In Democratic political theory, the function of mass-based political parties is to put forth viable candidates for public office in order to influence public policy in a preferred direction.
Based on what was put forth in 2016 and 2020 and will be presented to us again this November, this function is no longer being performed. Indeed, based on such evidence one could conclude that our party system and much else concerning the electoral realm is broken.
As such, If I were made king for a day, with the power to sweep away traditions and laws and party rules and even modify the Constitution, I would issue the following edicts:
Get rid of the primary system that was established in the 1960s and return to the practice of selecting nominees at the party conventions.
Let those with actual skin in the game -- members of Congress, mayors, governors, and big-time donors (once called "party leaders")--make deals behind the scenes to unify party factions and select a nominee who could win in November, defined as someone who could appeal to a broad a range of the electorate.
Talented public servants would no longer be discouraged from seeking our highest office by a grueling campaign marathon which required sacrificing one's dignity at the altar of political ambition. They wouldn't have to appear in "Gong Show" debates alongside obscure goofballs and travel the country begging for money and pandering to special-interest groups.
We would get better, more experienced and likely more moderate candidates, along with much shorter campaigns (essentially a "sprint" from the end of the conventions in late summer to early November). Opening up our parties' nomination processes to make them more "democratic" was based on the assumption that voters in Iowa and New Hampshire know better than people whose business is politics.
They don't.
As such, the hunch is that most voters would rather have better choices in the fall than the opportunity to vote in primaries in the spring, especially when most don't and the race is usually over before their state's primary even rolls around.
Get rid of early voting, ballot-harvesting, and mass mail-in ballots.
Just about everybody would vote in person, with proper ID. For the sake of compromise and accessibility, we would expand poll hours and poll sites, maybe even have the first weekend in November ("Election Weekend") take the place of the first Tuesday after the first Monday ("Election Day").
The combination of ever-looser voting procedures and increasingly hyperpartisan, tribalistic politics is an almost perfect formula for undermining perceptions of electoral legitimacy. In any even reasonably close election, that combination ensures that the losers will be unwilling to accept the results and issue reckless claims that erode faith in our democratic process (and, regarding such, I am under no illusions that, if Donald Trump narrowly prevails over Joe Biden this time around, Democrats will be any more graceful in defeat than Republicans were in 2020; to the contrary, they will resort to every legal and political trick they can think up to try to keep him from taking the oath of office, as they already are with dubious criminal prosecutions).
Ensuring faith in our elections is vastly more important than constantly making it easier for the laziest and most apathetic among us to vote. Indeed, one could argue that more permissive election "innovations" have only had the effect of encouraging turnout of that persistent Achilles' heel of democracy, the "low information" voter.
Too many folks who used to beneficially stay home now rouse themselves, barely, to mail their ignorance in.
Finally, shift the Electoral College formula from "winner take all" (the primary cause of the controversy attending it) to the systems used by Nebraska and Maine, wherein the winner of each congressional district gets a single electoral vote, and the winner of the overall statewide vote gets the remaining two votes.
The number of electoral votes would remain the same -- 538 -- and there would still be rewards, as in the current arrangement, for winning the statewide vote (100 of the 538), but adoption of the Nebraska/Maine system would both better reflect the preferences of voters and allow Republican and Democratic candidates to acquire electoral votes from just about every state.
The end result would be to beneficially drill down to the congressional district level for the allocation of electoral votes, in place of the state, and thereby produce outcomes which are more accurate and fairer.
There are plenty of Republican enclaves in California and New York and plenty of Democratic enclaves in Texas and South Carolina, and with the winner-take-all formula rejected, the very concept of the "swing state" would likely disappear, and much of the misguided criticism of the Electoral College with it.
Of course, being the reactionary mossback that so many think I am, I might also decree, in an effort to bolster the crucial but fading concept of federalism, that we get rid of the popular vote altogether and allow electors chosen by state legislatures to once again pick our presidents. After all, that supposedly insufficiently democratic approach once upon a time gave us guys named Washington, Adams, and Jefferson.
Now we get guys named Trump and Biden.
Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.