Alabama just voted to replace a Senator who was picked to
serve in the President’s administration.
It was a very close election and was won by a Democrat. If you support Trump’s agenda, you will be
disappointed more than you would if the Republican had won the election. That will concern a lot of people, but that’s
not why I am writing this.
There are a number of reports of voter fraud: buses of people
brought in from out of state to vote.
This is why automatic voter registration is a bad thing and why voter registration
rolls need to be kept updated and cleared of non-eligible voters, like dead
people, people who have moved, and non-citizens: they provide more potential for non-eligible
voters to vote. This should concern all
of us, but that’s still not why I am writing this.
The vote tallies were very close, but neither candidate
received a majority of the votes. This
should make us hopping mad and prompt everyone to do something about it. If not write letters or protest in the
streets, we should at least agree that it is not right, needs to be changed, and
we should at least talk about it enough so that maybe other people will do
something that might lead to change.
Think about this for a minute.
We have 330 million people in our country, and the only two
people we got to pick from for President were Donald Trump and Hillary
Clinton. Really?
We have a two party system that tries to cram everybody into
two polarized political parties that are getting further apart by each passing
election. On the Republican side, we had
Republicans, Tea Party, and Libertarians competing for the nomination, and the
Democrats had a Democrat, a Socialist, and I think the Green Party going for top
honors. And then we hear that the
leaders of the Democratic Party rigged the system giving the Democrat their support
in ways that made the Socialist lose in what would have been a much closer primary
election if they hadn’t.
And then, of course, there are the independents and undecideds
who can go either way, depending on what is trending in the latest news cycle.
We are told that’s what the primaries are for, to weed out
the candidates who have no or little chance of winning, but that is not the
case at all. If you have, say, 17 candidates
running, like the Republicans did, and everyone got single digits in a primary
vote, and one candidate got 30%, is that candidate the best choice? We don’t know. You still had over 60% of the voters who didn’t
vote for him, or her.
I had about 8 candidates that interested me, but I could
only vote for one. That’s no way to pick
a candidate. Let everyone vote for as
many as they want, or maybe no more than 5.
Now that will tell you which candidate has the best chance of
winning.
But even then, when you get to the final two, one from each party,
if a third candidate wants to run, it only screws things up. People know he, or she, can’t win, but should
they vote for them anyway to make a point?
Should they vote their conscience, or think politically?
What can happen in a three-way Presidential race, or in the
Alabama race where write-in ballots were highly encouraged, is that a person
can win the election with as little as 34% of the vote. And that is just wrong. And stupid.
A President still needs a majority of the Electoral College
to win, but the state elections don’t require a majority to win. So you never really know who the majority of the
people want.
But you say we do. We
have the national totals. But the
Founders chose an electoral college system for choosing a President, but that’s
for another article. But simply, the
Founders knew that people all over the country were different and had different
needs, interests, and wants.
Determining a President by popular vote would become a tyranny
of the majority, where minorities of opinions would have less say in the final
results. For example, people who live in
large urban areas tend to vote differently from people in rural America. People in largely populated states vote differently
than people in less populated ones. The
Founders wanted a President for all America, not just the most heavily
populated states.
Our country needs third party or independent candidates. We need more options in the final
election. And there is only one thing
that makes that impossible in our political process, and it’s not money.
Now money is certainly one of the reasons the system doesn’t
want to change it or hasn’t changed it so far.
They don’t want to make it any harder for their candidate to win. But raising or having a lot of money is not the
main reason independents or third-party candidates don’t run. It’s why we shouldn’t expect the system to
change. This is why ordinary people need
to get involved, at least simply just start talking about it.
The only thing that stops a third party or independent
candidate from running in most elections is that everybody knows that if you
give your vote to that candidate, you are more likely to get the candidate that
you don’t want the most a better chance of winning.
You are used to voting for one of the two major parties, but
this time you are intrigued by the third person. So instead of voting for whomever you ordinarily
would have voted, you vote your conscience, taking votes away from the person
you would have voted for, thus essentially giving your vote to the person you
really didn’t want to win.
Nobody should have to make that choice.
Nobody should win an election without winning a majority of
the vote. The Presidential election is
unique in that the Founders intended for states to have more of an independence
than they do today. Originally the Founders
had state legislators choose their senators, because they wanted the Senate to
represent the states. The only people
they wanted directly elected by the people were those in the House of
Representatives.
Yes, I know things change, but with too much change, you
lose the country that we were founded to be in the first place. That is why changing the Constitution is not
an easy process. We have the most stable
country in the world because of our current system. We have had the same Constitution longer than
any other country. And I think that has
been a good thing.
So, every election should require a majority of the votes to
win. This is why we don’t get more
choices, independent candidates. third party candidates. This means there need to be runoffs in any election
where nobody has the majority of the votes.
Or a cheaper and faster way to go is that, when there are more than two
candidates, allow voters the option on their ballot to pick a second choice. This will allow people to vote for whom they
really want rather than the lesser of two evils, in some cases.
This one change will revitalize our elections and break the two-party
control over our lives. Which, of course,
it is why it will never happen. Unless
people start talking about it and demanding it.
If you personally don’t have the time or energy to actively work for
change, at least just talk about it. And
eventually people who can do the work for change will be more inclined to do
the work.
This one change can do more in a positive way for our
country than possibly any other one thing, except, of course, for term limits. But that’s for another article.
