Favorability Voting is the Best Electoral Method – Amelia May Johnson

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[–]Zapped 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (3 children)

Good piece. I would like to see a lottery system to find candidates and then let the current election system take over. This would allow people who would accept the responsibility and duty of public office without being stuck with people seeking power.

[–][deleted] 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (2 children)

Good piece.

Thanks!

I would like to see a lottery system to find candidates and then let the current election system take over. This would allow people who would accept the responsibility and duty of public office without being stuck with people seeking power.

That would lock out a lot of good candidates, while allowing for the possibility of several, bad candidates that wouldn't really represent the general population very well. It would also be hard to organize any kind of political movement to get popular policies passed.

Now, an idea that I could get behind is randomly selecting a group of people to propose laws to the legislature (that they'd have to vote on; they couldn't just kill it in a committee). It wouldn't be mandatory to serve, but it would give Joe Schmo the opportunity to have his opinion heard without the risk of actually giving him any power.

There are two problems with our democracy:

  1. The electoral system

  2. Money in politics

Favorability voting solved the first one, while Andrew Yang's democracy dollars proposal would solve the second. After implementing these two solutions, I doubt there would be very many problems left to solve, but I would be open to more radical solutions if they fail or don't go far enough.

[–]Zapped 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Now, an idea that I could get behind is randomly selecting a group of people to propose laws to the legislature (that they'd have to vote on

An advisory committee is an interesting idea. I think that could work better than the current system. Kind of like a grand jury.

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I don't like juries (read more here), but I actually came up with this idea while writing that article; my problem is that they have decision-making power, but I'm fine with non-binding, advisory power that just forces elected officials to make a decision.