Benjamin Harrison-the dubya of his time?

I conducted my interview of the Con last night, and it will be up as soon as I can transcribe it. Mike and Heather made me a delicious birthday dinner last night, and I want to post the recipe for Mike's bruschetta as soon as I get it from him. This morning over coffee I was talking to the Croatian woman I work with and she told me that she saw Fahrenheit 9/11 last night and that although she isn't yet a citizen it has inspired her to investigate her rights and see if she is eligible to vote. I told her that she should do that, but that even if she can't vote it's ok because we live in a democratic state, and all of California's electoral votes will go to Kerry anyway. She knew nothing of the electoral college (she's not a very political person so that just shows again how cool Fahrenheit is), and I tried to explain it to her. She was perplexed and asked why we would have such a stupid system. I couldn't come up with any historical justifications, so I decided to do a little research, and here's what I could gather from the confusing mess that is our election system (by the way, if you want to read the whole document I got this from it's at: http://www.fec.gov/pdf/eleccoll.pdf , it was written by the deputy director of the federal election commission) Our founding fathers had a problem when trying to design a system to elect the president because the citizens were very suspicious of the central government, long-distance communication was difficult,there were no political parties, and it was considered ungentlemanly for a man to actively campaign for an office (are you getting the impression that this system might be outdated yet?). The man who wrote this pdf claimed that the f.f.s rejected the idea of a direct election not because the founding fathers doubted the intelligence of the average voter (I'm not so sure about this), but because they feared that the uninformed voters would just elect whatever candidate was from their state. By the fifth presidential election, there was already a problem with this system. Political parties had been formed, and the Democratic and Republican parties cast an equal number of votes for Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr. It took 36 votes by the House of Representatives to resolve this, so the president was really not chosen by the people at all in this case, but by the legislators. This led to the 12th amendment to the constitution, but not to the abolition of the electoral college, probably because methods of communication were still rudimentary and, according to this author, because of lessons learned from the dangerous populism of the French Revolution. You know, honestly, I am trying to read this document and glean more information from it, but the electoral system is so fucking confusing that I can't. Anyway, a couple of more interesting facts: In 1888, Banjamin Harrison lost the popular election by 110,000 votes, but won in the electoral college. The document I got this info from was written before the 2000 election, so the author repeatedly asserts that there hasn't been a problem like this in more than a century. Also, this system is inherently unfair because the number of electors in a given state is based on the number of representatives in the house (which is based on the population of the state) plus the 2 members in the senate. So, because every single state has 2 in the senate, the votes from rural states count more. A vote from someone in Florida (or California) carries a third as much weight as a vote from someone in Alaska! WHY? WHY? WHY DO WE STILL HAVE THIS SYSTEM?

benjamin harrison Originally uploaded by becklerg.