Had the same idea years ago, only it would have required that every ballot for any elective office, at every level, to add two additional blocks for every single office, on every single ballot.
One would be a blank line for a "write-in" candidate, in order to take advantage of the fact that there are often well qualified potential candidates that are well known in their communities, but because they haven't been swaged through the party selection sizing die, never get on the ballot. This would correct that short-coming by allowing the community at large to simply bypass the party and vote in their own man by acclamation.
The very last block for every office on every ballot would be for "None Of The Above" (and no you can't just change your fucking name and run as 'None of The Above' Any candidate doing so would be required to have a separate block with his name above the last two blocks, specifying that the candidate's name is Mr./Mrs. None of The Above.) If "None Of The Above" got the most votes, another election would have to be held and NONE of the previous slate of candidates would be able to run again, having already had their unworthiness amply demonstrated to one and all.
I think this would go a long way towards our not having the usual bunch of pre-selected, pre-approved, pre-packaged, bi-factional uniparty candidates stuffed down our throats every 2, 4 and 6 years.
The other idea was to have a perforated tear-off tab at the bottom of every ballot. Every ballot would have a bar code at the bottom, above the perforation, so that each and every ballot had a unique identifier. The barcode would be repeated on the tear-off portion. When you turn in your ballot, you keep the tear-off portion. The perforations would be random cut by machine so that any attempt to make copies would not match the perforation pattern at the bottom. Ballots would be hand counted and the only portion that would be machine scanned would be the bar-code, in order to check that against a database for repeats.
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