My Vote's Important?

            Hi Everyone. I’ve been busy over the last couple of weeks. Have I ever. Since I posted last time, six job applications have gone out. In my September 15 post I described how this job search works, and it is just as difficult as it appeared then. Though I am thankful to God to be able to say that a number of positions have popped up and if I was offered all or even a couple of them, I’d really have to think and pray about which one to accept. Now it’s time to finish up the dissertation’s data write-up and move on.

 

            As I write, Election Day is one week away. In some districts such as my own here in Champaign County Illinois, you can take advantage of early voting. I am registered here and I’ve already voted. The voting terminal had the same screen-reading software on it that my computer uses, and the buttons were labeled in braille. I found the electoral commission guys friendly and helpful, and they even let me in a bit early so they could orient me to the machine and leave me to it.

Yet, as I contemplate the vote I cast, I ask myself how much it really mattered. How much does my presidential vote truly matter? It matters, I conclude, more than the cynics think it does, but a bit less than we were told in high school civics class. The reason is the electoral college. Frankly, and here we come to the heart of the matter, the electoral college is outdated and unnecessary. It may, in fact, be harmful as regards the nation choosing its president. I’m going to briefly overview how it works, just how our president is elected, and propose getting rid of the thing. As a side note, you won’t be able to gather from reading this who I voted for. I don’t mind telling you if you ask at some point, but that’s not my focus here today.

 

How The President Is Elected:

            If you are already well-informed about the finer points of this process, you can skip this section or let me know if I have made a mistake in laying out the procedure. Though since this is a blog post and not a course in constitutional or election law, I’m going to skip some of the more minute details. As a side note consider this. What topic has been the subject of the greatest numbers of proposals for constitutional reform? If you said ‘the electoral college,’ you’d be right. Over 700 constitutional amendments have been proposed over the past two centuries that have aimed to reform this system; that means there have been more proposed amendments on this subject than any other.

 

After the ballot scandal in the election of 2000 I heard of this bumper sticker, “Welcome to Florida! Where your vote counts, and counts, and counts …” Judging by the uproar over ‘hanging chads’ and miscounts, you’d think the people had something to do with the election. They do, but only just.

            The electoral college was established by the framers of the Constitution as a compromise between a popular vote (which would have been a difficult thing to efficiently coordinate in the late 18^th century) and having the president elected by state legislatures (which would have eliminated a people’s vote altogether). So, when you cast your vote, your vote is counted up and used to decide which set of state electors will cast votes for your state. The electors are the ones who actually decide the presidency. Your state’s number of electors is based on its population. My home state of Tennessee has 11 electors. Illinois where I live now has 20. No state has fewer than three including Washington D.C.  Texas and California have the largest numbers of state electors with 38 and 55 electors respectively. So, to become the president, Romney and Obama don’t need to win fifty or sixty million votes, certainly not yours or mine strictly speaking. Rather, one of them has to win 270 electors out of 538, a majority by a single vote, and it absolutely doesn’t matter which 270 the  winner gets as long as he does get them. For all practical purposes, only 538 votes really count in this country.

            Here’s a timeline of just what happens after Election Day. These dates and procedures are taken from the site of the Federal Archives, which has extensive material on the electoral process:  http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/key-dates.html. After Election Day November 6, your state’s governor will prepare a ‘Certificate of Ascertainment,’ a document that basically lists who the electors were for your state and which president on the state’s ballot won its vote. These certificates are all sent to Washington D.C. This year, states have until December 11 to finalize their decisions, do recounts if need be and so on. On December 17, each state’s set of electors will meet (probably in your state capitol) and they will actually vote. On January 6, Congress will sit in session to count up the received Electors’ votes, and the President of the Senate will declare the president and vice president of the United States. That’s how it works in a trouble-free election. You elect the electors. The electors choose the president according to your votes. … Question, am I the only one who sees a problem with this setup?

