Our country continues to struggle with Democracy 1.0, the best political system that was available in the 18th century. Unfortunately, most of the rest of the world has moved on to Democracy 2.0 and beyond, with proportional representation, instant runoff voting and other expressive innovations.
One of our major problems is that we are stuck with the Electoral College, which replaces the popular vote with a system that was designed to appease 18th-century slaveholders so that they would vote to approve the new Constitution. Choosing our presidents by a system where the winner of the popular vote in a state gets 100 percent of the Electoral votes, even if he or she won the popular vote by a 51-49 margin, is a practice that has to end in 2008.
In 2004, the presidential candidates did not spend their time campaigning in all 50 states. They chose 12 “battleground” states, where the entire sum of the state’s Electoral College votes could be swung into either the Republican or Democratic column. Compare this with 1960, when Kennedy narrowly defeated Nixon. In that election, 24 states met the definition of a swing state (where neither side was expected to get over 53% of the vote in a two-person race), and fully two-thirds of the states were considered “competitive” (where neither side was expected to get over 58%).
While it is bad if any person’s vote is given second-class status, the ramifications of this “focus your campaigns on the swing states” strategy has been especially bad for APAs and other minorities. The Shrinking Battleground: The 2008 Presidential Elections and Beyond (http://www.fairvote.org/?page=1555) is a report where researchers from the Center for Voting and Democracy found that more than 30% of whites live in battleground states, compared to only 21% of blacks and Native Americans, 18 % of Latinos and 14% of Asian Americans...
