One Man, No Vote

Getting back to democracy and related issues. In this blog, I will opine on a rather local issue. Voting for the President of the US in Massachusetts.

The US is a federal system with distributed power shared among the states. For the most part states can set their own laws so long as they don't contradict the Constitution. Inter-state commerce and related activity is governed by the federal government and so on. States have their priorities that may differ from other states. States come in various sizes, small and large. It may be obvious that larger states in the absence of any laws can influence smaller states, inequalities may prevail. Thus the framers of the US constitution made provisions to provide some "fairness" in the governance of the nation. For example, a bicarmel legislature with the Senate providing equality for the states no matter what size and the House of Representatives having representation bases on population.

And so it is with the election of the President. In the US, technically, the states elect the president not the people. Which in my opinion works just fine. The Electoral College is a set of representatives from each state that casts ballots for the President. How the representatives vote is totally dependent on state laws. In some cases, in most, all the electoral votes go to the winner in that state. In other states, the electoral votes are divided based on the vote of the population, so if 60% of the people vote for Candidate A, the Candidate A gets 60% of the electoral votes for that state. And obviously there may be other ways of selecting the votes of the electoral college for a state.

Why is this fair, at least in my opinion? It allows power sharing among the diversity of the nation. Consider the example of a state the has the majority of the population of the nation, say for example California, then during a presidential election all activity would be focused on one state, they rest of the country would become irrelevant. While the dominance of one state may not be realistic, the dominance of several states is realistic. Consider, California, Texas and New York, these states can dominate a presidential elections. Thus people living in much smaller states essentially have very little impact on the election.

This is where the electoral college comes in. Each state has votes proportional to the population of that state. More populous states have more votes, less populous states have less votes. But, and this is important, no state or a few states have enough votes to dominate an election. The election of the President of the United States is a country-wide event. All regions have input into the selection of the President.

So we come to Massachusetts. A couple of years ago a law was passed whereby all the electoral college votes from Massachusetts will go to the candidate who has the most votes in the country. To me this means that Massachusetts is making itself irrelevant in a Presidential election. From a personnel perspective, mine, why bother voting if you live in Massachusetts. The electoral college votes from Massachusetts are determined by the rest of the country not by the good citizens of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Is this democracy at work? I certainly don't think so. At best it is a good example of rational thinking gone awry. Let's hope that the good people of the Massachusetts legislature come to their senses and change the law so that we, citizens of Massachusetts, again have impact on Presidential elections.