As one comment on my previous article on the elections noticed, we hardly have any choice in local elections, but look at the presidential offerings. We seem to have a plethora of choices with names of presidential and vice-presidential candidates in seven parties. But we all know that we are not voting for those candidates because of the Constitution’s electoral college system of presidential choice.
Presumably we are voting for five electoral college representatives from this state who will vote for us. Who are these people? Well, by reading a lot of old news I was able to find three names: Debora Maesta, Eric Coll, and Julie Rochman. Two of these are Republicans and one is a Democrat. So, I really don’t know who I’m voting for or why since I can’t tell anything about them. The reason for this state of affairs is the result of the creation of political parties and the way the parties took over the whole voting system of the country.
Let’s go back to the beginning. The founding fathers were clearly and articulately against the formation of political parties. Madison, Hamilton, Jay, Jefferson all wrote about the danger of parties and factionalism to the political fabric of the nation. The Constitution avoids parties like the plague and especially in its invention of the electoral college.
While we may dislike that system because it does not empower the people to select its president, at the time of the Constitution it was a reasonable way to give the electorate that power. Of course, the electorate was pretty small, not only was the mostly rural population pretty small but basically only property owning and tax paying white, male Christians were voters (about 6% of the population, I read somewhere). Presumably, a voter elected a representative that was locally known and respected to vote for some presidential candidate who most likely was not known locally but known to the electoral representative because of his wider contacts. It seems, given the mores of the time, a reasonable way of bringing individual and direct knowledge into political play. The electoral college gathered together, and each Elector casts two votes (Art. II of the Constitution). The highest number of votes selected the President, and the next highest, the Vice-President. No parties.
But voting in Congress during the first few decades of the country quickly settled into groups, and in the competition, minority groups started forming parties for elections in order to get greater legislative clout. Parties, therefore, were formed specifically to win elections.
They are electoral machines. They turned thoughtful consideration of what was best for the nation into strategies for winning, creating the horse race we are now accustomed to. Gerrymandering was one of its first partisan inventions, named after Elbridge Gerry, a Democratic Republican who initially opposed the creation of parties but used redistricting to defeat the Federalists. While ideology or basic philosophies of governance have always been part of party rhetoric, positions shifted all the time depending on the tactics of winning. We know this because of very radical changes in positions, most recently the shift in Republican values when that party found itself having to support Trump in 2015. A much more dramatic shift happened earlier when the Republican party replaced the Democratic party in the South in championing states’ rights, a partisan issue that was the cause of the Civil War, while the Democrats took on the mantle of the federal union that the Republican Lincoln wore.
The take-over of the whole election system by party structure is clearly demonstrated in the Primary Elections held for the Democrats and the Republicans and from which we independents are barred. But it is also clear on my ballot today which by law only has the parties’ candidates’ names and not the electors’ names. Similarly, the joining of the Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates into a single ticket exposes the dominance of the party system over our original electoral system. That President and Vice-president serve the party is something not at all envisioned in either the original Constitution or the 12th Amendment (though that amendment already has hidden in it a party system).
Parties, as you may know, are top-down organizations. They are run, whether the Republican, the Democratic, or the Chinese Communist Party, by a Central Committee, at the top of which sits the Chairman. In New Mexico, the Republican and Democratic Conventions legally appoint the electoral college representatives of the party, but it is so insignificant an event that convention news releases don’t mention the names. Practically, the Chairman names them by certifying the names of the five individuals to the Secretary of State. So, we are not even electing those representatives by our vote. We only chose the party. The parties chose the electors for us.
This party system of voting makes us even more remote from choosing a President or a Vice-President than the electoral college system itself. We are doubly removed.
In 2019, New Mexico joined the coalition to replace the electoral system by a supposedly direct vote. The state pledged to give its electoral college votes to the winner of the national popular vote if the coalition states combined electoral college votes exceed 270, the number needed to elect a President. But even then, we are far from a direct vote if the party apparatus stands in the middle.
As I said, I don’t know what I’m voting for, but I’ll vote anyway.