If you were around four years ago, you’ll remember that I seemed to channel my apprehensions regarding the upcoming presidential election by writing about arcane presidential trivia. I’ve already done so a couple of times this year. Here’s another one.
I’m sure that everyone understands this by now, but US Presidents are not elected by voters. When I cast my vote, even though my ballot says the candidate’s name, I’m not actually voting for that candidate. I am actually voting for a slate of people (the so-called electors). If the candidate that I vote for gets the plurality of votes in my home state, then that means that the slate of people associated to that candidate will get to cast their votes in the electoral college.
This slate of people are chosen specifically for their loyalty to a candidate, so the assumption is that they will indeed cast their votes for the candidate that they are bound to. In fact, several states have laws (that I believe have been upheld by the Supreme Court) mandating that electors must vote for their preferred candidate or suffer penalties.
However, they don’t have to. In fact, it is so common for electors not to vote for their preferred candidate that a name, faithless voter, has come into being. It happens more than you think. In the wacky year of 2016, there were numerous faithless voters. On the Democratic side, you had votes for the following tickets: Bernie Sanders / Elizabeth Warren, Faith Spotted Eagle (?) / Winona LaDuke, and three votes for Colin Powell with three different running mates (Susan Collins, Maria Cantwell, and Elizabeth Warren). Even a Republican elector got in on the act and cast a vote for John Kasich / Carly Fiona. So, for you trivia buffs out there, if anyone ever asks you the name of the first female Native American to receive a presidential vote, you can confidently say Faith Spotted Eagle.
The bottom line is that, when voting for President (you know, possibly the most important position in the world), no matter who you think you’re voting for, some random person who you’ve never heard of can vote instead for whoever the fuck they want to.
How did this come into being? At the constitutional convention of 1787, when it came to electing the president, there were two camps. One camp wanted the people to choose (you know, like in a democracy). The other camp wanted the president to be chosen by Congress. In case you think that the second camp was totally insane, that was kind of how the Articles of Confederation was set up, except that its president wasn’t the president of the country but the president of the congress.
The Congress camp was generally leery of the idea of the unwashed masses directly electing the president. The Democracy camp was equally leery of a chummy Congress gathering in a room to decide who should be the leader of the entire county.
Out of that discussion came the compromise of an electoral college. Not beholden to Congress, the electors would be selected by each individual state government. Whoever won the election in a specific state would then use their slate of electors to cast their votes on behalf of the state.
If it seems like a dumb idea now, it seemed like a dumb idea even back then. The primary architect of the Constitution, James Madison, hated it. It seemed like no one really liked it, but they were tired and wanted to be done with it. In fact, they were so tired that they didn’t even think to have the college vote for President and Vice President separately, causing the first real constitutional crisis in 1800 when Thomas Jefferson and his Vice President running mate Aaron Burr received the same number of votes. This caused a quick Constitutional Amendment to be passed.
What makes it ridiculously dumb now is that, after over 230 years of practice with it, presidential candidates have figured out the game. There are red states, blue states, and purple states. Candidates know that they don’t have to spend too much time in red states or blue states. They’re pretty much guaranteed to go Democratic or Republican. If you’re a presidential candidate, there’s no point in spending too much time campaigning in a state that you know you’re going to lose. In fact, other than to suck up those sweet campaign contributions, there really is no point in campaigning in a state that you know you’re going to win.
You end up in the absurd situation where the two most populous states, California (population 39,000,000) and Texas (population 31,000,000) aren’t, from a voting perspective, strategically important to either campaign. Those two states contain twenty percent of our country’s population and neither campaign cares about them.
In fact, it is much, much worse than that. The number of purple states (the states that could go either Democratic or Republican) have decreased dramatically. Gone are the days when a Ronald Reagan or a Franklin Roosevelt could essentially sweep the country. Either party could nominate a zombie (campaign slogan: “Braaaaaaaains”) and it’d get at least 200 electoral votes.
For 2024, I’ve seen articles that claim that it’s going to come down to possibly three states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Whichever candidate wins at least two of those states will probably win the election.
In case you think that’s bad, it turns out that, since this is a rematch of 2020, that there might only be 100,000 or so people spread across those three states that could spell the difference. Some of that difference could easily be that some of those 100,000 people might not even choose to vote, thus dooming the candidate that they voted for in 2020.
So, in an election that will probably have over 150 million people casting ballots, it’s going to come down to maybe 100,000 semi-random people that are spread across three states.
Even scarier, what if the electoral college is really close and a couple of faithless voters decide, fuck it, I’m going to vote the Kim Kardashian / Dwayne Johnson ticket?
We have all of this madness just because a small number of 18th century white men gathering in a hot stuffy room didn’t trust voters to be able to choose their President. Since the Republican party has what it thinks is a cheat code to get an electoral majority without winning the popular vote, there is zero chance that this situation will be fixed in any near future.
The good news for me personally is that, since I live in Pennsylvania, I could probably get either Biden or Trump to come over personally and wash my car in a desperate bid to earn my vote.
dorkenstein 