Electoral Dysfunction (2012) Voting Is A Privilege Dummies.

Electoral Dysfunction (2012) Independent

I must say that I sometimes feel like I live on another planet when I watch these films.

I have never seen a political documentary by Mo Rocca before so I was not quite sure what to think going into it. I usually stay away from political documentaries like the plague because honestly they are never clear about the actual facts and few sources are mentioned.

I used to debate in high school and I am now highly trained to be skeptical when I hear outrageous numbers without any sort of source. I also need to know the origin of that source and what type of work they are known for in order to validate that information being real. Some sources are about as credible as a guy saying it on Facebook so it’s hard to take a lot of people seriously.   

One thing I dislike about documentaries is it usually shows extreme cases of every problem and it usually talks to a lot of people involved that have a great deal of political involvement. I dislike this because it is hard to expect many of our elected officials to be non-biased especially when it comes to the information they have. Whenever I watch a news network I see a lot of people talking about a lot of different topics and saying some pretty untrue things after I later research the topics. In a world where you cannot take things at face value, it behooves one to do the majority of the research on their own.

The movie focuses on the several nuances of laws in the state of Indiana for voting. They are all very confusing and there is no real consensus from anyone about what we should do as a country when it comes to voting laws by state and the Electoral College. Some want the government to only use the popular vote as a way to elect the president and to streamline the voting process nationally. Others want to keep the Electoral College and force people to pass a civics test in order to vote.

I really wish we were all educated correctly so that a civics test would not be needed in order to vote. Most people I have talked to are unaware that the reason we have public schools is to inform the general public about history and politics so that they can be educated in their voting behaviors. Sadly, school is not taken very seriously in many places and very few grasp the concepts when it comes to the laws of the state.

One of the things the documentary does not do well is give a consensus about what could be done to better improve the system. Instead of getting more people to talk about specific voting laws in one state, I thought it would be more interesting to see what scholars thought on the matter of the Electoral College. I guess that may not be as entertaining, but it would be fruitful.

One system I am in favor of when it comes to the Electoral College is to use what is known as a “Pro Rata” system. This would allow the states to keep their voting laws while allowing for a system that incorporates everyone non-dependent on what state they lived in. It would matter if you voted democratic in a republican state and it would matter if you voted republican in a democratic state. The election process would involve more people because it would divide the electoral votes of the state’s population based on the voting in the state. So if Colorado (with 9 electoral votes) had 55% of the general populous vote democratic and 45% vote republican, it would give 5 electoral votes to the democratic nominee and 4 electoral votes to the republican nominee. It seems like a fair system based on the fact that every vote counts, unlike how it is represented in the current system.