It’s obvious that the recent presidential election was rigged in favor of the Democrats just as the 2000 presidential election was rigged in favor of the Republicans.
I suppose that one could easily say that one rigged election is deserving of another, but then we’d be at a stalemate playing a winless game with no motivation in place to change the system.
As it stands now, it is Corporate America that chooses our presidents.
This is accomplished through corporate-owned main stream media which herds the mob into the cattle pens of superficial chanting.
Your thoughtful vote is thus stampeded out of existence by the fickle behavior of the mob that is controlled by morning talk show know it alls and infotainment boobs.
This is not a good thing because our country is then under the control of an unelected body, that being Corporate America.
Is this what we want?
I don’t think so.
Given that it would seem prudent to discuss precisely what kind of world we do want.
What kind of presidential election, if any, would work?
We are adults. We can do anything we want to do.
We can have any type of government we choose.
Where shall we begin?
The best place to begin is with the Founding Fathers and the mechanism they chose to elect our President of the United States.
The Founding Fathers were definitely opposed to pure democracy.
They feared the mob.
That is why they instituted the electoral college.
In a nutshell, the way it worked was that each state would have a certain defined number of electors who would elect the president.
The state electors would be selected or elected depending upon the state; each state would develop its own format for choosing electors.
The state electors would then get together and each cast two votes for the man they thought would best be president. One of those votes had to be cast for a citizen outside the state of that elector in order to prevent big states from dominating the candidate pool.
The man who got a majority of the votes was President and the runner-up was vice President.
There were other rules in effect for cases where no one got a majority.
This system proved to be ineffective and so the system was modified.
Without going into detail as to why it was modified, it should be obvious that if the electoral college was modified once, it can be modified again.
Circumstances change. The world changes.
Clearly the problem that we face today is increased corporate power. It is Corporate America that is deciding our presidents for us. If we are to survive as a nation, we must discover a way to limit this corporate power. We cannot have Corporate America deciding our presidents through mob rule.
What has happened in the electoral college over the past century is that states select their electors based upon election. But the election is based upon how the mob feels about a particular presidential candidate. Additionally, state electors are now committed on a winner take all basis.
So although the electoral college is electing the President, really the mob is electing the President. All that is required to control the mob is mass media and a willingness to rig the votes at the polls.
This is what we want to prevent.
First, we want to limit the effect of mass media upon the mob. Mass media is now controlled by a few institutions; these few institutions pose as multiple sources of information so as to create a consensus – which is illusory.
Second we want to prevent rigging of elections at the polls.
We also want to shield the election of the President from the immediacy of the moment. We don’t want Presidents chosen on whim and emotion.
For that reason, it is important that the electors be chosen well before the actual election.
It is also important that the electors represent the political bias of the citizenry.
Only an indirect election of the President can fulfill these requirements.
Clearly, the states’ interest must be influential in the selection of a President. So must the will of the people.
To accomplish this, a better approach might be to have the state legislators, who already represent the will of the people, select the electors who will be free to vote their conscience for the President and his running mate. They would not be obligated to vote for any particular person or party.
The number of electors that each state possesses is up to the state’s discretion. They may have 1 or 1,001. It doesn’t matter because the electoral votes allocated to each state will be fixed based upon population.
Each state’s electors would vote on Election Day. There would still be the traditional 50 individual winner take all races but with some critical differences.
First, the electors may vote their conscience. They may vote for Ish Kabibble.
Second, there is no direct popular vote for President. The people will have already voted indirectly in their local elections. This will energize people to pay attention to their local races.
Third, billions of dollars will be saved in trying to sway a clueless public.
Fourth, it will be near impossible to falsify votes as there will be only at most a few hundred electors in each state, and we will know who they are.
Fifth, no dead people will be voting, and no one will be voting twice.
Sixth, people who know the issues will be voting. As it stands now far too many voters can’t begin to comprehend the issues.
Those are some tremendous advantages, and they are pretty close to what the Founding Fathers envisioned.
Now, of course, we can do nothing. We can bury our heads in the sand and continue to believe that our elections are legitimate and that our votes count.
But that would not be the truth.
Sincerely,
Archer Crosley
Copyright 2020 Archer Crosley All Rights Reserved
Cowboy Archer 