Dear Congresspeople,  

Today is November 8, 2000. The outcome of the presidential election is still in doubt, waiting on final results from Florida. During this election season, I have had some thoughts about the process that we use to elect the president of the United States. I see some problems with the system which is used and would be interested in any thoughts that you might have on this subject and also would like you to consider if the system could be altered. I suspect that this would require a constitutional amendment, but I think that it might be worth the effort to at least look into this possibility.  

Below, I have outlined the problems and have some suggestions for how they might be solved and some discussion.  

The electoral college system makes the values of votes (and voters) in different states different.  In this election we saw the candidates concentration the majority of their efforts in "battleground" states. As I understand it, these are states where the outcome of the presidential election is considered to be in doubt. Other states are considered, by campaign strategists, to be essentially won by one candidate or the other and are largely ignored. This seems to me to be an undesirable situation. I think that each person in this country should be treated equally (I think the constitution even says something about this). The state-by-state voting system devalues people in non-battleground states. The obvious solution to this is just to eliminate the electoral college and elect presidents on popular vote. An intermediate solution would be to have the electoral votes of each state be proportional to the votes gained by each candidate in each state. This would eliminate the all-or-nothing state and make each have the same value.  

The electoral college can lead to a candidate can be elected president while losing the popular vote. I think that everyone agrees that this is a problem. Why not eliminate the electoral college and elect presidents by popular vote.   

Third party candidates actually tend to hurt the changes that the major candidate whose views are most similar to theirs will be elected.  In this election it was said that a vote for Nader was the same as a vote for Bush. I do not entirely agree with this statement, but it is certainly true that a vote which went to Nader instead of to Gore increased Bush's chance of winning relative to Gore's chance of winning. Many people, myself included, felt that they had to vote for Gore rather than Nader, not because they wanted Gore over Nader, but because they were afraid that Bush might win and felt that that option was not at all tolerable.  One thing which would at least alter this situation would be to allow conditional voting. That is, you could vote for one candidate but specify that if that candidate did not win (or got less than X% of the vote) then your vote would transfer to another candidate. This would have allowed people in this election to vote for Nader but specify that if he did not win they their vote would go to Gore (or even Bush). I do not see this as a perfect solution, but it may be a better option than the current situation. The problems I do see with this solution are:

It would complicate election results calculations. I don't think that this would be a large problem in the days of computers, but there would have to be a clear cut system for determining what happens if votes for the candidate are very close to the cutoff. I think that this would be an issue, but could be dealt with. ·

It would marginalize votes for third parties. In many ways the major parties could ignore the third part candidates even more than they do now because they would probably assume that they would end up with the votes which now go to the third party. I am not sure what to do about this, but this system would at least allow voters to express their desire to elect third party candidates and would potentially allow third party candidates to more effectively demonstrate their popular support.   

Thank you for your time and please let me know if you have any comments or questions.   

Ethan Strauss