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Murphy’s Law, written by Barbara Murphy, appears monthly in The Golden Times. The column represents the opinion of the author and is not necessarily the opinion of the publisher.
Let All Votes Be Counted — It’s Time
To Abolish Electoral College
U.S. Sen. Robert Casey (D-PA) recently took the highly unusual step of interjected himself into the State of Pennsylvania’s legislative business.
He urged the Republican-controlled state Senate to reconsider its proposal to award the state’s Presidential electoral votes proportionally instead on the winner-take-all basis which now prevails in all other states except Maine and Nebraska,
Senator Casey was wrong!
Instead of begging the state Senate to drop its reform proposal, he should have urged it to devote heart and soul to an effort to abolish the Electoral College.
In fact, Sen. Casey should urge the whole nation to fight for abolition of the College, which is an abomination — an institution that deprives Americans of the right to vote for their presidents and vice presidents.
Sadly, a lot of people don’t realize that when they cast their ballots for the nation’s top leaders, they are not voting for the candidates listed on their ballot but rather for “electors” who the voters do not know — electors are hardly ever listed on any state’s ballots — and who in fact are not legally required to vote for the candidates for which the voters cast their ballots.
Under the winner-take-all system, the candidate who wins the popular vote in a state, even by the tiniest of margins, gets all the state’s electoral votes. Four times in our history — most recently in 2000 — this has led to the loser of the popular vote becoming president — an absurd and undemocratic result to say the least.
The Electoral College also distorts the reality of how the people actually voted. President Obama won what many have called a landslide victory in 2012, but the landslide was only in the electoral vote. The popular vote was much closer. Mitt Romney did a lot better than people — including his own party — give him credit for.
Consider the fate of George McGovern. He has gone down in history as one of the great presidential losers. The truth is that in the 1972 presidential election, McGovern got 38 percent of the popular vote but only three percent of the Electoral College vote. Twenty years later, Bill Clinton was elected president with 43 percent of the three-way split popular vote — just five percentage points less than George McGovern received but because Clinton won in the Electoral College he became president and is lauded as a winner while McGovern is still a laughing stock among many politicians and political reporters.
The history of the Electoral College reveals that down through the years the college has a number of “faithless” electors — electors who refuse to vote for the candidate they were pledged to support. There is no legal penalty for this. This happened most recently in the year 2000.
In her excellent book, Electoral Dysfunction, Victoria Bassetti said that “efforts to encourage [Electoral College] faithlessness spring up in every close election.”
She wrote: “In 1976, when the race between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford potentially turned on fewer than 10,000 votes in Ohio and Hawaii, the Ford campaign prepared a faithless elector strategy.”
She quoted Ford’s running mate, U.S. Sen. Bob Dole, as telling a Senate Judiciary Committee: “We were shopping — not shopping, excuse me — looking around for electors. It just seems to me that there is a temptation [for electors] in a very tight race to really negotiate quite a bunch.”
The Electoral College also thwarts the efforts of third parties to win the presidency. It 1992, third-party candidate Ross Perot won nearly 19 percent of the national vote — more than 19 million popular votes, the greatest number polled by any third-party candidate in American history. Despite this, Perot got no electoral votes at all.
Defenders of the Electoral College argue among other things that it protects the interests of small states and helps to preserve the two-party system.
As for the first argument, history proves the contrary. Presidential candidates spend most their time and money campaigning in the states with the most electoral votes and virtually ignore the smaller states, which offer only a handful of such votes.
As for the second argument, the two-party system is now so entrenched it can be expected to survive the death of the Electoral College and operate successfully in a popular vote system.
As for third parties, are they so bad? Other democracies have multiple parties and don’t fall apart. The emergence of viable third parties in America might help to break the obscene gridlock in Washington, which poses a very real threat to our economic and political systems.
The Electoral College was created for the worst possible reasons — to minimize the political power of the average working man and to keep the slave states in the Union. At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, James Wilson of Pennsylvania proposed direct popular election of the president to no avail.
During Pennsylvania’s ratification debate, he proclaimed; “The supreme, absolute and uncontrollable authority remains with the people... I consider the people of the United States as forming one great community....”
On March 28, President Obama signed an executive order establishing a commission to study and recommend solutions to three serious voting problems: long lines at the polls, registration issues and lack of voter access. The President should add one more topic to his order — the Electoral College. And he should strongly recommend that the commission call for its abolition.
