Why Are Election Officials Praying Rather Than Acting?

Last Sunday's New York Times "Week In Review" section contained an article entitled Imagining The Danger Of 2000 Redux. In it we learn that "the likelihood of trouble at the nation's 200,000 polling places may be greater than in any year in memory. According to the Times "In every hamlet, city, county and state election officials are praying, Please don't let it be close here."

Why are these people praying rather than acting? Why haven't these issues been comprehensively resolved since the last election debacle?

The Times goes on to note that if either candidate wins without a majority of the popular vote, there could be renewed calls to abolish the Electoral College and make other fundamental changes in the structure of American democracy. That would certainly be the answer to this writer's prayers.

The essence of the trouble with our political system is brilliantly described by Daniel Lazare in The Velvet Coup: The Constitution, The Supreme Court and The Decline of American Democracy. Strictly speaking, the U.S. is not a democracy at all. It is an 18th century republic that has come to resemble a democracy but which at its core remains stubbornly pre-democratic. The individual citizen has no constitutional right to vote. Article II states clearly that the power to choose members of the Electoral College lies with state legislatures rather than with the people at large.

The problem with any attempt to reform or abolish the Electoral College is that it would require a constitutional amendment, a process that was made purposely difficult by the Founding Fathers. But, they were living in a relatively underpopulated, slow moving agrarian society that was largely isolated from the rest of the globe. We, on the other hand, are inextricably bound to a rapidly changing world confronted by economic and social problems that the Founders could never have dreamed of. It is imperative that we begin to rethink our governing institutions with an eye toward making them cleaner, more efficient and truly representative of the needs of the majority of U.S. citizens.

As Lazare point out in one of the concluding chapters of The Velvet Coup, "In the modern era, any government seeing itself as democratic necessarily sees the conduct of free and fair national elections as its highest responsibility. Yet rather than placing responsibility squarely in the hands of the national government, America's superannuated Constitution placed it in the hands of the states."

That is something that simply must be changed.