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.