While introducing Sen. Barack Obama to an intoxicated – the mental and emotional kind – McArthur Court crowd, retired Air Force Gen. Merrill McPeak noted that Oregon’s Democratic primary vote will mean something for the first time in 25 years, referring to the 1984 Mondale/Hart duel. Vermont, Ohio and Rhode Island have handed me the match with which I can burn my ballot by securing John McCain as the Republican nominee. And so I ask; why doesn’t the Oregon vote matter every election year? Aren’t we all supposed to have an equal vote? Forget an equal vote. Shouldn’t I have a reason to vote at all?
Primaries are screwed up and filled with so many unconstitutional attributes it forces me to call for amendments to a Constitution which I like to think I interpret in a strict constructionist manner. The fact that political parties enforce primary voting dates for states is ridiculous. Why does the Democrat Party have the ability to determine if Florida and Michigan are seated? Why do Iowa and New Hampshire hold more political sway than Oregon and South Dakota? Primaries should be held for all states on the same day. This will take out the variability of momentum and reduce states like Iowa and New Hampshire to their rightful place in politics.
It’s not just the primary process that is soaked with unconstitutional provisions; the general election has managed to bend but not break our Constitution. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) is proposing a new nominating process for presidential candidates. The legislation calls for six regional primaries with rotational voting. More importantly, he naively calls for the popular vote to replace the Electoral College. I understand Nelson is well intentioned, and agree that the current system doesn’t represent the people to the degree it should. But it’s important to determine; to what extent should we directly vote for president?
The Electoral College wasn’t created by accident. It’s there to provide stability and a greater sense of legitimacy to the president-elect in a close race. It’s also in place to force candidates to recognize smaller states. This I generally accept; but at what cost? What’s the point of having a clear winner if that winner shouldn’t have won in the first place?
The United States isn’t a direct democracy but a federal republic. Individual states, not individual people, form the federal government. The Electoral College, somewhat explicitly outlined in Article 2 of our Constitution, is in place to secure the relevance of this republic. Nevertheless, there are procedural rules left to the states that have created major inequities in the voting process.
The number of electors a state receives is equal to its congressional representatives in both the House and the Senate. Unfortunately, the Electoral College has the effect of allocating smaller states greater proportional representation than larger ones, granting some voters undeservedly louder voices than others. This is best illustrated with an example:
Wyoming has the United States’ smallest voting population at 210,000, but because states receive at least 3 electors (2 senators and 1 representative) every elector represents a mere 70,000 people. Oregon has 7 electors representing a voting population of 1,512,000, resulting in each elector representing over 215,000 people. Clearly this is a major disadvantage, which allows less populated states to have a vote worth three times as much as those in larger states.
Our founders created the electorate in the hopes that representatives would choose a president by “analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice.” They assumed members of the Electoral College would be independent of political parties and make reasoned judgments about who would be a suitable president. Today, party lines clearly divide the electorate.
Despite this, I am no proponent of direct democracy. Alexander Hamilton, along with almost all of the revolutionaries, believed the general population too ill informed to directly choose the Commander in Chief. Taking into account improvements in communication technology and the media, I still believe those basic tenets to be relevant today. However, the way in which our electors represent us has changed dramatically since the 19th century.
Because the Constitution doesn’t indicate how electors should be divided among candidates, states have determined apportionment rules. In the general election a candidate must win merely 50.1 percent of the popular vote to receive all electoral votes. Instead, electors should be awarded proportionally to the number of votes a candidate receives. This would retain the effect of magnifying close races in order to determine a clear winner, while allowing for greater individual representation. Moreover, electors should correspond with the same number of individuals, no matter the state’s population.
[email protected]