In a presidential election year, retired high School teacher Edward T. Weeden
looks back on the 2000 election and considers what lessons it holds for the
forthcoming election
by Edward T. Weeden
Another election is looming, along with all the depression associated with having to listen to bloated speech-making from the candidates and incumbent. If this didn’t have a major negative influence on our political and social outlook, how about the record of past incumbents and candidates? That’s even more depressing. One could easily be excused from participating in this process, except . . . well except that it is our country!
Citizens, Candidates and Choice
And it truly is. We are the ones who possess the sovereignty of the United States, loaning it to our representatives during the course of their terms of office. Since we have this highly desired gift to give, we should give it to the most deserving of candidates. The trouble is, there seems to have been a good deal of dispute over the last 215 years about who exactly most deserved our gifts. With the power of sovereignty also comes the power of choice, not just of candidates, but also of methods for determining who is the best candidate. Sometimes this is a simple matter of ‘what’s in it for me’ and sometimes it involves lesser or greater amounts of ‘the general welfare’ – but the choice of both method and candidate is squarely up to us.
The only choice we should not make as citizens is to not exercise our choice. That would be voluntarily throwing away our little bit of sovereignty, our little bit of the United States. Gifts work best when they are given. They may be taken back, particularly in elections, but they should at least be given.
That being the case, it is very important that we as citizens know where the candidates stand, with respect to our own welfare, and with respect to a multitude of other issues facing the nation. Americans often have an illusion about their political past, particularly about presidential elections. They have the illusion of some sort of golden era past, inspired by Currier and Ives lithographs showing well-dressed gentlemen engaging in speeches and debates.
Nothing could be further from the truth, however. Most political harangues during past campaigns have involved liberal amounts of drinking, bribery, lying and cheating. Most presidential campaigns – right from the beginning – have also involved massive amounts of spin by both contenders. And most have involved scandal at one or more points during the contest – against even our most cherished persons – Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln included. Nothing is new under the ‘sun’ of American politics.
What all this means can be summed up very nicely by the words of the last surviving knight in the movie “Indiana Jones – The Last Crusade”. We must “choose, but choose wisely”! That is not always easy to do, but the choosing – and how we choose is completely up to us.
Now for those of us who are so angry and alienated at the selection process that we may forget or forego the election process, we need to comfort ourselves with the wisdom of the Founding Fathers. You remember, those rebellious long-hairs, who risked a hangman’s rope for an idea – that we could rule ourselves, without being told how by others.
As most of us have learned, the United States is not, repeat not, a democracy. We are a republic. What is the difference? In a democracy, people rule directly. In a republic, we select representatives to rule on our behalf. The same is true of electing a president. None of us vote for presidential candidates. We vote for representatives to elect the president for us. They belong to a group called the Electoral College. So, in essence, we go to a college to get the president we want every four years.
Why? The entire concern of these Founding Fathers was that the more populous states should not bully the less populous states. They had experienced royal bullying in the American Colonies for over 150 years, followed by bluster from powerful states like Massachusetts, New York and Virginia in the Articles of Confederation for another 15 years before writing the present Federal Constitution.
To make sure that didn’t continue, they decided to make states more equal during presidential elections. So they established an ‘electoral college’ in the same proportion as they did the Congress – one member for each congressional representative, plus a member for each senator. We would vote for this group – or college – and they would actually select the president in each election. We do that to this day. The total in the Electoral College is now 538 (including three from the District of Columbia, added in 1961).
This college is why you can get a presidential election where more people actually voted for un-elected candidates than did for the successfully elected candidate. This has happened sixteen times in our history, the most recently before the election of 2000 were Kennedy, Nixon (1968) and Clinton (both 1992 and 1996).
Some of our most successful and brilliant candidates have been elected as ‘minority’ popular vote presidents – presidents like Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman. Without Jackson we would never have gotten the broadening of democracy to non-property owners. Without Lincoln it would have taken many more years to get rid of slavery. Without Wilson we would never have gotten the Fourteen Points, the League of Nations, or the domestic progressive reforms of his era. Without Truman, Europe might just still be recovering from post war economic depression.
So the argument that Al Gore got more popular votes does not hold much water with me, unless we are talking about virtually disenfranchising the voters in less populous states. If we are, then why not just hold the election in New York, Pennsylvania, Florida, Illinois, Texas and California and be done with it? We could do away with six months of candidates prancing around talking gibberish and save the proportionate expense. We might even entice back some voters in the few states participating. Undemocratic? Perhaps. Unrepresentative, most certainly.
I don’t mind ‘going to college to get a president’. In cases of elections where the college is unable or unwilling to vote a clear majority for one candidate, I would even have no problem with approaching yet another C – Congress.
Congress has determined the outcome of presidential elections on two occasions, 1800 and 1876. In both cases, there was the typical ‘wheeling and dealing’ of American politics, with all its accusations of scandal and skulduggery. But in both cases, the outcome of the congressional vote was a good one for the American body politic.
In the former, we got Thomas Jefferson instead of Aaron Burr, a most healthy selection – but only after 36 separate debates and ballots! Given our hindsight on the character of the two candidates, it seems remarkable that more than a single ballot was required. This confusion resulted in the twelfth amendment to the constitution, that federal electors mark separate ballots for president and vice president.
In the latter election three separate state commissions convened – appointed by Congress – in order to determine which electors were ‘genuine’. After several weeks of tense negotiations, another healthy choice was decided upon: Hayes not Tilden. Not that there was much difference between the two. But the process of seeking a congressional – representative – solution to a contested election was again validated. This election produced legislation to ensure that only one ‘slate of electors’ was deemed valid by any one state. And that is how it remains to this day.
But there is something that has recently surfaced over the horizon I greatly fear. And that is going to the courts to get a president. Why? Because the courts are an un-elected, unrepresentative body. We have all heard that the courts are impartial, that there is equal justice before the law. Perhaps as a matter of law and justice the courts are indeed impartial – that is another story. But with respect to politics, the courts are most certainly not impartial. If that were not the case, then why the upheaval in the U.S. Senate each time a president makes a judicial appointment, particularly with respect to the Supreme Court – the final arbiter?
In contesting election results through the courts, what the parties are doing is essentially asking an un-elected, unrepresentative, politically appointed body to decide the validity of a supposedly politically impartial process. Elections are supposed to be the ‘level playing ground’ onto which the contestants stride with their statements, policies, their character and strategy. When the results of an election goes to the courts for a decision on the winner, it is no different than the nomination process going into a ‘smoky room’ for a decision on who will be the candidate. Both the judges and the politicos are part of a process which is unelected and non-representative, and in which the individuals doing the choosing cannot help but incorporate their political view of events into the picture.
This situation has been a relative rarity in local elections, and up until the last federal election was unknown at the highest levels. With the introduction of the courts into the elective procedures at this level, several dangers exist. There is a potential for great increases in the time and expense of elections due to the incorporation of the legal processes and factors (namely lawyers) into the process. There is a potential for obscuring the steps of the election and post election processes due to the ‘spin’ effect of various legal teams involved. There is the spectre of the ability of the courts to nullify either the votes of the people (as in Dade County Florida), the votes of the Electoral College, or both. And there is the danger that courts may eventually be called upon to take over the functions now performed by the Federal Elections Commission, including the certification of elections. Any of these ‘incursions’ by the courts into the election processes will result in de facto ‘government of, by, and for the judges’ rather than ‘government of, by and for the people’.
What must be done if this shows itself to be the case in upcoming elections? Current political polls make much of the fact that both major contenders are now ‘virtually tied, even’ in the run for the next presidential election. With faction and politics being the order of the day, and likely to remain that way, we must rely on what is the surest means of keeping any group of the un-elected – no matter how lofty and high intentioned – from hijacking the gift of temporary sovereignty we have given our representatives.
We need an aware, aroused and active voting citizenry to counteract the danger of ‘ties’ in elections, with their consequent transfer to the judicial branch for decision. This will not take complex technologies, delicately negotiated changes in election processes, or populist panaceas. What it will take is a simple and straightforward method of choosing elected officials, and a population that wants to take its own country back. If we can invent the telephone, the airplane and the moon rocket, we should surely be able to invent a voting machine that even the most frustrated and confused voter can use quickly and effectively. If we can invent the income tax refund, and the grocery store coupon, we ought to be able to invent a substantial refund policy – say $100 per voter – for ballot stubs turned in with tax forms or at the unemployment / welfare desk.
If this were the case, then the circle would be closed, and we would be back to citizens, exercising sovereignty over their own political process. Such massive participation would greatly reduce the risk of both ties in elections, and of any group of people deciding for themselves what the American people allegedly want in an election result. This does not need to be complicated, like computers, brain surgery, or nuclear physics. It simply needs to be the taking back of what belongs to each and every one of us – our country and our sovereignty.
American Studies Resource Centre 