Actually, it hasn’t been all that long; I last checked in here not quite three weeks ago. That’s an eye blink in geologic time, but apparently forever in blog years.
Mostly I’ve either been immersed in or desperately trying to avoid the elections.
But something related to national elections in general -- though totally irrelevant to the 2008 elections in particular – came across my desk last week: a packet from an outfit called National Popular Vote. It’s got a Web site and an impressive bipartisan roster of backers, and the general idea is that the Electoral College system of electing presidents pretty much sucks.
The NPV folks make the point – and it’s a matter of historical record -- that there have been elections when the system put minority (as in votes, not race) candidates into office, and a couple of close calls when the holder of a substantial majority of popular votes could have lost by a narrow edge in a single significant state.
F’rinstance . . . Four times in 55 elections, most recently in 2000, winners of the popular vote lost the presidency. (Clearly there was more to Al Gore’s loss than just the flaws in the Electoral College system, but that’s another story.)
In the most recent election, even though President Bush led by more than 3.5 million votes nationwide, a shift of just 60,000 of those votes would have elected John Kerry.
Those are rare and extreme scenarios, and you could make the case that even a tainted election, or a revival of Bubonic Plague, would have been preferable to the Bush presidency anyway. But that’s not really the point here.
The more universal problem is that in an all-or-nothing system like the Electoral College, citizens on the losing side of even the slimmest popular vote margin are effectively disenfranchised.
Case in point: I currently vote in Alabama. My vote for Barack Obama will be the civic equivalent of howling in a vacuum, because Obama has about as much chance of winning a presidential race in Alabama as I would.
Yet even in Alabama, somewhere between 40 percent and not quite half of the people who go to the polls on Nov. 4 will pull the lever or touch the screen or punch out the chad for a guy who won’t take a single electoral vote in the state. Tens of thousands of people will make the purely ritual civic gesture of casting a Democratic presidential vote in a state 100 percent of whose electors will be Republican.
The NPV folks are right. That sucks.
The problem hits both ways, of course: A Republican in Massachusetts or Minnesota is just as homeless in most national elections as a Democrat in Alabama. And aside from the obvious unfairness of a system that leaves literally millions of Americans literally unrepresented in choosing the leader of the free world, it’s one hell of a deterrent to voting.
I’m not sure the NPV folks have the right idea, either; you can make that call for yourself. Their idea, as I understand it, goes something like this:
The Constitution gives states the power to decide how they allocate their electoral votes. Under the NPV formula, if enough people in a state go along, the state enters into agreement with other states to give all their electoral votes to whichever candidate wins the most popular votes nationwide, thereby ensuring that the winner of the popular vote wins the presidency.
Here’s the rub: The NPV plan is that the system would go into effect only if enough states with enough electoral votes to elect a president under the current system agree.
Got that? A proposal to change the current Electoral College system of electing presidents would depend on a majority of votes as apportioned by . . . the Electoral College.
Personally, I have my doubts. It’s still an all-or-nothing system, and the thought of all my state’s electoral votes going to whoever the rest of the country prefers doesn’t make me feel any less disenfranchised than what we have now. I still think a formula for proportional distribution of electoral votes could be workable.
Meanwhile, I’ll just go to my local polling place – still the fire station, I think, unless they’ve changed it again without telling anybody, in which case some belligerent county bureaucrat will respond to any and all complaints by insisting with huffy righteousness that there was more than adequate notice and if a few hundred voters didn’t get the memo it was their own fault, etc. etc. etc. – and plug in a futile Democratic vote that goes round and round and round and comes out for McCain. While I’m at it, I might buy a lottery ticket, too.
Oh, wait – I still can’t do that in Alabama.
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1 comment:
Although Obama won, I feel sorry for him. He didn't constantly whine about his Grandmother, but I am sure after his win, he had a funeral to attend. On top of that, some make a big deal of him for their biggest reason 'he's black'. I don't think Obama wants to see this as the main factor of his win. I voted for him. I am glad, so glad, that he won, but do the media have to go on and on about him being Black? He refers to himself as a mut. Most of us American's are muts. I do not believe that Obama ran on 'being Black'. I can respect that Black people are happy that race was overcome for the reasons that we elected him for. I bet if anyone could ask him, he would say, cool it on the Black stuff. Those who voted for him did not vote for him because he was Black, We could see he was Black. It's great and historic, but too much hype about just him being Black will not help those who did not like him for being Black or other reasons. People need to let our new president be the president, and let the Black stuff take its place, but let Obama himself, take precedence over his race.
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