Let's Vote on It
Krayton Kerns
8/13.08
After the 2000 presidential election there has been a move to replace the Electoral College with a direct popular vote system. This switch sounds simple enough as it is exactly how we elect our county coroner and state representatives however, this change would be a disaster for Montanans. The easiest way to explain why, hit me in July as I was riding the subways under Washington DC.
Deep in the bowels of our nation’s capitol is a subway system containing a couple hundred miles of track. Having a car is just an expensive hassle in any large metropolitan area thanks to $1.80 subway tickets. The system seems confusing at first but before long you can sprint from train to train, plop into a seat, scrunch your I-Pod phones into your ear canals and adopt that vacant “I-don’t-give-a-crap” stare displayed by DC subway natives.
Because I am a redneck I found underground travel convenient but disconcerting due to the lack of positional reference from either the sun or the north star. If you have to walk, which way is home? Since these things are powered by electricity, if eastern politicians were foolish enough to power their entire grid with alternative wind energy, the dang thing could leave me stranded when the wind quits blowing. (Evidently there aren’t many DC rednecks because I could not find another underground traveler who had a clue as to the direction of true north. When I asked them, most just popped the I-Pod phones out of their ears and replaced the “I-don’t-give-a-crap” stare with a regular “blank” stare.)
Now to my point: Let’s leap to November of some fictitious year and, assume there is a fictitious presidential election where the Electoral College has been replaced by a popular vote system. Fictitious candidate “O” claims the energy crisis can be negated by inflating your tires and swapping out your plugs, points and condenser. He also hints that raising the gas tax would encourage conservation and make us more like his heroes in the socialist democracies of Europe.
Fictitious candidate “M” advocates solving the energy crisis by expanding domestic oil exploration through off-shore drilling…that is, if the Chinese will scoot their drilling rigs over and let us drill off our own coast. They probably won’t because China loves environmental extremists who have convinced representatives like Nancy Pelosi to prohibit off-shore drilling to American companies. (Are crude oil barrels from Chinese companies drilling off our Gulf Coast stamped “Made in China” or “Made in USA?”)
It’s now November 4th and time to vote. The DC area, like many of our big cities, has a population density of 8,952 people per square mile and almost all hop the subway for the $1.80 ride to the polling place. Expensive gas, inflating tires and tuning engines are meaningless to them, so most vote fictitious candidate “O”. After all, “O” also proposed penalizing big oil with a windfall profits tax and redistributing that money to the citizenry in the form of another $1,000 stimulus check. DC residents don’t even own cars so that check is pure gravy.
Montana has a population density of 6.2 people per square mile and voters here make a 45 mile parts run to Shiptons before they stop at the polling place. European style gas taxes will bankrupt them regardless the pressure in their tires or the tune-up status of their engines. Most vote fictitious candidate “M”.
With a popular vote system do you see who will always elect the president? It won’t be Montanans. The concerns of country folk in the sparsely populated states will be ignored or overruled by voters living in the foreign world of the big cities. Across this nation state legislatures are calling for a Constitutional Convention to adopt this change. Montana’s legislature must vote “no”.
