Right Idea

13 April 2007



Maryland Drops out of Electoral College

On Tuesday, Maryland’s Governor Martin O’Malley signed a law that effectively changes the way Maryland’s electors in presidential races are chosen. In future, Maryland’s electors would be bound to vote for whichever candidate received the most popular votes nationwide. Hawaii and California are considering similar rules. The way the legislation is worded, the new approach will only enter into force if states holding a majority of the electoral votes pass such laws. It’s a flawed concept, but it side steps the need to amend the constitution for fix a greater flaw.

For those who are unfamiliar with the US system, voters in the world’s greatest democracy don’t choose their president. They vote by state for electors, who chose the president ina separate election. Each state gets one elector for each senator it sends to Washington DC (all states have 2) and for each member of congress (this varies by population), and 270 votes wins the White House. It’s evolved into a regime where the top vote-getter in a state gets every elector from that state, rendering the democracy less than perfect. Mr. Bush won the 2000 election despite losing the popular vote, and this has happened on three other occasions in the last 230 years.

To change this by amending the constitution is impossible. Any such amendment requires the approval of 38 state legislatures, and the smaller states won’t go for reducing their influence. The electoral college is, in fact, there to over-represent them. Consequently, this “compact among states” approach cuts the Gordian knot. There are no rules on the selection of electors; the states are free to adopt their own, and indeed, Maine offers something other than a winner-take-all system. In 1796, when the electors chose a guy named George Washington to be president, there were only three winner-take-all states.

Currently, there are only a dozen or so states that are politically heterogeneous enough to be worth a candidate's time. California and New York are solid for the Democrats, and Texas, Alabama and South Carolina are Republican strongholds. Consequently, candidates campaign in those states and address the issues important there only during fundraisers. When they solicit votes and really work, they do so in the so-called “battle-ground” states: Nevada and New Mexico in the West, Arkansas in the old Confederacy, New Hampshire up in New England. The people who live in those places count for more.

As this journal has stated on numerous occasions, democratic elections don’t necessarily result in good government. They merely provide a moral legitimacy that no other system provides. The voters choose their leaders, so they are stuck with them. That legitimacy suffers when the electoral system gives one voter’s ballot more weight than another’s. The Maryland legislation is an elegant attempt to fix a major flaw in the American system that is overdue.

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.


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