XXth Amendment:
Section 1. Election of both of a state's Senators shall take place in the same election, with all candidates running on the same slate for the two Senate seats. When voting for the senate, each voter may vote for any or all candidates on the slate. At the time of the passage of this Amendment, the term of whichever Senator is shorter shall be extended so that he or she next stands for election at the same time as the second Senator from his or her state. After a Senatorial election, the two candidates with the most votes shall be seated as Senators.
Section 2. Each Senator shall have a variable weight of voting in the Senate, which shall be the number of votes he or she received in his or her most recent election, divided by the total number of registered voters in his or her state eligible to vote at the time of the election.
Section 3. Where the Constitution before this amendment required a majority in the senate to pass a bill, order, law, or resolution, it now requires a sum of at least 50 votes. Where the Constitution before this amendment required a 2/3 majority, it now requires a sum of at least 66.7 votes.
The idea here is to address one particular failing of our democracy. In our system, a person that does not register and/or does not vote is counted as if he or she voted for whomever wins the election. And the votes of all the voters are proxied as if they all agree with the winner of the election. This amendment would have the effect, for the Senate, of treating registered voters who either don't vote, or vote for a non-winner, as voting *against* everything the Senate does. That makes it a lot harder to do anything in the Senate; which is the point.
This amendment also smuggles in a particular form of alternate voting called "approval voting", which should have the effect of widening the election considerably. In approval voting third parties are not bedevilled with the paradox of "throwing away your vote".
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