getmygoat

You’re expecting me to tell you to vote, aren’t you? Well I’m not. I did, and I think it’s a good idea to do so, but I know several people who don’t vote for various reasons, and I respect that.

No, instead I will wax poetic about the election system. I’ll admit that I didn’t think much about how it works until I watched the John Adams miniseries. I take for granted that every four years we have the following process: primaries, nominations, mudslinging, election. So it was interesting to see how a small group of Old White Men used to cast their votes for various party members running separately; in the end, the person with the most votes was president, and the person with the second-most votes became vice president, and so forth. While I am glad that voting is open to women and minorities (although America certainly did take its sweet time on that one), I can’t help but wonder how this system would work today.

Would third-party candidates have a better chance? What would happen if George W. Bush’s vice president had been Al Gore or John Kerry? How would McCain and Obama run the country together?

I have a feeling it would be a huge mess, considering some of the major hot-button issues dividing the two dominant parties. Then again, Adams and Jefferson managed to work out some pretty huge political differences together (although the movie depicted the vice presidency as relatively removed from national politics at large).

So vote, or don’t. I won’t tell you what to do, except to think about how the nature of the electorate has changed since the birth of our country.

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