The Electoral College

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

We all learned about democracy in like the third grade, right?

Whoever gets the most votes wins, power of the people, majority rules and all that.

A lot of this even got a pretty early example of the opposite of that, like when my sisters and I all wanted McDonald’s but my Mom overruled us. “This is not a democracy,” she would say.

Now, of course, somewhere between “one man, one vote” and “dictatorship,” there are a lot of different kinds of government.

We actually have one right here in the good ol’ U.S.A. We are actually a republic, aka a representative democracy. We don’t vote on every single issue. Some stuff we do, usually on a local or maybe a state level. But for most things, we either have a person elected to represent us or we have elected someone to have certainl powers without requiring a vote. That person has

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what we call “executive” powers. At the city level, the mayor has executive powers, at the state level, it’s the governor. And the chief executive of the country is, of course, the president.

We the People vote for the president — sort of. Most of you know this. We actually vote for who our state will pledge all of its electoral votes. Electoral votes are based on the number of senators (everyone has two) and representatives (Arkansas has four) each state has. So, our state’s six electoral votes will all go to the candidate that gets the most votes in Arkansas — most likely Don-

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ald Trump. That means that all of the throusands of Arkansans who vote fot Kamala Harris, arguably, don’t count for anything.

The same can be said for the millions of Democrats in Texas and the millions of Republicans in New York and California.

While the electoral college (kind of) made sense in the early days of our nation, many people today say that it is outdated and unnecessary in today’s world.

We are, in fact, the only nation in the world that still uses it to elect its chief executive and have been for quite some time. Why?

Well, it’s in the U.S. Constitution that way, and the Constitution is by design, notoriously hard to change.

And a lot of people would argue that it doesn’t really matter. There have only been four instances in our country’s 240 years of elections that the person who got the most votes did not become president. The issue is that two of those instances have been within the past six elections (Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016). So the prevailing theory is that Republicans won’t move to abolish the electoral college because it would likely block their path to the White House for the foreseeable future, and Democrats won’t move to abolish it because it would give more voting power to GOP voters in large “blue” states like New York and California.

So, we’re probably stuck with it, along with other outdated ideas like Daylight Saving Time and video rental stores.

But still, you should vote…