Could This Be The Beginning Of The End For The Electoral College?

Maryland Takes the Lead

Maryland has taken the first step in reforming the methodology of the electoral college by mandating that the votes of Maryland's electoral college delegate be fully alloted to the victor in the popular vote for president. As much as we pride ourselves on being a democracy, many times our votes have been nullified by the entire workings of the electoral college. We need to reform our electoral process in many ways, including campaign reform, campaign oversight, verification of candidates and eventual elimination of the electoral college.

The electoral college was put into place by our framers and founders because the vast majority of voters were not well-educated and there was still a bit of elitism among our forefathers. Now that we have a more diverse and better educated electorate, we should eliminate this last bastion of institutionalized elitism and let the populous vote count for more than a popularity metric... then we should work on making sure that politics and civics are given its due attention in our schools, much in the way it was once taught and emphasized.

Perhaps if we reform our electoral processes, we might just elect representatives and officials that put our interests first, thus producing a government that truly represents our constitutional, ethical and moral values. Well, it's a good thought in any case.

As the nation braces for a long and numbing presidential election, the State of Maryland has done voters a favor by rejecting the Electoral College as a fossil in need of a democratic makeover. Gov. Martin O’Malley and the Annapolis legislature made the state the first in the nation to decide that its Electoral College members should someday be required to vote for the presidential candidate chosen by a plurality of the nation’s voters, not according to the state’s parochial tally.

The change would not take effect until it won final acceptance by enough states to amount to a 270-vote majority in the college. (Maryland has 10 votes.) But it is something all Americans would benefit from, particularly the masses of voters routinely ignored when candidates focus on a few battleground states — just 16 in 2004 — that increasingly settle modern campaigns.

The need to scrap the creaky college machinery was made clear in the angst of the 2000 election. George W. Bush lost the popular election by almost 544,000 votes, yet won in a Supreme Court showdown over Florida’s electors that hinged on far fewer disputed state ballots. Four years later, it was Mr. Bush’s turn to sweat as he handily won the national vote yet came close to losing Ohio — and the White House — in the college’s arcane state-by-state fragmentation of the popular majority.

The reform movement, driven by a bipartisan coalition called National Popular Vote, has a long way to go. But Hawaii is close to approval, and hundreds of legislators are sponsoring the change in more than 40 other states. It is an ingenious way around the fact that the alternative strategy of trying to amend the Constitution would require the approval of three-fourths of the states, leaving veto power in the hands of smaller states over-represented in the college.