You might think the voting for president ended on Nov. 4, with Barack Obama declared the official winner.
You’d be wrong. The official voting takes place today, when “electors” from all 50 states and the District of Columbia will cast ballots for president and vice president. It’s their votes, not yours, that will actually decide the election.
See, when you voted for president this fall, you were actually voting for a slate of 11 people chosen by their party to serve as our state’s electors. Obama won Washington’s popular vote, so his electors will be the ones voting in Olympia at noon today.
Why did the Founders write such a convoluted system into the Constitution? For one thing, they didn’t trust the judgment of the masses, fearing they could be easily manipulated by smooth-talking candidates. Electors provided a layer of insurance. The Founders also wanted to prevent large states from drowning out small ones in national elections. The winner-takes-all formula (still present in all but two states), it was thought, would encourage candidates to take smaller states seriously.
Today, though, the result is that a relative handful of “battleground” states hold too much influence in presidential elections, at others’ expense. Witness Ohio, which in the final weeks of the 2008 campaign got the lion’s share of visits from Obama and John McCain, while our state got none. Other regions, and their issues, are similarly ignored each election cycle.
This system has outlived whatever usefulness it once had. It’s time to either amend the Constitution to move to a direct popular election of the president, or for Washington to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, in which individual states vow to cast their electoral votes for the winner of the national popular vote. That’s likely an easier path, as it doesn’t require changing the Constitution.
Direct election might encourage candidates to spend most of their time campaigning in major population centers, but they’d also have an incentive to pay attention to key regional issues all over the country. It could also give rise to viable third parties, perhaps bringing creative new ideas into policy debates, and prevent the divisive scenario of 2000, when George W. Bush won the presidency even though he lost the popular vote to Al Gore.
Democracy works. Let the people choose their president, individual vote by individual vote.
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