The American system for electing the president and vice president has been changing steadily since 1804 when a law was passed to force the candidates, or their parties, to state clearly which of the candidates running together would be president and which would be vice president. Before that, the one with the most votes (in a very complex system) was president and the runner-up was vice president—just like in a school or club election.
There is no Constitutional recognition of political parties at all. Over the past 204 years, however, as the Constitutionally-founded basis for elections has become less and less meaningful—even less workable—in our changing world, we have allowed the dominant political parties to swoop into every void and set up camp as arbiters of the system, and ultimately, determiners of the presidency. In a world where ordinary citizens had very little education, got their news very late and in sparse bits—especially outside major cities—and in which the average American seldom traveled, the electoral college concept was the only hope of “timely” elections.
Without getting into the complexities created by two centuries of the election process failing to keep pace with the environment of American citizenship, let me remind you that you never vote for a presidential candidate. Instead, your vote is cast for the elector (chosen by a political party) who is likely to support the candidate whose name is on your ballot. Party rules determine whether that will actually happen. Also, because electors are distributed by state-party organizations with variable rules, we have the situation where a candidate might take the most popular votes and lose the election.
Look at Nevada 2008. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, but Barack Obama picked up one more elector, in a mathematical division so messy that news agencies reported the results, corrected their reports, and then corrected their corrections. We saw the national-level version of this when Al Gore got over a half-million more votes than George W. Bush in 2000, but lost the election by five electors. A similar thing happened in 1876 and 1888. There have been other times—like the election of Bill Clinton in 1992—when presidents did not get the majority of the popular vote, but took office thanks to the quirks of the current system.
“We the people of the United States” must assert ourselves and demand that our votes count. We are no longer a nation of under-educated bumpkins who need the paternal care of electors, or require the intervention of political parties in our right to have each voter’s one vote counted as “One Vote” for the candidate chosen. We can make our own choices, and we can do it in an orderly and timely way. Federal laws implementing Constitutional requirements and recognizing the circumstances of the world in 1789 made sense. Now, not so much.
States and electors and Congress are given lots of time to play their roles in selecting the president. Electors, for example, have a period from the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November until the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December to get their votes from state meetings to the U.S. capitol.
It doesn’t take five-and-a-half weeks to get news to D.C. Now we can do that in about one nanosecond! We don’t need political parties telling us how to elect presidents and when to vote for them, and all too often, profoundly altering the sentiment represented by the popular vote through rules that distribute those votes among candidates differently in different states.
We don’t need to conduct 1789 elections in 2012. It is time, and well past time, to put the selecting of the American president, for the first time ever, into the hands of the citizens of the United States.
Even so, I am not saying there is no place for political parties. There is. The parties work out platforms of ideas and ideals, representing a particular vision, that help to educate and even enlighten politicians, but candidates are no longer hidebound by their parties’ positions. Rudy Giuliani is for gay rights and maybe not against abortion; Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul are for dismantling the IRS. These positions are not core “value” stances of the Republican party.
One reason the parties are likely to oppose direct popular-vote election of presidents is simple: Their power will be reduced—tremendously so. Third- and fourth-party candidates will be empowered. With a change in ballot access laws equivalent to the change in electoral process laws, a person of no particular party could even be elected president. What’s more, with the accumulated detritus of 204 years swept out of the process, presidential candidates would have to distinguish themselves by communicating to the voters specific ideas that voters would approve. This is possible nowadays! We might even reach a point, even instantly, where we would be voting for the candidate of our choice, rather than voting in favor of the history of a party or voting against the representative of another party.