I was reading through this book today and thought it had some really interesting ideas about fixing the voting system to level the playing field during political elections. Check it out.

-----
Politics: Like everything else, our government has everything backwards and upside down. In a true democracy, the people are in charge, not the elected official. Elected leaders are public servants and should do the will of the public. That is not happening now. The so-called public servants spend much of their time and our money serving themselves, and or their party or support group.

To fix the system we have to make a few changes to the system.

We will remove the incentive to be corrupt. Outlawing campaign contributions and favors has been tried and does not work, so we have to create a political environment where more money does not help in anyway. We have to really level the playing field for everyone. Every state has different procedures and requirements to get on the ballot. This makes it time consuming and expensive to get into a national election. We change it to make it easy for anyone that wants to run for office to run for office.

Webpage: All candidates will have to have a website that is in a form like all the other candidates. It will be an equal and uniform presentation of the candidates. When an election is coming up, an e-mail is sent to everyone to notify them. You would then click on a link that shows you who the candidates are, and have links to their websites which will tell you all about them. You can ask them questions by just e-mailing them. Every site will have a message board, so people can debate the issues and their proposed plans for us.

Vote on the issues: All the websites will be identical to each other, so we can see in black and white where the candidates are on the issues, and compare apples with apples.

The way it is now, it is a popularity contest; people vote more for or against a candidate’s personality than where they stand on the issues.

Debates: We will use the websites to narrow the field down to just a few people, and then have televised debates. The public will compare the candidates through televised debates paid for by the government. The problem with the debates now is that the candidates are being allowed to avoid answering the questions, and this needs to be changed. If candidates do not answer the questions, are evasive, or make a statement, they are penalized, or kicked out of that debate.

Vote online: We will all be able to register and vote online. We will be given a security code when we register and/or use our social security number. People think that voting online could be tampered with easier than a ballot box at a fixed location. It is not true, anything can be fixed, especially ballots, because they have had hundreds of years to figure out how to do it and get away with it. The truth is, voting via the internet can be much more secure. Voting has to be made easier to get a true vote. An online voting method would be the easiest, and it could be made secure by allowing it all to be seen electronically as it happens. A lottery would pick three independent auditing companies from all the accounting firms in the US to check the system’s integrity before and after every election.
-----

Page 84, from the free book, The Present, at http://www.thetruthcontest.com

The section gets into more detail via the link provided. What do you think about these ideas?

___________________
...and in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.