Impeach The Electoral College
A New York Times editorial has it right -- the Electoral College should be abolished:
The main problem with the Electoral College is that it builds into every election the possibility, which has been a reality three times since the Civil War, that the president will be a candidate who lost the popular vote. This shocks people in other nations who have been taught to look upon the United States as the world's oldest democracy. The Electoral College also heavily favors small states. The fact that every one gets three automatic electors - one for each senator and a House member - means states that by population might be entitled to only one or two electoral votes wind up with three, four or five.The majority does not rule and every vote is not equal - those are reasons enough for scrapping the system. But there are other consequences as well. This election has been making clear how the Electoral College distorts presidential campaigns. A few swing states take on oversized importance, leading the candidates to focus their attention, money and promises on a small slice of the electorate. We are hearing far more this year about the issue of storing hazardous waste at Yucca Mountain, an important one for Nevada's 2.2 million residents, than about securing ports against terrorism, a vital concern for 19.2 million New Yorkers. The political concerns of Cuban-Americans, who are concentrated in the swing state of Florida, are of enormous interest to the candidates. The interests of people from Puerto Rico scarcely come up at all, since they are mainly settled in areas already conceded as Kerry territory. The emphasis on swing states removes the incentive for a large part of the population to follow the campaign, or even to vote.
Those are the problems we have already experienced. The arcane rules governing the Electoral College have the potential to create havoc if things go wrong. Electors are not required to vote for the candidates they are pledged to, and if the vote is close in the Electoral College, a losing candidate might well be able to persuade a small number of electors to switch sides. Because there are an even number of electors - one for every senator and House member of the states, and three for the District of Columbia - the Electoral College vote can end in a tie. There are several plausible situations in which a 269-269 tie could occur this year. In the case of a tie, the election goes to the House of Representatives, where each state delegation gets one vote - one for Wyoming's 500,000 residents and one for California's 35.5 million.
The Electoral College's supporters argue that it plays an important role in balancing relations among the states, and protecting the interests of small states. A few years ago, this page was moved by these concerns to support the Electoral College. But we were wrong. The small states are already significantly overrepresented in the Senate, which more than looks out for their interests. And there is no interest higher than making every vote count.
The so-called electoral college didn't drop down from the sky. It's in the constitution folks. We do not have a pure democracy here. Oh, many think we do. But consider that we elect people who do the real voting at various levels. City councils, county board of supervisors, state legislators, federal legislators. Occasionally, when the politicos are at an impasse, or too chicken, they will had over a direct vote on something called Proposition 187, or a school bond issue. We in California, other states I don't know about, have a love/hate thing with state initiatives. Because we have people who we did not vote for directly, judges, who can rule any intiative we were allowed to vote for directly as voters as unconstitutional and thus not taking effect even though we voted it in as a majority...a democracy by definiton should mean the people can vote in the majority and that majority cannot be overturned. Which is what the author was trying to point out about the electoral college system.
We have a representative form of government. High school civics, anyone? The electoral college is just what the designers of the constitution negotiated amongst themselves at the time they were concocting it. And it was never called the electoral college, by the way. It all boils down to you never, ever vote directly for a prez. Why? Because back then the big fear was that some special interests, read rich and powerful folks, as well as really effective rabble-rousers might create groundswells within all the dummies out there who were given voting privileges in the spirit of democracy and vote in some hairball that starts wars we don't need, or spends money we don't have. And if you are thinking Republican-Bush(2), Iraq, then include Democrat-Kennedy/Johnson, Vietnam. This isn't a partisan issue. But the designers in their final draft wrote that all we, the commom voter types, could do was elect other people who really voted for the prez, which would then provide a layer of protection from radicalism, or just plain corruption. Sounded good at the time. Still does for some, since there's some evidence of plenty of dummies running loose. And there's plenty of rich and powerful nutjobs ready to have things more to their liking.
Individual opinion seems to depend upon if one likes the winner of the last one. And that's pretty much why the whiners are Dems now who didn't have much to say when Billy Bob whupped Bushy Bob back when with less than 50% of the popular vote. Repubs will start playing the same tune if Kerry wins this one, and the Dems will just laugh too late, nyah-nyah, we love our constitution.
allan at August 30, 2004 7:41 PM