Federal Elections

[Jonathan Buhacoff]

Proposal:

The federal legislature shall elect the chief of the executive branch and the chief of the investigative branch.

If there are two chambers in the federal legislature, the assembly shall elect the chief of the executive branch and the chief of the investigative branch, and the senate shall confirm or reject the official appointments of cabinet members and justices by the chief executive and special prosecutors by the chief investigator.

At the invitation of the legislature, the candidates for chief executive and chief investigator may debate or make public promises in front of the legislature to influence their votes. If the legislature invites candidates to speak, it must invite all eligible candidates and grant them equal time.

Intent:

To elect a chief of the executive branch and a chief of the investigative branch in a fast and secure manner and to ensure that the chief executives and chief investigators are accountable to the people who elected the legislators and to the legislature itself which enacts the laws that the executive and investigative branches enforce.

Discussion:

The chief of the executive branch should be accountable to the people.

One way to do that is to have the people directly elect the chief executive. However, some disadvantages of such a direct election by the people is that election day must be coordinated across all the states, the results must be certified in a timely manner, and challenges to election laws and claims of election fraud can cast doubt on the winner and result in chaos.

A better way is to have the legislature elect the chief executive. The legislature itself is already accountable to the people, with individual legislators accountable to their own constituents. The legislature can meet and elect the chief executive in a single day, in plain view of independent observers, and without the need for voting machines or any other system which would invite doubt about the results.

Having already set up infrastructure for state elections in each state, and having elected those officials, and having already set up an infrastructure for inter-state voting in the federal Legislative Branch, it is a complete waste of resources to run country-wide elections for federal offices and to coordinate all the people in all the states doing it on the same day, or collecting and counting mail-in ballots.

The people of each state already voted for federal representatives to represent them in the federal government. It is those representatives who must represent the people of their state and vote in federal elections.

On federal election day, the voting should be done in the Legislative Branch — the same way that states votes on enacting laws, they should vote on selecting the President and Vice President. Instead of having every eligible voter in the country turn up the same day to vote, their elected representatives can vote for them.

The state’s elected representatives to Congress have a full-time job of understanding what the people in their state need and want and can invest the necessary time in learning about the federal candidates and in making an informed decision for their constituents, in contrast to the vast majority of the population who have jobs or businesses and can only learn about the candidates in their spare time, and who may be unduly influenced by advertisements, shenanigans, and gimmicks when they don’t have enough time to research the facts for themselves.

The members of the federal legislature should gather to talk and vote. The talking period could be multiple days, and the legislature can invite the candidates to debate on a variety of topics.

The legislature may choose to use multiple rounds of instant-runoff voting, also known as the long version of ranked choice voting, to choose the candidate with the most overall support. Alternatively, the legislature may choose to elect a candidate in two rounds, with the first round being a primary to select the two most popular candidates, and the second round being the election where one of the two candidates with more than 50% of the vote wins the election. Any such method is easy for legislators to understand and implement because they are familiar with following procedures and because they are all in the room and can do multiple rounds immediately, whereas such methods are impractical for the general public because results are generally not known the same day and keeping the voting stations open for multiple days is expensive and creates opportunities for problems to occur or perceived problems to be challenged.

When the votes in the legislature have been counted, the new chief executive and chief investigator will be certified. The newly elected officials will then be invited into the chamber to take the oath of office.

Comparison to the United States

In the United States, the current version of the electoral college has “electors” from each state who are chosen by the winning political party in that state and they all vote for the candidate from their party. They are completely redundant — since all their votes are the same it may as well be just one person, such as the governor, certifying the election results for the state. They are undemocratic, most people don’t know who they are and didn’t choose them to make any decisions on their behalf.

The electoral college unnecessarily injects non-elected partisans into the election process not just as workers but as people who certify the results, instead of relying on elected officials. The problem with this was evident in the 2020 election in the United States, where in 7 states, groups of non-elected partisan “electors” assembled to self-certify themselves as the authorized electors and declare their preferred candidate as the winner even though that candidate lost the election in that state. To underscore the illegitimacy of these “fake” electors, the group in Arizona met in their party’s headquarters instead of in government offices.

Any system where that allows people states to just send a group of self-certified documents to Congress to be counted without being actually authorized by the people of that state is simply broken. The federal government should only accept election results from the current elected officials of the state who run the elections, or as in this proposal from the legislature itself when it convenes to elect the chief executive and chief investigator.

Under this proposal, those elected officials would be the representatives to the federal Legislative Branch who already have the infrastructure in place to assemble, vote on behalf of their states, and have these votes counted immediately to tabulate a result in public which eliminates all methods of cheating that people try to do in elections that use ballot boxes or mail-in votes or electronic voting equipment.

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