A Plan to Renew the Promise of American Life, Plank 1
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Plank 1. Ensure ballot integrity
Specific Recommendations
1.1. To safeguard the sanctity of the ballot: 1) permit only citizens of the United States to vote in state, local, and federal elections, 2) require a valid form of identification for in-person voting and require all absentee and online ballots to be notarized or reliably verified, 3) require state and local governments to keep their voter lists current and cleaned up on a continuous basis and penalize those who fail to do so, and encourage states to join an interstate compact for sharing voter-registration information on an instantaneous, real-time basis, 4) prohibit unsolicited vote-by-mail schemes, 5) prohibit and punish ballot-harvesting and the fraudulent production and bundling of mail-in and absentee ballots, 6) prohibit the use of unmonitored drop-boxes, 7) prohibit election-day registration unless it is at least as fraud-proof as pre-election registration, and 8) prohibit private funding of elections.
1.2. To safeguard ballot secrecy, and to maximize voters’ confidence in election results, require the use of paper ballots in all cases, employing machines only for counting paper ballots. In all cases, permit voters to photograph or otherwise retain a copy of their completed ballot for future reference. To prevent ballot-stuffing, canvass and count all early and absentee votes prior to the start of election day voting. Canvass and count ballots in the presence of independent observers. Eschew machine and online voting, but in cases where such means are used, make the contents of each ballot non-anonymous and readily and permanently viewable by the public.
1.3. To ensure a reasonable simultaneity of voting, require all votes to be counted by the end of voting on election day, with no exceptions. Do not for any reason count any votes received after the close of election day voting. Restrict early-voting periods to no more than, say, the ten calendar days immediately prior to election day, with a mandatory pause of, say, three days prior to election day, to ensure that all early votes are counted before the start of election-day voting. To reduce gaming and coercion, do not allow ballots to be ‘corrected’ once validly cast.
1.4. To encourage voters to do their duty voluntarily, publish the fact of whether a voter has voted in a given election, in real time, as soon as he or she has completed the voting process. Do this without revealing how he or she voted except when the vote was cast using a machine with no paper record. Do not make voting mandatory. Offer a symbolic ‘none of the above’ option in all cases, so voters can register dissatisfaction with the question without preventing a decision.
1.5. To restore voter sovereignty and the benefits of healthy political-party competition: 1) abolish open primaries and such anti-partisan voting schemes as blanket, nonpartisan, and jungle primaries and top-X-number-of-candidates elections, 2) safeguard the right of parties to make their own rules for choosing nominees, 3) protect the right of parties to hold closed primaries (open only to declared party members) and to hold conventions or caucuses instead of primaries, and 4) allow only declared party members (as defined by the party, not the government) to vote on internal party matters. To make it easier for voters to send specific policy signals to the two major parties, make it reasonably easy for serious minor parties to secure a place on the ballot, and allow candidates to run on multiple party lines simultaneously (that is, allow ballot freedom or fusion voting, but do not use dual labeling). In doing these things, always strictly enforce the civil rights of all citizens.
1.6. To ensure that voters choose their representatives and not the reverse, take all reasonable steps to minimize the evils of political gerrymandering. For example, have truly independent nonpartisan commissions — chosen by lot — draw legislative district lines after each census, guided by the simple rule, ‘Districts shall consist of compact and contiguous territory, simple in shape and nearly equal in population, and where feasible without division of existing political units, such as counties, cities, towns, and villages.’ Do not stack such commissions for partisan or demographic ‘balance.’ Limit the role of judges in redistricting disputes to disallowing maps that do not conform to the above rule. Do not allow judges to initiate or revise a voting-district map.
1.7 To promote political tranquillity, reasonably encourage the partition and subdivision of states and counties, so there are more of them, taking care to keep such changes lawful and mutually consensual among the parties directly concerned.
1.8. To keep senators and representatives dependent on their constituents, reject proportional representation schemes at all levels. Stick with single-member geographic districts.
1.9. To bring representatives closer to the people, at the state and federal levels, reasonably maximize the number of districts in the more populous chamber and adjust their boundaries regularly to ensure ‘one person, one vote.’ At the federal level, do this by adopting the so-called Wyoming Rule, whereby no congressional district may be more populous than the least-populous state. (Implementing this rule today would bring the total number of U.S. House seats to around 575.) To ensure the two chambers of a legislature effectively check each other, maximize their size difference. Eschew unicameralism.