 

Throwing The Game:

            You’ll notice in these last paragraphs that I said not a word about what would happen if electors didn’t vote according to how they were supposed to, that is,  according to what the people in your state decided. That is because electors are held to an honors system when it comes to voting as they’re supposed to. They don’t go to jail or pay hefty fines or anything else if they actually get to your state capitol on December 17 and say, “you know what? Screw X. I’m voting for Y, popular vote be damned.” Aside from being sentured, what amounts to your boss saying, “tisk tisk,” nothing will happen to an elector who chooses not to vote as he or she is authorized. It doesn’t happen often, but it can. If 10 out of your 20 electors through their votes away, that can change the whole election and dishonestly represent what the people of your state wanted. As you might expect, tracking down occasions when particular electors broke with the state’s vote and did something else is not easy. It’s not the sort of thing you’d want to publish, but it is possible and even legal in many places, though it’s neither ethical nor honest as I said before. The one instance I found was that of Barbara Lett-Simmons, an elector (or is that an electresse?) for Washington D.C. who cast a blank ballot in the 2000 election. Essentially, she didn’t vote. Her reasons aren’t particularly important for our purposes, but it is a real example from history.

 

The People’s Vote:

            In an election that runs normally, the electoral college ought to reflect the people’s vote. It doesn’t always do that, however. It’s perfectly possible for a president to get elected and not have received the majority vote. The people’s vote or popular vote has no legal bearing on the outcome. Like I said, only those 538 votes truly matter. There have been several elections where the popular vote didn’t reflect what happened in the electoral college. The most recent was the election of 2000, where Gore got half a million more votes than Bush did. So, if your vote really mattered, Al Gore would have been president. As a side note, the other elections when this happened were those of 1824, 1876 and 1888. There are Wikipedia articles on all of these.

 

Conclusion:

            This isn’t a political science class, and I’m not interested in talking about how the electoral system could be misused if we went to popular voting. Corruption is part of human nature, and any system is subject to rigging or abuse. The current system is no exception, and if you don’t believe me, research the election of 1876 and get back to me. Also, I’m uninterested in spouting numbers. Telling me that this state has proportionally equal electoral power with this other state because it has yay electoral votes and we have such a fine electoral college is a numbers game. The fact is, Alaska has fewer electoral votes than Texas because Alaska has fewer people! If we went to popular voting, that wouldn’t change. Here are some things that might change, however.

            In Illinois, your vote truly doesn’t matter. Illinois has voted democratic in most of the presidential elections over the past century. I think it went republican for Reagan, but that’s more an exception than the rule. The reason is Chicago. That city and its surrounding suburbs contain about three fourths or nine million of the state’s twelve million residents. If Chicago votes democrat, Illinois is going democrat. Thus, if I voted for Obama today, my vote’s unnecessary because Chicago took care of it. If I voted for Romney, my vote’s useless because Illinois’s electors will be given to Obama. Because Illinois always goes democrat, campaigning doesn’t really happen here. The republicans know they can’t take Illinois and the democrats know they don’t have to.

            So, how would this be different if we went to popular voting? Well, in Illinois’s case, it might or might not be. TO use this election as an example, Romney might have hit south and central Illinois hard, where republican sentiment is strong, and Romney and Obama would have battled it out in Chicago for the votes of that city. I also think that smaller states would get more of the candidates’ time. Just now, no one gives a crap about what North Dakota wants or how Nebraskans will vote. That’s the hard truth. Those two states combined only have a small number of electors. No one cares. But if every vote counted, then a million votes either way would make a difference, and if those million votes came from North Dakota, New Mexico or Idaho, they would see candidates trying hard to win them over.

            Finally, I think voter turnout would increase dramatically. As it stands, how can you expect people to care a fig for the election when only the electoral college is directly involved? If I knew that my vote directly contributed to the president’s election, I’d care a lot more. How would elections have been different if, for example, 85 or 90% of eligible voters turned out rather than the 40 or 50% that actually tends to show up? I submit that the presence of the electoral college gives people the distinct impression that their vote just isn’t that important. I wonder why. … Last but not least, how is it that I can elect my mayor and my governor based on a popular vote, but not my president? Come on, now.

            The American people are more capable than they’ve ever been of choosing who they want to lead them. This doesn’t mean we will always choose wisely or well, but that’s the way of things. We have the technology to implement computer-recorded voting and to tally it up efficiently. In short, what we can do at the city or state level can be done nationally. I don’t want to elect electors. I want to elect a president, please and thank you.