10.Free HBO for Everyone!
If the new president would like to do just one thing to make everyone’s life a bit happier, he could pick up the tab for every household to get free HBO.
Let’s face it, TV is dead. It has become truly unwatchable. Other than a couple of comedies on NBC (The Office, 30 Rock), a couple of dramas on ABC, and the 11pm hour on Comedy Central, the rest of the week seems like it was written by guys who eat their lunch in the crapper. The sitcoms are so stale they will soon become like vaudeville. (“What’s vaudeville?” Exactly.) Extinct.
This is not to say that there are not informative shows on all those cable channels up in the triple digits. I’ve learned where to find the best feather pillows on HGTV, how to handle our dog when she is filled with anxiety on The Dog Whisperer, and how to hem a dress quickly should I ever end up on Project Runway.
But by and large, it would do us all a world of good to turn the damn thing off and go for a walk. Or have a conversation with a friend. Or do some laundry. Or learn to play the viola.
Of course, most of the younger generation has already turned it off and moved across the room to a smaller screen that is both a wealth of egalitarian information AND a brand new crap machine of time-killing, mind-numbing nothingness.
In the landscape of all this noise, there still remains an oasis of keen and hip smarts, a place where they never have to worry about offending a sponsor or a government oversight panel. That place, as you know, is called HBO.
On top of showing movies uncut and uncensored with no commercial breaks, HBO has produced some of the finest television in recent memory. The Sopranos was like the greatest of novels—a work of modern literature—and if there could be a Nobel Prize for such an effort, this show deserved it. The other HBO dramas were/are of near-equal brilliance: Six Feet Under, The Wire, Big Love, even Rome was cool and sexy and weird. The comedies, too, are great: Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, Entourage, Extras, Sex and the City—the list goes on and on.
HBO should be free and made available to every American. (Or at least to me for giving them this unsolicited plug.)
HBO is proof that we can still do some things right as Americans. Its existence says that we are not afraid to take risks, that we are in fact NOT a nation of idiots. Thirty million of our 110 million households already have it. Let’s bring the rest of our fellow citizens in on the fun and the smarts.
FREE HBO! GOD BLESS AMERICA!!
4
Six Modest Proposals to Fix Our Broken Elections
As we all know, there was no better proof of how messed up our electoral system is than when the man who got the most popular votes in 2000 (and the most electoral votes, had all the votes in Florida been counted) did not become the president of the United States. It was a smackdown of epic proportions to our Democracy, and one from which it hasn’t recovered.
Since then, the move to electronic voting machines has only made it worse. Experts estimate that 10 percent of those machines fail at least once in each election.
Voting turnout in the U.S. remains among the lowest of all Western democracies (even though there has been a nice bump this year, thanks to the close race on the Democratic side).
And at the root of it all lies the money. No matter how many reforms have been tried,no matter how you try to color it, money rules the day. Even though the vast majority of Barack Obama’s funds have come from small donors, when he first started running in 2007, the only way he could launch his long-shot candidacy was to depend on the money of rich people. Fifty-four percent of his funds in 2007 came from people who gave $1,000 or more.
The worst of all of this is that the campaign season, which used to be confined to six grueling months, has now expanded to two bone-crushing, mind-altering, soul-sucking years of our lives. Two dozen debates, hundreds of pundits run amok, the same exact speech given in every single city. Have mercy on us!
This has to stop. And it can. In some very simple, easy ways, we can spend less time, less money, and have more say in our future.
Thus, here are my Six Modest Proposals to Fix Our Broken Elections:
1.Hold All Elections on the Weekend.
Upset that you have to work 100 hours a week at your two jobs and just can’t find the time to vote? Ever wonder why our leaders still think a work day is a good day for people to vote? Maybe so that not too many of those “workers” show up? The people in charge aren’t stupid—if they made it too easy for the working class to vote, God knows what would happen. What if we had our elections on a Saturday or a Sunday? Well, nearly everyone might vote.
Those who have an easier time taking off to go and vote whenever they damn well please are the same people who have a vested interest in making sure those with unnecessary grievances—the poor, the uninsured, those whose kids go to substandard schools—don’t flood the polling places on election day.
The United States of America ranks #139 in voter turnout of countries that have held elections since 1945. We Americans like to be #1 at everything—but #139?!
I was wondering, just how do these other countries get a bigger turnout? One of the reasons is that many of them hold their elections on a Saturday or Sunday. Check it out:
COUNTRIES DAY OF WEEK FOR VOTE
Australia Saturday
Austria Sunday
Belgium Sunday
Brazil Sunday
Finland Sunday
France Sunday
Germany Sunday
Greece Sunday
Iceland Saturday
Italy Sunday and Monday
Japan Sunday
Mexico Sunday
New Zealand Saturday
Portugal Sunday or national holiday
Russia Sunday
Spain Sunday
Sweden Sunday
Switzerland Sunday
So my first proposal is that our national election day is changed from the first Tuesday in November to the first Sunday of November. That should guarantee a bigger turnout and thus our Congress and the President will be more representative of the whole country. The only reason why we vote on Tuesdays in November is because when this tradition began in 1845, it was the most convenient time for farmers to vote. It was timed for after the fall harvest and on a Tuesday because Monday was needed as a travel day to get to the polls. In other words, they set up our original elections to occur when it was least likely the majority of people would be working!
