Popular Vote V. Electoral College – Assembly Bill 2948 – Sacramento Bee + MY COMMENTS May 22nd, 2006
EXCERPT:
“Six years after Democrat Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the presidency to Republican George W. Bush, there’s a new move afoot in the California Legislature and other states to ensure that such things never happen again.
The proposed ‘interstate compact’ is designed to guarantee that presidents will be selected by popular vote, without amending the U.S. Constitution or eliminating the electoral college.
Assemblyman Tom Umberg, D-Santa Ana, who chairs the Assembly Election and Redistricting Committee, said the premise is understandable even to children.
‘When you’re in first grade, if the person who got the second-most votes became class leader, the kids would recognize that this is not a fair system,’ he said.
Umberg’s Assembly Bill 2948, proposing such a compact, passed the Assembly’s elections and appropriations committees on party-line votes, with Republicans opposed.
‘We have a system that’s worked effectively for more than 200 years,’ said Sal Russo, a GOP political consultant. ‘We probably should be very hesitant to change that.’
[SOURCE @ + CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE]“
MY COMMENTS:
I will keep my comments about this issue concise, for now; however, I will certainly write more about it in the future. Basically, the main argument (and pretty much the only one that I hear) comes from people in southern states, or “red-states” that are very sparsely populated. They make the argument that if the United States of America switched to popular vote (THE MAJORITY OF SPECIFIC VOTE CHOICES), instead of the current electoral college system, then they would not have as much of a say in national elections.
My response to this is: TOO BAD! Democracy is supposed to be based upon the “majority,” correct? If more people voted one way than another way, then that should be the end of the story. Those people that make this lackluster anti-popular vote argument act as if singular votes are not being placed; plus, they talk as if there are not authentic individual Americans making very important decisions that they are expecting to make a difference. If a majority of Americans vote a certain way in a particular election, I do not see why it should matter whether any less populated regions tended to vote the same way, or not – since the very definition of “LESS POPULATED” means that fewer individuals are casting votes that are added up to count the total quantity of votes (I.E. literal majority V. literal minority)!
The original reasoning for creating the electoral college process was primarily (and some would argue wholly) based upon the real-world time that it took to PHYSICALLY take tallies to the nation’s foremost headquarters from different parts of the country. We do not have this problem any longer, because technology has made that specific concern completely obsolete. For example, maybe we should get rid of modern mail service in 2006, in order for people living physically across the street from the post office to able to get mail out with the same speed as someone who lives one-hundred miles from the nearest USPS mail drop!
RJP|RWCS.COM
Popularity: 1% [?]
