I was wondering if you've heard a sensible explanation for the existence of the Electoral College.
If so, please share it with me. Years ago, back during the Iron Age, when I was in high school, I remember having the Electoral College explained to the class. The theory was, when the Founding Fathers were thinking through our national election process, they reasoned that Main Street voters in, say, Maine could not be expected to make intelligent, well-informed choices about candidates from, say, South Carolina and Michigan.
So, instead of voting directly for the candidates themselves (the popular vote), they would vote for "electors" in their own state who had party affiliations and knew the candidates from rubbing shoulders with them in Congress or elsewhere on the national stage. In those days, voters in one state got little to no information about the records of elected officials in distant states.
Those days have gone the way of the horse and buggy. Today, with CNN, MSNBC, FOX News, PBS, all the free channels, not to mention YouTube, Twitter and the blogosphere, every citizen gets inundated ad nauseum with information on public figures around the country and the world.
If honest ignorance was the problem; that problem has been solved. Today, it is safe to follow the "one person, one vote" concept that was the spirit of the Founding Fathers truly democratic ideals.
Today, Americans from coast to coast are already painfully aware that Clint Eastwood's best days are behind him and that Rick Perry's mind isn't large enough to accommodate three things at once. Even Herman Cain could handle nine things but his campaign foundered on his Clintonesque proclivities.
My point is the Electoral College is an idea whose time has past. It is a solution, however ingenious, to a problem that began to wither away back when "I Love Lucy" and "Gunsmoke" were popular. It is an anachronism – an error in chronology. One vote in Ohio is equal to one vote in Nevada. A candidate should not be able to carry all of New York and California's electors by winning those states by 100 votes and thereby get elected while losing the popular vote by millions of votes when all 50 states are counted. Remember, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all? I see some value in having states. It does make things like infrastructure maintenance and more accountable local government easier. But, in national elections we don't need swing states, we need swing voters.
Corporate personhood is truly an abomination, but abolishing the Electoral College would force super political action committees to spread their money and lies evenly across the country instead of focusing it where it can do them the most, perceived electoral good.
There is a national citizen's group called Move to Amend that is working to end "corporate personhood." I support the group and wish it luck. There also needs to be a national group working to abolish the Electoral College as well. It devalues "personal personhood" and flies in the face of the Founding Fathers' noble intentions. Presidential elections should be conducted just as gubernatorial elections are. We don't elect county officials or Congressional representatives to vote for governors. As it stands, we are voting for delegates whose name we don't know near as well as we know the candidates, if we know them at all.
