The United States is a nation founded upon the basic principle that those who govern the people shall be elected by the will of the governed. Well, that’s what the history textbooks would like us to think. A true democracy contains an electoral system in which the popular vote determines the leader of a given country. However, the United States utilizes a system called the Electoral College in which each state is given a certain number of electoral votes based on population (congruent with the number of congressmen from each state). Whichever candidate wins the popular vote in a given state is awarded all of the electoral votes from said state. This may seem reasonable enough on the surface, but upon further examination this system is the antithesis of a true democracy.

Let us examine the 2000 presidential election in order to exemplify the folly of this system. In a hotly contested race between Republican Governor of Texas George Bush and Democratic Vice President of the United States Al Gore, the final vote count was the closest in recent memory. As the election night (November 7, 2000) was concluding on the east coast and Florida’s polls closed, virtually all of the major news networks declared Gore to be victorious based on exit polls conducted throughout the state. As the actual votes began to be tallied however, Governor Bush began to build a substantial lead over Gore, causing the networks to revoke their projection and declare that Florida was still undecided. By around 2:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, Bush had mounted a 100,000 vote lead over Gore with 85% of precincts reporting, compelling the news networks to award Florida’s 25 electoral votes to Bush, and thus declaring him to be the next President of the United States. However, the 15% of the votes that had yet to be counted were largely located in the Democratic strongholds of Broward County, Miami-Dade County, and Palm Beach County.

As these votes began to be counted, Bush’s once substantial lead began to rapidly decline, ultimately seeing his lead decrease to a mere 900 votes once all ballots were accounted for, including absentees. This triggered an automatic recount of the votes in the state of Florida, and Vice President Gore requested a hand recount to assure that the votes were assigned to the correct candidates, as permitted in the state. However, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris (R) announced that she would reject all recount results submitted after November 14, 2000, failing to provide nearly enough time for all of the ballots to be recounted. When the Florida Supreme Court extended the deadline to November 26, the conservative-leaning U.S. Supreme Court ruled that this was unconstitutional, and that Harris’ deadline would be upheld. The fact that the Republicans could block the votes from three Democratic strongholds to be recounted is absurd, and speaks volumes about the folly of the American electoral system.

As we all know, George W. Bush was handed the reigns of the nation by his Republican friends in the judicial system, and the results speak for themselves. The Iraq War was undoubtedly the greatest U.S. military blunder since the Vietnam War, as the Bush Administration gave the order to invade the Middle Eastern country despite the fact that there was no proven Al Qaeda link within its borders. Claiming that America was freeing the Iraqi people from a violent dictator (Saddam Hussein) who was a threat to world peace, the United States was left a 1.7 trillion dollar bill and even more instability in the region by the war’s conclusion. Furthermore, U.S. military involvement in both Iraq and Afghanistan has further inflamed the hatred of the Muslim world against the United States. However, Bush was far too generous to merely leave the nation with a gargantuan war debt. Some other notable Bush accomplishments include ignoring the international ban on torture, slashing health care funding for veterans, cutting the tax rate on the wealthiest Americans, and attacking women’s basic reproductive rights. One may ask, “If George Bush was such a terrible president, then why was he elected twice?” Well, if the United States was a true democracy in which the President was elected based strictly on the popular vote, then “Dubya” would have spent the first decade of the 21st century sitting on a rocking chair in his farm in central Texas, and the nation would have likely avoided the Iraq War.

Hindsight is 20/20, and perhaps this discussion would not be as pertinent had the Bush presidency been a successful one. However, it is abundantly clear that Americans must begin a dialogue regarding how our lawmakers are elected. It is essential that we secure, as Lincoln referenced in the Gettysburg Address, “a government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Therefore, Congress would be wise to forge an amendment to Article Two of the Constitution (which states that the President and Vice President were to be elected through the Electoral College), and replacing this system with an outright popular vote. Proponents of the Electoral College claim that it simplifies the remarkable arduous task of tallying every single vote in order to determine a winner. They believe that counting each vote would prove to be far more time consuming than merely utilizing the electoral college. Furthermore, those who support the current system believe that the existence of the Electoral College encourages candidates to build a base of supporters that is more geographically diverse. While these are reasonable points, the need to have a true democracy in which the popular vote determines the winner of an election supersedes any merits of the Electoral College by a wide margin. The Founding Fathers of our nation felt that the Electoral College was necessary in order to create a buffer between the population and the election of the President. Since democracy was a relatively novel concept during the 18th century, many aristocrats felt that the uneducated citizens should not play such an enormous role in the fate of a nation, as they could easily be manipulated into voting for a potential tyrant (clearly a sensitive topic at the time). Now that the electorate has the tools to become far more educated about the candidates than Americans during the 18th century (Fox News viewers excluded), this is a relatively antiquated concept. Regarding the initial argument that the Electoral College streamlines the process of electing a President, I feel that Americans would be more than willing to wait an extra month to see that all of the votes are counted in order to assure that the President of the United States is elected by truly democratic means.