I remember being a young lad sitting in my social studies
class, listening to my teacher espouse the virtues of democracy. This was by far my favorite hour of the day,
I couldn’t wait to breach the threshold of that classroom. The origin story of America is trumped by
nothing. It’s a delicious cocktail of independence, romance, strength, destiny,
fortitude and imagination. It’s simply
beautiful, unless you’re a native but that’s a post for another day.
We hear the word democracy, and we a trained to pivot toward
“one man…one vote”. In America we have a
democracy in every election save ONE. That ONE is the presidential
election. Odd because it’s by far our
most important election. The
presidential election is “representatively” democratic. I learned in that social studies class that
there is a thing called the ELECTORAL COLLEGE where the president is actually
elected. In this ELECTORAL COLLEGE each state is given a proportional number of
votes based on the population of the state, essentially creating voting blocks
and making the individual ballot less valuable.
My teacher did a great job of explaining the necessity of
the ELECTORAL COLLEGE in the 1700's. At the time there
were 13 colonies, they were independent primarily and unified secondarily. Most areas had favorite son candidates that ran
for president, they having not the wherewithal to travel from state to state to
campaign. There was no mass
communication apparatus or mass transit vehicle to facilitate awareness. So
using a popular vote among several candidates didn’t feel like consensus. There needed to be a way to broker these
choices between the election in November, up and through the inauguration in January. Creating an ELECTORAL COLLEGE was a genius
idea for a burgeoning nation, and it was
essential for the first 120 years of our union.
However in 1901 the national primary system was taking hold. Candidates had the ability to move around.
There were newpapers, telegraphs, and an emerging railroad system. National candidates were entering the public
arena, giving birth to a National Election of our president. So this all begs
the question…why continue with the outdated ELECTORAL COLLEGE?
There are 538 electoral votes. 270 electoral votes are needed to win the
presidency. So as it stands
mathematically a president would need only to win the 13 richest electoral states. Imagine that? There are 50 states and by
winning a mere 26% of the states a person could become president. That doesn’t sound like democracy. Sounds more like a rigged election.
There have been 4 presidential elections where the candidate
that won the popular vote didn’t win the presidency, the last occurring in
2000. That means we've had 4 imperfect elections.
An electoral map will show that there are states that are
strongly democratic or strongly republican.
An unintended consequence is that a presidential election only occurs now in
“swing states”. These are states that
have gone elephant and donkey in at least one election over the past 30 years.
The states that currently elect a president are VA, NC, NH,
OH, CO, FL, IA, NV, PA, MI, and MN.
Democracy lends itself to the myth that every
vote counts but in reality it doesn’t.
If you’re a democrat in Texas your vote doesn’t count. If you’re a republican in California your
vote doesn’t count. Some votes count,
and the rest of us are "playing" democracy in presidential politics. Many wonder why voter turn-out is
underwhelming. It’s because people have figured it out. In 39 states our presidential vote doesn’t matter.
