Election Methods

How should we choose our Commander-in-Chief, known to those of us outside the military as our President? I know a lot of people with a lot of ideas, so here we go.

Some people want to get rid of the electoral college in favor of a popular vote. That's lunacy, in my opinion. It is rare when the electoral votes do not favor the popular vote-- the numbers are meant to work that way. (Remember, the founders of this nation actually believed in integrity and knew some math, unlike our current crop of rich pricks and blood sucking lawyers.) The only times a problem can happen are when electoral districts have their populations out of whack. We don't need to replace the system, we need to re-work it for a society that moves faster than our census plus congress. Doing the census on a year right after a presidential election, rather than the year of one, would put the redistricting time in a better spot for preventing problems.

Some people I know have completely different voting schemes.

One friend of mine wants to let everyone vote in all parties' primaries. In other words, anyone can vote in the spring, and when they vote they select their choice for Democrat, for Republican, and for any other party that wants to be in the game. Top choice in all gets the convention delegates.

Another few people, including ProLPconserve here, have suggested versions where individual parties run more than one candidate, maybe their top two. That's a neat idea. My favorite way to go with it would be that the electors choose from among the top three, which in a two-party system would cause more imbalance between the congress and the administration. Hey, maybe we could make this a Republic after all!

I know at least one person who approves of a certain weighted voting scheme. In this method, the person chooses their first and second choice. The first gets two points, the second gets one point. The candidate with the most points wins. Who can guess what this person's worst subject in school was?

Johnny has an idea for a vote of no confidence. He explained it in an earlier comment--

Add a vote of "no confidence." This way people could make it clear that they actually want to vote for one candidate as opposed to against another. Also, we know if people actually like the third party candidate or just hate the other two. Additionally, if the vote of no confidence is greater than the other two candidates, then we have a new election without either candidate.

In a similar vein comes my personal favorite. I know one person who, to better reflect the way people actually make their choice, strongly supports that everyone gets to give their vote a sign, plus to vote for someone or minus to vote against someone. People could then vote either for a candidate or against a candidate, but not both. The only caveat is that the winner needs to get a positive number in the end. What if there is no positive number? For one thing, it would show how sad and sorry our ruling class is. Just to keep things moving, we could let the highest scorer into office with more limited powers for a half term (doing things like having congress select their cabinet and removing certain rights of the office). Other ideas bandied about at the bar have included rock-paper-scissors, light saber duels, skeet shootin', and Beirut.

So, what did I miss? Do you have any other ideas?