Meh. I was going to post a whole long diatribe about some rock guy that was on KISW this morning, calling for the removal of our electoral college system of electing presidents (something about “who are these guys anyway?” and it being their fault that Gore lost ) but I’m just not in the mood to bother with it.
Long story short: the electoral college was designed so bigger states can have louder voicers while not leaving out smaller states entirely, the electors are tasked to mark their ballot based on their regions voting, read a political science text book before forming opinions on the political systems of the world, and place blame where blame belongs which usually means on the ppl in FL.
That just about covers it.
This op-ed article suggests we need a new Constitution. One of the changes would be to overhaul instead of abolishing the electoral college entirely.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-sabato10oct10,0,7038015.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions
I disagree on a few levels.
One is that the Constitution is the most successful Work In Progress project I know of. It’s never “done” – you can ammend it (and ammend the ammendments!) as times change. I think we’ve simply forgotten that since we haven’t had a new ammendment in years… so we could very easily introduce a new ammendment that ammends the Article in the Constitution that calls for the need of the electoral college.
But I also disagree that we should be rid of it. I look at the civil unrest that percolated in the US over the last decade… we haven’t matured enough. We still have “mob rules” mentality – “No Justice, No Peace!” – and that’s exactly what the electoral college works to avoid. It offer protection for the smaller states while allowing larger states to have more pull… it’s a system of balance.
I find the people that want to abolish it entirely should spend their copious time educating the voters of FL :)
Nationwide recount on the popular vote in a close Presidental election? Wouldn’t that be fun!
Could be like WA state’s governor: they just kept recounting until they got the person “everyone” wanted. At some point the now-governor (but loser after the second recall) was saying “humans should recount the votes because machines make mistakes” – and the government agreed with her!
In a lot of ways I’m heartened by the level of interest the mass populous has in government out here. Yet, having seen some of the outcomes – i.e. the three time recount fiasco and the Seattle Monorail debacle (they voted to approve it and then voted eight times after that until it was killed off) – I wonder if our government is better off with apathetic citizens…