The XXXX
party recognizes that the voting system needs to be fair and to
best-determine and implement the wishes of the people. As of 2005 the USA
unfortunately uses the highly flawed "plurality" voting system in exceedingly
gerrymandered districts, with biased voter-registration and
unequal ballot-rejection policies.
1- We support "range voting" for all single-winner elections with 3 or more choices
(including write-in candidates). In this system each "vote" is a numerical rating of
each and every candidate within a fixed range such as 0-to-99; voters who
wish to express "no opinion" about a candidate are allowed to "X" that score instead.
The candidate with the highest average numerical rating wins.
2- We abolish gerrymandering by demanding that
all election districts be drawn by the following completely unbiased automatic procedure:
Start with the boundary outline of the state,
Split the number N of desired districts into two as near-equal whole numbers A, B as possible:
N=A+B, for example 7=4+3.
Split the state into two parts with population ratios A:B via the shortest possible splitting
line segment (or more precisely since the Earth is round, "great circle segment")
Proceed recursively on the two hemi-states thus created.
3- Universal voting registration:
all adult citizens
are automatically registered to vote (a practice already
in use in many other democracies and recommended for the USA in 2005 by the report
by Jimmy Carter and James Baker).
4- Each voter's ballot must be immediately
checked for validity, and the voter immediately notified of its non-validity so
that he/she can try again to produce a valid ballot.
Voting machines that silently reject invalid ballots are hereby illegal.
(Exception: in locales that use hand-counted, not machine-counted, ballots, this
demand is dropped since it would conflict with the desire for ballot secrecy and anonymity.)