What is needed, obviously and painfully, is a voters' bill of rights and the first item of such a bill HAS TO BE runoff elections or instant runoff elections for all public offices.
Nobody should ever fear to vote his first choice, at least on a first ballot, and nobody should ever hold any public office with less than 50% of the vote.
There should also be a None-Of-Above choice on all ballots for public office and if that choice ever wins, then the other candidates should be barred for life from holding any public office and the parties sponsoring them should be barred for at least ten years from sponsoring candidates for that particular office. The penalty for running dead wood for public offices should be severe.
Another item on such a voters' bill of rights should be something which would eliminate voting fraud for all time and if that means getting rid of the secret ballot or at least limiting it somehow or other, so be it, we're paying too high a price for it. Somehow or other it has to be possible to check up on votes when there are questions or evidence of fraud.
One last item on such a list would be a provision that when a president is impeached and removed, his VP goes out the door with him and the office is either vacant until the next election or an emergency election is held to fill the office for the remainder of the current term. Granted removing a president should be difficult but it should not be impossible and if we couldn't remove Slick, we'd not have been able to remove Hitler or Nero either.
What happened in 98/99 was that Trent Lott simply refused to hand the presidency over to Algor with a year to go on Slick's second term, for obvious reasons. The situation should not be possible.
But the most critical thing is runoff elections, for all public offices, everywhere. That would make it possible for a new party to rise up and replace one of the existing parties, should the existing party become disfunctional or antifunctional, as has been the case with the dems for the last 50 years.
I had to stop and think about all of that for a few minutes (I’m about ready to leave work) but those strong measures are exactly the kind of things we need to do to seize control of the government and put it back under the control of the people. Good ideas.