I don't know if anyone actually reads my posts about election reform. Well, that won't stop me from posting.

In the system suggested by Hill, politicians would be appointed to set voting standards, but I am worried that they'd make bad standards and too many standards. For example, they might make voting so secure that only a few select people have access to the voting information, which leaves us with a strong possibility of corruption. Alternately, they might make so many standards that verifying votes becomes difficult and expensive.

Most implementations of the "voter-verfied voter trail" system suggest that we use paper copies of the votes as the "source of truth", and that recounts would have to be done based on these paper counts. Not only is this incredibly difficult to do, the chance of innaccuracy or corruption of vote-counters is very high.

I propose a different system. We should make all vote information immediately accessible to as many people as possible. When you vote, you should be able to immediately view that vote online, along with a count of all of the votes for each candidate. Summary reports of all votes everywhere should be available on demand. The source code used to generate all of this information should be available.

With this much insight into the voting system, anyone can monitor the poll numbers, and anyone can verify that his own vote has not changed at any time. Plenty of people from every ideology will be watching for any signs of corruption, and we won't even need to use tax dollars to pay them.

Prohibiting voter intimidation is fine by me.

I do not see what the problem with voter registration is. It doesn't seem to me that universal registration will do much to elect better candidates or prevent fraud.

For the most part, these seem like good ideas, except I don't know how one would determine who qualifies as a "candidate" and is entitled to money and airtime. We obviously can't let just anyone have these things, but if we require a minimum number of supporters, well that pretty much means only wealthy people and primary political parties will be getting this free air time and financing, which gives us the same problem we have today.

Further, I think it is generally a bad idea to limit donations; the idea of limiting the spending cap is better.

To me, this statement destroys the credibility of this article. The author clearly has no idea why we have the electoral college, and he likely doesn't care.

In fact, the electoral college was created for a very good reason, and fixing it is the most important part of election reform. My recommended election reform is almost entirely based on fixing the electoral college. But we can't do that if politicians decide to remove it. If you're only going to read one piece of my post, this should be it:

The electoral college was created because our founders knew that the average person is completely uninformed about politics. Because of this, they didn't want the average person deciding who we should elect as president. But even though the average person is uninformed about politics, he might still be able to point to someone else and say, "I don't know much about politics, but this guy over here knows a whole lot." So instead of electing the president, the people would elect this college, and this college would make the real decision about who the president is.

The idea is that presidential candidates would not campaign to the people, but would instead campaign to the electoral college. This has many advantages if done correctly.

Instead of spending millions of dollars on television ads which call their opponent a "war monger" or "someone who can't make up his mind", presidential candidates would have to talk about real issues to this small group of college members. They'd have to do this because these college members would be more informed about politics than the average person, and they're going to see through trash-talking.

Each college member could personally meet each candidate, talk to that candidate, and ask questions of that candidate. Long debates could take place, instead of just the "two minutes per issue" that we get in television debates. And every college member would pay attention.

Candidates wouldn't need to have lots of money, and they wouldn't need to be from a big party because they'd only have to talk to a small group of people, and that small group would be very willing to listen.

But the most important part of this system is that we elect a different kind of candidate. We don't elect the charismatic trash-talker who looks good on television. We elect the political thinker, who has the right stance on the issues.

You may be wondering why things don't work this way right now. We do have an electoral college, after all. Well, the problem is that states were allowed to decide how the electoral college would be elected, and all the states made a very poor decision. Basically, the electoral college is elected on the same day as the president, and people don't vote for college members, they vote for a political party. Whichever political party wins, gets to choose all the college members. So we pretty much end up with a bunch of radical college members, who decided who they are voting for before the candidates were even announced.

Instead of this, college members should be elected directly by the people a long time before the election, maybe even before the presidential candidates are even announced. Making this simple change would vastly improve our election system.

The benefits of IRV are somewhat diminished by reforming the electoral college in the fashion I mentioned above, however, it would still be a good system to use in many places in our election system.

Hmm, I don't know much about this election system. It seems like it has some advantages.

The founders would almost certainly reform the electoral college so that it might be used in the fashion it was intended.