Moeller Commentary: One Citizen, One Vote … Really?

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I wonder if it isn’t high time to do away with the Electoral College method of selecting our president. Let me change that — I’m firmly convinced that it’s time to do away with a system that has been archaic for more than a century, ever since mass communication expanded to virtually all parts of our country.

Why was this system selected to deal with elections in our nation in the first place? To begin with, if you’ve ever read any of the many written collections of communication between the fathers of our country, you can’t escape the fact that they — each one of them — seemed to feel that he was the only person capable of correctly running our country.

Grade school and high school history books don’t emphasize the egotism, made obvious in their letters to each other and their solution to the method of casting a vote for a president showed it. 

At the beginning of the nation, the majority of our population lived outside of cities and, therefore, outside the range that newspapers were likely to reach. Scarcity or the absence of schools outside of cities was another contributing factor to the policy that “too many folks don’t have the intelligence to vote as wisely as I do.” 

Therefore, every man (but no woman, remember) could cast a vote. But here’s the hitch — that vote was only for another man they considered more qualified to vote intelligently than the average citizen.

It didn’t take long for even legislators to realize that this system was becoming unmanageable, that hundreds of men were gathering together, each with his own choice for president. Then political parties became strong enough to sway opinions and gather those individual votes.  All this becomes the preamble to the point that the electoral laws, born at a time when communication — even between states — was difficult, may no longer be applicable today and should be changed. 

Is there any other nation in the world where the issues within individual sections are as diverse and strongly held as they are between individual states here in our own country? Let’s face the facts: we’re one single country now, supposedly. We’re no longer a conglomeration of individual parochial feelings and actions. The Civil War has been over for 150 years, folks.



 But, eventually, another electoral method was proposed and ratified as the Twenty Third Amendment to our Constitution in 1961. Each state would have the same number of votes — three — in choosing the president. That satisfied the smaller states and, also, the southern states that wanted to escape the dominance of the larger northern states. And it’s worked up to a point. 

Most citizens may be as surprised as I was to learn that the concept of all states giving all three of its’ votes to a single winner is not part of the amendment. It was seized on, early and not surprisingly, by the leading political group in each state attempting to remain in power.  But, as a matter of fact, two states — Maine and Nebraska — did not and do not adhere to that process.

It’s time we acknowledge the need for change and act accordingly. We have the technical ability to count each citizen’s vote and it’s time we exercised that ability. It would be difficult to achieve, though, because a party in power would never vote to diminish its advantages.  I can feel possibly another column coming on because the situation is more complex than that.

In national elections, the concept of “one person equals one vote” is being trampled into the dust if only the votes of a majority in each state count, possibly erasing almost half of the votes cast. It just ain’t fair, folks, it just ain’t fair. 

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Bill Moeller is a former entertainer, mayor, bookstore owner, city council member, paratrooper and pilot living in Centralia. He can be reached at bookmaven321@comcast.net.