automatic confirmation to the voter when the ballot is received (submitted). Auto-investigation if ballot is NOT received back at all. [Possibly change this, if an online voting method is reliably and securely developed, better than a month-early ballot.]
- Every single ballot has a unique number for the voter, tear-off receipt like raffle tickets. Every submitted ballot is available online (www.vote.gov, easy!) so you can check to see how your vote was counted in the official tally. Only you know/have your number, so there’s no outing of ‘who voted how’ info. This prevents mis-tabulations, votes being forgotten in a trunk of a car, etc etc. A high enough percentage of the populace will likely check, so faking any of this will be very difficult.
- Also, vote.gov shows complete totals for each city/county/precinct/etc, so anyone can see how many people voted in their area. [For now, metainfo saved on SD card on voting machine, uploaded later. Until we have a fully secure online-capable voting machine.]
- Every dead person is marked on the voter check-in list, and anyone attempting to vote as a dead person is held for psych eval for a minimum 72 hours (at least until voting is over) (should have a sheriff deputy at every location, State police if Sheriff’s office can’t handle em all at all hours).
- Voting is the location where your residence is. None of this bullcrap of letting a student town have students control the politics, when hardly any of them actually live there. Local places, however, can choose to allow non-resident voting for local stuff only (vacation home, summer home, rental home, etc owners do have a property interest in a place they may not domicile, stuff like that), but this is subject to very strict scrutiny.
- Ballots are only in the national language (English). There are extremely few cases of people who can legally vote who legitimately can’t speak English: naturalized citizen, over I think 65 doesn’t require English proficiency, but everyone else eligible to vote should be speaking fluent English. Requesting an interpreter requires proof of naturalization over such age.
- All total votes are reported from each precinct NLT 20min after polls close, ±5min. This prevents big cities from determining how many fake votes to add to the total when ‘needed’. Each polling station has Reps from the two biggest parties (or three/four if we ever get to that point) who have to sign the count. (Or, could be just a SoS employee, but I think better to have someone from opposing major parties.) (Note this is simply total number of votes cast, not a full tabulation of how the votes went, that can be accomplished within the current usual time standards)
- All voter rolls are fully dropped (archived) after each Pres election (say, a tenday after inauguration, to give States time for any downticket runoffs before purging, but can be extended in extreme recount circumstances). You have to re-register for next time, so this helps remove dead people and people who moved to a new voting district. Also somewhat eliminates the populace that’s ambivilant about voting and waits until the last minute. If you don’t care enough to register on time, you obviously don’t care enough to be worth an opinion in the vote.
- Registration closes two weeks before the first election day. EVERY registration is to be verified with at least one source of public info by the SoS office. Presentation of job-type identification at the time of registration is acceptable (A/B lists). .1%(?) minimum is audited each year to verify.
- All States are required to share voter info. This allows for people with vacation homes or other properties to vote in local elections affecting them (if such locality allows for it), but limits them to only primary residence for federal stuff. So really just the Pres, as States can individually determine if they allow CongressCritter voting by residents only or all property owners as well.
- And, of course, voting weekend is moved to the weekend after tax day. No-brainer. (And, tax year is shifted to match the fiscal year instead of calendar year. then voting actually lines up closely with tax time!) [THIS IS IFFY ACTUALLY. SEE TAX CHANGE SECTION]
RELATED:
- Primaries are relegated entirely to the parties, government is not allowed to be involved aside from potentially hosting vote locations (such as libraries, schools, rec centers, fire/police stations, etc).
- Parties decide how to hold their primaries, and if they’re smart, they’ll come up with a formula based on Govs’ and State Reps’ and CongressCritters’ party affiliations to determine who is the most Repub/Dem, and then time their primaries in descending order. No more of this stupid “Iowa is first” bullshit. And hey, maybe we’ll finally be able to get the damn corn out of our fuel tanks!
- It would be interesting to make that part of the primary process: once a week/month, each candidate is assigned a random issue of the day, and they have to do a five to ten minute explanation to old-time Americans (17/1800s) explaining both sides of it, and why they support which side. No help from aides or other staff, they have to show, themselves, that they can understand the issue and at least half-ass an explanation.
- Likewise, Pres debates are modified to mostly eliminate the moderator. Each candidate picks an equal number of topics/questions, then they discuss amongst themselves on each bit. Say, hour-long debate is three topics each, and nine-ten minutes per. Give 2-3min alternating discussion, or mostly free-talk. Moderator’s only job is to keep the debate civil.
- It would be awesome to limit voting to landowners/military only, but that’s pretty politically impossible.
Some of those would be a good start.