December 6, 2000

It could be worse

You may be a frustrated Democrat, as I am. You may be a Republican with a sense of fairness, who thinks that a country has spoken its mind and should be heard when a given presidential candidate is 300,000 votes ahead of the guy who's number two. That, of course, is not happening. GWB has not yet conceded to AG. The guy who's 300,000 ahead is the likely loser in this election. In fact, there's a strong chance Gore was even the choice of more Floridians than Bush. However, be of good cheer. It could be worse.

Suppose the largest states that went for Gore really had gone all the way. I mean, suppose California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania had given Al Gore percentages of Stalinesque proportions. (Joseph Stalin used to get numbers like 99.6 percent of the electorate of the Soviet Union "voting" for him, a "mandate" if there ever was one). Gore could be fifteen million votes ahead, and still be in the same pickle. Florida would still be in the news, and the lousy voting systems they use in Florida and other parts of the country would still be causing fits.

The electoral college system means the vote you cast for Gore was meaningless if it was part of his last million or so votes in California. All Gore needed was 4,350,000 or so to outscore Bush in this state. The rest of California's Gore votes might as well have gone to Ralph Nader (or me, for that matter,) with no difference in the end result.

The electoral college is a cumbersome, deeply flawed reminder of the 18th century. However, because it gives more power to the smaller states, those smaller states will veto any change. The Constitution is a fantastic document, but it's not a perfect one.

Because even the smallest state has three votes in the Electoral college, there will always remain the possibility a minority of the voters will select a president. However, we in California should be fair to ourselves. We are deeply divided. The interior counties are far more conservative than the liberal coastline. A democrat, the kind with a small d, wants the true will of the voters to be expressed. I suggest we divide every state's electoral college delegation as closely as possible according to the vote. In the November election, that means Gore would have received 29 or 30 of California's 54 electoral college votes, Bush 22 or 23. Ralph Nader would probably have gotten two.

The unfairness of the Electoral College system is pointed up by the fact that it would take more than 191,000 California votes to nominate one delegate, while the votes of only about 71,000 Wyoming folks would be needed to choose one of that state's three delegates. In that state, Gore would have gotten one vote, Bush two.

It's unlikely we will get a better system for choosing presidents. I'd be willing to settle for a better way of choosing voting systems. The needle punch, with its chad and other shortcomings, should be replaced with something like we have here, some form of optical scanning. That's not perfect, either, mostly because of the shortcomings of voters, but it has several fail-safe concepts to fall back on. All of us, even the ignorant, or semi-literate, or aged, or feeble, or otherwise handicapped voter should have the right to participate in the voting process. And our vote should count.

The new Reactor website can be found at home.earthlink.net/~thereactor. Paul's new e mail address is thereactor@earthlink.net