Perfect Government

Each time an election is scheduled, a non-political group of teachers is tasked with coming up with a general knowledge test. The subject material is varied, including mathematics, languages, history, nutrition, geography, astronomy, physics, cooking, technology, medicine, problem-solving, memory retention, etc. The questions and answers are published six months before the election.

For politicians, the passing mark is set to whatever score the top 20% is expected to achieve. Every politician must take the test, and if they score lower than the top 20%, they aren’t allowed to run for office.

For voters, there is no passing mark. Your score on the test is how many votes you get. Score 100, you get 100 votes. Score 10, you get 10 votes. Don’t take the test, you get zero votes.

Voting is not mandatory or even encouraged. If you don’t care enough to vote. Stay at home. We only want the votes of people who care enough to vote.  I have never understood why we encourage uninformed, indifferent people to vote.

The same non-political group of teachers who created the first test is tasked with creating a questionnaire identifying the major issues facing the electorate at the time of the election. The questions are multiple-choice. Each candidate for office must select one of the multiple-choice answers for each question. They don’t get to write a paragraph explaining their nuances.

Candidates may also introduce their own topics for the questionnaire, so if a candidate has bold new ideas like colonizing Mars, he can put that forward for consideration.  A system would be created to vet these topics to prevent the questionnaire from becoming lengthy.  

On voting day, you don’t vote for a candidate. You take the same questionnaire the candidates took and you assign a number from 1 to 10 to each question indicating how important you consider this issue.  The system then takes your questionnaire and the weighting you gave each issue, and chooses the best candidate that matches your choices on the questionnaire. This isn’t a complex algorithm. It is simple arithmetic. All your votes (however many you got on the test) go to that candidate. In cases of a tie, your votes are split among the matching candidates.

All government legislation must, by law, include a measuring system to determine its success and a time frame for expected success. The measurements and targets are not set by the legislature but by an unrelated new branch of government.  The legislature may only state its goals with the new legislation.  Grading will be done by others.

If the legislature implements a tax cut hoping it will create jobs, an unrelated branch of government must at the same time create a set of measurements to judge the tax cut’s success at creating jobs.

If the legislature mandates the use of daytime headlights on cars to reduce car accidents, an unrelated branch of government must create a measuring system to determine if car accidents were truly reduced by this change. 

If the legislation fails to achieve its stated goal, it is automatically repealed.

A new branch of government will be created: the Accountability Branch.

While serving their term, elected officials are constantly graded by the Accountability Branch to decide if they need to be fired. If they are judged incompetent by the standards set by the Accountability Branch, they are replaced immediately with the next candidate.

Elected officials are also judged by the Accountability Branch on their performance based on the questionnaire they filled in. If they said on the questionnaire that they are pro-abortion and vote against abortion, they’re gone. If they said on the questionnaire that they’re against gun rights but they vote against gun control, they’re gone.  Omnibus bills containing multiple pieces of legislation will be banned, so as not to cloud this matter. 

All candidates are identified via a number and are forbidden from disclosing their elected service to the public before, during or after their term in office. They must serve totally anonymously. They can tell their friends they work for the government, but they can’t say what they do for the government. 

The press may cover candidates and elected officials, but may not say their names. “Defense Secretary 315 will be visiting the UK on Monday”. They must also blur out the politician’s face in photos and videos. 

Government officials will receive minimum wage and no pension. No candidate may serve more than one term in office.

Political parties will be banned.  Let each legislator learn to work with others who may differ with them.

This will get rid of most parasites, power-hungry glory seekers, and attention whores.

This system isn’t perfect but it’s better by far than what we have. There would be a million details to sort out. The number of candidates may need to be artificially limited and the system may require several run-offs with more detailed questionnaires to sift through the ties, and so on. I’d take it over any government system I see on Earth today, though. People like Donald Trump would not only never get elected under such a system, he would never qualify to run.