Marcelo Calbucci

    I continue to try to keep political posts to a minimum, but it's just too hard not to say something during major elections.

    This year I became an American citizen, so I'll take the time to vote. I don't know much about elections in the rest of the world, except Brazil which went through some Democracy learning on the 90s after almost 20 years of military dictatorship.

    Amazingly enough, the US government keeps talking about "spreading democracy" throughout the world, but the reality is that US democracy is quite broken in many aspects. Here are 7 things that *I* think are very broken and should be fixed.

#1 No Popular Vote

You know the difference between Russia's indirect voting system and the US electoral college? None, really. The people are not voting for the president. No excuses. The Electoral College is indirect election and should be abolished.

#2 Only Two Parties

It's pretty hard to believe that people are either Democrats or Republicans. Yes, there are a few other parties, but they are irrelevant. What about a fiscal conservative, but social liberal? The system in place has been setup and manage in a way that prevents new parties from forming.

#3 Judges Election

Now that's just screwed up. Voting for Judges is an awful thing because it forces them to associate themselves with political parties (wrong), to raise money to run for office (wrong) and to take sides without a case ("I'm against big oil"). Judges should move up based on merit on their career. Maybe a panel of Judges decides who gets promoted.

#4 Manual Voting System

About 12 years ago Brazil held an all-electronic election. The voting closed at 5:00 PM and by 5:15 PM the name of the new president, all new congressman, new senators, etc., were known. Yes, you can have fraud proof electronic elections. The core of the problem in my view is that states are left to do voter registration and to manage the voting process, what end up happening is a lot of duplicate efforts by 50 states to figure things out, while a single federal agency could make it much more efficient. And I'm not even going to mention the people managing the election process from each state were elected officials w/ party affiliations.

#5 Single Stage Voting

A president (or any other elected official) should not be considered the winner until he gets 50% + 1 of the casted votes. This means that if Obama gets 49.5% and McCain gets 48%, with 2.5% going to other candidates, another election should be held just between McCain and Obama. Yes, this is how it is on a lot of countries. It's a two-phase election, where the first phase eliminates all but the top 2 candidates. This would prevent an extreme left-wing or extreme right-wing candidate from taking votes of a left or right candidate, respectively.

#6 Allow Money to Buy Votes

This might be a socialist statement, but what if all the candidates of any party had exactly the same amount of money to spend? Better yet, what if, instead of money they had the same exact amount of TV time, radio time and print space. The fact that individuals or corporations can give money to candidates feels wrong because it gives a better chance at candidates that have "rich friends".

#7 Voluntary Voting

The fact that part of a strategy of a candidate might be to "un-motivate" people from voting says it all to me. Voting should be mandatory for every citizen of the age of 18 or more (if he/she is able to). Anyone that doesn't vote would have to pay a fine of $10. Having only 50% of the population decide for everyone is wrong.