One Step Closer to a National Popular Vote
This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on May 19, 2011.
The Electoral College is a unique feature of our system of electing a national leader. After two centuries, though, is it time to do away with the College?
The Electoral College is the body that actually elects the President and Vice President. When we, the people, vote for a presidential candidate, we are not actually voting for a single person. We are, instead, voting for a slate of electors. The chosen electors meet on Elector Day, sometime in December following the general election, and cast their votes for the two offices.
Each state has a number of electors equal to its congressional representation. With one seat in the House and two seats in the Senate, Vermont has three electors. Electors are selected by each party fielding a presidential candidate. The electors are typically party loyalists, pledged to cast their vote for the party's choice for President and Vice President.
The Electoral College was designed, in 1787, for an entirely different America. Time, however, revealed some fatal flaws in the Electoral College system, and though the most egregious flaws were fixed long ago, it may be time to take another serious look.
Originally, each elector cast two votes for President. The person with the most votes became President, and the runner-up became Vice President. This system would have worked fine if people did not begin to divide themselves into parties - but they did, almost immediately.
In the election of 1800, the Democratic-Republican party ran Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr against Federalists John Adams and Thomas Pinckney. Each dutiful Democratic-Republican elector cast his votes, toeing the party line: one for Jefferson and one for Burr. In the end, both Jefferson and Burr got 73 votes, even though the plan had been to elect Jefferson. Someone forgot to tell at least one Democratic-Republican elector to vote for someone other than Burr. The resulting fray, where the election was decided in the House by a Federalist majority, lead to the 12th Amendment, that specified separate ballots for the two executive positions.
The 1876 election of Rutherford Hayes was a partisan mess. Hayes's opponent, Samuel Tilden, won a narrow majority of the popular vote, but when it came time to count the electoral votes, the results were not quite so clear. Hayes and Tilden were both close to the needed majority, but many electoral votes were challenged. It took a congressional commission, and the end of military occupation in the post-war South, to assign enough votes to Hayes.
Most of us remember the controversy between George Bush and Al Gore in 2000. Gore had a narrow lead over Bush in the popular vote, beating Bush by just over half a percentage point. After much controversy in several states, and Florida in particular, the electoral vote went to Bush, 271-266.
The National Popular Vote movement, which aims to make the winner of the popular vote the President without concern for these electoral college vagaries, got a boost this year when the Vermont legislature threw its support behind the plan. The NPV movement looks not to amend the Constitution, but to work within its confines.
It seeks to create a compact of sorts, accumulating support one state at a time, until at least enough states to make up the majority of 270 electoral votes sign on. In states where NPV is enacted, the state's law would change to direct its electors to cast their votes for whichever candidate won the national popular vote, without regard to the candidate's vote tally in that state.
Including Vermont's three, NPV now has 77 electoral votes from eight states to its name.
I'm a fan of working within the system, and would like to see the NPV plan come to fruition. I am dubious that electors could be punished for not voting with the national popular vote (the Constitution gives the electors wide latitude in their votes), but it would not be difficult to avoid faithless electors with proper vetting.
I do think that losing the Electoral College would be a sad thing. It is quirky, uniquely American, and an avenue into learning more about where we came from as a nation. But despite the value of these things, having a simple, straight-forward, and predictable system, based on the popular vote, seems like the best way forward for our democracy. Hopefully, Vermont's support for the compact will nudge other states to support NPV, too.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Thursday, May 5, 2011
With Somber Reflection
With Somber Reflection
This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on May 5, 2011.
It was getting late on Sunday night when I heard a rumor that the President was going to make an announcement on TV within a few minutes. I quickly tuned to CNN to see if the report was true. It seemed to be - Wolf Blitzer was telling viewers that the President would be speaking to the nation from the East Room of the White House "any minute now."
CNN was very careful not to speculate what the announcement was about, so my mind started to race. Such an announcement is very unusual, and reserved for big (and usually bad) news. Did something happen to the President's family? Is the Vice President dead? Did terrorists strike somewhere? Was there a tragedy with our troops overseas?
Checking Internet news feeds, reports that Osama bin Laden was dead started to become more and more frequent. And finally CNN had enough strong sources that they could say that this was, indeed, the big news. When the President finally came on the screen, his announcement was almost anti-climactic, though the scant details he provided were interesting:
Bin Laden was expertly killed by U.S. forces operating in Pakistan. His body had been taken into custody by those forces. The identity of bin Laden was definite. No Americans lost their lives in the process.
CNN was also reporting that there were cheering crowds just outside the fence surrounding the White House. Just off-camera, I could hear emotionally raw and off-tune renditions of The Star-Spangled Banner being belted out. There was obvious joy in the news. Watching, I knew that this was good news, for America and the world.
