More Democratic, Less American
By Michael R. Bowen (08/05/04)
Robert Koehler, an editor at Tribune Media Services, has issued a call for repair of America's broken electoral system. He says he wants our elections to be more "Democratic", and he's not kidding.
He begins correctly enough, by decrying our shabby voter participation rates. It's a disgrace when less than half of Americans vote in presidential elections while more than 80% of the citizens of Bosnia, New Zealand, and Italy show up. It's worth noting, however, that more than 30 of the nations studied by his source (the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance) have enforced voting with fines and other sanctions for failure to attend. But facts really aren't the point here anyway, and by the fourth paragraph we can see the real objective of Mr. Koehler's campaign: revenge for Florida 2000.
Getting in a cute little jab at the proven winner of 2000 election, Mr. Koehler remarked that the Bush administration continues to "violently export pseudo-democracy" while the same "super-patriots" are less interested in participatory democracy at home. Koehler says people don't vote because they've lost confidence in our electoral process, and they've lost confidence because, well, just insert your favorite Gore 2000 lawsuit allegation. For this reason, says Kohler, we must invite foreign election observers to monitor the 2004 vote, and he knows just the outfit to do the job: Global Exchange, a predictably leftist San Francisco-based activist group.
The 2000 election, in Koehler's eyes, was marred by "everything from widespread minority disenfranchisement" (a lie), to " preposterous and confusing ballots" (which were designed by Democrats), to "the trumping of the national will by an anachronism called the electoral College" (much of the Constitution being an anachronism to Democrats).
Mr. Koehler is an editor for large media organization, so presumably he heard the outcome of the extensive investigations of Florida 2000, carried out by several major news organizations and the United States Commission on Civil Rights : not a single instance of deliberate disenfranchisement was ever found. Interestingly, in Florida, the districts with the highest number of spoiled minority ballots were controlled by........... Democrats. Even more interesting, among minorities, the greatest number of erroneously cast ballots came from the most wealthy voters. The police dogs? The roadblocks? The intimidation campaigns? Sorry, didn't happen. The allegations weren't just spin, and they weren't good old-fashioned campaign rhetoric. They were flat-out lies, and Mr. Koehler knows it. But he'll still use them to change the way our elections work.
The other great Gore 2000 trope is The Popular Vote, which Gore unquestionably won, and which is completely irrelevant. The electoral College, that "anachronism" Mr. Koehler so despises, is of course there for a very good reason. Without it, every election would be decided by the most populous states. The framers of the Constitution understood well that America would become a federation of diverse regions: rural and urban, industrial and agricultural, worldly coastal sophisticates and straightforward heartlanders. In a straight popular vote our president would always be chosen by New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, so the Electoral College was established to permit Montana and Wyoming to have a voice instead of being shouted down by California. In other words, it permits true diversity in our electoral system. Democrats, of course, champion diversity -- as long as it puts Democrats in office.
Oh, and let's not forget another emerging Democratic constituency: criminals. Mr. Koehler laments that there are still states which will not permit a killer or a child molester to cast a vote from his prison cell. And since the majority of prisoners are black, voilĂ ! Disenfranchisement! Racism! Mr. Koehler and the Democratic Party have a problem with the concept that rights cannot exist without responsibilities, so they think that even if you violate society's rules by robbing banks, you are still entitled to a say in how society runs. Heck, if we can't restrict the voting rights of criminals, who's to say that we shouldn't be allowed to take away their freedom? Oh, wait-- the Democrats already say that. Imprisonment and punishment aren't the solution to crime; we're supposed to be looking for the Root Causes: poverty, racism, etc. It's all really society's fault, after all.
With this sort of blather going on, you just know that we're going to hear about campaign finance: "the overwhelming influence of money on the US political process" as Mr. Koehler puts it. But didn't we just solve that problem, thanks to Granny D and John McCain? Of course not: money, like water, will always find a way to seep in. Money follows power, and power follows money, and the reason for the "overwhelming influence of money" in choosing our government is the overwhelming influence of our government on money. If our government stuck to the duties prescribed by the Constitution, it wouldn't have all that money to dish out, and there'd be no point in all those lobbyists and campaign contributions. As P.J. O'Rourke likes to say, "When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold will be legislators."
Mr. Koehler's argument, then, boils down to this: our voters are stifled by disenfranchisement that doesn't actually happen, democracy is derailed by an Electoral College which permits all the different regions and subcultures of America to have a voice, the right to vote is criminally denied to people who criminally deny others the right not to be shot to death, and, despite the fact that the government takes away all our money and distributes it to the constituencies of whichever party is in power, the only reason there is so much money influence in our elections is that we haven't invited observers from Africa to oversee things.
In short, the problem with our electoral system is that doesn't elect enough Democrats. Mr. Koehler and his Lefty friends at Global Exchange have a solution to our problems, all right. All we need to do is make our system more big-D Democratic, and less American.
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