Nearly every day, we hear the latest tracking poll showing the percentage of people who intend to vote for Romney or Obama. Today I heard one with 48% for Obama and 45% for Romney (the rest undecided). The percentages keep changing.
The thing is: IT DOESN’T MATTER. It’s like picking Harvard to win every football game, because their players have the highest IQ. Irrelevant. That’s not how games are decided.
America isn’t a popular democracy, where the person with the most votes wins. At least not in presidential elections. Majority vote prevails at every other level–city and county, state, US Representatives, Senators–but we use a whole different method for selecting a president. Doesn’t that seem odd? It’s like playing a full soccer game, and if it’s tied at the end, you switch and play a whole different game (the lame shootout, or kick-off, or whatever it’s called).
We have this electoral college thing, treating states on a winner-take-all basis. Most states are already considered in the bag for one candidate or the other (including my state, Indiana). Romney and Obama will focus on just a handful of states, and eventually just one or two states. We call them “battleground” or “swing” states.
I realize there are pros and cons to the electoral college, and it’ll never be changed. But I’d like to see the nationwide popular vote decide who wins the election. That way, EVERY vote would count, not just those in Ohio and Florida (or whatever the battleground states du jour are). And we’d get pummeled with the same spate of TV ads assaulting everyone else. (Okay, this is a distinct advantage of living in Indiana.)
For instance, California will go to Obama; a majority of Californians will vote for him, no matter what Romney does. But I’m sure there are huge pockets of moderates who could easily swing to Romney, and would make a difference in a popular-vote election. But Romney’s not going to go after them, because they don’t matter. He won’t waste his time on the millions of voters in California. Nor those in New York and Illinois.
Likewise for Obama in Texas, Arizona, South Carolina…and Indiana. There may be hundreds of thousands of voters he could swing his way, while still not carrying the state. In a popular election, those voters would still matter. Because a vote is a vote. But in our system, they don’t matter. A vote is NOT necessarily a vote. Only in certain states.
Over the years, 700+ proposals have been introduced to reform or end the electoral college (a term which doesn’t appear in the Constitution itself), but none have gone anywhere. Polls consistently show that a wide majority of people favor abolishing the electoral college (75% in 1981). It’s an archaic system, which may have fit the world of the late 1700s, but it’s time to go. Plus, the electoral college is death to third parties. Ross Perot won 19% of the votes in 1992, but received NO electoral votes because he wasn’t strong enough in any single state. I’d love to see a third party candidate who actually stands a snowball’s chance.
Here in Indiana, we moderates can basically sit this one out, again. The state is firmly in the Romney column, and neither Romney nor Obama are going to waste time or money coming for a visit. We are taken for granted. And I hate that.
Yep, many of the various states have become polarized to the point that their citizens’ votes for president don’t really count.
However, our founding fathers wanted The United States of America to be a federation of states because they feared a strong central government. Given that, they carefully crafted a balance of power between the Federal Government and the various States. They enumerated the powers of the Federal Government and reserved all other powers to the states and citizens.
Election of the House of Representatives is proportional to population. Election of the Senate and the President is proportional to the states. This has helped maintain the delicate balance of power between the states and the central government.
I am also frustrated when my vote for president does not really count. However, I will gladly endure that frustration to avoid ceding more power to the central government.
Great post! While we’re at it with reforming the electoral college, why not reform election spending at the same time. I loved Jimmy Carter’s comments yesterday where he referred to our electoral process as “shot through with financial corruption”.
Here are his comments as recorded by the Seattle Times: http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2019128334_apuscarterelectionspending.html
I believe Colorado is a contested state, so the candidates will be giving your vote a lot of attention. As opposed to Indiana (and most other states).
I understand why we have an electoral college, which is wrapped around the idea of sovereign states–the whole federalism thing. There are definitely merits to it, especially from a philosophy/ideological viewpoint. But a downside is that we can elect somebody who doesn’t get the most votes, and then what I pointed out in my blog post–only a few swing states get the attention of the candidates.
Most democracies use direct election–whoever gets the most votes wins. However, a good number use a parliamentary system. I understand that Germany, Pakistan, and India are considered to have an electoral college system; the latter two were set up by England, which is ironic–England setting up an American system.
Although the US has been involved in nation-building in a number of countries over the years, we have never set up a system with an electoral college. Why is that?
It seemed like a good idea to our Founders to fit the country we were at that time and the technology available–just 13 states located fairly close together–and it solved some issues they were struggling with. But an electoral college isn’t something we care to export. More commonly, we set up a parliamentary system–Japan, Iraq, for example. Or else we set up a system where the head of state is elected directly by majority vote–Philippines, Afghanistan, Panama, Haiti.