I know this node is pretty long, and I hope I'm not blammed for making it longer, but I dug up an old persuasive essay assignment I did in my junior year of high school (probably late 2002). I thought it was worthwhile reading, and there's no better place to put it but here.
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One Man, One Vote
In November of last year, over 100 million people across the United States went out to cast their vote for the presidency. After all the votes were counted and recounted and recounted again, Gore had received 50,996,582 total votes. Bush had only received 50,456,062 votes; that was over 500,000 less votes. Through some twist of fate, we now call George Bush "Mr. President", while Gore was stuck shuffling through endless piles of Florida ballots. How did this happen?
When people vote in America, they don’t vote directly for the president. The people vote for their candidates’ electors to be given a vote in the Electoral College. Each state is allowed a number of electoral votes that is equal to the number of its senators and representatives combined. For example, Alaska has two senators and one representative. Alaska would have three electors. In each state, the popular vote is tallied up. The party with a majority in the state is the party that gets to choose the electors that vote in the College. The electors must vote for the candidates of the party that chooses them. The winner of the electoral vote becomes president. What do you think about the Electoral College? Do you know how it really works?
Most states have a "winner take all" system implemented. In this system, the majority of the state’s popular vote gets to choose all of that state’s electors. This ignores large minorities. The most notable example is the state of Florida. In Florida, the votes between Bush and Gore were nearly tied: 2,912,790 for Bush and 2,912,253 for Gore. Because of only about 500 voters, all of Florida’s 25 electoral votes went to Bush. The only exceptions to this are Maine and Nebraska, who split the electors by district. An elector represents each district that has a representative in the House. The remaining two electors are chosen by the state majority party. This is much fairer, but unfortunately it is not the norm. In the winner-take-all system, a candidate who loses the electoral vote can still win the popular vote by having large minorities in a lot of states. This is an embarrassment to the American republic; the people are not getting represented.
In school, we are taught that every vote counts -- "One man, one vote." How accurate is this? Originally, the electors did not have to vote for the people that chose them. The founders of America thought that the common people at that time were not educated enough to decide the presidency on their own. The Electoral College was designed so that the people’s vote could be overruled if the people voted for someone incompetent. As well as provide a competency test of sorts, the College also benefits the less-populated states. Rhode Island has about 410,000 active voters and 4 electors. Each elector represents about 100,000 people. California has about 11,000,000 active voters and 54 electors. Each elector represents about 200,000 voters. In Rhode Island, the individual voter counts more because it takes fewer people to influence the state’s electors. Both of these reasons were valid at the time that the College was started. In those times, the general populace was uneducated and did not know much about politics, or even about the candidates themselves; on top of this, the most educated, most politically-inclined people were concentrated in the northernmost, smaller states. The education level and partisan system that we have today has changed politics entirely. Now, educated people are found throughout the country, eliminating the need to favor the smaller states and the need for a checkpoint. The parties can and do have much stricter agreements with their electors, so that it is unthinkable that an elector would vote for anyone but their designated candidate. However, the fact that we still have this archaic system in place undermines America’s allegedly democratic system.
How do you feel about the Electoral College? Think about it in the following way. Next year, (my high school) will hold election for class officers. Two hundred and thirty-two seniors will vote. The teachers decide they’re going to have an electoral system by homerooms: every student votes, but each homeroom gets one overall vote per homeroom of 29 kids -- whoever gets a majority in the homeroom will win that class’s vote.
Two homerooms have a unanimous vote for Brittany. In the other six, it's a close call. In one other homeroom, Brittany is ahead by one. In all of the others, she loses by only one or two. In terms of the electoral system, Sunny would win, five homerooms to three. However, nearly twice as many students would have voted for Brittany than Sunny. In an electoral system, a minority can easily trump a majority.
Even though the presidential election was not nearly as dramatic in popular vote differences, one can see the difference between what schoolchildren are taught and the actual state of our nation.
How do you feel about the Electoral College now?
“One man, one vote?” I don’t think so.