Electoral college impairs democracy

Steve Keller Guest Writer

In a democracy, it would only make sense that the candidate who receives the most votes would win the election. Nations such as France, Ukraine and even Iran elect their leaders using the principle that whoever gets the most votes wins. It’s a pretty simple system and it makes sense.

But we don’t do things that way. Presidential candidates in this country don’t have to win a majority of the votes across the country—no, instead they have to win a majority of “electoral votes” to win the White House.

Currently, each state has a number of electoral votes equal to the number of representatives in Congress, which is based on population, plus two for each Senator. Every state except Nebraska and Maine (which don’t matter much in the long run) has a winner-take-all system, which means that whoever wins the popular vote in each state wins all of the electoral votes, no matter whether the margin of victory is 537 or five million votes.

By any standard, this method is ridiculous. And it causes many voters to be ignored in the campaigning and vote-canvassing process. States in which one party is guaranteed to win by a safe margin are ignored. Why would a candidate bother visiting a state that they know they’re going to win or lose by 10 points anyway? These marginalized states include large states such as New York, California and Texas. Voters in states that are not competitive simply don’t receive attention.

Even if John Kerry had been able to garner 10 million more Democrats to vote for him in California, it didn’t matter. What matters are the votes cast by those living in “swing states” such as Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania.

Another problem of the electoral college is that it inflates the value of small states by giving them a “bonus” two points on top of the population-based number that they already have. For example, Wyoming has one electoral vote for every 171,000 people, compared to New York, which only has one vote for every 612,000 people. This means that under the current system, Wyoming voters are nearly four times as important as New Yorkers.

No other democracy in the world has a system as strange and arbitrary as ours. Admittedly, in 51 out of the 55 presidential elections in history, this clumsy system has not gotten in the way of the will of the electorate at large. But in 1824, 1876, 1888 and most recently in 2000, the majority of people in the United States have not seen their choice for president enter the oval office. Over 300,000 more people voted for Al Gore in 2000, yet due to a broken system (not to mention irregularities and corruption across the board) George Bush entered the White House in 2001.

It is no surprise that since the 2000 election, there has been a growing cry to abandon the electoral college and choose a more democratic system. A ballot initiative in California for the November elections appears to introduce true democracy to the presidential election process. If this ballot passes, each congressional district won will net a candidate one electoral vote. In addition, the winner of the statewide popular vote will win two votes.

A fine idea, but if one thinks about the implications of this measure, it becomes clear that this is just a cheap political trick. Should this ballot measure pass, it will virtually guarantee that a Republican wins the White House in 2008. By splitting the vote in California, a “safe state” for Democrats, the GOP stands to gain 20 free points without changing anything about the electorate. Sponsored by Thomas Hiltachk, a Republican lawyer in Sacramento, this ballot measure is nothing more than a sneaky Republican maneuver. It would be a disaster for the Democratic Party.

Reforming the system on a state-by-state basis would be impractical and would undoubtedly cause one party to gain an unfair advantage against the other. The only way to implement true democracy in America is to amend the Constitution, a difficult process that is unlikely to succeed.

But what if the bill were to pass? The media is generally chastised for being too passive and not following important issues. But should this partisan trick work, it could set off a firestorm across the country. The Democratic party would be galvanized and its members would undoubtedly call for either a repeal of the ballot measure or for a complete overhaul of the Electoral College. Through the media, I believe that the Democrats could deliver the breath of fresh air that our democracy has been anticipating for the last 231 years. The popular will of the people has been constricted and distorted. It is time for true democracy in America.