As for your specific questions:
- Would you support an online voting system?
Only if we can find a way to secure the bejeezus out of it, probably requiring multiple independent audits and open source technology. The problem with any computer-based system is there is not very much human oversight, so fraud can be perpetrated far too easily because it could involve only a few people and would tend to require technical expertise to detect. It needs to be really, really un-messable. One way might be if the system would allow anyone to check their own votes, though it might require everyone to be able to see how everyone voted, which would cost anonymity, which is not good. Paper ballots that have to be handled by many people, most of whom are volunteers interested in fairness, is very hard to come close to beating with technology that removes most people from the process.
– Would you support a federal holiday to allow people to vote?
Sure. And/or use an existing holiday, or always use a Saturday, or allow voting over 3 days or a week, not just 24 hours.
– Should we be using paper, electronic, or a combination of both types of ballots?
As I wrote above, we should use paper as long as electronic votes cannot provide as good or better security. We know corporations are interested in buying our elections, and are willing to use anonymous agents and spend billions of dollars to do so, so it was to be very very secure, which means transparency and public oversight. I’m not aware of any electronic system that’s as secure as paper.
– Should there be a way to confirm that your vote was counted?
Ideally yes.
– Would things be different for primary vs general elections?
See my previous post. It wouldn’t require a primary election. However there could be an elimination round, which might make sense, and it could be something much less secure, because it would just be something like you need to show you have some threshold of support.
– Should we do away with caucuses?
No, we should do away with having two large generic parties that dominate elections and act like gangs. The existing parties can exist and do what they want, but we should make them far less dominant by changing the election system to a fair one, as I described in my first post above.
– Should there be a federal standard for all election rules and processes, so that states are not allowed to make up their own?
There should be some federal standards, to avoid SNAFUs from incompetence and/or corruption, but some amount of state freedom to do as they want can be good, as long as it doesn’t cause serious problems.
- And what about voter eligibility and registration? Should this happen automatically at 18 years old, or should there be a manual process for registering? Should there be any actions which a citizen could take that would invalidate their right to vote (felony, etc)?
I think the main thing is it should be very easy for citizens to register. I don’t like automatic because it implies automatic citizen tracking that I don’t approve of. I think that there should be a review of felony voting invalidations and what the standard should be. Maybe a national referendum after an investigation is presented to the public. This is especially important because “it is known that for decades the “war on drugs and other police targeting has been aimed at removing voters’ rights from targeted groups, such as African Americans.