Wednesday, August 4, 2004

An election approaches the vanishing point


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An election approaches the vanishing point

Every four years in America a cry rings out bemoaning low voter turnout. There even emerges a rather clinical term for it??voter apathy??as if it were some insidious illness a tsetse fly might carry.

The tsetse fly in this case is the Electoral College?a forgettable little subject that takes up about an hour of high school government classes.

A state gets one Electoral College vote for each senator and representa-tive. A candidate needs 270 Electoral College votes out of 538 to become president. The real hitch in the system is that in all states but two, it is a winner-take-all gambit. Get one more popular vote than your opponent and you get all of the state?s electoral votes. It seems the Electoral College was a compromise between those who wanted Congress to elect a president and those who favored the general population determining who became presi-dent.

What, then, is so evil about it? Nothing, unless elections are close, very partisan and with a tiny swing vote in the middle?exactly the situation we have now (and had in 2000).

In this situation, the context in which one casts his or her vote deter-mines its relevance. A Republican voice in Massachusetts has as much punch as a Democratic one in Wyoming?none. Hence, the apathy. A po-litical discussion may change the mind of one neighbor, but it is not going to sway 10 neighbors.

Consider, however, if you lived in Florida, Missouri, Wisconsin Oregon or Nevada. Best of all, imagine living in Columbus, Ohio. Columbus is about as close to the center of the voting universe as any place in the nation. All of the hoopla, all of the money?hundreds of millions of dollars?time and energy is being focussed on Ohio and a handful of other swing states. In reality, a relatively few number of voters in these swing states will have a profound effect on the rest of us.

What?s more, the election will be decided on remarkably few issues. With all of the problems floating around out there?health care costs, Social Security, energy, education, racial equality, civil rights, foreign trade, global public health?both sides, with the complicity of the media, seem to be content to let the election hinge on a single issue: ?strength.? It?s not even an issue. It?s a sense of character. The question that keeps getting posed by politicians, pollsters and the media is this: Who is going to be the ?strong-est? president in this era of terrorism? Granted, the security of the nation is paramount. But we are approaching it as if we were engaged in an arm wrestling match. What exactly does strength mean in the context of global terrorism? And how does that translate into political leadership? Does it simply mean a willingness to go to war, or does it mean something else all together?

There seems to be great impetus to simplify this vote, distill it and the issues down to the most elemental form: yes or no, black or white, with us or against us. It is, I admit, a comfortable way to approach the problems we face. Comfortable, but inadequate. Because we live in a sea of grays, more so than in our past. Being able to make distinctions within that sea is the quality we should seek in a leader.

In the end what we have done is narrow the electorate, then narrow the issues almost to the vanishing point. We should be broadening the discus-sion, not narrowing it.

What we will likely end up with won?t be representative of the nation. It will be representative of what a sprinkling of undecided voters sense is of one candidate?s approach to one issue.

We might be better off trying to find the will of the people in hanging chads.




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