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CYNTHIA TUCKER

You matter, but your vote might not

Published on: 10/06/04

As much as we Americans like to brag about our democracy, it's still a 
work in progress. Not until the 1960s did the nation begin to honor its 
promise of full equality for all. And we're still stuck with a vestige 
of the Founding Fathers' disdain for the wisdom of the average citizen — 
the Electoral College.

Because of the college, not every vote counts in a presidential contest. 
If you're a Bush supporter in California or New York, your vote won't 
count. The same is true if you're a Kerry supporter in Georgia or Texas. 
That's because the majority of states award their electoral college 
votes on a winner-take-all basis. Sen. John Kerry is widely expected to 
get every electoral college vote in California, as President Bush will 
no doubt reap every electoral college vote from Texas.

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Cynthia Tucker
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So in a tight election like this one, the candidates ignore states — 
like Georgia — where either man shows a substantial lead, homing in, 
instead, on 16 to 20 "battleground" states where the polls show a dead 
heat. The result is a weird distortion where every hamlet in 
Pennsylvania is being trampled by presidential candidates and Secret 
Service agents and the whims of every Michigan voter taken into account.

While Atlanta — home to Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, CNN 
and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — stands a greater 
chance of being the target of a terrorist attack than, say, Cincinnati, 
home of Procter & Gamble, the campaigns don't care. Bush and Kerry 
pander to Buckeyes.

Their inattention to Georgia is prompting a few college students who 
grew up here to vote in their adopted states. Robin Blusiewicz, a 
Westminster graduate who attends Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, told 
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Andrea Jones that she will cast her 
vote for Kerry in Ohio.

"It just seemed like the smart thing to do," Blusiewicz said.

Robert Lee, a College Republican who grew up in Thomasville, has made a 
similar decision. He told Jones he would cast his vote in Florida, where 
he attends school. Why cast a vote here when Bush likely has every one 
of Georgia's 15 electoral votes sewn up?

If there was once a good reason for the existence of the Electoral 
College, it has long since disappeared. The nation is no longer a loose 
confederacy of strong states; it is a nation where citizens see 
themselves as Americans first and Georgians second, third or tenth. It's 
a union of highly mobile citizens, many of whom are likely to live in 
several states during their lifetimes. If the Electoral College was 
intended to protect the peculiar interests of states, that's no longer 
necessary. (Nor is it necessary to protect the presidency from the 
unwashed masses of regular voters.)

All the Electoral College does is set up the possibility that a 
president may be elected even though he did not receive the most popular 
votes. That has happened three times in American history — with 
Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, Benjamin Harrison in 1888 and George W. 
Bush in 2000. With the nation so divided, it is likely to happen again 
over the next couple of decades. That tends to undermine Americans' 
faith in their elections process.

In November, Colorado's voters will decide whether to join Maine and 
Nebraska, the only two states which divvy up electoral college votes. 
The issue will come up for a vote because Colorado has a process that 
allows citizens to introduce ballot initiatives.

Georgia has no such process, and it is quite unlikely that the state 
Legislature would pass a bill to change the process for allocating 
electoral college votes. That would be the case whether Bush or Kerry 
won; partisans tend to stick with the system that benefited them.

A serious rethinking of the Electoral College will have to await the day 
when a president is elected by an overwhelming popular vote. With such a 
mandate, he (or she) might feel secure enough to institute a change long 
overdue.

Until then, those of us outside the "battleground" will have to settle 
for watching the presidential campaign on TV. We're unlikely to see any 
presidential candidates here in Georgia.