No More Voting: A Reform Proposal

[BeFree]

Read about this in Ode magazine press.

The idea is this: instead of electing a certain individual to the house, citizens are enjoined much like juries are, too make decisions much as lower house legislatures now do.

Imagine plain old citizens gathering around to do the nations business!

There would be no need for the confusing ballots tailor made for e-voting.

Senate members would be selected by the assembled citizens in the lower house.


Citizens would serve no more than two year terms. They would not have to campaign, raise funds or compete in what today might be considered a beauty pageant.


Gone would be the endless bribing, the corporate influences and the shameless boot-licking, congresscritters now have to lick in order to get elected.

I see a house that would consist of around 1,000 members of plain citizens taking care of business.

And it would pretty much leave us with a simple voting process for a few locals and the president.

[Hello_Kitty]

1. Citizen legislature

Many have proposed the idea. Randi Rhodes has said that you could pick 435 random people off the street and they'd do a better job than our current Congress. It would be similar to jury duty. You would be summoned and unless you had a compelling reason why you couldn't serve, you would do your 2 years in the House.

It's actually got some merit, I think.

[babylonsister]

2. Wow, I love it! No huge salaries, lobbyists, corp. interests! nt

[KingFlorez]

3. Good idea, but

People need to have choice of who makes the decisions, with this it is still a number of people that might not get the job done right. The better thing to do would be to reform campaign laws so money isn't such a big deal, that's why regular citizens can't always run because they can't afford it. Picking a number of citizens might do well for redistricting though, just pick them and set them are with experts on population and geography and let them draw the maps.

[Teaser]

4. expertise/staff

Who would be there staffers? Where would they get the expertise needed in assessment of policies?

Right now its the congressional staffers that actually *know things*. But the congress people pick them from a stable of people they know and have worked with in the past.

Now imagine an entire body of citizens with no experience in governance and no connections to knowledgeable policy makers. Where do they get their staff from? Are the staffers already there? In that case you might have a situation where the professional staffers become the real lawmakers. An oligarchy of sorts.