An Unorthodox Proposal

First off, a nod to Jonathan Swift for providing the inspiration for this post's title.  Now, on with the show.

Alright, look. It's obvious that America's current system of choosing a president isn't working.  320 million people, and one of the final two candidates we could come up with - the one who went on to win* - was Donald Trump? That was the best we could do? Really, America?!?

You'll notice I didn't mention Hillary Clinton in the above paragraph. That was intentional.  I didn't want to lump her in with Trump.  Sure, Hillary Clinton had a fair amount of political baggage.  Some of it was deserved and of her own doing, but the overwhelming majority of it turned out to be baseless accusations peddled by the right-wing smear machine.  But she was also the most qualified candidate, by far, and she was certainly miles ahead of the walking, breathing dumpster fire currently occupying the White House.

Whoops, I got distracted and went off on a tangent there.

Back to my main point, which is that the current process for electing a president is in desperate need of reform. I don't want to get too into the weeds talking about how the institutional mechanisms in place need to be modified, although I will say that the Electoral College needs to be revamped, the Voting Rights Act needs to be restored, and alternative ideas like ranked-choice voting and holding primaries on weekends (when more people can participate) need to be at least looked at.

No, the change I propose is more tonal than structural.  Here's my idea.  Instead of the current handful of campaign debates, which are nearly worthless spectacles, we have each party's candidate (it would have to be after the primaries, because in the past couple presidential elections there would be too many candidates for this to work) undergo some kind of exam by a select panel of experts in various relevant areas.

For example, say we want to evaluate a candidate's knowledge on foreign policy. We gather a team of experts in all the areas foreign policy could be expected to cover: economics & trade, science, military strategy, and so on.  Then these experts ask the candidates a bunch of questions, to gauge their knowledge. Now, the questions could take any kind of format - I'm not too choosy.  It could be an in-person panel, like a job interview; or it could be like a college-level exam. 

The point - and this is the important part - is that the results of the Q & A are made public, to see just how much a certain candidate knows (or doesn't know.) If it's a panel interview, record it and play it on all the news networks later.  If it's a written test, publish it in a special insert in every major newspaper, and post it online. Also, just like any other test (which is essentially what this is), the candidate's performance is scored.  1 - 100, just like most tests.  Any candidate who scores too low is disqualified from running.

And that's it.  We wouldn't change anything else about how votes are cast or counted, we'd just replace debates with a process that (hopefully) prevented the country from electing a complete idiot.

I don't expect this to be adopted, of course.  It's pretty much got a snowball's chance in hell.  But I don't think anyone will dispute that elections have become way too much like a popularity contest - a certain level of that is always expected, but it's getting ridiculous. 

Anyway, I was just throwing this idea out there.

* Russia helped Trump win