(U-WIRE) - The birth of the United States and democracy in North America remains a crowning achievement in the annals of world history. The Founding Fathers' brilliance and foresight still fascinate scholars.
Unfortunately, they didn't get everything right.
Most of those fine old gents believed that women, blacks and men without property didn't have the right to vote. Now, more than 200 years later, we have gotten rid of all voting restrictions, but we still rely on an archaic institution known as the Electoral College to decide the final outcomes of our presidential elections. Americans have moved past the regional mentality of 18th century political scientists who feared the domination of larger, more populous states. The fact that the Electoral College still exists serves as a testament to the consistent strength of American political elites and their ability to mobilize ignorance and apathy among the voting public.
Through the years, Americans have cast off other impediments to personal expression and the rights of our citizens by dispensing with slavery, Jim Crow laws, sex-based discrimination and forced school prayer. But while the Electoral College is less severe and repressive than the aforementioned institutions, it nevertheless stands as a testament to a time when the opinions of a select few were officially recognized as more important than those of the everyman. I bet many of you thought that when you cast your vote in the 2000 presidential elections it was for one of the men whose names appeared on the ballot, Al Gore or George W. Bush. Unfortunately, you were actually voting for somebody whose name never appeared on the ballot: an anonymous, faceless elector. Of course each elector is pledged to cast his or her vote for the candidate that you chose, but this begs the question: Why not cut out the middle man?
If the American people won't tolerate a middle-man when buying car insurance, why should they embrace one when it comes to choosing their president? Because of the state-based electoral system, your individual vote doesn't matter quite as much as that of your elector's and which way your state happens to swing. The laudable principle of one person
one vote is rendered irrelevant by a winner-take-all state-centric system that punishes those who happen to fall in the political minority of their region. A Democrat's vote in Texas or a Republican's vote in Massachusetts really doesn't mean a whole heck of a lot when it comes to presidential elections. Sure, the people who cast their votes for Al Gore in 2000 were tallied along with all the others who happened to be in the majority that year, but that's little consolation when the popular vote has no bearing on who actually becomes the president of the United States.
The time is nigh for people to push for the elimination of the Electoral College. No viable arguments can be made for continuing its existence that do not characterize the American people as a childish, uninformed rabble unfit to choose its own chief executive.
Americans are a fickle and scrutinizing people, but we're far from the slack-jawed simpletons that popular talking heads on cable news channels would have you believe 17
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James B. Phillips
