This Week's Editorial:

Since I was on vacation last week in the lovely states of South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho (eek! red states!), and thus out of touch with my regular news sources, I'd like to take a break from my angry ranting about George Bush and talk about something else.

I recently had a discussion with several friends about politics. After the discussion we always have with our libertarian friend about why everyone but him was voting for Kerry (yes, we know the system sucks, but there's too much at stake right now to waste our votes to "make a point"), we moved on to the electoral college. And, for once, we all came to the same conclusion: boy, does it suck!

The framers of the Constitution wanted to avoid having Congress choose the president (which would be closer to a parliamentary system, which the founding fathers weren't big on), but they also didn't want to subject the selection of the president to a "mobocracy"--in other words, they didn't fully trust the tyranny of the masses. There are a total of 538 electoral votes available (one vote per senator and congressperson that represents your state). You have to get 270 electoral votes (the majority) to win. When you vote, you're actually voting for a representative of your state to vote for the candidate who won the majority of votes in your state.

So what's the problem? Well, for starters, in 2000 about 500,000 more Americans voted for Al Gore than for George W. Bush. But because of the electoral college (and the Supreme Court, but that's another editorial), Bush received 271 electoral votes to Gore's 266. Bush became president, even though 500,000 more people voted for his opponent.

That's not enough? How about this: there is absolutely no law that requires your electoral college representative to vote for the person your state told them to vote for. And it's happened; electors have changed their votes in the twentieth century presidential elections of 1948, 1956, 1960, 1968, 1972, 1976, and 1988. In a close election, that could be devastating. Let's say that this year John Kerry gets 270 electoral votes and George Bush gets 268 electoral votes, and Kerry wins Washington. But if one of Washington's electors decided that he just couldn't give his electoral vote to Kerry and switched to Bush, then the college would be tied at 269 apiece. Nothing can prevent him from doing that. The election would then be void and sent to Congress (who the founding fathers didn't want to pick the president). Or, even worse, if a few electors made this choice, the entire election could go to the other candidate.

One of the things I really dislike about the electoral college, especially this year, is that candidates pander to the swing states with more available electoral votes, and if you’re not in a swing state, well screw you. One of the arguments for the electoral college is that it gives more power to a small state with a small population, so they won’t be overruled by the “tyranny of the majority,” but look at a state like Wyoming. It is the least populous state, it has three electoral votes, and candidates never visit Wyoming. Even if Wyoming wasn’t a glaringly red state, candidates wouldn’t go poking their heads in there to try to get those three votes when there are far juicier morsels to set their sites on—like Ohio (20 votes) and Florida (27 votes). Instead of giving smaller states more power, it ends up giving bigger states more power because those are the states the candidates feel are worth fighting for. If California (with a whopping 55 votes) or Texas (coming in second at 34 votes) were swing states we wouldn’t see Bush or Kerry leave them until the election. So let’s say you’re Average Joe in a non-swing state. No one is interested in talking to you about your issues, no one is interested in working to gain your vote. The electoral college sends the message that you may as well stay home, because your vote doesn't matter.

At the very least, electoral votes should no longer be all or nothing. As much as I love living in Seattle, I recognize that most of the rest of Washington doesn’t think the same way that we bike riding, indie music loving Seattleites do. Since the greater Seattle area holds the majority of the state’s population though, it has been able to control where the electoral votes have gone in the last several elections. People in Yakima may as well not vote for president, because, historically, their vote has meant nothing. And even if I don’t agree with their vote, I think it’s bullshit that one pocket controls the votes of the whole state—imagine if it was the other way around, like it is for Texan Democrats. If we’re going to keep the electoral college, it needs to be reformed so that the votes of states are representative of how the residents of that state vote. If 55% of Washington’s population votes for Kerry, and 45% vote for Bush, Washington’s electoral votes (we have 11 of them, by the way) should be divided so that Kerry gets 6 and Bush gets 5. Isn’t that more of a representative democracy than what we have now, where if Kerry gets 49% and Bush gets 51%, Bush gets 100% of our state’s votes?

In our discussion, several of my friends suggested abolishing the electoral college completely; presidents should be elected entirely by popular vote. I wholeheartedly agree with this. Suddenly candidates might be interested in talking to Average Joe in Wyoming because his vote would be just as important as the vote of Frank Lopez in Los Angeles. Presidential candidates might realize that issues like unemployment and health care are just as important in Montana as they are in Ohio, and they might make an effort to get their message out, and more importantly, to listen to a broader range of Americans. The electoral college system doesn’t allow for this to happen. Even if Kerry or Bush actually wanted to visit every single state, visiting South Dakota (which, like Wyoming, has 3 votes) instead of Florida just doesn’t make sense. 27 will always be more than 3, no matter how you slice it. If states have no numbers attached to them anymore, and candidates just have to win votes from a majority of people, they might try harder to listen to more people. When presidential candidates are working harder to talk to all voters instead of a select few, the voters win.