B Y DUSAN VUKSANOVIC
On the evening of November 4, 2008, a few minutes after 11 PM Eastern Time, CNN projected that Democratic candidate Barack Obama won the presidential election. At Green Mountain College, students gathered in front of dorms, hugging, kissing, and congratulating each other on electing the forty-fourth president of the United States of America. The Star Spangled Banner was sung collectively on three occasions. Some people were even crying.
The next day, the Yahoo! Political Dashboard showed that Obama had captured a landslide victory against John McCain, tallying an impressive 364 electoral votes compared to McCain’s 162. However, the popular vote numbers showed a completely different picture – Obama had captured 52% of the overall votes, while McCain had won 46%. In fact, the popular vote statistics showed that the race was a very close one.
These numbers pose a very serious question – were all the parties and their constituents equally represented in the presidential elections? In order to get to the answer, one must explore the presidential electoral system.
It is important to note that the popular vote does not decide the president, but rather the electoral vote. For example, in the 2000 election, Democratic candidate Al Gore won the popular vote by 537,179 votes, but the Republican candidate George W. Bush won the electoral balloting by 271 to 266. Technically, a voter who casts a ballot in his/her state doesn’t give his vote directly to the presidential candidate, but rather to an elector, who, in turn, represents them in the electoral college, where he/she casts a vote for a presidential candidate.
Furthermore, the elector is not legally obliged to follow the popular vote in the state that he/she is representing. Theoretically, the elector has the right to cast the vote according his/her will, but past practices have shown that the electors usually follow the popular vote. However, in 2000 elections, one elector from the District of Columbia didn’t fill out her ballot as a sign of protest for the city’s lack of representation in the Congress.
The number of electoral votes per state is determined on the basis of how many senators and representatives a state has. However, although each state has two senators, the number of representatives is allocated according to the number of residents living in a given state. Thus, for example, California, who has a population of 36,553,215 according to the 2007 US Census Bureau, has 55 electoral votes, while Vermont, whose population is 621,254, has the minimal amount of electoral votes – three.
Although each adult citizen of the United States has the right to register and vote, the popular vote is not equally represented in state’s electoral votes. Most states operate on a winner-takes-all basis, which only favors the winner in a particular state. For example, in 2008 election, Obama got the support of 67% of Vermont voters, whereas McCain received 31%. However, Obama won all three electoral votes, although the ratio between the two candidates was approximately 2:1.
The previous two points – that certain states have more electoral votes than others, and that the popular vote isn’t taken into consideration in individual states – are just some of the problems with the electoral college. However, the biggest problem represents the minimum number of votes from eligible voters that a candidate needs in order to become president. Namely, according to a recent The New York Times article, provided all 213 million eligible voters cast their ballots, a candidate could theoretically capture the presidency with only 47.8 million votes, which is about 15.84% of the overall US population.
One could say that not all voters were equally represented in the 2008 election. For example, in the previous two elections, the popular vote’s percentages were R-47.9/D-48.4 (2000) and R-50.7/D-48.3 (2004), but the differences in the electoral vote were five and 35 respectively. In 2008, although the popular vote difference was about 6%, the electoral vote difference was more than 200.
However, these pieces of information do not undermine the fact that Barack Obama was a clear winner in 2008. The United States of America have proved that equality has come a long way compared to forty-five years ago, when race riots were raging across the country. The voting system is something to consider, question, and work on improving, for not only does it decide the political course of one of the most powerful countries in the world, but also affects the rest of the world as well. Perhaps the voting system also needs a change.
