By Tony Wilsdon and Carlos Petroni

The Electoral College was created by our "founding fathers" to protect the ruling class from direct popular vote, and to give more power to smaller states, and thus to protect the system from the anger of the urban masses. Under this system each state is allocated the same number of seats provided for in their vote for the House of Representatives plus an additional two votes which represent their two Senators. Electors meet after the election to choose the President.

Electors are considered to be upstanding figures of the main parties, and can be relied upon to prevent a radical challenge to the system. Only in 24 states are members of the Electoral College bound to vote according to how the people voted in their state. In other states they can vote as they wish. As a result of this Electoral system, in a close race if a candidate of the working class and poor won a plurality of the popular vote for President, with say 40% of the vote, the delegates of the other two parties, with 60% of the Electoral College seats, would have a majority to decide who would become President.

Following the issuance of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the political leaders of the country, all people of great substance whether slave owners or rich merchants, sat down at the Constitutional Convention to write the Constitution.

One of the most quoted statements at this Convention was that by Thomas Jefferson: "I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing ... it is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government. God forbid that we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The trees of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural measure." However, he was in a tiny minority.

One of the key figures was James Madison. Writing in the Federalist Papers he expressed the concern of most of the new aristocracy when he wrote that the new Union should be able to "repress domestic faction and insurrection." He argued that the government needed to protect itself from "the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society." Madison explained what kind of rebellion he was concerned with: "a rage for paper money, for abolition of debts, for an equal division of property..."

His solution was to organize a powerful propertied faction against the other faction. Here we see explicitly, at the heart of the Constitution, protection of class interests rather than the democracy of the people. The institutions that came out of this Convention denied the vote to the vast majority of the American people: blacks, native Americans, white males who owned no property and all women.

Alexander Hamilton explained that: "All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well-born, the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct permanent share of government...Can a democratic assembly who annually revolve in the mass of the people be supposed steadily to pursue the public good? Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy..." He supported a President and Senate chosen for life!

To prevent a strong social movement from capturing power through the popular vote to a bi-annual House of Representatives, it was decided to create checks and balances in the system. This included the Supreme Court to be appointed by the President, a Senate elected not by the people but by state representatives, and a President elected by an Electoral College. Specifically, James Madison argued for a "well constructed Senate" as "sometimes necessary as a defense to the people against their own temporary errors or delusions," because "there are particular moments in public affairs when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be most readily to lament or condemn." Such contempt for the people's judgment could not have been better expressed.

The Constitution they developed was designed to protect the 3% who had really large holdings of wealth, and who created the Constitution, and also the one-third of the population, like city merchants, medium size farmers etc., who benefited enough economically to have an interest in preserving the system. This was the political base around which the "founding fathers" were willing to restrict democratic rights. This was a buffer against the blacks, native Americans and the very poor white population who they feared would rebel. As Howard Zinn described in his book A People's History of the United States, this enabled "the elite to keep control with a minimum of coercion, a maximum of law - all made palatable by the fanfare of patriotism and unity."

To make the Constitution more palatable, the "Bill of Rights" was passed. This document seemed to guarantee that the government would be a protector of people's liberties: to speak, to publish, to petition, to worship, to assemble, to have a fair trial etc. However, what was missing from this was the fact that the government they created would never be a guarantor of such rights. Subsequent events have shown, time and again, in the brutal treatment of African American protesters, in the attacks on the labor movement, with the Palmer raid arrests of socialists before World War I, and in the recent trampling of the democratic right to protest against the WTO in Seattle, that when threatened, the government reverts to its central role as guarantor of the economic interests of the elite, and tramples on the democratic rights of all who protest against it.

It has taken mass movement after mass movement to erase many of the inequities of this Constitution. The right of the people to directly elect the Senate was conceded only as a result of the emerging socialist movement and the wider radicalization at the turn of the century. After decades of struggle, women were given the vote in the US in 1920 in the period of radicalization following the Russian Revolution of 1917. (Such was the effect of the Russian Revolution that in almost every country the ruling classes internationally were forced to extend voting rights to the working class.) Despite being given the legal right to vote after the Civil War in the 1860s, African Americans in the South only received the unrestricted right to vote after the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Now another key safeguard against popular rule, election of the President by the Electoral College rather than by popular vote, has been exposed. This undemocratic system, which has been held in reserve to prevent a radical movement, has been accidentally exposed by the 2000 presidential race. Over 60% of the public now support abolishing this institution. We must seize the moment and bury it alongside the other undemocratic creations of the "founding fathers" - the denial of the right to vote of women, blacks, Native Americans and the poor. We will campaign in support of all attempts to remove this undemocratic institution.

As opposed to the Democracy of the Rich, socialists fight for the extension of democracy to its fullest extent (see article: "Program for a Movement to End the Bipartisan System" in this issue.) However, greater degrees of formal political democracy are far from enough. We need economic and social democracy combined with full democratic rights for the working class and the oppressed.

What we socialists call for is Workers' Democracy. That is the right of workers to control what they produce, to rationally organize production to serve society as a whole and not just the need of capitalist owners to maximize profits from factories, banks, transportation, natural resources, agriculture, etc eteras.

Workers and the oppressed need Economic Democracy. Those who produce goods and services need to receive all the benefits of such production. As it stands now, our wages represent a minimal fraction of the wealth our labor produces. Profits represent the biggest part of the pie and are appropriated by the bosses.

Part of those profits is spent by the ruling class to control the political system in order to preserve their privileges. That's why socialists propose the nationalization of all big businesses and to put them under workers' control. What to produce and where and how to distribute it, to serve the interests of society as a whole, will be decided by elected councils in workplaces and neighborhoods.

The right to free and universal education, including university education through the graduate level; the establishment of health care, housing and jobs as rights and not privileges, combined with the control of production by workers and the oppressed is what we call economic and social democracy. Along with this restructuring of society comes the control of the media and newspapers and full access to them for and by the workers and the oppressed.

Only the permanent inclusion of the working class and the oppressed in all facets of organizing society could be called an authentic democracy. Only the mass control of the decision-making processes and the media can avoid fraud, cheating, and the very existence of corrupt machines.

The process of choosing and electing representatives from among only two parties of the ruling class every two to four years, when they already control all the media and information and keep for themselves the profit of society's production, this fraudulent "democracy" is what needs to be replaced by socialist workers' democracy.