it takes a nation of millions to hold us back
Air America Radio reported this morning that CO's attempt to reform how votes for president are counted - Amendment 36 - is polling rather low, a little more than 30%. The amendment in question would call on the state's nine electoral votes to be split - five to the victor, four to the loser. There are two reasons for this perceived resistance to the new amendment, neither of which has anything to do with voter choice: First, the hinterlands of CO is home to an active, heavily moneyed, and perversly apocalyptic right-wing politics, and the chance the state's electoral votes might go to a heathen lib is too much for the white moron element to bear. This dovetails neatly into the fact that if 36 passes, it goes into effect this year, and as of this posting, CO is a "weak Kerry" state.
There is simply no good reason to continue to use the electoral college. None. None whatsoever, no matter how many viciously narrow-minded editorial boards and bow-tied-necks say so. There is always some silly bullshit reason pundits conjure up to oppose dumping the system - remember when you were in high school, and first learned about the EC? Wasn't the excuse then so a lunatic didn't get into the White House?
Here and now, one of the oft-mentioned reason's to block loopy-mad 36 is the result would be no candidate would want to spend time here campaigning if the votes were split. Now, even though I wasn't living here in 2000, my guess is neither candidate did a whole lot of stumping in CO four years ago - the state finished with Bush ahead by well over seven percentage points. These same pundits also may seem to be blind to the fact that the candidates have been spending more time whoring it up in the swing states than anyplace else, which should not be a confidence-builder in anybody's eyes - Bush and Kerry are running for president of the United States, not comptroller of Ohio.
It is a 200-plus-year-old novelty, when women, the poor, and anyone who wasn't white could not vote, and on top of that, there were less than 20 states.
There continues to be a serious gap between the kind of politics Americans vote on and what this country actually stands for in the world. Dismantling the electoral college, even piecemeal, would be the sanest first step to bridging this gap.
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