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this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2025
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Yes. With a mandatory "none of the above" option for every office, and an actual majority of eligible voters is required to win, and if "none of the above" wins you get a new election with new candidates.
I've heard of a completely different idea that is designed to get politicians to appeal to everybody as much as possible, but because it is not repeatable, I think it's an infeasible idea.
Anyways, it's called "random ballot". The idea is that, either for the entire election, or for one candidate at a time, you simply choose one random ballot, and that person is the winner.
The upside of random ballot is that, no matter what percentage of a politician's constituents approved of them, it would never be enough unless it was 100%. Even if they had a 99% approval... well, even in just the federal house, there are 435 reps, so on a nationwide level, you'd regularly see things happen that only had a 1% chance.
But the huge downside is if there was any problem with the ballots or with collecting them, even if you missed a single ballot, it can completely change the results, and there would be no way to fairly recount or rerun the election.
But I do like any scheme that incentivizes politicians to try to appeal to as many constituents as possible, not just to beat other candidates.
There's still incentive an to obstruct and suppress certain demographics from voting with a scheme like that. Not to mention the whole possibility that the winner could have literally received only 1 out of 17, 000, 000 votes being pretty horrible.
Oh I was thinking about it as alongside mandatory voting. I honestly don't know that democracy really works at all without mandatory voting.
Also, the problem with a very unpopular winner isn't really too different from what we already have. How many times has a candidate won unopposed? How many times has a candidate been elected saying that they'd vote one way, and then immediately start voting the opposite way?
It probably wouldn't be great for an executive position of great power, like president or governor. Like, imagine what one moron could do with the power of pardons. But for positions where they are just a member of a large legislative body? I think the amount of damage they can do in a single term is usually somewhat limited.