Sunday, December 14, 2008
It's That TIme Of The Year Again
June Kronholz, a reporter for the "Wall Street Journal," has a very good substantive article about the Electoral College, which most Americans are woefully uninformed about the process involved in electing the president. Most Americans assume the race ends in November, when they go to the polls to select the candidate of their choice. In reality, the voters go to the polls to select the electors, who will cast their vote for the President of the United States.
The Electoral College was the result of a compromise at the Philadelphia Convention surrounding who got to select the President--Congress or the voters. The Founders worried--with good reason--that if Congress was allowed to select the President, as one plan called for, then checks and balances would be fundamentally upset because this person would owe his or her selection to the Congress and thus would be in a position to do its bidding. But no one at the Convention favored allowing the voters to decide (they didn't even favor giving everyone the right to vote), for fear that they would be swayed by emotion and select demogogues instead of statesmen. In walks the Electoral College. It was designed to negate the choice of the voters should they make a "wrong" selection.
The Constitution mandates that the Electors in the states meet the first Monday following the second Wednesday in December--which means that this meeting will take place at noon in every state capitol this coming Monday, December 15. Because it is up to the states, the process happens differently state to state. In some states, there is a great deal of pomp and circumstance that accompanies the choice the electors make--for instance, in my own state of Ohio, there will be a "color guard and musical interlude" that leads up to the elector vote. In other states, such as Vermont, the three electors will meet in "Room 10 of the statehouse" and be done "20 minutes" later. Once the vote is counted, it is transmitted to Washington D.C., where Congress, meeting in a joint session (and covered only by C-SPAN) will recount the vote and the President of the Senate (VP of the United States) will announce a victor, bringing the 2008 election to an end. This vote will take place on January 8--not January 6, which s the date that the new Congress (111th) comes into session.
In 24 states, there is no law binding the Elector to the vote that took place in November. Thus an Elector can vote for someone different than the person one--so-called "Faithless Elector." We have seen a Faithless Elector in each of the previous two elections. In 2000, the Elector for D.C. cast no vote to protest D.C.'s lack of statehood. In 2004, a Minnesota Elector cast his vote for John Edwards as President. President Nixon is the only U.S. President to have a Faithless Elector in each election he ran--1960, 1968, and 1972. In each election, an Elector voted for someone more conservative than President Nixon.
Check your own secretary of state's webpage for information about the meeting this Monday in your state. Some are providing live webcasts of their vote. They also have a list of who these faceless Electors are, such as the case of Ohio.
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The Electoral College was the result of a compromise at the Philadelphia Convention surrounding who got to select the President--Congress or the voters. The Founders worried--with good reason--that if Congress was allowed to select the President, as one plan called for, then checks and balances would be fundamentally upset because this person would owe his or her selection to the Congress and thus would be in a position to do its bidding. But no one at the Convention favored allowing the voters to decide (they didn't even favor giving everyone the right to vote), for fear that they would be swayed by emotion and select demogogues instead of statesmen. In walks the Electoral College. It was designed to negate the choice of the voters should they make a "wrong" selection.
The Constitution mandates that the Electors in the states meet the first Monday following the second Wednesday in December--which means that this meeting will take place at noon in every state capitol this coming Monday, December 15. Because it is up to the states, the process happens differently state to state. In some states, there is a great deal of pomp and circumstance that accompanies the choice the electors make--for instance, in my own state of Ohio, there will be a "color guard and musical interlude" that leads up to the elector vote. In other states, such as Vermont, the three electors will meet in "Room 10 of the statehouse" and be done "20 minutes" later. Once the vote is counted, it is transmitted to Washington D.C., where Congress, meeting in a joint session (and covered only by C-SPAN) will recount the vote and the President of the Senate (VP of the United States) will announce a victor, bringing the 2008 election to an end. This vote will take place on January 8--not January 6, which s the date that the new Congress (111th) comes into session.
In 24 states, there is no law binding the Elector to the vote that took place in November. Thus an Elector can vote for someone different than the person one--so-called "Faithless Elector." We have seen a Faithless Elector in each of the previous two elections. In 2000, the Elector for D.C. cast no vote to protest D.C.'s lack of statehood. In 2004, a Minnesota Elector cast his vote for John Edwards as President. President Nixon is the only U.S. President to have a Faithless Elector in each election he ran--1960, 1968, and 1972. In each election, an Elector voted for someone more conservative than President Nixon.
Check your own secretary of state's webpage for information about the meeting this Monday in your state. Some are providing live webcasts of their vote. They also have a list of who these faceless Electors are, such as the case of Ohio.
