With the election rapidly approaching, I thought I'd enumerate some of the reasons I remain aloof from the process. With the greed and corruption prevalent in politics, the ever increasing intrusion of the federal government into our daily lives and the reluctant attitude of the populace to eliminate the feeding trough of the public dole, I don't believe it will ever change, But:

Wouldn't it be great if we had representative government as the Constitution intended?

Wouldn't it be great if we had no political parties? Nowhere in the Constitution are political parties mentioned as a requirement to provide representative government to the people.

Wouldn't it be great if there was no Electoral College to distort the will of the people in a presidential election. Instead of giving the entire block of electoral votes from the state to one candidate, Wouldn't it be great if each congressional district could have a say in the outcome by having the majority of the votes in that district constitute a single vote for the presidency?

Wouldn't it be great if each and every registered voter was given the opportunity to make their vote actually count? This could be accomplished by having them fill out a survey questionnaire as a prerequisite to be licensed to vote. the questionnaire would question their position on a long list of social and moral issues. And their selection options would be, "agree - disagree or don't care."

These selections would become a data base which would calculate and indicate the preferences by percentage on any issue , of the voters in each district . The next step to achieving true representative government would be to mandate that the representative from that district must vote by the preferential indicator from their district.

In this manner the Representative in Congress couldn't yield to their own feelings, pressure from others or the corrupting influence of the lobbyist in casting their votes on any issue. Failure to comply with the desires of the highest percentage of their constituency would result in instant recall.

The same data base could control the state Senator's behavior when voting on legislation.

Wouldn't it be great if all legislation both state and federal was limited to single issue, straight up or down votes? No pork, no riders and no gray areas as to definition.

Wouldn't it be great if states had more time to work out a comprehensive budget? I think a two year budget would free up our legislator's time to do the work we hired them to do. With single issue issues to be voted on, and the vote pre-determined by constituency, there would be little reason for committees to demand of their time. The only actual work required would be on issues in which constituency in their district voted a majority of "don't-care" votes.

Wouldn't it be great if the above reforms were in place, so we could lengthen term limits and have fewer elections? With our elected representatives complying with our decisions, we would have no reason to replace them. Possibly to comply with the demographic changes and in response to census data for redistricting, we should have an election every ten years.

Think about all the money we could save and how much corruption we could eliminate and most of all, think about how much better we would feel about ourselves and our nation on election day.

James Fox
Columnist,
Mountaineer Progres Newspaper