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Why set up a presidential election in which voters do not directly elect the president? Welch (32) explains that the founders devised this system "…because of their view that the people could not be trusted. The people were seen as an unruly mob threatening stable, orderly government," she continued. Even after Gore successfully petitioned the Florida Supreme Court to have election officials count 9,000 previously uncounted ballots by hand, that may well have given him the victory in Florida, the U.S. Supreme Court trumped the Florida High Court and ultimately gave Florida's 25 electoral votes -- and the presidency -- to Republican candidate Bush (the High Court vote was 5-4: 5 Republican justices to 4 Democrat justices).
Meanwhile, according to professor Mary C. Segers (Rutgers University), the U.S. system of government actually "enhances citizen impact on government" (Segers, 2002, p. 182). The Founders "struggled with a conflict between representative government and their fear of majority tyranny" and so they created a system in which "The fragmentation of political power and redundancy of functions within government multiply the points of access for groups attempting to influence public policy" (Segers, 181-82). Segers' opinion offers a counterpoint to the view that fragmented government is anti-majority, and somewhat balances the , and in the foreseeable future, nothing threatens that fragmentation from remaining the "powers that be."
Works Cited
Federal Election Commission. (2001). 2000 Presidential Popular Vote Summary For All
Candidates Listed On At Least One State Ballot. Retrieved August 25, 2011, from http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2000/prespop.htm.
Segers, Mary C. (2002). Piety, Politics, and Pluralism: Religion, the Courts, and the 2000
Election. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Welch, Susan, Gruhl, John, Corner, John, and Rigdon, Susan M. (2009). Understanding
American Government. Florence, KY: Cengage Learning.
United States Supreme Court. (2000). George W. Bush v. Albert Gore. Cornell University
Law School. Retrieved August 25, 2011, from http://www.law.cornell.edu.
Works Cited
Federal Election Commission. (2001). 2000 Presidential Popular Vote Summary For All
Candidates Listed On At Least One State Ballot. Retrieved August 25, 2011, from http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2000/prespop.htm.
Segers, Mary C. (2002). Piety, Politics, and Pluralism: Religion, the Courts, and the 2000
Election. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Law School. Retrieved August 25, 2011, from http://www.law.cornell.edu.
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