There is a big stir going on once again about how a candidate for president can win the popular vote and lose the election. That’s because our election process is a mystifying and extremely costly and flawed process. Take note of the following, “political parties” are the operative words.
The two major political parties go about gerrymandering their voting districts to include party faithful and cut out others long before the general election. Party insiders also choose the electors for the Electoral College. Next there is a long drawn out nationwide winnowing process. The candidates spend months and millions of dollars promising, if they are elected, they will put a chicken in every pot and provide jobs for everyone and drain the swamp in Washington.
Once the character assassinations have been completed there is a big party called a convention held by at least the two major parties, at which candidates are chosen to be on the general election ballot in November.
When the general election is over in November and the popular votes are counted. One would think it is actually over, but no, the candidate that wins the popular vote may or may not win, even after having won the most votes in the general election.
That’s right; the winner will be decided by someone else, not you or me. The winner will be decided by some people the political parties had chosen. These people are electors to the Electoral College.
In Maine, political parties choose their electors at a state convention. Non-party candidates name their electors when they submit the signatures they must collect to get on the ballot. Using the district method, the state divides itself into a number of districts, allocating one of its state-wide electoral votes to each district. The winner of each district is awarded that district’s electoral vote, and the winner of the state-wide vote is then awarded the state’s remaining two electoral votes.
So if you couldn’t vote to choose an elector because you didn’t attend the partisan state electors convention and very few of us ever do, when the actual voting is done by the electors and they choose a candidate that did not win the popular vote, your general election vote didn’t count at all. Ain’t democracy great? I say, dump the Electoral College.