Every vote should count equally

by David Grand
October 28, 2004

Fs you see, I wrote this column in advance of the election, confident as I was that the final result wouldn't be known for as long, if not longer, than it took to declare a winner in 2000, especially with thousands of lawyers from both sides monitoring every polling place looking for any perceived irregularities to challenge in the courts. It may even drag out until right before Inauguration Day on Jan. 20, creating more suspense and nail-biting in the country than Alfred Hitchcock's mystery movies.

      But when it's finally over, let's hope that all the bitterness and rancor that has so divided this country during the campaign will quickly subside, and that people will once again return to being civil towards one another, and agree to "bury the hatchet" in other than each others heads. That may, however, prove to be so much wishful thinking on my part, for some of the deep wounds that were inflicted by the opposing camps could take years to heal, if ever.  

      As concerns the election itself, heaven forbid it doesn't end up like the last one with the Supreme Court making the final call, or with the second-place vote getter able to claim victory because of the winner-take-all Electoral College math, where one can win the popular vote as Gore did by a half million votes in 2000 yet lose in the Electoral College. But as President Carter once said. "life is not fair." Nor I would add are many elections.

      I'd have thought that following that fiasco in the 2000 election both parties would've pushed to change that constitutional provision, which violates the central principle of our election system that every vote should count equally, and that the victory should go to the person with the most votes as in congressional elections. That to me is a distinction without difference. And after 2000, Democrats fully understand that, as should Republicans before they, too, learn that lesson the hard way.

      From what I've read, the Founding Fathers were wary of letting the people choose the president through direct elections, believing, erroneously as history has shown, that voters would know very little about the candidates, and that smaller states would have less say-so in the selection of a president without the Electoral College. But there was, of course, no mass-comunications back then, with people having to rely on the papers and what they heard by word-of-mouth about the candidates.  

      Not so, says Stanford historian Jack Rakove, the premier scholar of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, who describes it as "a hastily sketched system that was obsolete within a bare decade of its birth; and which does not protect smaller states, who are granted proportionately more votes than larger ones." And as he points out, residents in such states have no discernible common interests merely because they're small;" and "that Americans vote on the basis of ideology, religion, race, economic concerns and on the personal appeal of the candidates, not on some 'hazy' state interest."

      I guess what it boils down to is, as columnist Steve Chapman says, "We keep the Electoral College only because it doesn't frustrate the majority will very often and, if it did, we'd get rid of it; but if majority will is what truly matters, we shouldn't elect a president under a system whose only function is to periodically rise up and deny the people their choice."

      All I know is, that if I was a Democrat living in Texas, or a Republican in California, I'd curl up with a good book, or lady friend before traipsing to the polls to waste my time voting for Kerry in the Lone Star State or for Bush in the Golden State, "mortal locks" as they are to win in a landslide in those respective states. Forgive me if that makes me appear un-American. But not to count every popular vote in the election is, to me, more un-American by far.