Ms. Harrop states
...the Democrats' discussion of delegate math is already moving to Electoral College math, and here the skies turn cloudier for their likely candidate. One fear is a repeat of 2000, when Democrat Al Gore got a plurality of the popular vote, but Republican George W. Bush won on the basis of the Electoral College tally. Not very democratic, was it?If Democrats ever intend to again argue that the raw numbers should determine the next president -- and not an archaic system that can frustrate the democratic will -- they might start by setting a better example.
Ms. Harrop criticizes the Democrats for abusing a certain definition of democracy in their primary process, basically that the most popular votes is democratic and just. This is odd and harkens back to those misconceptions about how we choose presidents that proliferated after the 2000 election.
We don't have direct majoritarian democracy in the USA because in many respects it can be judged unjust. I repeat, democracy so interpreted can violate our liberal principles of justice. Certainly Ms. Harrop and those disgruntled anti-Bush Democrats are not arguing for an unjust system. But maybe, just maybe, they don't know it. I try to explain this in a previous post (What's Fair?), but I'll apply the main points here.
First off, the party primary system is a simple social choice mechanism to arrive at the presidential nominee most likely to win the election. It's not really about giving registered partisans an equal voice, unless of course the party so chooses to make that another of its objectives. (Unfortunately, as we've seen this year, these two objectives may conflict - then what do we do?)
Democrats chose primary rules that tried to split the difference between these two objectives: a widely participatory system of states' primaries with delegates apportioned according to the popular vote. (There is an odd inconsistency between caucuses and primaries, but that is a complexity that varies by state and goes beyond this simple summation.) To complement the primary process, the party also chose to award superdelegate voting status to certain party elites and backroom cigar smokers, just in case the first process went wrong. In other words, the Democrats wanted to give their registered voters a say in the selection process, but not so big a say that they might mess it up. Now, with the Obama-Clinton faceoff, the entire process has become a messy snafu.
Contrast this with Republicans, who award delegates on a winner-take-all basis. Fair? Unfair? It's a silly question. Their objective to choose a candidate was arrived at efficiently and most analysts believe McCain looks to be the perfect choice for the beleaguered Republican party's nominee in 2008. We'll see how well this holds true in November.
But my point is that a simple majoritarian voting rule is not inherently more "fair" than any other voting process. It all depends. In the presidential voting process the objective is to exercise the will of the people in selecting a national leader. If 60 million voters vote one way, and 60 million voters vote another, does the 120,000,001th voter's preference determine with any comfortable certainty what the will of the people is? When the popular vote is so close, it means the peoples' will is unclear. That's when the Electoral College rules become critical, as they should. When the popular vote is unclear, the default objective becomes how widely each candidates' support is spread geographically across the nation's 50 states. One may disagree with this objective, but it seems to make good sense given our nation's frequent historical divisions based on regional geography.
2 comments:
The main problem here is that so many Americans are under the mistaken impression that the U.S. is (or was ever meant to be) "a democracy". The electoral college system, convoluted as it is, is just one more example of the American system of appointing someone else to make the decisions for us.
Hi Tiffany,
Actually don't you think it's "appointing someone else" to execute our decisions, as expressed through voting? The question is what we believe counting individual votes tells us. Often it's not clear.
I think we have a representative republic by design because we recognize that most people have neither the time or inclination to research and implement every possible political decision that may affect our lives. I would agree it becomes a problem when the elected representatives no longer respond to voters' expressed wishes.
As far as the EC is concerned, the electors in almost all states are bound to vote as their states' voters voted. People object to the winner-take-all rule, but that just makes a state's regional identity more explicit in a dichotomous vote. In other words, we have to vote for candidate X or Y, not 48% of X and 52% of Y. States reserved the right to cast their vote as one. This has mixed effects but my opinion is that the good outweighs the bad.
Thanks...
Post a Comment