Voters' Bill of Rights

America needs a Voters' Bill of Rights, i.e. something to eliminate the worst abuses of our system and allow the ordinary citizen to think there might be some point to voting in elections; what we have now is vanishingly close to a one-party system. A minimal list of items I'd like to have in such a list would be:

* 1. The most major item: Runoff Elections. Nobody should ever fear to vote his first choice, at least on a first ballot, and nobody should ever hold any public office with less than 50% of the vote.

* 2. A "None of the Above" choice on all elections for public office. And whenever this None of the Above" choice wins, the other candidates should be barred for life from running for public offices and the parties which sponsored them should be barred from running anybody for that particular office for 20 years, i.e. until the entire leadership echelons of the parties have turned over. The penalty for sponsoring dead wood for public office should be horrific.

* 3. An outright guarantee against vote fraud and horrific penalties for it. To me this means that somehow or other, individual votes have to be traceable.

* 4. Candidates for public office beyond some level should be required to pass at least a secret and possibly a TS security check like anybody else who ever handles classified information. The idea of somebody like Slick KKKlinton, who clearly could not pass the simplest such test to be a guard at the gate of any military base being POTUS is basically obscene. This would also prevent the William Jeffersons and Marion Barrys from holding public offices.

* 5. An update to the impeachment process: if a president is ever impeached and removed, his vice president goes out the door with him, and the office is handed over to the oldest person of his party in the US Senate on condition that he never run for the office again. Nobody should profit from their own misdeeds or failings; likewise it should not be easy to remove a president, but it should not be impossible either, and if we were not able to remove Slick, we wouldn't have been able to remove Hitler or Mussolini either. Trent Lott rightly refused to hand the presidency and the incumbency over to Algor with a year to go on Slick's final term; nonetheless the clown needed to go, badly.