THE CATASTROPHE OF THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE ON DEMOCRACY.
Presidents
are not elected by the popular vote. President are determined by the number of electoral votes they receive from the electoral
college.
When you go
to the pole you are not voting for a President but for an Electoral College “elector”
to be determined by your party leaders (whoever they are.)
The founding
fathers decided that the people were not reliable or smart enough to determine the
outcome of an election for the head-of-state, so they devised a system where
party leaders could put their finger on the scales to affect an outcome acceptable
to the political elite.
Here is how
it works. Each state is allowed the number of votes
equal to their number of Representatives and Senators.
Here is the
rub: Representatives are determined by the population of the state, but every
state has two Senators. That means the North
Dakota with a population of half-a-million gets two votes for their senators
and California with a population of thirty-seven-million also get only two
votes that represent their senators.
This supposedly levels the playing field for states with small
populations; but it also means that the will of the people – the popular vote –
is devaluated.
So, when I
cast my vote here in Maine I am voting for someone that I don’t know to choose
someone else that I don’t know to represent me in the Electoral College in the
hope they will vote for the person I voted for.
The problem
with this system is that by the end of this year, two Presidents that were not
elected by popular vote will have replaced five members of the Supreme
Court. What kind of fucking democracy
is this?
the Ol’Buzzard
