Here we go again. Every four years. All this talk of Swing States and States that are Hard-Democratic or Leaning Republican or red or blue or purple states. No one in the national media pays attention to the voters in the vast majority of America; it all comes down to a few states and the "swing voters" who play coy about who they will vote for.
BASTA!!! (I mean, well, "enough".)
Every four years we have election for all the seats in the House of Representatives, one third of the Senate, and sundry other mayoral and state legislative races. It's called the General Election Year. (Not to be confused with the General Electric Year, which will come soon when we start naming years after corporations to get sponsorship money to defray the cost of the National Debt.)
In this election, which by the way I think is a lovely idea lest you think I'm just cranky about all the negative ads on television, there is one and only one race that is not decided by the popular vote. That is the most important race of them all. The Presidency.
It seems that back in 1787 the majority of our Founding Fathers decided that the direct election of the Chief Executive was a bad idea. A system was set-up whereby each state would have a number of Electors--set up by the number of Senators each state has (2) and the number of members of the Congressional Delegation of each state. We also had a Constitution that said that the candidate who finished second in the Presidential Race would be Vice-President under the man who finished first. But we got rid of that in the early 1800's because there appeared to be a good chance that the President and the "VP" might hate each other's guts. We also had a system where each Senator was appointed by the state legislatures of the respective states (who were elected by "the people", AKA white guys). But we got rid of that in 1913 during the Progressive Era thanks to the Amendment ot the Constitution. Now Senators are elected by a direct vote of the people.
Why can't we do this with the Presidency? We are no longer a rural nation with isolated regions where there might be several "favorite son" candidates dividing up the vote. We are a major urban/suburban nation which sports two-national party system that draws votes from all over the country. The Electoral College isn't needed. The idea of having "swing states" like Florida and Missouri having undue influence over the outcome of the most important position in the country is hopelessly passe. Let each and every vote count whether its Point Barrow, Alaska or Bangor Maine or Key West or San Diego.
Four times in our nation's history--most recently in the year 2000 with the famous "Bush v. Gore" case in the Supreme Court and the ballot imbroglio in Florida--the candidate who got the most votes lost the election. (The other times were in 1824, 1876, and 1888.) Does that make any sense? Not to me. Do we have to wait until the conservative GOP candidate loses the popular vote before we reform this antique layer of anonymous Electors planted between the people and the White House?
I say 220 years of playing Russian Roulette with majority rule is enough. Let's give the candidate who gets the most votes the Presidency; just like every other office in this nation.
(below from www.howstuffworks.com )
Electoral College Results
In most presidential elections, a candidate who wins the popular vote will also receive the majority of the electoral votes, but this is not always the case. There have been four presidents who have won an election with fewer popular votes than their opponent but more electoral votes.Here are the four elections when the candidate who led the popular vote did not win the office:
- 1824: John Quincy Adams, the son of former President John Adams, received more than 38,000 fewer votes than Andrew Jackson, but neither candidate won a majority of the Electoral College. Adams was awarded the presidency when the election was thrown to the House of Representatives.
- 1876: Nearly unanimous support from small states gave Rutherford B. Hayes a one-vote margin in the Electoral College, despite the fact that he lost the popular vote to Samuel J. Tilden by 264,000 votes. Hayes carried five out of the six smallest states (excluding Delaware). These five states plus Colorado gave Hayes 22 electoral votes with only 109,000 popular votes. At the time, Colorado had been just been admitted to the Union and decided to appoint electors instead of holding elections. So, Hayes won Colorado's three electoral votes with zero popular votes. It was the only time in U.S. history that small state support has decided an election.
- 1888: Benjamin Harrison lost the popular vote by 95,713 votes to Grover Cleveland, but won the electoral vote by 65. In this instance, some say the Electoral College worked the way it is designed to work by preventing a candidate from winning an election based on support from one region of the country. The South overwhelmingly supported Cleveland, and he won by more than 425,000 votes in six southern states. However, in the rest of the country he lost by more than 300,000 votes.
- In 2000, Al Gore received 50,992,335 votes nationwide and George W. Bush received 50,455,156 votes. After Bush was awarded the state of Florida, he had a total of 271 electoral votes, which beat Gore's 266 electoral votes.
Help pushing http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/ to your state's law.
ReplyDeleteJust the site I wanted to find. Thanks incognitte.
