Iowa, Electoral College, and Pie Holes
Posted by Pie Hole on January 3, 2008 under Pie Hole | 
Comments are off for this article
Today is the date of the Iowa Caucuses. Through some secret elections and processes that baffles anyone outside of Iowa, and most people inside Iowa, they are still confusing. To be quite honest, the only people who really care about the outcome of the Iowa Caucuses are the presidential nominees and the news stations. Since Iowa only has seven Electoral Votes, having it be the first state with any sort of presidential nomination gives it some extra money.
Wikipedia claims that
An electoral college is a set of electors, who are empowered as a deliberative body to elect a candidate to a particular office. Often these electors represent a different organization or entity with each organization or entity by a particular number of electors or with votes weighted in a particular way. Many times, though, the electors are simply important persons whose wisdom, it is hoped, would provide a better choice than a larger body. The system can ignore the wishes of a general membership whose thinking may not be considered. When applied on a national scale, such as the election of a country’s leader, the popular vote can on occasion run counter to the electoral college’s vote, and for this reason there are some who feel that the system is a distortion of true democracy in a democratic society.
The entire United States Constitution was built around a system of Checks and Balances. Since “Many times, though, the electors are simply important persons whose wisdom,” it is obviously another Check and Balance built into the Constitution. People vote for someone. What if it’s the wrong person? The Electoral College checks the people. The House and Senate are Checks against the Electoral College. Even in spite of the people espousing their belief that the Electoral College is not needed, there are some who read between the lines of those who want to discard the Electoral College.
Most states have an “All or Nothing” system that gives all of the state’s Electoral Votes to one person from one party. The Iowa Caucuses are a method of whittling down a party’s nominees to offer the people just one person on election day. Unfortunately, since more and more states want the dollars that the media circus brings, they have been pushing their primary and caucus dates forward to create “Super Tuesdays” of media and political blitz. It stretches the Primary season so much that it begins as soon as Inauguration Day, and stretches three and a half years until the conventions in the summer before election day in November of every fourth year, and most voters are burned out.
The obvious solution to voter burnout is for the largest states to move their primaries back as far as possible. If California, Ohio, New York, Texas, Illinois, Florida, and Pennsylvania (all states with 20 or more Electoral College votes) moved their primaries back to the earliest weekend they could before the parties’ conventions, some of the other states with three Electoral College votes would jump on that “Mega Tuesday” to add clout to their states.
I can see that this is starting to drag me into a tar pit of exponiferation, so I must stop here. Remind me in a couple days to keep writing about this so I can get more elaborated and insightful comments. In the mean time, most people who are not politicos or in the media who really really give a rat’s ass about what happens in Iowa today should probably BLOW IT OUT YOUR PIE HOLE(S)!
Popularity: 22% [?]
This post was tagged with electoral college, Iowa, money, pie hole, US primaries, voting.
