By Steve Brawner

Our country’s political system is broken — for average Americans, for upcoming generations and even for politicians, most of whom, I’m convinced, run for office at least for partially noble reasons.

By contrast, it hums nicely along for those who have the means to influence it, particularly giant corporations and the super rich. It also works well for those who make money off it — lobbyists, media types peddling outrage and controversy, and political consultants paid big bucks to tell candidates to smile whenever they say nasty things about their opponents.

Americans are a dynamic people, but our system is stuck in the late 1700s. It doesn’t need a tune-up. It needs an overhaul, and here are four ideas to fix it.

—Replace the Electoral College with a popular vote. Thanks to the Electoral College, Arkansans’ votes in 2012 already have been counted by political operatives on both sides because this is a “red” state, meaning it reliably votes Republican in presidential elections. The opposite is true in the so-called “blue” states, resulting in the votes of a majority of Americans being taken for granted by one party or the other. That’s not healthy for a democracy.

Defenders of the College say it attracts attention to small states such as Arkansas. Nonsense. In 2012, the major party nominees will focus on a handful of big swing states, such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida, and hardly set foot here.

The most pressing electoral problems aren’t with the presidency but with Congress, which brings us to a second idea.

—Let’s just have elections every four years. The biblical book of Ecclesiastes says there is a time for everything. In our democracy, there should be a time for campaigning and a time for governing. Unfortunately, when one two-year election cycle ends, another immediately begins, making it difficult for political leaders to pause and work together.

Members of both the House of Representatives and the Senate should be elected during a presidential election year and then should get to work serving the American people for most of the next four years. Instead, this permanent campaign cycle has forced congressional candidates to never leave campaign mode and to spend too much of their time begging for money from special interests, all of which comes with strings attached. It’s legalized bribery, which leads to a third idea.

—Optional public financing of congressional campaigns. Let’s make it possible for candidates to accept public campaign funds (yes, tax dollars) in exchange for a promise to accept no direct campaign donations from anyone. I’m thinking $500,000 for any Arkansas congressional candidate who collects signatures from 10 percent of a district’s registered voters — a standard very few could meet.

The major party candidates would almost always forego that measly $500,000 in favor of soliciting the big bucks from donors, and that’s fine as long as voters understand what is happening. Meanwhile, each election cycle might produce one or two Arkansas candidates, including nonwealthy independents, able to run a bare-bones but credible campaign without owing any favors to anybody except the taxpayers.

You say we can’t afford $500,000 for one or two candidates every four years? I say we can’t afford what we now have: Elected officials repaying millions of dollars in campaign donations from special interest groups with billions of our tax dollars.

—Finally, it’s time to reform the way congressional districts are formed. This year’s “Fayetteville finger” legislative redistricting controversy was a reminder that elections are decided not so much by ideas but by who draws the maps. (Although, let’s be fair, legislators eventually created districts that weren’t particularly advantageous to either party.)

Across the country, the two major parties have used the power of redistricting to shut out competition. Most districts are “safe,” meaning they reliably vote Republican or Democrat. Members of Congress know they will stay in office not by serving all their constituents but by satisfying their partisan bases, so both parties are drifting to their extremes.

How do we solve it? I don’t know, and I’m running out of space. But the country that invented modern democracy (and the light bulb, the telephone, the moon rocket, the personal computer, the Internet, etc.) can figure out a better way of drawing maps.

Maybe these are all crazy ideas, and at the very least, each would create new problems. For example, not having the Electoral College could have resulted in a messy nationwide recount during the 2000 Bush-Gore race.

But the status quo isn’t working. It can’t decide if it wants to raise the debt ceiling even as it can’t decide how to stop going into debt. It’s two years late reauthorizing the next highway bill. It can’t even address problems over which there is broad national consensus, such as the need to be independent of Middle East oil cartels.

It’s broken. Let’s fix it. Got any crazy ideas? Email them to me at brawnersteve@mac.com, and I’ll reference them in a future column.

Steve Brawner

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Steve Brawner is an independent journalist in Arkansas. His blog — Independent Arkansas — is linked at Arkansasnews.com. His e-mail address is brawnersteve@mac.com.