ReplyDeleteUS politics get weirder and weirder and the more I learn about them the more confused and horrified I become. The founding fathers, and whoever else contributed to the imbroglio (well if they weren't dead already I would say they need to be taken out and shot - and we don't even have the Death Penalty). How on earth can you call it democracy if the outcomes are not decided by the people's vote?
ReplyDeleteI whole heartedly agree. This every vote count campaign is a bunch of hooey. The electorial college is antiquated. We have the technology and the ability to make every vote count. With computers they could even do it in real time. There would no longer be winning a state. You just get the votes cast for you. I am all for disbanning the electorial college. I am sure there are 537 people who want the electorial college to stay as it is.
ReplyDeleteWell, Iri Ani, its a good question. We are really a republic, which wouldn't be so bad if there wasn't so much big-money influence sneaking into our political system through lobbyists. (So I'd say we are a flawed republic as far as one person/one vote means anything.)
ReplyDeleteYou're so right, Fred, and we have been able to do just what you describe for years. It's a matter of people making direct election of a President important enough to get politicians to have to take a stand--and then we vote accordingly.
ReplyDeleteOh yes I forgot you people only get one vote - we get two votes each on the 8th of next month ( does this sound like boasting lol)
ReplyDeleteThe reason for the electoral college is to make sure that areas or interests are not able to put their candidate in the white house without considering the whole country. I think of it more as a way for rural areas, which are terribly under-represented when it comes to votes, to have more of an equal say. It also protects us from special interests or religious organizations from having excessive say as well. It really ties into the checks and balances built into the system to prevent one of the three branches of the federal government from gaining too much power.
ReplyDeleteThe electoral college is one of the basic articles of the constitution. To eliminate it would require at least one constitutional amendment and those are pretty hard to pull off.
Personally, I don't think this is a Republican/Democrat issue at all. Sorry, but I'm going to back those guys that wrote the constitution - they were pretty smart guys and probably forgot more about government and how it should work than most of us know. The whole idea was to prevent someone from gaining excessive power and it still seems to be working.
The only ones getting the power in the elections are the 'Capitalist Cabal', which runs the 'cabinet', and decides the issues that are worthwhile for the president and vp to do anything about. Big government is actually big business, in disguise, and interestingly, it seems the states with the most electoral college votes may well be states where business is entrenched, or at least able to be situated in a way they are favorably treated...CA, CT, DE, NJ, NY, TX and a few others come to mind...those have interesting laws as to the incorporation of businesses, and tax shelters, etc., so it makes sense they would be happy to keep things as they are...in their corner. And NOT to shift to our interests, in OUR corner of the ring...
ReplyDeleteThere is no doubt it would take a Constitutional Amendment, which is why I think it would have to be a be a bipartisan effort. And the only way that would happen is if people who are partisans for both major parties felt burned by said College System. That may be a tall order but I think whatever positives of this system are outweighed by the putting too much attention to a handful of states over and over, many of those, like Florida and Missouri, are not overall rural or small states.
ReplyDeleteI certainly don't dispute the brilliance of men like James Madison, Hamilton, Franklin, et al. I simply believe this EC needs to be put out to pasture as electing Senators though the state legislatures have been. I wouldn't want anyone to touch the separations of powers between the branches of government. Thank you by the way for giving the needed opposing view.
I think part of the problem that has caused "The Crash of 08" has been that too many Treasury officials are Wall Streeters, usually from Goldman-Sachs, who were too chummy with forces they were supposed to regulate. And I include Robert Rubin and Larry Summers who are (supposed to be) Democrats.
ReplyDeleteIt's sounds like a good system,as you've presented it in your own blogs. I'd boast about it a little :-)
ReplyDeleteThanks for that interesting history of the electoral college and the US presidential system of voting.
ReplyDeleteIt has cleared up a lot of things for me. Previously I thought the General Election Year was when the government at the Pentagon took turns to elect a General while the population were distracted playing lotto on Diebold machines temptingly placed across the land.
To be serious though, the US (like in fact the UK) is in urgent need of electoral reform if there is ever to be any meaningful change in the way it is governed. In both cases alternatives would be nice.
Writing in 1758, David Hume observed: "Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few, and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of the rulers."
Funny. Actually, Diebold just came out with a video poker/voting machine which, while not properly recording votes, will at least pay off a nice little jackpot for the would-be enfranchised voter if he hits four of a kind. Deuces, of course, are wild--but not as wild as the long lines caused by faulty voting machines already happening in the state of Florida right now, where early voting has started. (I'm sure the county registrars will have it all sorted out by Christmas.)
