[Exeter]

While sitting around one evening between football games one of my friends came up with a novel idea to solve the "term limits" dilemma. After 2 terms in office for Senators and 3 terms for Representatives, the candidate in question can continue to run for office, but his name can't be on the ballot. He/she can only run as a write-in candidate, the logic being that if the incumbent was such a success in the previous terms then his name should be well known positively by his constituents. If, on the other hand, his performance was so lackluster that the voters can't remember his name unless it's printed in front of them, then it's definitely time for a change.

This discussion didn't get too deep as the next ball game was just starting...

[princess leah]

Here are 2 things I thing should be implemented:

#1) they could limit donations to only those who would actually be able to vote for/against the candidates (meaning in state donations)...

#2) a candidate would have had to have lived in that state a minimum of 5 years sometime in their adult life (that would have eliminated Hillary from getting elected in NY)...

[supercat]

While sitting around one evening between football games one of my friends came up with a novel idea to solve the "term limits" dilemma. After 2 terms in office for Senators and 3 terms for Representatives, the candidate in question can continue to run for office, but his name can't be on the ballot.

That reminds me of my proposal for changing ballot access rules:

1. Any person who wants to run for an office may register to do so. The person would be randomly assigned a six-digit candidate ID.
2. Ballots would not contain any names--just spots for voters to mark the IDs of their preferred candidates in machine-readable form.
3. Candidates would be responsible for informing voters of their IDs by whatever means they saw fit.
4. There would be an official web site where users could type in an ID and confirm the candidate's name.
5. Write-ins would not be accepted, but candidates would be allowed to register any time prior to the opening of polls.
6. All votes would be tallied. To discourage 'vanity' votes, reported vote totals would aggregate candidates who didn't get many votes under "other"; there would also be a count for "no candidate selected" which would not officially affect the results, but would be useful for auditing (since the total number of candidate, "other", and "no candidate selected" votes should match the number of ballots, which should in turn (at least in most states) match the number of voters).

How does that sound for a proposal?