[lit-ideas] Why so complicated?

From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
To: ANTHRO-L <ANTHRO-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Lit-Ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 7 Sep 2008 13:44:18 +0900
Having been asked to write a short article on U.S. elections for the
magazine of our club in
Yokohama (where U.S. citizens are very much a minority), I wrote the
following.

-------

Why U.S. Elections are So Complicated.

An election is a simple thing. Whoever gets the most votes wins, right? Not
in the United
States of America.

When the Founders wrote the Constitution they were aware, as Hamilton puts
it in
Federalist No. 1 that

"Happy will it be if our choice should be directed by a judicious estimate
of our true
interests, unperplexed and unbiased by considerations not connected with the
public
good. But this is a thing more ardently to be wished than seriously to be
expected. The
plan offered to our deliberations affects too many particular interests,
innovates upon too
many local institutions, not to involve in its discussion a variety of
objects foreign to its
merits, and of views, passions, and prejudices little favorable to the
discovery of truth."

One set of those particular interests that Hamilton mentions pitted the
larger of the
thirteen original colonies, New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia, against the
smaller ones,
Rhode Island and South Carolina, for example. The former asserted the
importance of
majority rule, which would, if simply accepted, have given them control of
the new
country. The latter countered with right of minorities to be protected and
have a voice in
the new Republic. The result was a compromise in which the legislative
branch would be
divided into two houses, the House of Representatives, in which
representation is
proportional to the populations of the states as determined by the decennial
census, and
the Senate, in which every state, regardless of population, gets two
Senators. In addition,
the President would be elected, not by the national popular vote, but
instead by an
Electoral College in which the number of electors apportioned to each state
equal its total
Congressional delegation, Representatives plus Senators.

Thus, for example, Wyoming, a state with a population of 515,004, one
Representative
and two Senators, has three electoral college votes. Each of its Electoral
College votes
represents 171,668 people. In contrast California has a population of
36,457,549, fifty-
three Representatives and two Senators. Each of its Electoral College Votes
represents 662,
865 people. Thus, a voter who casts his or her vote in Wyoming has, roughly
speaking,
nearly four times the impact on the election of a California voter.

A further set of complications is introduced by the fact that how elections
should be
conducted is not specified in the Constitution. That is left up to the
states. The
Constitution, moreover, makes no provision for political parties. Thus, not
only does how
votes are cast and counted vary from state-to-state, so does the choice of
processes by
which the parties nominate their candidates.

Current options on the table include primaries, caucuses or, in at least one
recently
notorious case, "the Texas two-step," both. Primaries are run like other
elections, with
people going to the polls to vote. Primaries may be either open, allowing
independents
and members of the other party to vote in a party's primary, or closed,
allowing only
voters registered as members of the party in question to vote.

Caucuses are party meetings, typically open to anyone who shows up and signs
a
declaration that he or she is a member of the party. Historically, caucuses
have given the
edge to politicians whose supporters control the local party machinery, are
able to get
supporters to attend, and have mastered the often byzantine rules under
which caucuses
are run. They have also been favored by smaller and poorer state parties,
for whom
running a primary may be seen as too costly, given the need to conserve
resources for the
general election.  As recent events have revealed, however, an insurgent
national campaign
can turn the tables on the party hacks by getting its people to attend
caucuses in large
numbers and training them in caucus procedures in advance.

Feeling confused? Don't blame yourself. Imagine yourself an American trying
to
understand cricket. The one thing you really need to know as the U.S.
elections climax this
November is, "Keep an eye on the electoral votes!" That's the score that
counts.


-- 
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
http://www.wordworks.jp/
[lit-ideas] Why so complicated?

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