Barneyisfat

Some thoughts on improving our political process:

1. The standard answer to election pollsters should be, "Sorry, not interested." This way polls would be considered even more inaccurate and people would pay less attention to them.

2. Election night exit polling should be outlawed. Maybe if they actually counted the votes before calling a winner people would feel more like their vote was actually counted.

3. Every embassy on foreign soil should be a polling station. You could easily count all of the votes and e-mail the figures to each state by election night.

4. For every dollar spent on a campaign, politicians should be encouraged to give a dollar to charity (and simply frowned upon for not doing so). For instance, maybe the world would be a better place if Meg Whitman had spent 70 million on her campaign and given 70 million to a charity. She could have purchased 7 million bed-nets to help end malaria. To put that into perspective, almost every person in Rwanda could be sleeping under a Malaria stifling bed-net right now and avoiding the leading cause of death in their country if just half of her personal contribution to the campaign had gone to that charity.

5. Reform campaign finance laws to only allow a small window for fundraising. Give politicians (and special interest groups) one month out of every year to make their fundraising pitches - and give the public plenty of time after that fundraising month to absorb the news of who is funding whom.