Well, times have changed, Tuesday’s a work day, so let’s move our election day to the weekend. It’s already been proposed in Congress; Senator Herb Kohl of Wisconsin has introduced the Weekend Voting Act to Congress in 1997, 2001, 2005, and again this year. All we need is some presidential leadership to get this moving. President Obama?
2.Every Citizen Is Automatically a Registered Voter.
I was once talking to a Canadian friend before an election there, and I wanted to know whether the party he favored had a chance of winning. I asked how their voter registration drives were going and if they were gonna turn out a big vote. He looked at me as if I were asking him to show me his handgun.
“Uh, voter registration drive?” he asked.
“Yeah. You gotta register new voters and young people if you want to have a chance of winning,” I explained. “Aren’t you canvassing, going door-to-door, registering students, holding house parties, going to nursing homes . . . ?”
“You do all that just to REGISTER voters?” he asked me. “That’s a waste of time and money, eh?”
“I guess. But you have to do it if you want to win elections.”
My Canadian friend explained to me that they too, at one point, had a time-consuming, money-wasting system that ended up leaving far too many voters off the election rolls.
Rather than blowing all that time and money only to end up falling short and leaving some voters unregistered, they created a federal database that eliminated the need to go though all that mess.
It was then that my Canadian friend
hit me with some more humbling news. “Most Western democracies have systems like this. As a matter of fact, most democracies have universal voter registration. The requirement for being registered to vote is just being born. Your birth certificate is, in essence, your automatic Voter I.D. card. But you don’t take your birth certificate with you when you vote. You just show up and they look you up in the federal database of people who were born in Canada. So let’s say you’ve moved recently. Or you’ve been out of the country for a few years. Or you haven’t voted in a long time. Doesn’t matter. You just show up at the polls. They have your name.
“That way, I guess you could say our voter registration is 100 percent!”
I inquired how this was possible. “You mean you don’t have to stand in line at the city clerk or driver’s license place to register to vote? By the simple fact that you were born in your country, this automatically makes you a registered voter 18 years later?”
“Yup.”
Of course, my American mind goes right to the “what if” worst-case scenario.
“What about voter fraud? People going to different towns and voting more than once?”
“Is that your problem?” the Canadian asked me. “People voting too much? Isn’t your problem that you can’t get Americans to vote in the first place? It seems like it’s hard enough to get your countrymen to even vote once, let alone finding Americans who would devote that kind of energy and gas money to traveling all over hell’s half acre just to vote again and again!”
The Canadian was right. Why do we make people jump through hoops just so they can vote? You don’t have to go sign up somewhere for the privilege of paying taxes, do you? If you work, you pay taxes. You don’t have to go stand in line and fill out a form for the right to drink alcohol at age 21, do you? On your 21st birthday, you can legally drink. You don’t have to prove you have been living at a certain address. If you want to have a baby, you don’t have to register with any government official. You don’t have to show any papers or be responsible in any way. You just have to take off some of your clothes and make sure your partner is of the other gender (unless you want to be artificially inseminated, then you can skip getting all sweaty having to listen to him mispronounce your name).
Shouldn’t the simple fact you are a citizen be enough to be handed a ballot on election day? Sure a few will try to cheat, but I guarantee you that will be less a threat than continuing to have only half our citizens participating in their democracy.
3.Use Paper Ballots. And a #2 Pencil.
Gee, what a simple idea. Here’s how it works in nearly every other high-tech, industrialized country:
A voter shows up at the polls, she or he is handed a paper ballot, the voter then goes behind a curtain where—lo and behold!—there sits a #2 pencil! The voter takes said pencil and places a mark next to the names of the candidates she or he wishes to vote for. The voter then opens the curtain, walks over to a big box, and places his or her ballot inside it. Done. No tiny holes to try and punch, no computer screen that is harder to read than an ATM machine in Tunisia, no ballot that must then be fed into an optical reader.
An optical reader! Man, are we a bunch of lazy asses or what? We’d rather trust a machine to do our reading for us? Or some computer server a hundred miles away? What happened to our own two eyeballs?
Because “those two eyeballs” is how they do it most other places. When the polls close, the box of ballots is opened and, in the presence of a representative from each party with a candidate running for office, the ballots are placed on a big table and, in full view of everyone, the counting begins. When they are done, they often count them again. Any observer can object at any time.
How has this worked for the Canadians, the Brits, the Irish, and everyone else? Just fine. The mistake rate is practically nonexistent. Compare that to our mistake rates for electronic voting machines (2.2 percent), optical scanners (1.6 percent), or punch cards (2.6 percent). So if a hundred million Americans vote, that means that over 2.5 million of them don’t get their votes counted. There is no better way to vote and count ballots than the old school way—a piece of paper, and a pencil.
