Today, me, Pam, and the dogs went to vote. I told several people at the polls that we were educating the girls about democracy. Everyone seemed to think it was funny.<\/p>\n
I am so glad the election is over today. We won’t know who won until later but at least we’ve got this horrible campaign behind us. It has ruined so many friendships and caused so much heartache. Maybe now we can begin the processes of rebuilding our society and find some long term solutions to the flaws in our election system.<\/p>\n
I know I’m being naive. There is too much money involved in keeping the system the way it has been to expect any quick fixes. I have heard some good ideas though. Maybe if enough of us got behind them we could start a dialog and get some of the archaic misfeatures of our system changed.<\/p>\n
One important change would be to either hold the election on a weekend or declare election day a national holiday. Then people wouldn’t have to take time off without pay to vote. The current election day was selected to cater\u00a0 to voters that had to spend a day traveling to their polling place.<\/p>\n
Another change that I’d like to see is to change the rules so that if somehow two candidates got on the ballot that you absolutely hated, there would be a “None of the above” selection. If “None of the above” got the majority of votes, the election would be automatically rerun and none of the candidates from the first election would be allowed to run in the new election.<\/p>\n
The most glaring flaw in the system is the electoral college. It might have made sense in the eighteenth century but it makes no sense at all in a modern democracy. We need to change the system so that the president is elected by straight popular vote. If necessary, we need to amend the constitution of the United States to do so.<\/p>\n
Of course the major parties will fight this tooth and nail because they have used the system to their advantage numerous times in the past. But they answer to us in the long run. All we have to do is keep voting people out of office until we get people in that will listen to the will of the people.<\/p>\n
There are other possible improvements to the system but these changes would go a long way to making the system more to my liking.<\/p>\n
We could also nominate candidates that treated each other like civilized adults instead of junior high school bullies but that might be asking too much.<\/p>\n
It’s good to have this election behind us. Let’s be kind to each other no matter who wins today.<\/p>\n
Sweet dreams, don\u2019t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today, me, Pam, and the dogs went to vote. I told several people at the polls that we were educating the girls about democracy. Everyone seemed to think it was funny. I am so glad the election is over today. We won’t know who won until later but at least we’ve got this horrible campaign … Continue reading “An Olive Branch Offered Before the Returns are In”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=797"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":798,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797\/revisions\/798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}