How to Pick a President – Really
Can you think of any problems with the way we currently
elect a President? Do we really think we
are getting the best people to run, yet alone be elected? Is anybody bothered by the need for a
candidate to raise millions of dollars to mount a campaign? Isn’t the very idea of a campaign fraught
with cunning, manipulation, deception, backroom deals, slander, owing
contributors and favors, potential for outride fraud, stolen elections?
Do we really think we are getting enough options? Under our current system, third party or
independent candidates have little chance of success in that under our present
system, they only reduce the number of votes needed for somebody to win,
meaning that a candidate can win a state without even getting a majority of the
votes, which is just wrong. Do you
really think our politicians want to change this?
Does a President really need to be photogenic or a good
debater? Doesn’t the very idea of
running for this office attract people who might seek personal power and glory
rather than what is really best for the country? Should an incumbent spend half his term
running for a second term?
Did you know that our Constitution wanted none of this? Political parties were
considered “mischievous if not downright evil” in those days, and it was “felt
that gentlemen should not campaign for public office (The saying was "The
office should seek the man, the man should not seek the office.").”[1]
A direct popular vote was rejected also, because
larger states would have too much weight in the decision.
The Founders decided to have an electoral
college. And like a lot of good things,
if you don’t take care of it and remember why it was set up in the first place,
it deteriorates and changes, and shrewd people can distort it.
The Founders didn’t want a campaign where people
bashed each other and had fund raisers where you had to pay $5000 to have
dinner with the person. And who and how
many people can take two or more years out of their lives to campaign and travel
around the country? Don’t these people
have jobs and families? So it’s usually
(career) politicians and the very rich who run.
We say we don’t like either, but all the other people don’t want to be
away from their families or can’t afford to be away from their jobs.
Each state is supposed to choose people to be
electors. They couldn’t be federal
office holders or profit from the government.
I would take that to mean for our day that they would not be recipients
of any kind of government assistance or benefitting from a government program,
besides not already holding office. I
would understand that also to mean Social Security, but that’s another article.
The electors could vote for anybody they thought
would be the best President. It could be
somebody already in government, but it could also be a writer, a business
person, a professor, why even a talk show host.
And, of course, at that time, there were no political parties.
Originally they voted for two people, at least
one of which had to be out of state. A
list of all the nominated candidates with their vote tallies was then sent to
the Senate to be counted. If someone had
a majority, they became President. If no
one had a majority, the names of the five people with the highest number of votes
was sent to the House where they would vote state by state (one vote for each),
the one with the majority would win. The
12th Amendment reduced this number of potential candidates to the
top three. The person with the second highest number of votes would be
Vice-President, not somebody that a candidate picked out by himself, but
actually the second most desired person for the job. The 12th Amendment changed this
also, so that they would vote separately for each position.
What happened along the way was that the states
ended up letting voters decide who the electors were, and political parties
chose who the possible electors would be, based partly on their commitment to a
predetermined candidate. It’s a bit like
a gerrymandered representative district.
You can vote how you like, but the politicians have essentially already
decided who is going to win. You do get
two choices, but the plan was to have a totally open field of candidates based
entirely on merit and not on looks, debating skills, or political clout.
It sounds so democratic to have the voter choose
the electors, but what it has done is to limit our choices in many cases to the
lesser of two evils. It has limited our
choices essentially to the two major parties whose candidates were chosen in
primaries where, depending on the number of candidates, it could have taken at
little as 20% of the vote to win in a state.
And, again, we are limited to those people who
can take several years out of their lives to campaign, travel around the
country, raise funds, and owe a lot of people favors for their help and money.
Now we are at a point in our country where,
while politicians have always tried to buy people’s votes through government
goodies, this has been taken to a whole new level where our country is drowning
in debt, and the people continue to vote for the one party determined to give
as much as they can to as many people as they can to ensure their continued
success at the polls, regardless of how this affects the country as a whole.
Now this may sound like a problem so large that
talking about solving it is meaningless.
But it’s not. It starts with the
states, even one state. It’s the state
legislators who decide how a state chooses its electors. They would need to explain to their people what
the Constitution says about how a President is to be elected and why they chose
to do it that way. They would need to
explain how the current system fails the intention of the Constitution and them
by severely and adversely limiting the number of possible candidates and
probably excluding many better candidates.
The legislature would need to establish rules
for choosing electors and be very transparent about the whole process. This whole change in procedure will be
portrayed by the media as a way to further rather than impede backroom
political maneuvering and dealing. It’s
a political axiom that you can’t take something (away) after you have given
it.
There will be loud critics who will believe that
this will undermine democracy by supplanting voter participation. They would rather you felt empowered by
voting for either of two candidates of their liking rather than having the
possibility of having better people through an unfamiliar, long forgotten process
that was originally conceived by the very people who created our Constitution
in the first place.
In a close Presidential election, this state’s
action, or states’, might be enough to leave the election undecided after
election night until the Senate counts the votes at a later date and maybe even
has to send the matter to the House for the final decision. The public would then learn of the
possibilities offered to them by doing this the way it was originally intended.
The office of President is too important not to ensure that
the very best person is elected to this position. Our current system has too many problems and
limitations: only two parties to really choose from, a pool of candidates
pretty much limited to career politicians and the very rich, a process based on
campaigns requiring huge amounts of money that ends up rewarding the large
donors, a route that attracts people who seek power more than service.
As states gradually try to follow more the parameters of the
Constitution, it will lead other states to do the same. Many times when I have seen the Presidential
candidates, I have thought to myself, “Is this really the best that we
have?” The only way we will have the
best candidates is that we choose them out of everybody and not just from those
who are willing and able to mount a two year, extensive, expensive campaign
where their lives are examined back to their earliest childhood. The Constitution tells us how we do that.