ReplyDeleteBoy, Dave Hume sure said a mouthful there. Hope he took the rest of the day off after that gem rolled off his writing stand.
The United States was the first real democracy in the westernised world and what the European Colonist Founding Fathers came up with back then was an incredibly radical form of government when compared to the Monarchist governments of the countries which they had come from. It seems clear to me, however, that because they were used to monarchist government in which often one person had the final say they built this into the presidential powers, which these days gives him (it has always been a him so far) powers above most monarchs and other leaders of today with the exception of fascist and totalitarian states. This is out dated in a democracy and should be a priority for review.
ReplyDeleteThe founding fathers were also used to classist societies in which the monied classes had all the power and they clearly retained all the perceptions of their class. Also as Catherine has already commented above, all people from capitalist classes will always make sure they retain conditions which will advantage themselves. The founding fathers, in devising their electoral system especially where it involves the election of the leader (the man with all the power and the ability to VETO anything he does not like even if it involves the democratic wishes of the American people), have clearly devised a sytem which protected the interests of the capitalist classes. All this needs to be reviewed also and imperatively.
Democracies which came after the inception of the US improved on the model. What was the most democratic in the past history is now creaking on its knees. It looks old and sad.
I think this has often been the case as you say, Iri Ani, but the American Constitution as originally written did provide for the Congress to be able to override a Presidential Veto by an override measure of two-thirds of the Upper and Lower Houses. This, admittedly, is tough to do in a bi-bicameral legislature but it has been done against measures enacted by sitting Presidents as diverse as Harry Truman (sadly, in my view, in passing an anti-labor law called the Taft-Hartley Act) or restoring social program funding cut by Ronald Reagan forty years later.
ReplyDeleteCongress also explicitly has the power to declare war. The founders were aware that giving an Executive that power, as the English Monarch had until I gather The Glorious Revolution of 1688, was too dangerous a tool for one person.
Perhaps the saddest spectacle in American politics is how often Congress since World War II has punted away this war power authority with "war resolutions" giving the President a blank check to deploy the military and expand a war into infinity.
A War Powers Act was enacted by Congress in 1973 to stop other "Vietnam-like" wars from happening--requiring President to report to Congress after 90 days into a military deployment and subject his actions to a vote to approve or withdraw said forces--but it has never been used. Perhaps we don't need a better Constitution so much as better Members of Congress.
I agree that later democracies have improved here and there on the American model. And that they should, given they had such a fine model t odraw from devised by remarkable men like James Madison, John Jay and Benjamin Franklin. They were scholarly men not adverse to careful studies of ancient and modern history and also learned from the foundations of Athens and Rome and philosophers like Locke and Montesquieu. (In many cases they were also men of action who fought or at least risked their lives for the best of those Enlightenment Ideals. Yes, they had flaws, and personal interests, but not as many as we see today in America's modern electronic political circus. )
But the American Constitution is also an organic document--at least to those who don't subscribe to the notion of "Original Intent", an ultra-conservative petrification of the Law . The fact is that The American Constitution is capable of being amended and has from time to time for 200 years. It is through the Amendment Process--which ended slavery and brought adult female sufferage-- that I hope we can still change America's political system by casting off old chestnuts like The Electoral College.
What you said about class notions in our founding document over here reminds me so much of a book I was exposed to in college by Professor Charles Beard, one of the most respected scholars of the Constitution in the 20th Century.
It is "The American Constitution: An Economic Interpretation" (1913). I don't know if you are aware of this book or Beard's general theories, so I enclose a link below if you want to compare your thoughtful criticisms and the class bearing on the document to Beard.
http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0506/0506beard.htm
His was not the last word on the subject by a long shot , but he "broke the dam" so to speak in analysing the case for the Constitutional Convention as a viable entity, a "living document", rather than something delivered from some American Mount Olympus and not to be touched by modern concerns and a changing and more complex society.
No I have never heard of it. I will check the link out. Thanks Doug.
ReplyDeleteI love the American Mount Olympus allusion. I have often felt as I read various blogs around Multiply that indeed this is how that document is indeed viewed, as though it was somehow enshrined on an altar, immutable, unchangeable, cast in stone.
But we all need to move, we all need to change, we see what works and what does not. A constitution should indeed be a "living document".
Here here. It's too bad they don't allow Kiwis on our Supreme Court ;-)
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