Let’s Kill the Electoral College So We Never Have to Pay Attention to Ohio and Florida Again

http://www.alternet.org/election-2012/lets-kill-electoral-college-so-we-never-have-pay-attention-ohio-and-florida-again



The best argument for finally ridding ourselves of the Electoral College, besides that it is a regular reminder that our sainted Founding Fathers created an explicitly undemocratic and exclusionary form of government when they invented a system that no other country has been fool enough to imitate, is that it assigns far too weighty a responsibility to states that are completely incompetent and mostly run by horrible assholes.

And so this particular miserable election has come down to essentially three states: Florida, Virginia and Ohio. But mostly Ohio. Ohio is a depressing place already, as is much of the post-industrial Midwest, and this attention is not making them any happier. Florida is full of lunatics and run by criminals. Virginia might elect George Allen again. This is no way to run a country.

Thanks to the Electoral College, and our bizarre system of assigning electoral votes, and our decentralized and easily demogogued system of determining who gets to vote, and when, and how, the minority of voters who show up to vote in midterms and off-year elections choose the men who control the ballots and the polling places, and those men (and, once, Katherine Harris) do everything they can to ensure that people have a hard time of it.

(It’s depressingly rare that presidential elections end up riding primarily on the results in states with pristine histories of clean and fair elections. Though I heard Romney’s “expanding the map” to Minnesota, so who knows.)