by David Furritus

Created on: August 07, 2007   Last Updated: January 24, 2009

Oh, this is a pretty obvious one: The American Voter is meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

Let's analyze things from a few different perspectives:

1. The Electoral College. In the early days of the US people were too far apart to make counting individual votes for the President easy. As a result, they did it in small districts which reported their results to the State. The State determined which candidate had the most votes and allowed that party to select who the electors would be. Now, the electors were supposed to cast their vote to match that of their individual district, but for some reason all the votes would go to whatever candidate had the majority in the ENTIRE STATE. This made it look like that every voter in that state was voting for that one particular candidate. This is where the concept of "Red" and "Blue" states came from. A shining example of where this went wrong was the 2000 election. Yes, George W Bush had the majority of Florida's votes, but it was a slim majority and if the electors had voted their conscience we would have had a different President (Al Gore also had over 2,000,000 popular votes nationwide.).

2. Lawmakers in Congress. People elect candidates based upon the hopes that they might actually live up to their campaign promises. Topics like health care, fighting in foreign wars, immigration reform, and taxes are usually pretty heated subjects. The problem is that once they're in office they seem to magically forget these topics and immediately start toting the Party Line. The sad part is that every few years they start running again with the exact same campaign promises and once they're elected they magically forget them.

3. The Two Party System. The will of the people has been replaced by the will of the parties. It seems that no one really cares what the American people want, but instead care about what it takes to make their parties look good to garner more votes in future elections. The sad part is that people are still stuck on the idea that they have only two choices and quite often are voting for the "lesser of two evils".

4. Lobbyists. The average voter just doesn't have enough clout to make an impact on the way lawmakers will behave - unless they're backed by someone with a lot of money that will help a politician out with huge campaign donation. It's to the point where the almighty dollar is more important than the almighty vote.

Fortunately, there is hope. Thanks to the internet candidates can get more exposure with simple banner ads or web pages (most of the candidates that are running for the 2008 Presidency have MySpace pages!). Unfortunately, the problems mentioned above will take years to overcome and every year more people become disgruntled and decide not to vote.

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