Let's Become the First State with Republican-Styled Elections

   I enjoy the debate on the caucus-convention system, and it has given me three ideas on how to go about electing people.
   Today, Idea Two: It is said, one of the virtues of the convention-caucus system is that it is republican-type government. Some even suggest America wasn't intended to be a democracy, so much as a republic. In the convention-caucus system, you elect someone to be a student of the candidates, charging them with analyzing them and picking the best one. That's a principle of republican government. So, let's try the virtue of being a republic. Let's make Utah the first state to elect people in a fully republican manner. No more would we vote for governor, or attorney general, or state legislator. If the federal government will let us, we'll not even vote for our congress members.
   That will be done for us.
   I can hear the outcry from you, the reader. You aren't reacting well, at all, to this proposal. I think of the thoughts I have had about the caucus-convention system, of how it just doesn't make sense to get all dressed up and go to the caucus meetings only to do little more than turn our voting privileges over to a political activist. Give up my right to vote? No way! I'll cast my own vote, thank you!
   Well, that being my reaction to the caucus-convention system, I still see a lot of virtue in republican-styled elections. It is true many a voter doesn't study the candidates. Even the voters who say they do, sometimes don't. What's the phrase? "Let's not, and say we did"? That sounds like how we sometimes handle our study of the candidates.
   So, let's try the virtue of the republican-styled election.
  If you gander at our Constitution, you'll see it fashioned two of the three federal elections to be republican in manner. The U.S. senators were originally elected by the state legislators -- they were all the way until 1913 when the 17th Amendment passed the elective powers over to the people.
   The presidential election was also set up as a republican-type thing. We elect the Electoral College and the Elector College elects the president. Unfortunately (depending on whether you like the republican form of electing officials), in practice, we elect the president by popular vote -- altered popular vote, but popular vote, the same. The only time it isn't by popular vote is when in transferring the votes into the Electoral College, it skews the tally enough to elect someone who doesn't quite have the plurality of votes. Although we officially vote for the electors and they cast the official votes, that is somewhat of a charade. The process has degenerated from a republican-styled election. (Of note, the popular vote nationwide was not even recorded until 1824.) The way it is practiced, it is the presidential candidates, themselves, who have their names on the ballot. Not only are the Electoral College candidates names not on the ballot, we seldom even know who they are.
  So, the way the Constitution set it up, two of the three federal elections were to be republican in manner. Only the election of the house members was to be by direct vote. We remain a republic in that we elect leaders who represent us, and who vote on the issues on our behalf, but the manner of electing our federal leaders is not the republican-styled election the forefathers created.
   So, make Utah the first and only state in the Union to run its elections in the manner the Founding Fathers wanted two out of three of its elections to be.
   This would just be a nod to George Washington, James Madison and the others. (That might be getting a little too specific, for though I know how the Constitution came out, I don't know whether George and James favored election of the president by Congress or by popular vote, or what they thought of the Electoral College.)
   (Note: the following was added 2/19/14.
   Well, if we were to go with such an election system as I have stated above, one problem would be electing electors who trully would study the candidates. Simply turning our votes over to someone is of no use, if they are no better at finding good people for office than we are.