There is something fundamentally weak with the way the USA picks its president.
As the incapacitated person he is, justice (lower case) Antonin Scalia keeps repeating “Get over it” to anyone who asks him about the december 2000 decision to award the White House to his favorite George W Bush instead of rival Al Gore.
What Scalia and many other biased politicians don’t get is that the issue wasn’t just that Gore had won the election (by a lot of votes) but that the problem is bound to repeat itself, bringing the country ever closer to civil war. This is not about whom we like, but about what happens to a nation when someone is elected despite having lost. It is not about Gore being better than Bush (i have my doubts). It is about a system that is sabotaging itself (especially when compared with regimes that are not distracted at all by succession fights).
Let’s go chronologically. In 1948 Truman defeated Dewey by winning three states (Illinois, Ohio and California) with razor-thin majorities of less than 1%. If a few votes were not counted or were mistaken, then Truman stole the election. Luckily in 1948 people were not as partisan and as fanatic as in 2012, so the issue did not go beyond a “Dewey was not lucky” kind of comment.
In 1960 John Kennedy probably stole the election from Richard Nixon: Kennedy got less than 1% more votes than Nixon and became president because of rigged vote counting in Illinois. Even if he had won Illinois fair and square, it took an amazing combination of narrow wins in other states to gain enough electoral votes to become president.
In 1976 Jerry Ford lost the presidency because of 6,000 votes in Ohio and 7,500 in Mississippi.
In 1992 Clinton became president with only 43% of the popular vote.
In 2000 the farce reached a point of ridiculous when 537 voters in Florida (and justice Scalia) decided the presidency out of tens of millions of voters. Without that case, the presidency would have been decided by the tiny majorities gained by Gore in Wisconsin and New Mexico (less than 1%), and the result would have been equally divisive.
The point is that there is something fundamentally weak with the way the USA picks its president. The process lends itself to endless recriminations and undemocratic decisions by unelected officials (like Scalia). Whether you believe that it was right or wrong to give the presidency to George W Bush, whether you rooted for one or the other, there is no doubt that the numbers favored Gore: more people voted for Al Gore than George W Bush, and many more people voted for the candidates of the Left (Gore plus Ralph Nader) than for the candidates of the Right (Bush plus Buchanan). When George W Bush was sworn in as president, the will of the people was clearly ignored.
The lesson of that twisted and bitter election should not have been forgotten. Alas, the 2001 terrorist attacks created other priorities. But do we really want to get into another contested outcome that will make the USA an even more bitterly divided nation?
In 2012 the USA is faced again with a close election that may be decided by who wins which tiny state (by however tiny majority) and not by who wins the most votes. One could win 60% of the national votes and still lose the presidency if the other wins those few critical “swing” states by 0.01%. In fact, it is pointless to vote in states like California: we already know who is going to get the majority of the votes, and it makes no difference if he wins by 1% or by 49%: the number of electoral votes is the same (all the electoral votes that California is entitled to go to the winner). The votes of millions of registered voters do not count. Literally.
This is just one of the undemocratic rules in the USA (Rhode Island sends two senators to the Senate just like California, which means that a Rhode Island voter is thousands of times better represented than a California voter in the Senate, which prompted me to propose that California split in 100 states, so that it will send 200 senators to Washington); but it is the one that chooses the most powerful person in the world.
It was urgent, it is urgent and it will be urgent that the USA adapts the rules to the world of 2012. The original idea was that states send delegates to pick a president. Now that people elect the president directly, it makes no sense to count by states: just count the total and appoint president the person who got the most votes nationwide; and forget who won Florida or Ohio by how many votes.
It would also be nice to have a simple rule that the winner must have won at least 50% of the votes: if none of the candidates wins the majority, let’s have a second round between the two top candidates.
And let’s impeach Justices who answer “Get over it” to this key issue.
A country in which the one who gets fewer votes can become president can hardly be called a democracy. Justice Scalia keeps saying “Get over it” (senile people do tend to repeat themselves), as if the whole business was not worth discussing. It is very much worth discussing.
In fact, little else is worth discussing: either the USA is a democracy or it is not.
IEET Blog
Good advice, however Americans wont listen, they need protests to shake them up. I talk to Rightists all the time and they make it clear they want voting made harder, not easier; they want heavy emphasis on republican, light on democracy. America is a “republican-democracy”, saddled with a Constitution from the year the French Revolution began—old hat. The larger problem is something you don’t have to glimpse from afar, you can see from merely reading Rightist comments here at a technoprog site.. remote causation-based thinking: fifty years ago it was retaining prayer in public schools—of marginal benefit;
two decades ago it was banning flag burning (that is, American flag burning- they don’t care if foreign flags are torched);
today it’s preventing gays from marrying. Chicken-scratch issues, piddling little obsessions in a would of nuclear proliferation, diminishing H2O, and so on and so forth. Of the three issues listed above, only flag burning is of slight interest—but only because of the effect of the smoke on the atmosphere! Shows you how petty the issues are. Gay marriage isn’t all that important, yet it is current and some questions are:
would it matter to rubes if gays and adulterers migrated into outer space, or is ‘sin’ considered sin anywhere in the cosmos?
is sex with “gay” ‘bots sin as well? Sounds facetious because the issues are de facto facetious.
To deal with fear involved (loss of familial prestige) then rubes have to discuss issues out in the open and not hide in their political closets. One of the deepest issues is the one they wish to ‘fess up to the least: everyone thinks they deserve what they get, others they think are less deserving or not deserving at all. Billionaires think they deserve what they get from the state because they put more into the system but the homeless can sleep in the woods for all billionaires care. All is not vanity- all is status.