02-15-08

Cardboard Cutouts Part Two
200 years in college and still no degree
Before I get into this too deeply, let me first point out that I am not one of those guys who thinks that the Electoral College should be completely dissolved.  I don't think anyone with a small amount of reason believes that direct election of the President would be a good thing, and, if they did, all it would take to convince them otherwise would be a short trip to Walmart or Target on the day before a major gift-giving holiday.  I am also not in favor of any sweeping Federal mandate on the subject.  If anything, I'd like to see fewer Federal mandates on a lot fewer subjects.  I've always been of the opinion that one of the main causes of the failure of the Soviet Union was the attempt to centralize the daily government of a huge land area, undermining local authority and responsibility to the point that bureaucratic apathy and corruption became commonplace.

If you haven't guessed, the next item in my little hit parade of difficulties that need to be addressed in order to fix our electoral system is the electoral college.  The electoral college was invented by the drafters of the Constitution to prevent Americans from knowing how their government works.  The simple mention of the name has put most of you into a sleepy torpor, I can tell.  Right now, you're trying to remember what the girl who always wore sweaters even when it wasn't really cold looked like, and imagining what she might've looked like with the sweater off (women readers are doing this, too; the sweater-girl was ahead of her time in that she was an equal opportunity ogling target).  Well, High School is over, so wake up!  We'll never fix the country if you waste all day reminiscing about a girl you were too lazy or shy to talk to.  (For the record, I married her, and her breasts are even better than you imagined!) 

Actually, the electoral college is pretty simple.  Like the primaries, where you vote for delegates to the party conventions, when you vote for President, you really vote for a slate of Electors who, in turn, get one shot at coming up with a President.  What I mean by this is they get together in Washington, and they vote once, and the candidate receiving a majority of electoral votes becomes President.  If they can't come up with a majority candidate, then the question is left up to the House of Representatives.  This has happened more than a couple of times in our past.  It has been suggested that it was intended that there would never be a clear Presidential winner in the Electoral College, and the House would always determine who the President would be.  This is the same House that was going to clean up Washington, bring the boys back home, and shut down Big Brother, but only managed to hold a couple of hearings and run for Senate vacancies created by Presidential campaigns.

Now in and of itself, the Electoral College isn't a bad thing.  In most cases, the offset representation actually increases the power of individual voters.  What needs to be changed is the way Electors are selected.  Right now, the vast majority (by which I mean all, but I'm not sure, and I don't feel like looking it up) of states nominate their Electors under a winner-take-all plan.  This means that if you win Texas you get 34 representatives in the Electoral College.  More to the point, this means that if you win Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas, you will very probably get 34 representatives in the Electoral College, and if you win New York City or Los Angeles, you will definitely get New York's 31 Electors or California's 55.

Winner-take-all selection concentrates all power within our major urban areas and the states that contain them.  It would be possible to win a Presidential election by winning only 12 states.  Admittedly, those twelve key states together represent 58 per cent of the national population, but that's an even greater reason to move away from WTA selection.  It's unlikely that any Presidential candidate would walk away with all of the electors of any of the key states under any system other than winner take all.

But the problem is that the Electoral selection process is determined by the individual states.  I believe this is the right and proper way to do it, for the reasons cited above, but I also think that we Americans should start to lobby our state legislatures to fix them, and it's got to start in the key states.  The non-key states can't afford to switch to a mores reasonable plan because that would water down what little influence they have now, but key states have influence whether they go winner-take-all or not.  The only difference a reassessment would make in Texas is that the news organizations would no longer be able to report a winner as soon as Harris, Fort Bend, Tarrant, Fort Worth, and Bexar counties had reported.

Anyway, here's my plan for fixing the College, and remember, this has to be done on the state level, starting with the key states.  The number of electors allotted to a given state is equal to the number of congressmen and senators that state has added together.  My idea is that we should take that allotment literally.  Each state should have two at-large electors, and a slate of electors elected from the state's various Congressional Districts.  That would mean that if I, and the rest of the 9th US Congressional District of Texas, voted for the ragged remains of Ron Paul's candidacy (not that I would), then he would have one elector, plus a number of votes for the two at large electors.  I think this sort of redistribution would open the field more and ensure a better race.

Of course the race itself needs to be fixed.  At least the way we count a winner.  But that's for next time.