DO WE HAVE A TRUE "DEMOCRACY" IN AMERICA?
Reader comment on item: Islamic Law in the United States?
in response to reader comment: #811: Pipes on "Annapolis Blues" in the Jerusalem Post

Submitted by DANIEL REDMOND (United States), Nov 3, 2007 at 10:29

I am not quite sure how one introduces a new subject into this forum so I'll just go ahead and do it in this way. Our current president, and quite a few other political figures, tell us that we must spread 'democracy' around the world. The question I am raising is 'do we really live in a democracy here in the United States?' I don't believe we do.

Aside from the fact that we are technically a "republic" to being with, there remains one other glaring impediment to our ever acheiving true democratic status. It is called the Electoral College and it is nothing but an anachronistic holdover of the Eighteenth Century that serves no valid or legitimate purpose in today's world other than to ensure that we may at times place the loser of an election into the winning position in the White House.

It was the absurdity of the Electoral College that allowed George W. Bush to assume the White House after the year 2000 election, although Al Gore had actually received 540,000 more popular votes. Due to the vagaries of this bizarre system in which the only votes that count are the "electoral" votes cast by political party hacks in some backrooms across the country, the votes of more than half a million Americans were simply discounted and only the few hundred contested votes in the state of Florida mattered anymore, a state ruled by a politically bias governor---George Bush's brother---and his chronies.

When a decision on recounts made its way to the Supreme Court it was adjudicated by appointees of George Bush's own father. Some system of democracy. Advocates for retaining the Electoral College make the argument that small states---those with small populations and few electoral votes---would be ignored by politicians if there did not exist this 'winner take all' system of votes cast under Electoral College rules. [For the record, in 48 states a simple majority vote for one party's candidate awards ALL electoral votes in that state to that party; the 2 exceptions are Maine and Nebraska which apportion them in accordance with actual percentages.] It is my belief that the exact opposite is true and that small states are ignored now precisely because of this 'winner take all' system which causes politicians to focus their attention upon the 'big prize' states like New York and California.

To make matters worse, as former presidential candidate Ralph Nader has pointed out, forty of the fifty states are a "slam dunk" for one party or another, therefore most of a candidate's attention is focussed on those ten 'swing states' to capture their votes. These are the only states whose outcome remains somewhat uncertain. If you're a Democrat you can pretty well ignore Texas under our current system as being a waste of time. If you're a Republican you can ignore New York and Massachusettes. But if we removed the Electoral College from the equation then every state's votes would be worth fighting for, including the forty percent that a Democrat might gain from Texas and the forty percent a Republican might get in New York.

The Electoral College was created back when we lived in what has been called "a four mile per hour world." In other words, the fastest mode of communication was news delivered via a horse-drawn carriage. There were no telephones, no televisions, no radios, no computers, no fax machines. In order to speed up the process of election results a system was devised that allowed for selected representatives to cast votes behind closed doors and quickly estimate who was going to be the winner. Clip-clop, clip-clop went these quickly calculated election results down the road at 4 mph to Washington, D.C. But we now live in a world in which information travels at the speed of light. We can send the results of popular election polls anywhere and everywhere instantaneously.

That is what we should be doing. We should spend a few billion federal dollars on implementing standardized voting machines across the nation that are tamper proof and we should then electronically calculate their results and send them via the internet to Washington. And we should toss the Electoral College into the trash bin of history as an interesting but now useless relic of the past. Only then will be have a system that truly allocates the same importance to each and every citizen's vote in the United States of America. In other words, we will then become a true 'democracy.'

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