I saw something on here a while ago that seemed vaguely like this and reminded me to post this idea.
I thought of it while watching the Australian version of Big Brother and simultaneously complaining about how crap America was for electing George Dubya.
For anyone who hasn't seen big brother (Americans?), its a game show where 12 people get put in a house and filmed for TV 24 hours a day, nowhere to hide. Every week someone gets voted out by the public.
It strikes me that this would be a much better system for electing a president than the present electoral college thingo.
The candidates also have to complete tasks to prove how cool they are at certain stuff. Presidential big brother would have to include general knowledge quizes, speech making, lying, diplomacy (possibly involving a few rounds of the popular game), and counter-terrorism.
The only other alteration from the real TV show, is that they probably shouldn't install cameras in the shower.-- zero5, Sep 03 2001 There is no problem with our electoral collage. It was created so if the common Americans ever elected a complete moron who wasn't quilfied, the electoral collage would keep the moron from running the country. Wait that sounds kinda familiar doesn't it.-- JunkBugg, Sep 03 2001 Actually, [zero5], we have Big Brother in the U.S. too (not that that is something of which to be proud). However, I fear that the candidates would be even more stupid and boring than the current "houseguests".-- Susen, Sep 03 2001 The "big" political contest in the UK at the moment is for the leader of the Tory party, who needed a new leader after they were humilitated at the general elections for being too right-wing. They are in the final stage of a system *designed* to be terrible in order to stop spurious leadership challenges to an incumbant leader, which was designed by the chap that resigned straight after the election.
Your idea has to be an imporvement on this process (which is making a laughing stock of an already absurd party) so from me you get a croissant.-- Aristotle, Sep 04 2001 Dang! I had my campaign speech ready and everything. Then I read what this idea was really about...-- BigBrother, Sep 04 2001 We need something like this for the current crop of Republicans. Can we just bomb the house somewhere in the middle of the series?-- RayfordSteele, Jun 10 2015 random, halfbakery