Barack Obama Not Elected President -- Say What?!

That's right. Barack Obama has not been elected President -- yet. Even though Sen. Obama is being addressed as Mr. President-Elect, astute learners will remember that only the Electoral College has the power to elect the President -- with the approval of the Congress. (This latter is the most-commonly forgotten fact of our Presidential election process.) What America did on Tuesday was to select the Electors who would do the actual electing.

While this may seem arcane or only a formality, there were good reasons why the Founding Fathers decided against direct popular election of the President. After big money through the burgeoning power of corporations began to almost buy the Presidency, nineteenth century reformers sought to restore a democratic process to the selection of the President. What they came up with was, in effect, an end-run around the Constitution. Now, the letter of the Constitution is fulfilled, but the citizenry has been given the power by the various state legislatures of selecting electors who run pledged to a particular candidate. Since 1952 only the name of the candidate they are pledged to appears on the ballot.

Soon mathematicians from M.I.T. and other places will hold a conference attempting to bring mathematics to bear on the question of whether the Electoral College should be abolished. This is an interesting proposal.

As for my own view, while the Electoral College does have its drawbacks, since Congress is the final arbiter of the results of the Electoral College I find the process laid out in the Constitution to be in keeping with a representative democracy. It shields the republic from mob rule, and from an ill-informed citizenry. Let's not throw out the Electoral College until we are absolutely sure we have thought at least as carefully about the issue as the Framers did.


More about the conference on the Electoral College:
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/16/math-whizzes-scrutinize-electoral-college/