- Abolish the Electoral College.
- Make registration compulsory and attached to an active National database.
- Make election day a holiday.
- Prohibit polling and campaigning for at least one full day before the election.
- Prohibit the broadcast of exit polls until Hawaii is finished.
- Ensure that a vote cast is a vote counted.
- Get a partisan press and breakup the media monopolies.
- Establish non-partisan boards to oversee every aspect of the actual polling
- Stop gerrymandering.
- Educate the people.
Expanded below the fold:
- Abolish the Electoral College. The Electoral College violates the principle of the equality of all votes. A vote in Nebraska weighs more than a vote in California. That is wrong and bad for democracy. I'd be open to keeping it if it could be modernized in some way, but I'd just as soon get rid of it. Prognosis: Poor, Constitutional amendment necessary.
- Make registration compulsory and attached to an active National database. Attach a little box to any official business form, ideally machine readable, and feed it into a National database of registered voters which is then tied into all the other databases which I presume are kept at the federal level (if not, are they nuts?) such as the status of convicted felons, etc. Accept the inevitable demand for a national ID card, so long as it brings automatic voter registration. [I imagine this will be controversial but I urge people to think about it. Get something in return. Most of Europe has lived with ID cards for a long time now and the are just plain useful in stable democracies. Of course they are also useful in tyrannical dictatorships. I think we're going to get them so we might as well negotiate...]
- Make election day a holiday. Sorry, I'm going to go against the grain here. I don't like advance voting or mail-in voting. I'm old-fashioned on this. I want all my voting to take place on the same day, in private, witnessed by several people partisan and not, and I want my vote to be counted in public without anyone knowing who I am. It may be slow and expensive but this is important enough to do by hand. Allow absentees to vote where they are, via police stations, embassies, consulates, whatever, just do it in public on the same day. To compensate, make election day a holiday. One more holiday a year doesn't seem too high a price to pay to celebrate a better democracy.
- Prohibit polling and campaigning for at least one full day before the election. The electorate needs some time unpestered to digest the both the campaigns and the incumbent, without all the sound and fury. Let the last campaign appearance be on Saturday night. Let Sunday and Monday be blessedly free of campaign ads and rallies. Let Monday be poll dark. Devote Tuesday to democracy.
- Prohibit the broadcast of exit polls until Hawaii is finished. They affect the outcome of the election by dissuading people from voting in the western time zones. Exit polls should only be broadcast when the people have finished voting everywhere. However, exit polls are important to gauge the amount of cheating.
- Ensure that a vote cast is a vote counted. Do it by hand on a piece of paper with witnesses, for crying out loud. Just do it. It's really not that hard. [Dictatorship is a relatively recent memory for the countries I've lived in, maybe that is why they take the mechanics of elections seriously, and the mechanics matter.]
- Get a partisan press and breakup the media monopolies. I am not saying get rid of the NYT. I think the NYT is the worst newspaper in the world, except for all the others. Well, most of the others. But a partisan press which achieves credibility can raise questions (the emperor has no clothes) which will eventually have to be addressed by the NYTs. It is already partisan on one side (see Fox) and while the internet has begun to provide some balance with the strength of sites like this one, most people get their nightly local news in which the firefighters saving a kitten is more important than something Iran did. Get local TV back, or make it irrelevant. Please.
- Establish non-partisan boards to oversee every aspect of the actual polling. This was not actually on my initial list and I'm ashamed of that. It is just one of the newer problems with the practice of democracy in the U.S. In my defense the original list was thought up before 2000. In many European countries the elected government resigns and for a few weeks they are governed by bureaucrats until the newly elected leadership is sworn in.
- Stop gerrymandering. This issue should be near the top for true democrats. It is poison for both sides and for the system, Gerrymandering can be stopped and it has been.
- Educate the people. Americans are no stupider than anyone else and brighter than most. Give them the info.
[editor's note, by Athenian], edited numbers five and six above the fold to separate the siamese twins.