While we're contemplating the

need for reforms in our voting system a need that has become evident due

to the close vote in Florida why not consider this:

Why not go back to the system

in which the president is selected by electors chosen by state legislatures,

rather than by the voters.

Wait! At least think for a

minute before you react.

That's how it was done until

the 1820s. I haven't studied enough to know why it was changed, but it

was.

Why do we choose the electors

who choose the president by popular vote?

If your answer is "because

we are a democracy," think again. As I pointed out in last week's

column, and as many far smarter than I have pointed out many times, we

are not a democracy, and thank God we're not.

If we truly wanted to be a

pure democracy, with today's technology we could achieve it. You could

simply vote by Internet or by phone on every law and every decision of

government.

You could hire the city or

county administrator, and spend an hour or two every week telling him

or her how you want your government services run. You could vote on whether

to build a jail and how to fund it, how many fire trucks to buy and how

much to pay the folks who drive them, or whether to paint the new water

tower blue or purple.

There would have to be a limit,

of course, to how often a new law could be proposed. Someone would be

bound to offer laws legalizing marijuana once a day, and that would gum

up the works.

But with such a limit, there's

no logistical reason why we couldn't vote on every major decision at every

level of government, and quit paying those fat salaries and pensions to

get people to make those decisions for us.

You would have to have an e-mail

password or a telephone punch-in code to be sure your vote was recorded

only once. That's not a big problem.

So why don't we do it?

We don't do it because the

founding fathers, bless them, realized that, as bad as a government of

laws is, a government of people would be much, much worse.

Under that sort of mob rule

we would be governed by fad, and the majority would tyrannize the minority.

For instance, let's say someone

studied demographics and figured out that 60 percent of Americans make

less than $70,000 a year family income, and came up with the bright idea

that the government should send each family a check to increase everyone's

income to $100,000.

You might have to increase

those numbers to include 70 percent of the population, because some people

in that group would be smart enough to vote against it. But at some percentage

I'm sure you could interest a majority in voting for such a measure. And

with just a few similar ideas, you would bankrupt our government and our

economy and a dictator would be sure to move in and take over in the ensuing

chaos.

Those same founding fathers

left it up to the state legislatures to choose electors who then chose

a president, and it was probably an attack of populist ideology that caused

all the state legislatures to eventually decide that the method they wanted

to use in choosing those electors was the popular vote.

What that did was to make the

president more powerful and more corruptible.

That's what all this worry

over campaign reform is all about. It takes huge amounts of money to elect

a president, and there's a general feeling that those who provide the

most money end up buying some influence with the most powerful person

in the world.

Get rid of the popular vote

and you get rid of that sort of corruption.

Of course, there's always the

worry that shifting power away from the president and, therefore, more

to Congress and the courts would allow Congress to rum amok.

Not as long as the president

has the veto power, which is in the Constitution.

We are a government of laws,

not of people. But what has evolved is a system in which one person has

an awful lot of power, and we have had one recent occupant of the White

House who has demonstrated that a president, using executive orders, can

repeatedly flout the Constitution and get away with it.

So, are we a government of

laws after all?

Think about it.