I have voted in every Presidential election since the Johnson - Goldwater election of 1964, which was the year I turned 21. In each of those eleven elections, I have voted for the candidate nominated by the Democratic Party, and in only one of those elections, Jimmy Carter's in 1976, has my vote actually been counted. I'm not alleging vote fraud here, although no doubt there has been some in Alabama over that period. The reason my vote has been a non-issue in all but one of those elections is that the Electoral College system operates in Alabama to cast all of our electoral votes for the party that wins a plurality of the state's popular vote. Since Alabama has been the quintessential Republican red state ever since Barry Goldwater came out in favor of extremism, our electors have voted Republican every time except the year when our next door neighbor from Plains, Georgia was running. That doesn't mean, understand, that there are no Democrats in Alabama. Every four years, hundreds of thousands of my fellow citizens join me in voting for the good guys; but we all know that we are wasting our time. The Republicans are going to get their 55% or so, and our votes get ignored.
Alabama is not alone in adopting a winner-take-all approach to its electors, of course. Every state in the union other than Maine and Nebraska does it exactly the same way. In those two relatively more enlightened commonwealths, two electors are chosen in a state-wide ballot, and the rest of their electors are picked by a vote in each Congressional district. This is certainly an improvement over the plurality-wins-all approach; but not much of one. We have gotten so skillful at gerrymandering Congressional districts to protect the party in power (see Texas and Tom Delay), that this system is not likely to yield any benefit in terms of empowering minority interests. Indeed, neither Maine or Nebraska has split its vote in any of the elections in which it has used the Congressional District system.
Another flaw in the current system is that it disproportionately weights the votes of citizens of less populous states. Each state receives an electoral vote for each member of Congress, with the District of Columbia being alloted three electoral votes. Since each state has at least one member of the House of Representatives and two Senators, no matter how small its population is, no state has less than three votes in the College. The end result of this, based on 2006 Census Bureau estimates, is that the vote of a citizen of Wyoming counts approximately four times as much as that of a citizen of Texas. In Wyoming there is one elector for every 172,000 citizens, but in Texas the ratio is one to 691,000. Citizens of other populous states such as Florida, California and New York are partially disenfranchised in the same manner.
Of course, all of this is the offspring of the great compromise hammered out at the end of the 18th Century between Alexander Hamilton's dream of a strong central government on the one hand, and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison's concept of a loose confederation of quasi-independent states on the other. As much as I revere the two Virginians, especially for their insistence on religious tolerance and strict separation of church and state, I have to believe that their federalism is less and less a good fit for the realities on the ground in the 21st Century. Television, the internet, and the Interstate Highway System have all collaborated to make us more and more citizens of one national society. Alabamians, for the most part, gawk at the same celebrities, laugh at the same jokes, and watch the same bad TV programs as our counterparts in Oregon. We disagree with each other, to be sure, especially on the so-called Culture War issues; but those disagreements transcend state borders.
I support electing the President and Vice-President by direct popular vote, with every vote having exactly the same weight as every other vote. I suggest that one result of this change would be to increase the number of U.S. citizens who actually cast a vote, because they would know that their vote counted. It seems self-evident to me that our current system is unfair and contrary to the whole idea of representative democracy. I know that doing away with the Electoral College would require an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and that passing such an amendment may be virtually impossible politically, since the two major parties have such a strong vested interest in the status quo; but the fact that it is hard to do doesn't mean it isn't the right thing to do. Let's count all the votes.
Thomas R. Borden Waugh, Alabama June 27, 2007