this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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Asklemmy
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Competency tests before you can appear on a ballot, with a commission that reviews the requirements to prevent the exclusion of minorities.
All financial information must be disclosed by anyone with power over others.
Somehow replace shares with cooperatives and employee ownership.
No elected judges, with stringent training and yearly bias testing. Like a postdoc in judicial impartiality.
Same with sheriffs. No elected police. Police should be a career, like a civil engineer. To be promoted, people must pass ever more strict ethics courses.
Any person who is a position of trust and power who then acts contrary to the ethics of their role can never be elected. Or have power over anyone again.
Children must be free of religion until they are 25.
Children must not be mutilated by their parents religion.
National healthcare.
USA focused: each state gets one senator, plus one per 2 million residents.
A lot of those tests have already been done and were used almost exclusively to enforce segregation.
To be fair, literally anything can, will be or probably has already been used to enforce discrimination or segregation somewhere in the world. We won't get anywhere living in fear of bigots.
Which why there has to be strict oversight to prevent that from happening.
Oversight by whom?
Your new government, presumably.
Though if you can't trust it to faithfully enforce its laws, why have it? Or any government, for that matter?
Like, you can take the fear of discrimination to justify not having anything
You cannot trust a government to routinely create arbitrary standards used to regulate that same government.
This is different from a government enforcing your average law because this law applies to the election process itself and allows for significant bias. Where there is room for bias in this process, it will be taken advantage of. Look at gerrymandering.
What problem does your law actually solve? If people are willing to elect a candidate, isn't that a sufficient measure of competency? At best you're creating an elitist state controlled by those who set the bar for competency, and at worst you're creating a one party state.
Then you can't have any government, or really, any meaningful social interaction.
All democratic governments are built on the assumption they'll be acted upon in good faith, because without good faith, no cooperation or society is possible. All a society is is a group of people either working together in good faith.
If you want to go off and live by the law of the jungle, then by all means, go ahead. But the rest of us will move on without you.
Most of what you've described would inevitably lead to the establishment of a single party totalitarian state.
Don't like the opposing party? Just make it part of the test. Today, one party could exclude the other by including questions that agree or disagree with critical race theory, voter fraud, etc.
Same issue. Who determines impartiality? The party in power? Single party state.
Who determines "ethics"? Single party state.
What is religion? You're definitely banning several books, and possibly banning a lot more. Many books can be turned into a religion or contain religious aspects. The party in power decides what's a religion and what gets banned.
At that point, why have a separate Senate and House? The point of a two-chambered Congress is to balance state and federal power.
Those "competency" tests will be used to discriminate.