US elections are stupid and illogical, even with the electoral college

AND because of the leaders who won in these elections, the world and millions of souls suffered American-instigated and -led wars in the past two centuries by both Republican and Democratic presidents.

Think of Israel in the 1940s and Truman, who supported the creation of that artificial state based on Jewish tribe-serving legends despite opposition within the US government and from Arab states in the Middle East.

Think of Kennedy and Johnson and the Vietnam War, the two Bushes and the Iraq wars that have created millions of migrants, and more recently, Biden and the US’ all-out support for the horrendous genocide of Palestinians.

Democracy works only in small organizations, yet we have mythicized it. Ancient Athens invented it when it had a voting population of elites that numbered only 2,000. When its population grew to 30,000, it elected demagogues, traitors and, as today, unscrupulous politicians who bought votes, weakening its state that Sparta very easily defeated it.

Electoral democracy works when its voters are of such a small number that they would know more or less the qualifications of candidates. In our village, 150 permanent residents vote for the Homeowner Association’s board of directors, whose backgrounds they more or less know.

It is in a municipality of 40,000 voters that most voters wouldn’t know the background of mayoral candidates. They, therefore, get elected not because the voters assess that they are most qualified for the job but because they have built up for decades a network of patron-client clans supporting them and have huge campaign funds that they could even buy votes in one way or another.

Elections, in essence, are a stupid and illogical means of choosing who should lead big organizations such as a nation, as the groundbreaking work of economist Bryan Caplan in “The Myth of the Rational Voter” (2007).

Equal

There is no question that men, indeed, are born equal. It is nonsense, though to argue each man has one vote. Going through life, they become unequal in terms of how much information they possess and in their intellectual capacity because they are not given the resources by a feudal and capitalist system to acquire these. My caddy and I each have one vote, but she hasn’t had access to resources to allow her to understand what the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement is (and how it has made our country a target for nuclear strikes), a candidate’s stand on which should be a basis for her choice in a presidential election.

A one-man-one-vote democracy is a very imperfect mechanism for ensuring the best outcomes because it gives equal weight to all votes, regardless of the voter’s knowledge or understanding of policy. In our case, a huge number of Filipinos were delusional that Marcos Jr. would have at least a tenth of the leadership qualities of his father.

Caplan suggests that an epistocracy, or rule by the knowledgeable, may offer a more effective governance model. In an epistocracy, greater influence would be granted to individuals with a higher level of understanding or expertise, reducing the impact of uninformed or irrational voting.

Thus, in the US elections that end today (US, Tuesday, Nov. 5), those who would vote for Kamala Harris are those who do not know such things as her agreement to the Biden administration’s loose border policy that resulted in 7 million illegal immigrants — of which by one reckoning half a million had criminal records. Her voters also would not know her willingness to comply with the US Deep State’s (the neoconservative and US military-industrial complex) policies that are reflected in her unequivocal support for Israel, even if it continues its genocide against Palestinians, the most horrible crime in the country this century.

Reason

As many studies have shown, voters vote for a candidate not through a process of reason but because of their emotions that somehow got tied to a candidate. I myself bet that Trump will win by a landslide this election because American voters have tightly emotionally embraced him as a fighter for their welfare, and see him not just as a politician.

Trump actually already won the elections three months ago, on July 13, 2024, when a sniper missed blowing his head off by an ear. The image of Trump standing up, blood trickling down his cheek, and shouting “Fight, fight” has been deeply etched in American voters’ minds; they’ll forget that Trump’s real motive for running for the presidency is to escape his conviction on the $130,000 “hush money” payment his attorney made to adult film star Stormy Daniels and to overcome his $1.3 billion debt.

The US Constitution’s authors (most of whom, after all, were land- and slave-owning elites) were keenly aware of the threat of its presidential elections being hijacked by the more numerous poor, uneducated immigrants that they instituted the so-called electoral college system, in which it is not the number of individual voters that determine the winner but the number of “electoral votes” he or she wins. This system was also a compromise to ensure that smaller states would not be entirely overshadowed by larger states in choosing the president, giving them a minimum of three electoral votes regardless of population.

Roughly, this system involves the following:

Presidential electors

Each state is given a certain number of electoral votes, which is roughly, but not always, based on its population. Bigger states like California have more electoral votes, while smaller states like Wyoming have fewer. In total, there are 538 electoral votes given to all 50 states, plus Washington, D.C.

In all, except for Maine and Nebraska, if a candidate wins the majority of votes in that state, they win all of that state’s electoral votes — the so-called winner-takes-all system. So, if candidate A wins the most votes in Florida, even by just one vote, he gets all 29 of Florida’s electoral votes. To win the presidency, a candidate needs to get a majority of electoral votes — at least 270 out of 538. (Most US presidents, however have won both the electoral college and popular votes, with two modern exceptions — George Bush and Donald Trump, both of whom won only the electoral college votes.)

The myth in today’s elections in the US is that each American will vote for the candidate he sees fit to lead the nation. The fact is that most Americans will vote for the candidate their party tells them to vote for, and they will merely rationalize that it is their reasoned choice. That Americans don’t really use reason to vote who will lead them is shown in the fact that most states have been for decades solidly Democratic (“Blue” states) or solidly Republican (“Red”) — they vote for their party’s candidate, whoever he is.

However, there are the so-called battleground or swing states — I’d call them the thinking states — where neither major political party has overwhelming support that it is uncertain how voters there would vote in a particular election.

While the list can vary slightly from election to election, the following states are considered the battleground states in today’s election: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In a sense, the US elections today would involve only these seven states, with an estimated voters of 32 million, or 20 percent of the total 168 million votes. That’s a lot less than the 56 million Filipinos who voted in the 2022 presidential election here.

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US elections are stupid and illogical, even with the electoral college
Source: Breaking News PH