Some thoughts on Election 2012

   It's Wednesday morning, Nov. 7, 2012, not quite 24 hours after President Barack Obama secured reelection. Finally, we can breathe again. Finally, the endless campaign ads can stop. Finally, we have answered the questions of who will control Congress for the next two years and who will lead this nation for the next four. Now, life can return to normal, right? Not quite.
   If one thing became apparent last night, it's that the system that was brilliantly conceived by our Founders more than 200 years ago is no longer working as I think it was intended. Oh, we had a definitive winner at the end of last night, with Obama collecting 303 electoral votes to Mitt Romney's 206. And in that sense, the system worked perfectly. But if you looked at the map and saw how many states went to Republicans and how many went to Democrats, something is very wrong.
   Specifically, Romney carried the South and large parts of the middle of the country. Obama, as expected carried the coasts and the Industrial Northeast, with a few isolated blue specks in the middle. To look at the Electoral map, one would almost certainly conclude that our country was a strongly Republican nation. Yet, that's not what happened.
   Because a good portion of our population lives along the coasts -- in states like California, Washington, Oregon, New York, Pennsylvania and in the Northeast, Obama was able to collect the Electoral votes he needed while leaving the middle of the country largely to Romney, with the exception of a few battleground states such as Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin. While that strategy was good enough to win, is it really fair that the middle part of the country and the South went largely unrepresented last night? I don't think so.
   The Electoral College is an example of the many brilliant compromises our founding fathers made in creating our Constitution. Although many of the convention delegates originally favored the Virginia Plan, which would have weighted representation in Congress based on a state's population and had the president and vice president selected by Congress, many delegates from smaller states feared intrigue created by a small group of men gathering to select the nation's leaders. They also feared that the president's and vice president's independence would be compromised if they were selected by Congress. And they feared that larger, more populous states would carry disproportianate weight in selecting the president and vice president. And so, the Electoral College was born.
   Today, Americans elect the president and his vice president indirectly. When we cast our ballots for president, we are actually selecting a slate of Electors who are charged with voting for that  candidate, though they are under no legal obligation to do so. The number of Electoral votes assigned to each state is identical to that state's representation in Congress.
   The flaw in this system is obvious and fatal. Although the Electoral College was intended to even the playing field, to make sure that smaller states weren't dominated by larger states, we still have a system where the most populous states can determine an election's outcome. Worse yet, under the current system, a state's most populous cities -- such as Los Angeles and San Francisco in California  -- can actually swing a state in a candidate's favor. We saw this last night when California was given to Obama, even before all the votes were counted.
   At the end of last night, both Obama and Romney had collected 49 percent of the popular vote, with only a few thousand actual votes separating them. Yet, Obama was clearly ahead in the Electoral College. How is this fair, that the will of so many people was thwarted? And what can we do about it?
   One of the advantages of the current system is that it usually provides us with a definitive winner. Whichever candidate collects the most Electoral votes wins, no matter the popular tally. If we wanted to place more emphasis on the popular vote, one way would be to let popular vote determine the outcome. Keep the Electoral College, but only go to the Electoral votes in the case of a tie in the popular tally. In that case, whoever had the most Electoral votes would be declared the winner.
   Another idea is to divide each state into districts based on the number of that state's Electoral votes. Each district would get one Electoral vote, and they would be assigned according to how each district voted. The winner in each district would get that district's vote instead of the "winner take all" approach we currently have. This would likely increase the time it takes to declare a winner, but it would have the effect of making each vote mean something. And it would prevent a few population centers in each state from determining who won the state.
    Election 2012 is in the books, and while not everyone will be happy with the outcome, we should be thankful that we live in a country where we are free to elect our own leaders and where we continue to have peaceful elections. Our system has worked well, with only a few hiccups over the past 200+ years. That's remarkable, and it's something to be proud of. But that doesn't mean it can't be tweaked.
   My hope is that between now and the next election in 2016, we will seek to improve our system so that everyone's voice, not just a few, can be clearly heard and can help determine our nation's future.