Shoup's Policy Ideas
Criminal Justice Reform
- End qualified immunity
- End civil asset forfeiture
- End the "war on drugs"
- End warrantless wiretapping
- Eliminate cash bail
- Eliminate the sale of military equipment to law enforcement agencies
- Eliminate police unions
- Eliminate private prisons
- Eliminate unpaid prison labor
- Eliminate mandatory minimum sentences
- Eliminate pre-textual traffic stops
- Establish funding parity between district attorney and public defender offices
- Establish national database for police officer certification and de-certification
- Legalize sex work
- Legalize - or at least decriminalize - most recreational drug use
- Reform the coercive plea-bargaining system, including by prohibiting the threat of deals "expiring" and the rescinding of offers when trials start
- Replace the "Reasonable Officer Standard" with a "Reasonable Person Standard"
- Require police live in the communities in which they serve
- Require use of force complaints be investigated by outside organizations
- Calculate fines as a percentage of personal wealth.
Election Reform
- Ranked Choice Voting using a Borda Count system
- Independent Redistricting Reform
- Created by non-politicians without demonstrable party affiliation
- Creating districts which are:
- Equal in Population
- Comply with the Voting Rights Act
- Geographically contiguous
- Geographically compact
- Maintain "communities of interest":
- Cities
- Counties
- Neighborhoods
- Or other communities which share social and economic interests
- Abolish Term Limits
- Remove Partisan Identification from General Election Ballots
- No-excuse mail-in voting
- A regularized, clear and open process for purging voter roles, including communication between all precincts and states to automatically purge voters who register elsewhere and upon their death.
- Voting machines which make clear paper marks visible to the voter upon casting their vote.
- In-person election not limited to a single day, but across at least three days, at least one of which must be a weekend day.
- Processing of mail-in ballots, including signature verification, to begin as soon as the ballot is received.
- Implement 'double-blind' counting:
- all ballots should go through independent processes to be counted twice, and whose tallies are compared to check for discrepancies.
- Automatic instant recounts in cases with margins of victory of less than 0.5%
- Full re-enfranchisement of convicted felons who have finished serving their custodial sentences.
- For the purposes of Redistricting, prisoners' primary residence should be their last non-prison address so as not to artificially increase the size of a district in which there is a prison, increasing the power of the votes of those in that district.
- No official release of election results until all precincts in a given race have reported complete results.