Wednesday, December 13, 2000

By DAVE HAMRICK
Editor-at-large

While we're contemplating the need for reforms in our voting system a need that has become evident due to the close vote in Florida why not consider this:

Why not go back to the system in which the president is selected by electors chosen by state legislatures, rather than by the voters.

Wait! At least think for a minute before you react.

That's how it was done until the 1820s. I haven't studied enough to know why it was changed, but it was.

Why do we choose the electors who choose the president by popular vote?

If your answer is "because we are a democracy," think again. As I pointed out in last week's column, and as many far smarter than I have pointed out many times, we are not a democracy, and thank God we're not.

If we truly wanted to be a pure democracy, with today's technology we could achieve it. You could simply vote by Internet or by phone on every law and every decision of government.

You could hire the city or county administrator, and spend an hour or two every week telling him or her how you want your government services run. You could vote on whether to build a jail and how to fund it, how many fire trucks to buy and how much to pay the folks who drive them, or whether to paint the new water tower blue or purple.

There would have to be a limit, of course, to how often a new law could be proposed. Someone would be bound to offer laws legalizing marijuana once a day, and that would gum up the works.

But with such a limit, there's no logistical reason why we couldn't vote on every major decision at every level of government, and quit paying those fat salaries and pensions to get people to make those decisions for us.

You would have to have an e-mail password or a telephone punch-in code to be sure your vote was recorded only once. That's not a big problem.

So why don't we do it?

We don't do it because the founding fathers, bless them, realized that, as bad as a government of laws is, a government of people would be much, much worse.

Under that sort of mob rule we would be governed by fad, and the majority would tyrannize the minority.

For instance, let's say someone studied demographics and figured out that 60 percent of Americans make less than $70,000 a year family income, and came up with the bright idea that the government should send each family a check to increase everyone's income to $100,000.

You might have to increase those numbers to include 70 percent of the population, because some people in that group would be smart enough to vote against it. But at some percentage I'm sure you could interest a majority in voting for such a measure. And with just a few similar ideas, you would bankrupt our government and our economy and a dictator would be sure to move in and take over in the ensuing chaos.

Those same founding fathers left it up to the state legislatures to choose electors who then chose a president, and it was probably an attack of populist ideology that caused all the state legislatures to eventually decide that the method they wanted to use in choosing those electors was the popular vote.

What that did was to make the president more powerful and more corruptible.

That's what all this worry over campaign reform is all about. It takes huge amounts of money to elect a president, and there's a general feeling that those who provide the most money end up buying some influence with the most powerful person in the world.

Get rid of the popular vote and you get rid of that sort of corruption.

Of course, there's always the worry that shifting power away from the president and, therefore, more to Congress and the courts would allow Congress to rum amok.

Not as long as the president has the veto power, which is in the Constitution.

We are a government of laws, not of people. But what has evolved is a system in which one person has an awful lot of power, and we have had one recent occupant of the White House who has demonstrated that a president, using executive orders, can repeatedly flout the Constitution and get away with it.

So, are we a government of laws after all?

Think about it.

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