* * Politic'n

I’m sitting now, warming by the fire, after a cold, dark evening spent at my local polling place, doing my part to help the Democratic Party and our candidates. I was asked, so I agreed, to spend the last hour the polls were open handing out sample ballots.

If you voted, you were likely handed one of these sheets by a partisan volunteer. They were color coded; the Democratic was blue and the Republican was pink. Each one had the respective candidates for that party highlighted above the others.

I relieved a woman who had spent the last hour there, and joined three other folks doing similar work. One was a Harry Hillbilly guy, decked out in a camo jacket festooned with all manner of right-wing buttons and stickers. His hat was embroidered with “NRA”. He was dressed for the chill and had obviously spent much of his time outdoors. The other Republican was a more urban looking man, dressed in a stylish woolen overcoat and a polar fleece flyer hat.

Interestingly, my fellow Democrat wasn’t from around here at all. He was a resident of suburban Maryland and he worked as a Congressional staffer on the Committee on Science and Technology. Looking to be no more than thirty, he wore a light-weight suit jacket and no hat and was clearly unprepared for the chill of our mountain air. He was originally from Georgia and had gotten a law degree; I don’t remember where. He was handsome and clearly intelligent. He had driven 4-1/2 hours to be in Virginia because Maryland was not a battleground state and somehow he was assigned to our area.

Voting by that time was light. There were no lines inside and each voter simply walked in, did their civic duty, and walked out. We dutifully handed our sheets to them, and most people accepted both. But I questioned the efficacy of our efforts. How could anybody at literally the last hour of a grueling campaign season still be undecided? And if they were, how could we assume for even a charitable moment that they’d be swayed by the suggestions printed on a piece of paper handed to them at the door by strangers?

Anyway, we fulfilled our commitments to our respective parties, doing our best to be cheerful and conciliatory in the cold evening air.

As you might imagine, we didn’t have much to talk about except politics.

All of us felt that the amount of money spent on the election was inexcusably grand, money that surely could have been better spent in many ways. The total cost, I learned, for the races concluding that hour, was around $5.8 billion, with $2.5 billion of that going to the presidential race and the rest to the congressional races. We agreed that the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court had opened the floodgates to dramatic and unprecedented increases, and was not something either party really supported.

We also talked about the Electoral College system. I had done some reading on it a few days ago to refresh my memory. Rather than electing a president by popular vote, each state would elect “electors”, whose numbers are based upon the sum of each state’s Congressional representatives, that is their senators (two each) plus their congresspersons (proportional by population). So every state would have three electors, minimum, regardless of how small their population. The theory behind this system is that while Congress is popularly elected by the people, the President is elected by partisan representatives of a federation of independent states. It was possible, therefore, that a president might be elected by the electors while not receiving a majority of the votes cast, something that has in fact happened on three occasions, most recently in 2000 with Al Gore winning the popular vote but losing the electoral vote to George W. Bush. Interestingly, all of us agreed that the current system was a relic and had no logical justification in our modern nation of how a democratic system should work. In the election calculus, the result was that “battleground” states like Virginia received a wholly disproportionate share of campaign spending and effort by both candidates. For example all four candidates for President and Vice Presidents from the two parties came to Virginia over and over again but seldom to New York, Texas, or California, because of their clearly predicted outcomes. None of us felt that this was a defensible system and it should be abolished.

The four of us, sharply partisan people, shivering in the cold, were a diverse group, if not demographically at least culturally. We were all furious at the inability of Congress to get the work done that seemed so necessary to tackle our nation’s vexing problems. Yet as I departed, I couldn’t help but think, perhaps overly optimistically, that if the four of us held office and were called upon to reach agreement to move this country forward, we’d find a way to do so.

A new day would soon dawn, giving me hope.