*
Barbara Murphy, 80, writes about controversial issues each month.
To Abolish Electoral College
U.S. Sen. Robert Casey (D-PA) recently took the highly unusual step of interjected himself into the State of Pennsylvania’s legislative business.
He urged the Republican-controlled state Senate to reconsider its proposal to award the state’s Presidential electoral votes proportionally instead on the winner-take-all basis which now prevails in all other states except Maine and Nebraska,
Senator Casey was wrong!
Instead of begging the state Senate to drop its reform proposal, he should have urged it to devote heart and soul to an effort to abolish the Electoral College.
In fact, Sen. Casey should urge the whole nation to fight for abolition of the College, which is an abomination — an institution that deprives Americans of the right to vote for their presidents and vice presidents.
Sadly, a lot of people don’t realize that when they cast their ballots for the nation’s top leaders, they are not voting for the candidates listed on their ballot but rather for “electors” who the voters do not know — electors are hardly ever listed on any state’s ballots — and who in fact are not legally required to vote for the candidates for which the voters cast their ballots.
Under the winner-take-all system, the candidate who wins the popular vote in a state, even by the tiniest of margins, gets all the state’s electoral votes. Four times in our history — most recently in 2000 — this has led to the loser of the popular vote becoming president — an absurd and undemocratic result to say the least.
The Electoral College also distorts the reality of how the people actually voted. President Obama won what many have called a landslide victory in 2012, but the landslide was only in the electoral vote. The popular vote was much closer. Mitt Romney did a lot better than people — including his own party — give him credit for.
Consider the fate of George McGovern. He has gone down in history as one of the great presidential losers. The truth is that in the 1972 presidential election, McGovern got 38 percent of the popular vote but only three percent of the Electoral College vote. Twenty years later, Bill Clinton was elected president with 43 percent of the three-way split popular vote — just five percentage points less than George McGovern received but because Clinton won in the Electoral College he became president and is lauded as a winner while McGovern is still a laughing stock among many politicians and political reporters.
The history of the Electoral College reveals that down through the years the college has a number of “faithless” electors — electors who refuse to vote for the candidate they were pledged to support. There is no legal penalty for this. This happened most recently in the year 2000.
In her excellent book, Electoral Dysfunction, Victoria Bassetti said that “efforts to encourage [Electoral College] faithlessness spring up in every close election.”
She wrote: “In 1976, when the race between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford potentially turned on fewer than 10,000 votes in Ohio and Hawaii, the Ford campaign prepared a faithless elector strategy.”
She quoted Ford’s running mate, U.S. Sen. Bob Dole, as telling a Senate Judiciary Committee: “We were shopping — not shopping, excuse me — looking around for electors. It just seems to me that there is a temptation [for electors] in a very tight race to really negotiate quite a bunch.”
The Electoral College also thwarts the efforts of third parties to win the presidency. It 1992, third-party candidate Ross Perot won nearly 19 percent of the national vote — more than 19 million popular votes, the greatest number polled by any third-party candidate in American history. Despite this, Perot got no electoral votes at all.
Defenders of the Electoral College argue among other things that it protects the interests of small states and helps to preserve the two-party system.
As for the first argument, history proves the contrary. Presidential candidates spend most their time and money campaigning in the states with the most electoral votes and virtually ignore the smaller states, which offer only a handful of such votes.
As for the second argument, the two-party system is now so entrenched it can be expected to survive the death of the Electoral College and operate successfully in a popular vote system.
As for third parties, are they so bad? Other democracies have multiple parties and don’t fall apart. The emergence of viable third parties in America might help to break the obscene gridlock in Washington, which poses a very real threat to our economic and political systems.
The Electoral College was created for the worst possible reasons — to minimize the political power of the average working man and to keep the slave states in the Union. At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, James Wilson of Pennsylvania proposed direct popular election of the president to no avail.
During Pennsylvania’s ratification debate, he proclaimed; “The supreme, absolute and uncontrollable authority remains with the people... I consider the people of the United States as forming one great community....”
On March 28, President Obama signed an executive order establishing a commission to study and recommend solutions to three serious voting problems: long lines at the polls, registration issues and lack of voter access. The President should add one more topic to his order — the Electoral College. And he should strongly recommend that the commission call for its abolition.
*
Barbara Murphy, 80, writes about controversial issues each month.