by Sean Jackson

Created on: November 04, 2008

The Electoral College ensures our vote really counts

It sounds archaic, even absurdly undemocratic, but the electoral college is really quite important. Without it, politicians would only concentrate on large population areas and thus would craft their campaigns and even the national platforms based solely upon the desires of urban voters in the largest population centers. Places like New York City , Chicago, and Los Angeles would dominate the political landscape while small population states would have virtually no say in the national body politic. Yes it would truly be one man one vote, but your vote would be lost amidst a sea of possibly hundreds of millions of votes. Your vote would count, but instead of being numbered among your fellow state citizens it would be tossed in the national pool. There would be no "battleground states" no rallys. You'd still get lots of commercials, but the concerns of the Heartland would be all but forgotten.

Local politicians would suffer as well because a national popular vote, where many citizen's concerns would go unheeded due to their zip code, would depress turnout.The Electoral College seems wrong to many but one must realize the United States of America is not a democracy. It is a representative republic. We vote our representatives into office in order to decide public policy on our behalf. In theory, these representatives are supposed to know more about a given bill and its implications than Joe Q Public. Of course nobody could know much of anything about a 40,000 page bill written by an army of lawyers but I digress.

The Electoral College wasn't set up because it took a long time for information to get around to the folks; it was established because the founding fathers didn't trust the folks. They knew that a direct vote would lead to a mobocracy. An individual can be intelligent, reasonable, and sentient. People in large groups tend to act like sheep and are easily swayed by base emotions and mindless slogans. Instant access to lots of information doesn't make us wise. In fact, information overload can have an adverse effect on a person's ability to make a judicious decision. Too much and often conflicting information can cause a person to be overwhelmed, to doubt the veracity of the sources, doubt their own ability to discern, and cause them to either withdraw and give up the matter altogather or simply follow along with what they're told most everybody else is doing.

Without such a stopgap, public debate would cease to be a free and open exchange of ideas and would instead devolve into intimidation and outright suppression of opposing ideas by the ruling mob. We are already seeing this with the prolifration of political correctness.

Far from not having our voices heard because the Electoral College is in place, more peoples voices are heard. Whole states that wouldn't matter much in a national vote have their say. Still if you wanted to get rid of the Electoral College, there is a way where people throughout the nation would have a voice and not just the largest population centers. Have popular votes confined to individual states. Tally up the votes in a state and the person with the most votes wins that state. The person who wins the most states wins. What about other US Territories such as Puerto Rico? What happens in a 25-25 tie? I don't know? You figure it out.

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