America Entertains Ukraine

Like the rest of the world, Ukraine is laughing at the spectacle of the American Presidential elections and how a relative handful of voters in Florida will decide who will be the leader of the world’s strongest country, perhaps after the last absentee ballots come in ten days after the vote. In fact, every time I teach my American politics course I find that explaining how the Electoral College elects the President the most difficult thing to get people to understand. In seven years I have not been able to get my own wife to understand it, but let me try once again.

The Founding Fathers of the American Constitution did not want to set up a democracy but a republic, in which the people would have a direct voice (the House of Representatives) but not one big enough to let them actually do anything stupid. They wanted the President to be independent of Congress and the best person that could be found, and it seemed to make sense to them that the best way to ensure that would be to select the best people from the various states to decide who would be best for the job. The machinery they came up with was to have the states choose a number of its best people but did not tell the states how to do so, a number equal to their total representation in the House and Senate, but who could not actually be members of Congress. Those sage men would then meet, talk things over (perhaps over wine — or a stronger libation — and cheese) in order to decide who they would like to see as president and vice president, and send the results to Washington, where the outgoing vice president would tally up the results in the presence of both houses of Congress. If there was nobody with a majority or a tie vote, then the House of Representatives would decide who would be President, and the Senate would pick the veep. When the state legislatures appointed their electors (South Carolina did so until 1860), this system might have had some point, although it bogged down as early as 1804 and had to be modified by the Twelfth Amendment. In 1876, when the Electoral College had already lost any justification it might once have had, it paralyzed the country yet again, bringing it to the verge of yet another civil war, but thanks to Americans’ innate gift for compromise, the candidate who lost in the popular vote was inaugurated, and the republic survived. Watching the reports from Florida change when it is already clear who won the popular vote is simply leaving the world, Ukraine included, dumbfounded. When Congress and the President failed to agree on the budget in time some years ago, the plight of diplomats and other government employees who had to wait for their pay was not nearly so public and did not evoke such amazement. But this is a show for the whole world to see, the constipation of American self-government.

Albeit living abroad, I remain an American, and as both an American and a professor of political science, I have to say that the Electoral College is the appendix of the US Constitution, that is, an organ with no useful function that can mess the organism up royally. In the course of American history there have been over 100 amendments proposed to replace this rattletrap mechanism with the direct popular election of the president. Is it not time to pick one, dust it off, and resubmit it to the states for ratification? After all, a bad appendix has to be removed. Or do we Americans want to have a president to be elected who is not the choice of most voting Americans? It really remains up to the Americans in America, but as an American abroad, I find it downright embarrassing.