This should be part and parcel of a Voters Bill of Rights which we desperately need. To me at least such a bill would look more or less as follows:
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.
There should 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.
A person should need to be a US citizen for 18 years before voting in a US election. It should not be possible for a rogue political party to rule our land by simply importing large voting blocks for itself.
There should also be some mechanism to prevent utterly unqualified people from holding high offices. Certainly a candidate for president or vice president, or for US Senator or member of the House of Representatives should need to obtain the same basic and simple secret level security clearance which anybody would need to be a guard at the gate of any military base in our land. That isn't asking for much but it would have spared us from the last two democrat presidents.
There are a few other things you'd want but that's the main gist of it. There is also a question as to the extent the people should be voting on issues directly since we now have the technology to allow that while the founding fathers did not. You could get some of these evil social issues settled once and for all and out of politics, and you could limit the scope for corruption and bribery by letting the people themselves settle at least some kinds of issues.
Do you know how much political trading rights you get when you catch the other guy in a really bad act. Why impeach him when you can choke him for political favors and get him to support your pork at taxpayer expense.
First, your "Voters Bill of Rights" is wildly unconstitutional. It presupposes Federal powers that government should never have. The more you lean on "higher authority" the more power is alienated from the people.
As to runoff elections, they change the dynamic away from the "hard choice" that actually gives conservatives a better chance of winning.
If NOTA wins the candidates are barred for life? That's just nuts. This is the kind of authoritarian idea that scares people about conservatism, and rightly so.
Now, as to eliminating the secret ballot, one need only consider what the Disclose Act is going to do to unions to understand what a psychotic idea that is in a time when a computer can check anyone's vote when considering a person for a job. So, despite my vain attempt to be polite here...
You are a dangerous nutcase. There are plenty of ways to eliminate voter fraud without going that far.
I'll actually go with you on removing the VP as well as the President, with the proviso that the VP stands in office until an election can be completed. A dangerous world requires an elected CIC in office at all times.
A person should need to be a US citizen for 18 years before voting in a US election.
This precludes a reason for people to want to become Americans. It is against everything this country stands for. Tossing the SCOTUS rulings throwing out local minimum residency requirements is sufficient. That allows enough variation that natural law competition among states and towns seeking growth and investment would be sufficient to mitigate their behavior.
As to your "mechanism to prevent utterly unqualified people from holding high offices," I'd like to see you try to come up with a list of qualifications that won't get you hung as a tyrant. Really, this set of ideas is so bad that I suggest you go back to reading the history of the Founding to understand why this country was constituted as it was. They are anti-American.
No, I don’t nor ever would support instant runoffs.
We need an official vote fraud remedy brainstorm thread. I run across so many great ideas, we need a place to paste them to as we find them.