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by Fred E. Foldvary
| Mon, 24 Dec 2007 |
Abolish Presidential Elections
We are so used to voting for president that most folks regard doing so as a normal part of democracy. But technically, Americans don't vote directly for the president. When Californians cast their ballots in the primary election, they are selecting a set of delegates to the party convention who are pledged to vote for that candidate. In the general election, voters are choosing representatives to an assembly called the "Electoral College," who then meet to vote for the president.
The term "college" in the context of elections means a group of colleagues. The authors of the U.S. Constitution rejected a direct election of the president. Instead, they created an indirect process in which presumably well-informed electors would be chosen in each state, and the electors would vote for the candidate they thought would be the best president. The founders feared that a mass of ignorant voters could be swayed by deceptive campaigns and the influence of moneyed interests.
Later, the Electoral College became a mere formality, as the candidate who won the state's election got the votes of that state's electors. We got what the founders feared: mass democracy, in which ill-informed voters choose among candidates who seek to sway the voters with emotional appeals, negative attacks on other candidates, and misleading images.
One of the problems with the Electoral College system is that a president can obtain a majority of the electoral votes while another candidate gets the majority of the people's votes. To prevent this situation, some have proposed that the states deliver their votes to the candidate who wins the people's votes.
The state legislatures have the power to allocate the electoral votes. In California, as in most states, the candidate who wins the most votes in the state gets all of the state's 55 electoral votes. The assembly of New Jersey has approved legislation to have that state's electoral votes go to the candidate who wins the national election if states with a majority of votes in the Electoral College also do so. Maryland and Illinois already have enacted this election method being promoted by National Popular Vote, but in California, the governor vetoed the legislature's approval to join this states' compact.
Here, there has been a movement, supported by Republicans, to allocate the state's electoral votes in proportion to the popular vote, so that, for example, a Democrat who wins 60 percent of the popular vote would get around 60 percent of the electoral votes. This method seems to better represent the wishes of the voters, although of course it would reduce the electoral vote for Democratic candidates as long as the majority of Californians continue to vote Democratic. The backers failed to put the measure on the June 2008 ballot, but the effort to enact it continues.
The way the system is set up now, states such as Ohio and Florida can swing the vote, since states such as California are locked up with solid party majorities. However, replacing the Electoral College with a direct election of the president also would result in the very problems the founders feared – campaigns controlled by special interests, and demagogues who sway the ignorant public with appeals to prejudice and emotion.
From a logical perspective, it is madness for a mass of voters to elect presidents they know little about and whom they cannot control once in office. We should therefore abolish presidential elections rather than seek to reform our inherently dysfunctional mass democracy.
From a libertarian perspective, we get better government if power is decentralized as much as possible. It would be best for voters to only elect neighborhood councils made up of individuals whom they can know personally, then have these councils elect higher-level councils, and so on up to the highest level, Congress, which would then elect the president, like prime ministers are elected in parliamentary systems. Elected officials could be recalled at any time by the lower-level council that elected them.
I realize that we won't have such a radically decentralized bottom-up reform soon, but having this approach as an alternative should help people realize that mass voting for president is inherently problematic, no matter how it's done.
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