No way… He is between the worst candidate and the 'least worst'

By J. Antonio Ruiz H. / Twitter-X: @jantonioruizh

23 Oct 2024, 18:40 PM EDT

This will probably be one of the most difficult elections, and not for any of the candidates for the presidency of the United States, but for you as a voter. It has even become a cliché that in this country we vote between the worst candidate and the “least worst” (without anyone being afraid of making a mistake when proposing said vulgarism)… But whether we like it or not, this two-party system does not go any further.

Today it is impossible to deny how reprehensible both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have been in just their campaigns; It is enough to mention how immoral the unconditional support that both publicly profess to those responsible for the systematic murder of more than 42 thousand people in the Gaza Strip according to official figures, the majority of these children, according to the High Commissioner. of the United Nations for Human Rights, Volker Türk.

And for us as Mexican-American voters or as Latinos in general, the only difference is that one of those two candidates wants us out of this country, because he constantly threatens at his rallies to implement a mass deportation “effort” much worse than the one carried out by former President Dwight Eisenhower in 1954, with which he deported not only 1.3 million undocumented Mexican immigrants, but also naturalized American citizens or even born in the United States, but who were precisely of Mexican origin.

No way… He is between the worst candidate and the “least worst”, it is something that we have to accept, because in the strictest sense the Presidential Election of the United States is not democratic; The winner is not whoever obtains the greatest number of votes from the People, but rather whoever obtains at least a majority of 240 “electoral votes” of the 538 delegates distributed, honestly, arbitrarily.

No, the truth is that it is not justified that California has 54 delegates and Missouri 10, for example, because no matter how much it is argued that each state will have a number of delegates equal to its representation in Congress, which supposedly depends on the population According to the decennial census, in the end a vote of a Californian in the strict sense would have to be worth the same as the vote of a Missourian, because that is what democracy is about.

Outrageous is that this failed system is not due to a poor legislative design by our Founding Fathers, but rather was unfortunately a clever plan. In Federalist Paper No. 68, dated March 14, 1788, Alexander Hamilton describes the Electoral College as a mechanism to ensure that the election of the president falls to more “qualified” people, who would make decisions in the best interest of the country:

“It was also particularly desirable to allow the least opportunity for disorder and tumult. This evil was not the least fearsome in the case of the election of a magistrate who has to play such an important role in the administration of the government as the president of the United States. But the precautions so happily combined in the system we study promise to insure effectively against these evils” (Hamilton, A. “The Federalist Papers: No. 68”).

236 years later, we Americans should already feel of age and definitely “capable” to make our best decisions. Hamilton may have a very modern and sexy musical, but it condemned us, the Founding Fathers condemned us, to a democratic crisis in which we unjustifiably have to choose between only two parties, two candidates, no matter how unseemly they may be.

Let me be brutally honest with you: Without wanting to disappoint you, it is important that you know with less than two weeks until the election, that voting for any of the independent candidates right now is throwing your vote in the trash. In 1992 Ross Perot attempted the feat and in fact obtained almost 19 percent of the popular vote, but he did not obtain a single electoral vote, since he did not win in a single state, that is, it is impossible to obtain votes in the Electoral College without a decisive state victory.

Doing a simulation with Artificial Intelligence and in terms of mathematical probabilities, it is clear that the chances are extremely low that, for example, Dr. Jill Stein, the candidate of the Green Party and who could come closest (insignificantly) to Kamala Harris or to Donald Trump.

But do not be disappointed, although in this election it is Harris or Trump, there are other popularly elected positions and determinations that we will be able to choose… Furthermore, it is in our hands to reform the current electoral system and maybe, just maybe, that The next election can be defined by the People and for the People.