"When people start standing in line to get out of this country instead of standing in line to get in, then we can start worrying about our system."
- Bernard Baruch (1870-1965), American financier and diplomat
Dean Esmay over at Dean's World takes a stab at explaining our Electoral College System in order to help one of his Irish readers understand how we elect our president and vice-president. I think he does a pretty good job of simplifying it for the gentleman.
Because of this system, it is possible for a candidate to lose the popular vote, but still win the presidency. In fact, this has occurred 3 times in our history, most recently in the 2000 election, when George W. Bush defeated Albert Gore, Jr. with 271 electoral votes to 266 while losing the popular vote 50,456,062 to 50,996,582.
Many people don't understand how this happened and have suggested changing our system so that our president would be elected by popular vote only. Our founding fathers had legitimate fears about this. Do you think the concerns they had when establishing our current process are still valid today? It would appear they aren't, but anytime we start messing with our Constitution I think caution is in order. What do you think?
3 comments:
I think the electoral college should go the way of the dodo. With our modern communications systems, incl. the Internet, I can see no logical reason for keeping it. I also have a problem with a candidate winning a state by the narrowest of margins and receiving all of that state's electoral votes. If we keep it, we should make the state's votes proportional.
Another point I thought of a little later -- as a liberal in a mostly conservative state, I am pretty much disenfranchised in the presidential elections. In a straight vote or a proportional electoral vote, my vote would actually count for something.
Good point. Many people in your position either don't bother to vote or vote for third party candidates who they know have no chance of winning, because they reflect their views better than the candidates of the major parties. Either way, their vote is "lost."
Post a Comment