The Maryland House of Delegates is set to study a bill supported by their Senate and their current governor that would undercut that state’s democratic process. Groups that still cannot accept the presidential results of 2000 and 2004 see Maryland as a potential first victory in their war against the electoral college system. They want to force each state’s electors to vote for the candidate that wins the popular vote nationwide.
So why should West Virginians care if Maryland wants to toss aside its constitutional rights? It does not directly affect West Virginia, not yet anyway. Too many people fail to realize that the electoral college protects the political voice of smaller and medium sized states. In a system where the national popular vote is the deciding factor in a presidential election, what reason would a candidate have to court West Virginia’s relatively small population. Would Maryland even matter if a candidate captured the major urban areas? (No Maryland, Baltimore is not a major urban area compared to New York or Chicago.)
The Founding Fathers understood that balance is necessary in any political system to prevent tyranny. A majority can tyrannize as effectively as a dictator, just ask any blacks that lived under Jim Crow. Reducing our presidential elections to a simple national popular vote means that rural states lose their voice. What will happen to our gun rights, our property rights, and other issues that people outside of the major cities hold dear? The consequences when any group finds that they have no say in the system can be extremely serious.
The major shortcoming of the current system of electing the President arises from the winner-take-all rule (currently used by 48 of 50 states) under which all of a state’s electoral votes to the candidate who gets the most votes in the state. If the partisan divide in a state is not initially about 46%-54%, no amount of campaigning during a brief presidential campaign is realistically going to change the winner of the state. Thus, presidential candidates have no reason to poll, visit, advertise, organize, campaign, or worry about the concerns of voters of states that they cannot possibly win or lose. Instead, candidates concentrate their attention on a handful of “battleground” states. 88% of the money is focused onto just 9 closely divided battleground states: Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, New Mexico, and New Hampshire.
ReplyDeleteThe National Popular Vote bill would guarantee that the presidential candidate who receives the most votes in all 50 states will win the Presidency. The bill has 320 legislative sponsors in 47 states. It has been signed into law in Maryland. The bill has also passed the Colorado Senate, Arkansas House, and Hawaii House and Senate.
Under the National Popular Vote bill (www.NationalPopularVote.com), all of the state’s electoral votes would be awarded to the presidential candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The legislation would take effect only when enacted, in identical form, by states possessing a majority of the electoral votes—that is, enough electoral votes to elect a President.
When the founding fathers wrote the constitution they created the both the house and senate. In the senate all states are equal, and the house the members are based on population. This allowed for a balance of power making sure the small states were not out weighed all the time by the big states.
ReplyDeleteThe Electors that make up the Electoral College represent the combined number equal of house and senate members from each state. The idea was to maintain a balance of power. The big states still have more pull, but the small state remains relevant with the electoral college, which is the way it should be.
The winner take all rule was implemented in the election of 1800 by the Democratic-Republican Party (modern Democratic Party) in several states to ensure the election of Thomas Jefferson over John Adams.
ReplyDeleteGoing back to the original idea of separate presidential electoral districts might not be a bad idea. However going to national popular vote means that we will be violating the original intent of having checks and balances to prevent any one section or group from exercising too much power.
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