But wouldn’t this take too long? No. In Canada, a nation of over 30 million people—and with the second largest land mass in the world—their ballots are all counted within hours. I mean, these Canadians have to get to the polls by canoe, dogsled, or baby seal, from way up in the Yukon to the provinces that are half way to Iceland. Larger countries like the UK and France also use paper ballots (though there is a drive on in many of these countries to turn to computerized voting, this would be a huge mistake. They always want to copy us. Crazy).
Voting by paper ballot and pencil is a classic “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” We broke something. Now we need to fix it.
4.Hold Regional Primaries.
There is a much easier and sensible way to conduct our primaries. Instead of one state or one region having undue influence over this process (yes, I mean you aliens of Iowa and New Hampshire), we should hold just four primaries, one for each region of the country, and take turns rotating which region goes first. East (from Maine to DC and over to Pennsylvania), South (all the usual suspects, including Texas), Midwest (from Ohio to Kansas and the Dakotas) and the West (from the Rockies to the Pacific).
This way, the candidates can save time and money by concentrating themselves in just one area of the country at a time. Many of these regions share similar issues (the Midwest has water it’s trying to keep clean, the West would like that water, the East desperately needs better mass transit, and the South, they’d like more NASCAR tracks). This way, everyone gets heard.
And just so we don’t have to listen to a bunch of whining from Iowa and New Hampshire, we’ll let them open their polls an hour ahead of everyone else so they can say they were “first.”
5.Limit the Election Season to Four Months for the Primaries, and Two Months for General Election.
In Great Britain, the total length of the campaign for prime minister and parliament is three to four weeks. In Canada it’s four to five weeks. In Slovakia it’s 15 days.
Here in the U.S., it lasts almost as long as the Ming Dynasty. Months upon months have now turned into years upon years. By the time of the election, the public has grown hair in suspicious places and the pundits are down to discussing the candidates’ socks.
The 2008 election officially began in 2006, and by the time we elect a new president on November 4, more than 2 million people will have died in the United States since the campaign season began. That’s a lot of citizens who went to their graves getting all worked up about who they were going to vote for and yet never had the chance to have a say. Is that fair?
We need to set limits on the length of our campaign season. I propose we take the four regional primaries I’ve suggested and, with one month per region for the candidates to campaign in, we should know who the nominees are after just four months. No campaigning can begin until this primary season has started.
Then, after the two (and someday, hopefully more) parties’ candidates are chosen, it’s 8 weeks to barnstorm the country. Hold a debate every two weeks during those 8 weeks. That should tell us all that we need to know.
If we need more time than that to decide, then we’ve got bigger problems than this one.
6.Public Financing, Free Air Time, and Spending Limits for All Politicians.
By the end of 2007, a full ten months before the election, the entire pool of U.S. presidential candidates had raised MORE THAN A HALF A BILLION DOLLARS. Barack Obama alone has now raised a record $287 million as of late June 2008; McCain had raised $119 million and borrowed another $39 million. And they still had 4 months until Election Day. These guys are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to get elected to a job in which they make $400,000 a year.
Compare this to Slovakia, where presidential candidates are limited to spending 4 million Slovak crowns (about $210,000). Or Britain, where parties can’t spend mor
e than a total of £19.38 million ($38.5 million) but usually spend far less. Or France, where spending is capped at $13.7 million ($21.6 million) for candidates in the first ballot and $18.3 million ($28.9 million) for those in the second ballot. Same goes for Ireland. And Canada. And . . . well, you get the idea. They don’t turn their elections into financial free-for-alls like we do.
And in many of these countries, the public foots the bill for a big chunk of the limited amount of money they do spend. For instance, in Canada if a candidate gets at least 10 percent of the entire vote, he or she is reimbursed for 60 percent of expenses. In France, if a candidate receives more than 5 percent of the vote in the first ballot, they are reimbursed for 50 percent of their spending.
With all these caps and limitations, how do candidates get the word out? What with advertising so darn expensive, how can they actually pay for all their ads? After all, during a one-month period in the spring of 2008, Obama spent $11 million on campaign commercials alone. Total ad spending during the primaries was $200 million. And the Campaign Media Analysis Group estimates that total ad spending could push past $800 million (up from $650 million in 2004) by the time this election circus finally dismantles its tents and loads the elephants and donkeys on the train headed for Election Year 2012.
According to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, in 72 countries around the world, including 14 Western European countries (Andorra, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, San Marino, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom), political parties are entitled to FREE MEDIA ACCESS. Same goes for Canada. It’s actually against the law for candidates in some of these countries to purchase air time. In France, TV stations are required to help the candidates produce their free and equal commercial spots. In Ireland, political parties are entitled to free three-minute broadcasts aired every evening after the nightly news.
Just three minutes? Wow, sounds like the rest of the day’s 1,440 minutes can then be spent in peace and quiet, candidate-free.
Mike's Election Guide Page 8