By Nolan Higgins
In Motion Staff Writer
Democracy is the foundation on which our American political system was built.
It is broken.
The source of this breakdown can be traced back to political processes that have been around since the Founding Fathers, but have continually gotten worse over the last few decades as politicians become more brazen. These two processes have been plaguing America’s political system since the beginning. This corrosion of the democratic process has many Americans beginning to lose faith in the power of their vote. This dwindling faith is far from unfounded and some might even argue it was only a matter of time.
One nightmarish political process is known as gerrymandering, the drawing of congressional districts by state legislatures designed to favor one political party or another, with little regard for fairness or true democracy. The thought behind gerrymandering is to take large swathes or groups of people of the same political party and dissect them into separate congressional districts to the point where those people cannot become a credible threat. For example, look at the 2012 elections in Pennsylvania.
Those elections played out in the opposite direction that any true democracy should. Fifty-one percent of the popular vote in Pennsylvania went to the Democratic Party, yet the Democrats only received five out of the 18 House seats up for election. So 51 percent of the vote won less than a third of the seats being voted on simply because Republicans in the state legislature twisted the rules of our political system in their favor. But Republicans aren’t the only ones who do this. The Democratic Party pulled a similar stunt in New York in the 2012 elections. Democrats pulled in 66 percent of the popular vote yet ended up winning 21 out of the 27 seats up for election. Gerrymandering these congressional districts even effects presidential elections, given the pull over the Electoral College.
Few Americans truly understand what the Electoral College is. The Electoral College is a group of representatives from each state chosen by the states’ political parties. Because of this, if a vote is cast for Candidate A, the vote doesn’t actually go towards Candidate A, it goes to a representative who may or may not vote for Candidate A. The representative may choose to vote for candidate B or candidate C, even if the candidate is not affiliated with the representative’s political party. And this is simply the beginning of how little a vote may matter, if at all.
Another flaw within the Electoral College is a presidential election rule of “winner-take-all,” which makes minority party votes irrelevant. California is a state dominated by Democrats. Many people would consider it a “blue state,” yet California still had 5 million votes for the Republicans in 2012. Every single one of California’s Electoral College representatives, however, voted Democratic, leaving 5 million votes unheard. An even sadder truth though, is learning one vote in California has less power than almost anywhere else in the nation.
Due to the structuring of Electoral College representatives on a state-by-state basis, residents of less populated states have more voting power than those in more populous states. For example, in 2012, Wyoming had three electoral votes, or one vote for every 135,000 voters. On the flipside, California had 55 electoral votes or one for every 411,000 voters, giving Wyoming voters almost three times the voting power. All of these pieces compound themselves into a terrible recipe that completely undermines the power of votes cast. This recipe for disaster has left as much as 80 percent of the votes cast in past elections irrelevant, having no effect on the outcome of the election.
Given the sheer amount of problems corroding at the foundation of our political system, it is no wonder in recent elections, voter turnout has hovered around 60 percent even dipping as low as 54.2 percent in the 2000 election.
Unfortunately, the only way to fix this broken system would be through the power of democracy. Voter turnout has to increase for any changes to be made. Otherwise, the pattern of four out of every five Americans going voiceless will continue.