Reply #17: Create Conditions That Allow Legitimate Elections (where none now exist) [View All]

There are some excellent ideas in this thread. I do not mean to discount any of them. I do encourage you all to consider whether the US more closely resembles a fascist state than a democratic one. That is to say, the conditions do not currently exist for us to have legitimate elections where our chosen candidates then represent us with the Consent of the Governed. There is currently no BASIS for confidence in the legitimacy of the results reported from US elections. Here are eight fundamental changes identified in the No Confidence Resolution as necessary to create a new BASIS for confidence. Any one of them on its own would be good, but insufficient to establish this BASIS.

1) all private corporations are divested of ownership in election machines, and
2) clean money laws keep all corporate funds out of campaign financing, and
3) any future mechanisms for voting conform to a uniform national standard and produce a verifiable audit trail for every vote, and
4) all votes are cast on the same day, designated as a national holiday, with the exception of absentee ballots which will be granted to applicants meeting a narrow list of federally determined criteria, and
5) all votes are counted publicly in the presence of citizen witnesses and credentialed members of the media, and
6) equal time provisions are observed by the media along with a measurable increase in local, public control of the airwaves, and
7) presidential debates contain a minimum of three candidates, and are run by a non-partisan commission comprised of representatives of publicly owned media outlets, and
8) ranked choice voting, also called instant runoff voting, is implemented for federal elections (see H.R. 5293);