by Vic Campbell

Created on: October 30, 2007   Last Updated: September 05, 2011

How come people are so stupid? The United "STATES" is a REPUBLIC! Democratic principles apply but there is not nor has there ever been a pure democracy for this country. I don't know how they did it - but the founding fathers figured out that a people's democracy is a can of worms. You want a popular vote to determine who is President? Get real. If that were the case, then New York and California would determine who is President every election. Do you think people in Missouri would like that? The Electoral College works for the presidential elections the way the Senate works with the Congress to make laws. Every state counts as a whole unit in the Electoral process while in the Senate each state has two senators (providing equal weight in a vote count. States are assigned a number of congressmen to represent the population in that state (not unlike the number of electoral votes assigned).

Now - in a presidential election the popular vote inside the state determines if that state will support a given candidate for President. The WHOLE state and all its electoral votes based on the "voting population" is assigned to the popular candidate (in a very democratic way). This maintains the glue of the REPUBLIC (a bunch of independent states that have an idea they want to work in a "united" way on some mutual problems). Because of this, the state of Nevada, which is very different from the state of Vermont can make a stand on national issues and who should be president. If Nevada could not do that - well then - why not just leave the United States and run Nevada for Nevada and let the rest of the country do what it will?

We need the Electoral College system of voting for the President of our REPUBLIC. That does not mean there are not SOME things people would like to change. Usually we want to change them after "our guy" loses. A third party candidate is predictably a spoiler every time. Perot ran as a third party and siphoned off votes from Bush 41 (and the next time, Dole) that essentially threw the electoral votes to Clinton - who the popular consensus did not indicate as a preferred choice. The popular vote was not won by Clinton at all but he became President through a flaw in the way third parties figure into elections. Gore probably lost by only a few votes that were siphoned off by a third party spoiler, Nader. Teddy Roosevelt and the Bull Moose Party spoiled the elections of 1912 throwing Presidency to Wilson.

I think there is a way to solve this problem of

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