The Winkest Link

Electoral College…

Every four years the question arises… “What is the Electoral College” ???

Maybe we have the answer…

According to their recruiting brochure, Electoral College…..

-     Is located in Gol de Lac, Wisconsin

- Along the shores of beautiful Lac Lake….

- Was founded the same year Thomas Jefferson began dating his 2^nd mistress.

- Is known as the “Fighting Mead Sippers” (Go Sips!)

- May just be the easiest college to get into in the continental United States

(probable exception: Yale).

- Was the first Conservative Arts college in America (“We no longer offer degrees in Plantation Slavery Management”)

What??  That is not the “Electoral College” you meant?

You mean the one the TV people always talk about during presidential elections?

You will be sorry you asked…..

We here at WinkestLink have studied this at great length.  In fact, it was our collective doctorate thesis.  You believe this, right?

(Can you do a “collective” doctorate thesis? Why or why not?)

Where to begin?

The Electoral College is an imaginary mechanism used to select the President of the United States.

Each state is assigned a fairly random number of electoral votes, loosely based on population.  The candidate who gets the majority of electoral votes becomes the next president.

Electoral voters don’t actually ‘vote’ for anything, they simply rubber-stamp the results of each state. For example…..

Let’s pretend you live in Utah.  Your state gets five electoral votes.

On election day dedicated citizens travel to the polls and cast ballots for their favorite candidates.  They count up these votes, throw out all those that voted for a Democrat, and give the five electoral votes to the Republican.

All five votes go to the winner, even if the popular vote is 51% to 49%.  (Yes, we know Utah is more likely to be 92% to 8%, but you get the idea…)

Knowing that, during your lifetime, your state will most likely never give even one electoral vote to your candidate would be somewhat disheartening for a Utah Democratic voter.  This scenario plays itself out in state after state in this country, sometimes favoring the Democrats, but usually favoring the Republicans.

Trivia Question: How many other countries use this wonderful system?

A:         Zero.

Is it because this idea is too creative & clever for those stupid countries? We doubt it… All those other countries just count the votes.

Get this! The person with the most votes wins the election!!! What a ridiculous idea.

Granted, in the U.S most often the man who gets the most votes also wins the electoral vote.  The odds of someone getting fewer actual votes and winning the election are pretty long. (The last occurrence was almost 8 years ago.)

But more important than that is the obvious alienation of the typical voter. Non-voters often say “my one vote doesn’t count”.  Too often they are right….

People, pundits & politicians (alliteration!) frequently lament voter apathy, but nobody makes any effort to dismantle this antiquated system that is designed to discourage voter participation.

Why do we keep it?  Tradition?  Conspiracy?  Who knows?  (We at WinkestLink almost never subscribe to conspiracy theories, but we know many of you love conspiracies, so we will imply them on a regular basis, just to keep you as a reader)

Lets face it, the founding fathers whiffed on this one. Why would these paragons of democracy stray from ‘one man-one vote’?

Okay, okay.  ‘One man-one vote’ was not exactly the rule of the day when slavery was still widely accepted, and women were nearly 150 years away from getting the right to vote.  Regardless, “1M-1V” seems like an idea that might keep the populous interested in voting…

Maybe, just maybe, some of the ideas of these ‘super-visionaries’ needed a bit of refining. More on that later….

Note to the Humor-Impaired: There may be one or two inaccurate statements in the article titled “Electoral College”.  Feel free to try to spot them and point them out to friends.  This will show your friends how much smarter you are than the editors of WinkestLink!

Note #2: If you point them out to us, you may win a fabulous prize, but not from WinkestLink. We have NO fabulous prizes to give away. You may win the lottery for all we know!

(6 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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