If you could REMAKE the election system FROM SCRATCH what would you create?

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41. I'd create a Westminster style system of government...

It's tried and tested....


If there were three things I could change, it'd be:

1. Shorten election campaigns from the current endless slog to a short and sharp six week campaign that's publicly funded. Should cut the costs a whole lot and it's more humane for voters. Who wants candidate s getting in their faces for 18 months or more in some three ring cult of personality circus deal where you really have to dig to get to anything that deals with policies? If candidates can't get their act together in six weeks and inform voters of what their stance on issues are, then tough shit to them. As a voter I don't want to have to sit through endless campaign ads for well over a year and listen to a party tell me the same thing on day #458 that they did on day #1.

2. Ditch that whole primaries thing. I mean, WTF? How I see it is that for ages and before an election there's a whole other campaign where the folk who want to lead a party get to have a very lengthy and messy public cat fight and pretend that the opposition isn't on the other side of politics, and where their most ardent supporters are probably the only people that give a shit. How does anyone not collapse of campaign overload with all that shit? A much simpler solution is to vote for a local representative of the party you support. The parties select their leader and whoever the leader is of the party that has the numbers to form government becomes the new president. Easy.

3. Elections to be held on a Saturday with paper ballots and mandatory voting. Absentee voting for those who can't make it to a polling station and there has to be a sausage sizzle and cake stall at every polling station to make it worth people's while to turn up...