Beyond that raw and emotionally-informed knowledge, though, I wasn't so sure how I felt. It was only after discussing it with some friends and hearing what they had to say that I could begin to sort it out.
It feels odd to celebrate the death of a person. In our culture, we are taught to value life so highly, above almost anything else. I know this is not a universal value (though it should be). Bin Laden himself could easily be described as someone who valued politics over human life. He could even be rightly described as a misanthrope. But even given that, should I feel joy in his death?
I recall feeling the same sort of confusion when Saddam Hussein was executed in Iraq in 2006. Here was this tyrant, this despicable human being, responsible for war and the deaths of thousands of innocents, reduced to a cowering shell, stripped of his power and influence ... and the best we can do is kill him?
I'm convinced there are people who are better off dead. But it is much easier to be sure of this in the abstract. I wonder how evolved we really are if destruction of life is our best answer to these people.
The details of the bin Laden killing place his death in a slightly different category - he died in a firefight, not in front of a firing squad. Part of me wanted to see him captured, tried, and imprisoned. But if he'd been captured, his detention and trial would have been epic in scope and undoubtedly circus-like in ways I can only imagine.
I must conclude, then, that we are better off with him shot dead and buried at sea.
I'm just not sure joyful celebration is the proper response.
Another friend called it a Pyrrhic victory. We have already lost so many lives to bin Laden and al Qaeda, both as a nation and a species. Will we lose even more now that he is gone? Hopefully we have cut off the head of the snake. But the snake could end up being like the mythological hydra, with two or three new heads growing back where one was before.
To ensure that terrorism dies, we must not just be rid of its sponsors. We must change the minds of those who follow. Perhaps a means to that end is not to celebrate bin Laden's death with cheers and song, but to reflect on it somberly.
This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on May 5, 2011.
It was getting late on Sunday night when I heard a rumor that the President was going to make an announcement on TV within a few minutes. I quickly tuned to CNN to see if the report was true. It seemed to be - Wolf Blitzer was telling viewers that the President would be speaking to the nation from the East Room of the White House "any minute now."
CNN was very careful not to speculate what the announcement was about, so my mind started to race. Such an announcement is very unusual, and reserved for big (and usually bad) news. Did something happen to the President's family? Is the Vice President dead? Did terrorists strike somewhere? Was there a tragedy with our troops overseas?
Checking Internet news feeds, reports that Osama bin Laden was dead started to become more and more frequent. And finally CNN had enough strong sources that they could say that this was, indeed, the big news. When the President finally came on the screen, his announcement was almost anti-climactic, though the scant details he provided were interesting:
Bin Laden was expertly killed by U.S. forces operating in Pakistan. His body had been taken into custody by those forces. The identity of bin Laden was definite. No Americans lost their lives in the process.
CNN was also reporting that there were cheering crowds just outside the fence surrounding the White House. Just off-camera, I could hear emotionally raw and off-tune renditions of The Star-Spangled Banner being belted out. There was obvious joy in the news. Watching, I knew that this was good news, for America and the world.
Beyond that raw and emotionally-informed knowledge, though, I wasn't so sure how I felt. It was only after discussing it with some friends and hearing what they had to say that I could begin to sort it out.
It feels odd to celebrate the death of a person. In our culture, we are taught to value life so highly, above almost anything else. I know this is not a universal value (though it should be). Bin Laden himself could easily be described as someone who valued politics over human life. He could even be rightly described as a misanthrope. But even given that, should I feel joy in his death?
I recall feeling the same sort of confusion when Saddam Hussein was executed in Iraq in 2006. Here was this tyrant, this despicable human being, responsible for war and the deaths of thousands of innocents, reduced to a cowering shell, stripped of his power and influence ... and the best we can do is kill him?
I'm convinced there are people who are better off dead. But it is much easier to be sure of this in the abstract. I wonder how evolved we really are if destruction of life is our best answer to these people.
The details of the bin Laden killing place his death in a slightly different category - he died in a firefight, not in front of a firing squad. Part of me wanted to see him captured, tried, and imprisoned. But if he'd been captured, his detention and trial would have been epic in scope and undoubtedly circus-like in ways I can only imagine.
I must conclude, then, that we are better off with him shot dead and buried at sea.
I'm just not sure joyful celebration is the proper response.
Another friend called it a Pyrrhic victory. We have already lost so many lives to bin Laden and al Qaeda, both as a nation and a species. Will we lose even more now that he is gone? Hopefully we have cut off the head of the snake. But the snake could end up being like the mythological hydra, with two or three new heads growing back where one was before.
To ensure that terrorism dies, we must not just be rid of its sponsors. We must change the minds of those who follow. Perhaps a means to that end is not to celebrate bin Laden's death with cheers and song, but to reflect on it somberly.
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