My problem with the American election

00:00 05:07

Richard Dawkins has narrated this article for you to listen to.

In an ideal world, I wouldn’t have chosen an election year for my American book tour. It’s not that I dislike elections generally. And – praise be – a population of 300 million Americans has managed to raise one presidential candidate who is not a convicted felon awaiting sentence. No, my problem with American elections – and it viscerally distresses me every four years – is the affront to democracy called the electoral college. I’ve done the maths. The electoral college can hand you the presidency even if your opponent receives three-quarters of the popular vote. Of course that’s a hypothetical extreme. The familiar reality is that campaigns ignore all but a handful of ‘swing’ states. A genuine electoral college, however, could work rather well. Voters in every state would elect respected citizens to meet in conclave to find a president – like a university search committee or the College of Cardinals. They’d headhunt the best in the land, interview them, study their publications and speeches, exhaustively vet them, and finally after a secret ballot announce the verdict in a puff of white smoke. Perhaps the founding fathers had something like that in mind. If so, the rot set in when electoral college members became pledged to a particular candidate, and each state’s quota voted as a monolithic bloc, no matter how slender the state’s popular vote margin. Alas, my ‘search committee’ ideal would never fly: too vulnerable to corruption. And replacing the present ludicrously undemocratic electoral college by a sensible plebiscite needs a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress, plus approval by three-quarters of the states – a near unattainable goal because of vested interests.