Random Anti-Voting

All voting systems involving choosing a candidate, no matter how well-designed and fair the system is, suffer from the same flaw: they end up electing a politician.

As Douglas Adams said, "Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."

The more important the office, the more it will be interfered with by politics. But on this large a scale, simply choosing someone at random (as in "Selection, not Election") could very well result in choosing a real bastard who would revel in his suddenly-acquired power.

So, here's how to narrow down the choices. Each voter gets up to 10 anti-votes, with which he names anyone whom he thinks should not be President. Anyone who gets at least one anti-vote is eliminated from the pool of candidates. So, actively trying to become President and drawing attention to yourself would only get you anti-voted immediately.

There will probably be millions of inconspicuous, unknown people who get no votes. The winner of the anti-election is chosen randomly from these eligible candidates.

The random selection would have to be held in a publicly viewable way, such as someone picking digits from a Bingo machine to form a Social Security number, and repeating until an eligible candidate is chosen.

The result is that the President is someone whom nobody particularly cares about, and who might not want to be President all that much. He could decline the position and cause a new person to be selected; the result would be the same as simply anti-voting for oneself in the first place. The final selectee would likely be someone entirely ambivalent to being the President.