The ELECTORAL COLLEGE of the United States met and voted on
the next president and vice-president of the United States; Trump won.
Lately there has been a lot of talk about our election
system and its fairness and whether each vote actual counts during the
election; I feel the system is not fair and needs to be changed.
Last night, I was skyping with a friend in Poland and he
asked about our system and if the “electors” did not vote for Trump would a
civil war begin.
Obviously, many people do not understand our system, why it
was formed in that particular way and what our options are.
The Founding Fathers did not trust “the people” and feared
(rightly so) that the people could be manipulated by a smooth talking tyrant;
this is a masses are asses belief system. They also wanted ALL the states to
have a say in who is elected and not only the states with the largest
population; their concerns were legitimate.
In their system, each state had the number of “electors” which
equaled the number of representatives in Congress (allotted by population) and
two senators so even a state like Montana which has few people would have at
least 3 electors.
Currently there are 538 electors and 270 is the number
needed to win the election.
In the original idea, the Founding Fathers envisioned these
electors as upstanding and educated people that would actually consider the suitability
of each candidate in the election and in certain circumstances, despite the
votes cast by citizens, could vote for who they felt was more suitable. The
idea here was that these electors could and would prevent a tyrant from being
elected if they felt the candidate or some other power unduly and unfairly
tainted the popular vote through deceit, etc.
The original idea behind our system is not in play today.
The electors are chosen by the political party in each state and we, the
public, have no idea who these electors are or anything about their background.
In fact, being an elector is basically a ceremonial post as each elector has no
decision to make except to vote for the person that was elected in their state.
This is unfortunate because specifically in THIS election,
information has started to be uncovered about how Russia interfered in our
election process on the side of Trump and this is exactly what the original
intent of the electors was; that they would acknowledge what had happened and
disavow that person from becoming president since it was a tainted election.
This is why you saw a number of protests by people who
understand the original intent of our electoral process asking the electors to
vote their conscience but our current system does not allow that.
The problem as I see it is that the system no longer works
as originally intended and the fact that most states have the winner-take-all
electoral system in place (which is not mandated by our Constitution) means that
each vote cast does not have equal weight in the election. Hillary Clinton had
3 million more popular votes than Trump yet lost the election.
I am not advocating scraping the electoral system which
would take a Constitutional Amendment which would be practically impossible to
accomplish when there is such division in the country BUT the Constitution does
not say anything about allocating electoral votes based on the state’s popular
vote.
Maine and Nebraska already have this system in place. In
those states the electoral votes are allocated according to the percentage of
votes cast for EACH candidate so if one candidate won 25% of the popular vote
in that specific state, he or she would get 25% of the electors allocated to
that specific state. In this way ALL votes would count for something.
Just to show how our current system is just not fair imagine
a state that has 100 electors and one candidate wins the state by one vote; he
or she gets ALL the electors that state has and how in the hell is that fair.
The system has to be changed state by state and will take
years because like here in Michigan, our legislature is controlled by the
Republicans who will not want to rock the boat since they won.
Each state needs
to have a referendum on the issue and allow the voters to choose if they want
their votes to be used in a proportional manner instead of a winner-take-all
manner. This is the only way each one of our votes will actually count.
