Every four years, we have a Presidential election. Everytime a Republican wins, people start calling for a popular vote, instead of our current, insulated electoral college system. Right now the state of Washington, which elects their governor by popular vote, is still trying to count all the votes from their November election. A quick and dirty recap of the action: People vote. The GOP candidate is declared the winner in a fairly close race. The Dems complain, suddenly thousands of 'lost' votes turn up, with one county's total number of votes now higher than the total number of registered voters, and now the Democrat's candidate is declared the winner (this is already several weeks after the election). The Republicans cry foul, but now, all of the sudden, the Democrats are saying it was a fair election with no voter fraud, despite saying just the opposite when they were losing. Now it's March, five months later, and one county is now announcing that they found another 111 ballots. Just so you know, the previous final tally of votes gave the Dem the victory by 94 votes, so 111 suddenly discovered ballots is a big deal.
What does all this tell you? The electoral college has its problems, but the benefit is that you don't have to suffer through what Washington is going through. Of course there were problems in the 2000 Presidential election, but that was due to voter fraud complaints, not ballot lost and found problems.
8 Comments:
I'm just saying, but what if the reason that every time there's a close vote, thousands of lost votes show up, is because there's fraud and vote tampering on behalf of the Republicans? I'm not making any claims, but it's no more insulting or farfetched than claiming the Dems are systematically defrauding the system.
I agree, Scott. It's generally thought that voter fraud by conservatives usually consists of keeping people from having their votes counted, whereas the left tries to add in extra votes. I don't necessarilly subscribe to that. Anyway, my major point is not about fraud so much as that the electoral college does help to protect from the kind of mess they are having in Washington, despite not helping much in 2000.
Elections would be a complete disaster without the electoral college. With the electoral college, problems are isolated to one or two states. We hear about small discrepencies in a few states. Could you imagine if it was the popular vote that decided who won? Picture Florida 2000 across the entire country.
The other benefit to the electoral college is it gives legitimacy to the election. Look at France. They use the popular vote where one person must get a majority of the total votes. If nobody gets a majority they eliminate some candidates and have a revote. Kind of like a playoff system. As a result of this they have 7 or 8 political parties. In their last election Chirac got only about 30% of the vote, but he was in the top tier of candidates so he moved on and eventually one. What this tells you is originally 70% of the people wanted someone other than Chirac. How can any leader be expected to lead when 70% of the people didn't want him there?
I'm not a big fan of political systems where you have to create a coalition of groups that have differing interests in order to win. The two party system solves that problem, but also makes it so much more difficult for a group with new ideas to get any power. Nowadays I feel like the right person could start a party that quasi-libertarian, but not as far out as those guys, with fiscal conservatism and social liberalism, and do quite well, but it would be really tough to get started.
Mike,
The electoral college has nothing to do with the runoff situation you're talking about in France. We could still have runoffs with our electoral system, and if we did, we'd have more political parties. Now, everybody's too afraid of "wasting their vote" if they vote for a third party candidate who has no chance of winning. If you knew there'd be a runoff, people would be more willing to branch out a bit more. I think it would be a good thing to have more political parties.
It would be nice to have more political parties. There are alot of things about the Republican party I don't like. I would prefer they were more enthusiastic about enforcing our borders. I'm not a big fan of No Child Left Behind and the Medicare reform. I am a big fan of tax cuts though.
Ben, our two parties are already coalitions of differing interests. The only thing is, you can't pick and choose. We've got the value meal, while countries with multiple party-coalitions have alacarte dining. I mean, if My big issue is being against abortion, then I don't waste my vote on the people who care about the economy or the environment. I vote for the anti-abortion party, and even though they won't get the majority, when it comes time to make the coalition, if we're big enough, they'll have to take our views into account if they want to keep us on board.
It would probably be even better if we had, say 20 parties, but everyone got 2 or 3 votes. Then you could vote on the issue most important to you.
Of course, I was only talking about a runoff before. In that case, the Nader voters and the Buchanan voters would vote for their candidate to show solidarity, then in the runoff would vote for the 2 finalists.
I forget what it's called, but there's a system where you vote for your first choice, second choice, and third choice, and then they can do immediate runoffs if needed. I like that system, because it also opens up the way for third parties. I can vote for a third party candidatye, and know that if he doesn't do well enough to get in the runoff, my vote will go to my #2 guy, and not to the major party candidate that I detest.
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