Roseyland

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Yesterday I blogged about what I would change in the U.S. Government if I could. Today, I’m going to talk about the answer a lot of other people would give. Eliminating the Electoral College. In case you don’t know, and seriously, you should know, but in case you don’t, the Electoral College is how the United States elects a President and Vice President. Each State is given one elector for each Senator and Representative in the House. Washington D.C. get’s three electors. There are 538 electors in total. Each State decides how to split up their electoral votes depending on the popular vote in that State. Most states use a winner take all system, where whichever candidate wins the popular vote wins all of the State’s electoral votes. So, if a candidate wins a large state with a slim margin in the popular vote, he or she still takes home a large number of electoral votes. This is how George Bush was able to lose the popular vote by 500,000 in the 2000 election, but still win more electoral votes and thus win the election.

Many people believe that George Bush stole the election in 2000 because of our flawed electoral college system. This isn’t really fair though, because candidates campaign to win the most electoral votes. Had George Bush been campaigning to win the popular vote, it is entirely possible that he would have done so. Of course Al Gore wasn’t trying to win the popular vote either, and yet he managed to do it. Regardless, the point is, we don’t know what would have happened in a popular vote election.

I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who didn’t think the Electoral College should be eliminated. It’s just that it takes a constitutional amendment to change it, and it hardly ever makes a difference anyways, so why bother? The Electoral College does have it’s good points. It is supposed to protect the rights of small states. Which I think is a fair argument. There is a lot of group think going on in elections. I think most people vote for who their peers vote for, rather than making up their own mind. Just because some groups have more people in them, doesn’t make their opinions any more valid.

All in all, if it were up to me, I would probably eliminate the Electoral College. It doesn’t actually do much to protect the rights of small states, and to a small extent, it undermines the credibility of our democracy. It is interesting to think about how Presidential elections would change if we went to a popular vote system. Under our current system, candidates spend a vast majority of their time in a few key swing states, while a lot of other states are completely ignored. If we went to a popular vote system, I imagine that candidates would spend most of their time in major population centers, and the more rural areas would be ignored. This would probably be an improvement, since candidates would have to pay attention to a lot more of the country.

Wow, you have no idea how boring this blog post is. Oh wait, yes you do, you just read it. Why didn’t you stop and do something better with your time. I’m sorry. You have no idea how many times I stopped while writing this and thought, oh God, this is so boring, just post a Haiku or something. Oh well, at least I checked another NaBloPoMo day off. I’ll post pictures of my cat tomorrow. Everybody loves cat pictures.