In school, we learned that John F. Kennedy, one of our most influential, heroic and genuine presidents, beat Richard Nixon by a margin of one vote per district. If Kennedy hadn't canvassed neighborhoods to get out the vote, he would have lost to Nixon. This, as we learned from our history, would not have been a good thing.
Electing presidents has changed since the days I was a girl sitting in a classroom, learning about voting districts and canvassing. Not that the election process has changed, but the electoral system has been exposed as a system that is failing our republic.
Elections today are scientifically assessed, strategized, and flooded with candidates who have speech writers (we call them spin-doctors). Few voters have the confidence in the system that they did twenty years ago. The Electoral System I have given my children and will soon give to my grandchildren is a sorry, sad thing that frustrates me.
WHY?
When Americans go to the polls to vote for a chief executive,
we actually vote for a particular slate of electors. Each state has as many
"electors" in the Electoral College as it has Representatives and
Senators in the United States Congress (District of Columbia has three electors).
The electors meet in their respective states forty-one days after the popular
election. There, they cast a ballot for president and a second for vice
president. Each candidate must receive a majority of electoral votes to be
elected president. As the 2000 election proved,
the Electoral College does make it possible for a candidate to win the popular
vote and still not become president. We do not elect presidents on individual
votes, despite the stories we have heard.
If you don’t like the Electoral System, you can blame James
Madison. He worried (loudly) in 1788, about
what he called "factions," or groups of citizens who have a common
interest in something that could violate the rights of the nation as a whole. Madison’s fear was real – he saw it everywhere
around him. Alexis de Tocqueville described
this as "the tyranny of the
majority" – when a faction would grow to become more than half of the US
population. Madison had a solution for tyranny of the
majority: "A republic, by which
I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a
different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking."
With this, the Electoral College was born.
Alexander Hamilton, one of the brilliant writers of "The
Federalist Papers," said that the Constitution is designed to ensure
"that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man [or woman?] who is not in an eminent
degree endowed with the requisite qualifications."
We have lived to see that the electoral college can indeed be
hijacked by money, factions, and a bit of corruption, just like a majority
vote. We have also seen that the office
of the president can indeed fall to a man or a woman who is not in an eminent
degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.
We have also seen the system producing quite a bit of broken
friendships. We were raised that our
vote counts, and now we see that this may or may not be true. What matters are the votes and endorsements
of moneyed companies and individuals who want a piece of American
government. We have even learned this
week that this is for sale.
If I ask the majority of my friends and acquaintances if we
are living in a democracy, they will answer yes. We are indeed a democracy. The truth is, the United States is (and has
always been) a Republic. We are a nation
of electors voting for electors.
What’s the good news?
We are a Republic. Our Electoral
System may be broken, but its citizens are not.
If you want the system to change, you can exercise your voice at the
state and national level. A good read is
the 2013 U.S. News and World Report article, Should the U.S. Get Rid of theElectoral College? It points out how
easy (and how probable) the system can be gamed and manipulated.
Speaking of voting, VOTE for me as Sacramento’s BEST local
flavor BLOGGER!! In this election, your
vote really does count!!
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