Our Electoral College: Your vote really doesn’t count
Do we really live in a democracy when our President is elected via the Electoral System? Evidently our political forefathers were as egocentric and power hungry as our policy controlling politicians today. It seems very basic and common sense that the individual with the most votes (majority vote) wins. Apparently this was too simple for our political forefathers, despite the fact that a true democracy by the popular vote means each vote counts one. The idea of millions of votes squeezed to only hundreds (e.g. currently 270 electors to elect the President) is insulting to the populist voter, but advantageous to the privileged elitist. In at least two United States Presidential elections, the candidate with the most votes (majority) lost the election to the Electoral Vote (e.g. in 2000 Al Gore beat George W. Bush by over 500,000 votes, but lost the election.)
The premise of the Electoral College was to mimic the representational dynamic of the Congress, which assumed that it was both risky and impractical to allow the people to vote directly on matters of great importance; risky because the people were largely uneducated, and impractical because they were scattered across the rural vastness of the colonies, with no means of communicating quickly or easily. It was also a compromise to avoid the thorny issue of black suffrage (or last thereof) in the South. Everything about this has changed, yet we continue to apply an 18th-century mechanism to the task of electing our Presidents. The integrity of the national vote is at risk because it rests on an indirect, inconsistent, state-reliant mechanism that is susceptible to political manipulation and opportunistic legal attack.
Our very peculiar Electoral College has outlived its dubious usefulness. Unfortunately, direct popular vote in Presidential elections can only be instituted by constitutional amendment, which was most recently proposed in the wake of Richard Nixon’s narrow popular win over Hubert Humphrey in 1968. It had a good chance of success and was backed by Nixon himself but was filibustered to death in the Senate before it reached the states.
Recently President Putin of Russia was asked by North American news people why he was not following Democratic principles for his country—his answer—“Why do you ask?—your Electoral System is not democratic!” To the chagrin of the news people, they reluctantly admitted that Putin was correct—how embarrassing.
It is time that a Presidential candidate has the gonads to push for such a change in retiring our present Electoral System and using a majority popular system to where everyone’s vote COUNTS—make Putin wrong, and where we can honestly—factually say, we now live in a true democracy.
– David Easterla
Maryville
