It seems our ‘friends’ over in the Green Party (let me remind you that their Presidential candidate is Cynthia McKinney – and here and here) want to re-write the constitution, they even go so far as to say that the current format for Congress is incorrect – granted you have to understand how the Electoral College works to say that but that is their insinuation.

So once again how does the Electoral College work?

Each state is given a number of Electors equal to the number of Congressman and Senators that represent the State. Each state has 2 Senators. The number of Congressmen is determined by the population. Therefore states that have a greater population have more Congressmen and therefore are weighted heavier in the Electoral College (i.e. California has 55 Electoral votes and Iowa has 7)

Now how the Electors are divided is up to the state. Currently 48 states do it the old fashioned democratic way -- winner takes all. That means the winner of the popular vote in the state wins all of the electoral votes.

The remaining 2 states, Maine and Nebraska, use a Congressional Method. This means that the winner in each Congressional district wins that Elector and the popular vote getter in the state wins the two Senate Electors. This is both democratic and representative. In my opinion I think this method makes the most sense these days and should be implemented on a more broad scale.

The first candidate to 270 Electoral votes wins!! It is really that simple.

Since the Electoral College is based simply on the Congressional Formula the Green’s claim that the Electoral College was created to “expressly increase the power of the slave states” seems rather asinine!

So what do the Greens want?

Well unlike what the democrats have been calling for – popular elections (meaning that those of us in ‘fly-over’ country would mean nothing and all the focus would be on the large population centers) the Greens are calling for Proportionate Elections.

What are those you ask? Well that would be the warm and fuzzy determination of elections. For example: If Wisconsin split 50:40:10 the Electoral Votes would be divided 5:4:1 for the respective parties.

So what do you want? Should we preserve the republic as it has stood for over 200 years or should we rewrite the Constitution? Or should we chuck it all and move to a more “fair system” that includes other parties across the board?

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