By DR. LARRY MOSES
No one asked me but… This election season is the craziest I can remember.
The first election I can recall is the 1948 election. I was eight years old, and the Democratic candidate was Harry S. Truman. Truman had just completed the fourth and final term of the deceased Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The Republican candidate was a smooth politician from New York City, Thomas Dewey. I can remember running around the playground at James Whitcomb Riley Elementary School chanting “Phooey on Dewey.” I had no idea what that meant, but it had a nice ring to it. Everyone was convinced that the hick from Missouri would be overwhelmed by the city slicker.
In what was one of the biggest headline mistakes in American history, the Chicago Daily Tribune rushed to press with a headline that read: “Dewey Defeats Truman.”
Dewey had what appeared to be an early commanding lead. But as the evening and the next morning progressed, the heartland of America spoke and Truman was elected.
Today we may end up with a choice between an extreme right wing, Tea Party candidate and an extreme left wing socialist.
Actually, both Democrat candidates are socialists: one openly, the other trying to mask socialism with unconvincing rhetoric.
But where have the down-to-earth pragmatic leaders in both parties gone?
President George Washington warned his fellow countrymen about the dangers of political parties. [Political parties] “…are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government…” Today I believe Washington would have included women in that statement.
In a country that is supposed to be the most democratic in the history of the world the selection of the president is far from democratic. Every four years a small number of party hacks get together and decide which of two candidates the American people may select to be the President of the United States. One must be a party member to participate in the selection of the candidates for the highest office in the land. That excludes a large number of people who have grown weary of political parties telling them what they should think.
No one asked me but… A second step in the election process that further curbs the democratic selection of the president is the Electoral College. When someone asks me which presidential candidate I plan to vote for, I usually tell them I will not vote for any candidate and neither will any other American citizen. As they look at me as if I am crazy, I direct them to the 12th Amendment to the Constitution:
“Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress…The electors shall meet in their respective states, and vote by ballot …. And they shall make a list of all the persons voted for, and of the number of votes for each; which list they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of the government of the United States,…The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates, and the votes shall then be counted. The person having the greatest number of votes shall be the President, …”
One must remember that the President is not elected by the popular vote; he is elected by the vote of representatives from the various states that are directed but not required to vote with the majority of the people of their state.
In the state of Nevada, by statute, the electors are required to sign a pledge that they will vote only for the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote of the state. However, the Supreme Court has not ruled as the Constitutionality of that restriction. Nearly half of the states have no such restriction on the electors. The party that wins the popular vote for president is allowed to choose the state electors. These electors are the leaders of the winning party. In the history of the Electoral College, 99 percent of the electoral votes have been cast with the popular vote of the state.
The District of Columbia and 48 states have a winner-takes-all rule for the Electoral College. In these States, whichever candidate receives a majority of the popular vote, or a plurality of the popular vote (less than 50 percent but more than any other candidate receives), takes all of the state’s electoral votes. This means if a candidate wins by one vote or 10,000 votes, he still wins all the electoral votes of that state. What may appear to be a landslide election under the Electoral College may have been a very close popular election.
Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina, New Jersey, Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Florida, New York, Texas, and California are the only states that really matter in the presidential election. These states have the 272 electoral votes required to elect the President of the United States. All of the rest of the states combined only have 254 electoral votes. No President can be elected without at least one of the above listed states and that would only be if the candidate ran the table on all the other minor states.
Can a President be elected without the plurality of the popular vote? It has happened three times in American history. In 1824, John Adams lost popular vote but beat Andrew Jackson in the Electoral College. In 1876, Harrison was elected even though he lost the popular vote. And in 1888, Hayes was elected without winning the popular vote. There are those who still contend that it happened in the Bush/Gore election. President Lincoln won a plurality of the vote but was far from a majority.
With the technological capability of today, there is no excuse not to amend the Constitution in a manner to allow a direct election of the president. We have no problem selecting, by direct election, who the next American Idol will be. However, we still allow small groups of politicians to decide who should be the next American president.
Thought of the week… “I have ever considered the constitutional mode of election…as the most dangerous blot on our constitution,…”
– Thomas Jefferson
