by Jared Chamberlain

Created on: January 05, 2009

As I have grown a littler older and wiser (I am at the ripe old age of 23), I have seen time and again how the masses are duped and know far less than they think they do. Please do not misconstrue this as some elitist attitude. I am far from elite. However, those who constitute the elite also know this fact. They know it all too well and they have used it without hesitation in their perpetual fight for money, power, and prestige. Those elite people control the media and thereby control, or at least influence, elections. With nearly 400 million citizens in the U.S., that is potentially a massive amount of deceit.

The more these misinformed people have a (perceived) say in government, the less actual influence they have. Consider the 2008 presidential election: the Obama administration and those who have a stake in it spent hundreds of millions of dollars to convince an uninformed electorate to vote for a self-professed Marxist-admirer with zero executive experience to the most powerful position in the world. However disturbing this is, it is not a phenomenon unique to presidential elections.

Even in a congressional race, the candidate with the most money usually wins. Consider the following: I was a campaign intern for the candidate and incumbent of Ohio's 3rd Congressional District campaign. Of course the incumbent won. Why? Well, he had more recognition, having already served two terms in Congress and had been the mayor of the major city in the district, Dayton. He also had five times more cash on hand approaching Election Day than his opponent, who still managed to put up a good fight. No, this is not definitive evidence of whether or not electors can be bought by candidates, but I could cite dozens of other examples where the better-funded candidate wins.

Enter the 17th Amendment. This proposition was ratified by the states in 1913 and was supposed to remedy a problem that surfaced during the Civil War years when state legislatures, who were supposed to elect U.S. Senators, sometimes delayed elections by a significant amount of time, creating undesirable vacancies in the Senate. The original idea was that citizens knew candidates in their districts well enough to vote them to state legislatures but lacked the information (partially due to a lack of communication technology) to vote for representatives from their states to Congress. State legislators were more highly educated and informed than their constituents and could therefore make better decisions when

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