Where you live should not determine the value of your vote
Thomas Jefferson warned that Americans should not “remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”
So when the Florida Legislature finally saw fit to replace Confederate Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith with educator and activist Mary McLeod Bethune in the National Statuary Hall Collection in Washington, D.C., I felt some relief. However, even after years of recognition of Smith’s manifest unfitness for such a place of honor and near-unanimous support for civil-rights hero Bethune as a replacement, our Legislature managed to pass only a compromise bill loaded with cruel irony. The move requires the continued display of Smith in a public location at taxpayer expense, but necessitates private funds be raised for Bethune. Despite the obvious flaws, this statue switcheroo is a step in the right direction — that direction being no longer honoring white supremacists who actively fought against the United States.
Having finally settled the statue debate, and while we are tearing down the vestiges of systematic racial disenfranchisement, I suggest we focus on one relic of our nation’s past still wreaking havoc today: the Electoral College.
The Electoral College is rooted in racism every bit as much as the statue of Edmund Kirby Smith, and is just as deserving of condemnation and removal from its place of prestige as the bronze sculpture that bears his likeness. Early American politicians drafted expansion state boundaries, which determine the apportionment of the Electoral College, in a deliberate effort to keep slavery legal. By adding two states at a time, they were able to maintain a balance between slave states and free states, temporarily preventing the country from ending slavery — an unapologetically racist motivation.
Two hundred years later, those seemingly arbitrary boundaries are still limiting the influence of diverse voters in high-population states and giving disproportionate power to mostly white voters in rural states. This is because the Electoral College mirrors each state’s representation in Congress — another decidedly imbalanced, dysfunctional antiquity — leaving out millions of American citizens who live beyond traditional state boundaries. Even if you are able to look past its objectively racist history, it should bother you that the Electoral Colleges allows Wyomingites three times the influence of Michiganders, Vermonters nearly double the power of Montanans, and island-based Puerto Ricans no say at all.
Ending the Electoral College would be particularly beneficial to voters in Florida, who are woefully undervalued in the current system. By combining the populations of Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Kansas, Maine, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming, you get about 21 million people, approximately the same as the population of our crazy-but-lovable peninsula.
In presidential elections, Florida’s 21 million people get 29 electoral votes. Those 21 million Americans control an astounding 59 electoral votes, easily overpowering Florida’s voice.
Over a dozen states have already taken steps to fix this problem, by signing on to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. The Compact — a collaborative, state-based effort that would bypass the Electoral College without requiring a constitutional amendment — already has broad support in Florida. A recent poll found that nearly 70 percent of Floridians support moving to a national popular-vote system. In addition, several Central Florida leaders sponsored popular-vote bills in our Legislature this year, including House members Amy Mercado and Carlos Guillermo Smith, and Sen. Victor Torres. Despite broad public support, political leadership blocked these bills from consideration.
Where you live should not determine the value of your vote. Moving to a national popularvote system would guarantee every voter in Florida a fair say in electing our leaders while also representing a major step toward equality for all Americans.
The way we elect our president is arcane, undemocratic and inextricably tied to our shameful racist past. It is time we put the Electoral College where it belongs: off its pedestal and into a museum next to the statues of our barbarous ancestors, like Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith.