A while back I posted some ideas for political reform, one of which was ending the electoral college. This morning an article at Salon makes the same point better than I could.
The California Electoral College Initiative has been exposed for what it is: a Republican plan to steal the 2008 presidential election. The idea was to divvy up the electoral votes of the nation's biggest state by congressional district rather than give all 55 to the statewide winner -- who would almost certainly be a Democrat. But a mysterious $175,000 contribution heightened suspicions that the Rudy Giuliani campaign was behind the initiative, and prompted two key staffers to leave their posts with the group pushing it.The collapse of the effort seems to represent a Florida-style cooked-election bullet dodged. But our democracy won't be safe until we disarm the weapon intended to fire such bullets.
It's time to abolish the electoral vote system. We should do it now.
Other nostrums only go halfway. Maine and Nebraska already split their electoral votes. Maryland has a law ordering the state's electors to vote for the winner of the nationwide popular vote. Wisely, the legislators also mandated that the law would not take effect until states representing a majority of the nation's electoral vote adopt similar laws. But there are two problems with this approach. First, state laws directing electors how to vote are unconstitutional; and second, they leave in place the skewed distribution of votes in the electoral count, which award disproportionate influence to states with small populations.
Even in 1787, the electoral system was the Framers' single worst idea. As time has passed, it has become less and less defensible. It can't be reformed or tamed. It has to go.Americans revere their Constitution but don't understand it. Every year my students at the University of Oregon law school, channeling their 11th grade civics teachers, tell me that the Constitution is a brilliant document, conceived in near perfection more than two centuries ago. Virtually everything these students -- and bright high-school graduates everywhere in America --"know" about the Constitution is wrong. That ongoing mystification is nowhere more glaring than in the justifications offered for the "Electoral College" (a phrase, by the way, that appears nowhere in the Constitution).
Consider the arguments most often advanced in the so-called "Electoral College"'s favor: The Framers distrusted democratic elections; the system prevents candidates from ignoring small states; it maintains the two-party system; it recognizes the vital role of the state governments; without it, we'd have to have a national voting system; it has served us well.
These arguments are all sophisticated and sincere. But they're wrong.
Read the rest.
I disagree, Bill. The article is impassioned poppycock. You could never have made the argument against the Electoral College this badly.
ReplyDeleteFor starters, as a Californian, I feel the need to remind readers that the California Electoral College Initiative is NOT going to be on the ballot, it has been abandoned AND that it would never, ever have passed.
The idea that the electoral system was a terrible idea in 1787 is interesting. Does Garrett Epps really think the United States could have managed a national popular election for president from the beginning!? Up until about 1910, our country really was more of a congregation of states, with a lot of distrust between the states. The idea that a national, popularly-elected presidency would have worked from the beginning of our nation is downright bizarre. Such an circumstance would have accelerated the beginning of North-South strife and split the country by 1830.
Allow me to ignore half the article, then, and concentrate on the idea of a quick conversion to a popular election NOW and how horrible the Electoral College currently is.
Epps makes a big deal of a paucity of small-state presidents, but the impediment to small-staters becoming president mostly no longer exist, I would contend, and abolishing the EC wouldn't remedy whatever disadvantage small-staters might continue to have. 'Nuff said; this is a minor tempest.
While I agree that we need reforms to our national election to meet changes to our country, Epps chooses to highlight the problems of close elections, suggesting that had the popular-vote been in place things would have been smooth.
I would contend that corruption and vote tampering are magnified in popular elections, and that screwing with ballots anywhere can mess up the election with a popular-vote system, whereas the EC quarantines problems.