1.10. To prevent a few populous states and cities from dominating presidential elections, preserve the Electoral College and reject such misguided schemes as the so-called National Popular Vote Compact.
1.11. To make senators and representatives more productive, compensate them on a per diem rather than a salaried basis, paying them only for days actually worked, and permit them to vote remotely at, say, half-pay from a district office or their state’s capitol building. Prohibit proxy voting in Congress.
1.12. To encourage wiser deliberation in lawmaking, avoid plebiscites and end such ‘direct democracy’ reforms as initiative, referendum, and recall. Especially eschew ‘citizen-initiated’ constitutional amendments. Instead, leave the job of proposing state constitutional amendments, and all merely legislative, policy, and personnel questions, to the people’s elected representatives. To ensure a salutary stability in the law, require that state constitutional changes receive the assent of a supermajority of voters in a regularly scheduled general election (or alternatively, a simple majority in more than one successive election).
1.13. To diminish political corruption, abandon the hopeless goal of ‘getting money out of politics’ and instead dramatically shrink the size and scope of government, especially the federal government, and restore strict constitutional limits on government power — the only reforms that can even hope to actually reduce corruption and the influence of money-in-politics. Repeal all existing campaign-finance laws, except those prohibiting contributions by foreigners, and leave it primarily to states to regulate the conduct of election campaigns according to common sense, as the Founders intended.
1.14. Interfere in the states’ conduct of state and federal elections, via federal legislation, when clearly necessary to protect civil rights, safeguard ballot integrity, and preserve a republican form of government.
Comments
This first plank may strike the reader as boring. It is certainly a bit unfocused. It’s a catchall — admittedly not the most rousing way to open something as portentous as ‘a plan to save America.’ But I placed it first for a reason. Without ballot integrity, the rest of the plan is probably hopeless. We need to restore popular sovereignty, and that requires knowing the people’s will.
I also placed it first for a motivational reason. Enforcing strict ballot integrity encourages active citizenship, democratic participation. It gives citizens the confidence that their vote counts, that their political views and preferences matter.
The reader may notice this plank focuses on federal elections, and yet most of its recommendations are addressed to state governments. Why is that? Because under the federal constitution, States and Congress have a concurrent power to prescribe the times, places, and manner of holding federal elections and who may vote in them, subject to certain constitutional limits, but it is state governments who have the primary role, since they actually conduct the elections. So, out of necessity, I direct most of my recommendations to them.
I will probably win no fans with this statement, but I think we absolutely need to strengthen political parties. I know, who likes political parties? But we should like them. Political parties are a good thing — that is, when they’re allowed to be what they are, which is voluntary, private associations of citizens who band together to influence public policy for the better. Our system can’t really function without such associations. But to do their job, they must be self-governing. They must be privately run and, importantly, independent of the government. Hence the need to abolish ‘open’ primary elections and especially abominations like jungle primaries.
I’ll probably also win no fans with this final opinion, but I think efforts to ‘get money out of politics’ are doomed to fail, as long as we try to do it with things like campaign finance laws and public funding of election campaigns. These ‘remedies’ have not worked. They will never work. In some ways, they do more harm than good — tending to favor wealthy candidates, for example. I believe such ‘remedies’ fail because they target the symptoms rather than the disease. Our institutions are corrupt, but they are not corrupt because special interests bankroll politicians. They are corrupt because special interests jostle and scrum to capture the government’s (currently) unlimited power, and bankrolling politicians is a means to that end. So, the only way to reduce political corruption is to limit the power of the government, tightly. Which is what this plan, as a whole, tries to do.
Constitutional Amendments
This plank does not require any constitutional amendments.
Benefits
Strengthens confidence in our public institutions.
Ensures the people rule the ‘rulers’ and not the reverse.
Ensure voters choose their representatives and not the reverse.
Gives voters real choices.
Revised: April 27, 2024.
First published: June 21, 2013.
Author: Dean Clancy.
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I would also like to see a mandatory jail sentence of five years for anyone convicted of voting illegally. The presiding judge should have no power to reduce or eliminate the sentence. If the fraudulent voter is here illegally he or she should be immediately deported upon completion of the full sentence. Again, the judge should not be allowed any discretion in reducing the sentence.