The USA should not blame the Electoral College, better to go Parliamentary
Some Americans are angry about the Electoral College, saying that the USA ought to get rid of it and only count the popular vote.
Guess what, the Electoral College, as imperfect as it is, is the one thing that is responsible for the USA’s de facto two party system.
Without it, the USA would degenerate into a Presidential system that closely resembles the Philippines and most of Latin America, and they will end up with a proliferation of parties.
Yes, the winner-take-all system of the Electoral College for most states is brutal. Even if a candidate wins by a thread in the popular vote in a state like California which has 55 electoral votes, all those electoral votes are given to the candidate who wins by a thread.
Nebraska and Maine are the only two states have a system in which their counting isn’t statewide for all electoral votes but is based on each Congressional district. So counting is done by district, whichever candidate wins in each district takes that district’s electoral vote.
And then the remaining 2 electoral votes are counted by looking at the state’s total votes. Whoever wins statewide gets those two non-district electoral votes.
Lots of people who’ve compared countries wondered why is it that while parliamentary systems are generally better than presidential systems, among all the Presidential systems, only the USA is the only one that hasn’t gone through a major democratic breakdown in a long time. All countries in Latin America are Presidentialist and all went through military juntas due to coups, or got disrupted by revolutions like Cuba’s by Castro, etc… the Philippines went through Martial Law and then a revolution got rid of the President who declared Marital Law. The same went for the presidentialist countries of Africa.
As it turns out, it’s really just because the USA is the only Presidential system that has a parliamentary-like “indirect system of voting” thanks to the Electoral College.
Like it or not, it is the Electoral College that has somehow stabilized the system to avoid the chaos of direct popular-vote presidential elections where the natural tendency is for a plethora of parties and candidates to emerge.
Why?
Because there is a major barrier to entry for newbie-parties. Someone who says he wants to run for President can’t just run for president just because he wants to. He needs to be a member of a party that has a nationwide presence.
If you are a natural-born American citizen, you cannot just run for President because you want to. You need to run for President and have a nationwide “party infrastructure” that will allow you to field “candidates” for each of the electoral college “slots” in each state.
There are a total of 538 electoral votes all throughout the USA, and they essentially represent the total number of Congressmen which is 435, plus the total number of Senators which is 100, and then 3 electoral votes to represent Washington, D.C. which is not part of any state.
To realistically run for president, you need to find 538 people who are registered members of your party who must come from each of the 50 states, preferably from each of the districts in each of the states. Not an easy thing to do. And because the stakes are high, it discourages new parties from joining in. That’s why there are only two major parties.
In essence, the Electoral College is a PARALLEL CONGRESS. Each state has a delegation to the electoral college that equals the number of Representatives and Senators that it has. California has 55 electoral votes because California has 53 congressional district representatives and 2 senators. Add them together, you have 55. Texas has 38 electoral votes because it has 33 congressional district representatives and 2 senators. New York has 29 electoral votes because it has 27 congressional district representatives and 2 senators.
It is like a Parliamentary System in that there need to be representatives who will be voted per district and they in turn vote for who will be their leader — and that leader becomes the Prime Minister.
The US Founding Fathers set this up because they were coming from a British Parliamentary tradition prior to Independence.
This fact is what somehow saved the US system somewhat from the perils that most newer presidential systems went through when they decided to go with the more chaotic popular vote. Just look at the mess in Latin America and the Philippines. Then again, because they still departed from the parliamentary system, the US system could no longer take advantage of the superiority of the parliamentary system’s features.
In Parliamentary Systems, for instance, the party that was formerly in the Opposition can easily transition into forming the new Government because of the Shadow Cabinet. For every majority bloc Cabinet Member, there is one member from the Opposition who will be in the Opposition’s Shadow Cabinet scrutinizing and watching over everything that the Government does.
If an election occurs and the Opposition wins and becomes the new Government, the Leader of the Opposition already knows what he needs to know to become the Prime Minister because he already had access to information by virtue of his position in the Shadow Cabinet. The Opposition’s Shadow Minister for Defense will have no trouble whatsoever immediately becoming the new Government’s Minister for Defense because during his stint in the opposition shadow cabinet, he would have been present in the meetings presided by the former Minister of Defense from the previous ruling party, and he would have had access to all the same documents.
In the Philippines and in the USA, there is this need to swiftly cobble together a “transition team” to supposedly “smoothly transition” from the old order to the new one.
In a Parliamentary System, there’s no need! The Opposition would have already had access to what the Ruling Party was up to during the whole time.
Also, good Prime Ministers and their team can continue on in office for as long as they continue to deliver positive results.
In the Presidential System, there are term limits. In the USA, they give them 2 terms. In the Philippines and in many countries of Latin America, they tend to give only 1 term, forcing presidents to alternate because they cannot continue on consecutively.
Third World Countries cannot afford to have such discontinuity.
We need long periods of 20 to 30 years of non-stop progress and development that is consistent with a general plan.
That’s why Parliamentary Systems are better…
So…
If Americans are disappointed with the results of their election, and if other people from presidentialist countries are disappointed with the results of their own elections, it’s time to consider a PARLIAMENTARY SYSTEM.
Nope, Americans, the Electoral College is not the problem. The Presidential System is the problem.
Go and learn about the parliamentary system…
Now’s a good time to think about it.
I believe: This is a CoRRECT™ Video with a very positive message
Walang Natira: Gloc-9's MTV Rap about the OFW Phenomenon