The United States presidential election day is only six weeks away. We have various weekly poll results published every three days or so, all indicating how close the race could be between the two main contenders. Focusing on the poll results alone is not good enough to understand the dynamics of the presidential election because the United States is a federal system in which each component state enjoys equal rights.
As James Madison wrote in Federalist Papers No 39, "Each State, in ratifying the Constitution, is considered as a sovereign body independent of all others, and only to be bound by its own voluntary act. In this relation, then, the new Constitution will, if established, be a federal and not a national constitution." When Americans are voting for a President and a Vice President on November 4 this year, they are not voting for particular candidates for President and Vice President.
They are actually selecting presidential electors who will vote for particular candidates for President and for Vice President on December 15 (the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December). The United States Constitution allocates to each state a number of electors equal to the combined total of the number of its US Senators (ie, 2) plus the number of its US Representatives (which may change to the size of each state's population as determined by the national census).
This means 100 Senators and 435 Representatives at present. In addition, the District of Columbia has 3 electors. In summary, there is the total of 538 electoral votes. You need 270 votes to be elected president. The 12th Amendment of 1804 to the US Constitution requires that each elector cast one vote for president and a separate vote for vice president.
Elections through the electoral college were originally designed to avoid a tyranny of the majority by insulating the process of selecting the president from the whim of the public to the states, which are empowered, through the Electoral College, to choose the president.
In the words of Alexander Hamilton in No 68 of the Federalist Papers, "as the electors, chosen in each state, are to assemble and vote in the state in which they are chosen, this detached and divided situation will expose them to much less heats and ferments . . . than if they were all to be convened at one time, in one place."
The electoral college is not any pre-established body functioning all the time. The electors are chosen for the temporary and sole purpose of electing the president only. What Hamilton called "their transient existence and their detached situation" would make the electors enter the task of electing the President free from any sinister bias.
The manner of choosing the states' electors was left to each state's legislature, and by now all states adopted direct state-wide election to choose their electors with the exception of Maine and Nebraska which select two of their respective electors by a state-wide popular vote and the remainder by the popular vote in each Congressional district.
It seems utterly undemocratic, in view of the contemporary notion of "one person, one vote" in a direct voting process, to have the electoral college system in lieu of the public's direct voting in electing the President. But it is no more "anti-democratic" than the US Senate where there are always two Senators from each state regardless of the size of the population of that state.
Should direct voting be allowed nationally, it would alter the federal state system of governance to that of a unitary state system! The point of emphasis is that under the federal system the component states are not only equal to each other, but also almost independent, enjoying those powers reserved to the component states under the US Constitution.
The electoral college forces presidential candidates to pay attention to less populous states and their divergent regional interests. Balancing those divergent interests requires the support of the whole country (call it a "mandate") for the elected leadership of the federal government.
In other words, the Electoral College system serves as a unifying mechanism not only of diverse regional interests of the component states, but also of marginal political parties participating in the presidential elections. There is also a practical advantage in presidential elections (as distinct from the primaries): the ability to focus on "swing states," thereby permitting candidates to "expose" themselves intensively to a "sample" of the electorate in a rather compressed period of time.
In Pakistan, too, a President is elected by "the members of an electoral college," and Pakistan's electoral college is similarly sensitive to the difference of the size of the population of each province, and accordingly, the voting of the provincial assemblies is weighted in view of the different size of each provincial population.
Each provincial assembly has equal 65 votes in the electoral college. Which means that each member of the Punjab Assembly 65/370 =0.176 votes; each member of the Sindh Assembly has 65/166 = 0.392 votes; each member of the NWFP Assembly has 65/124 = 0.524 votes; and each member of the Balochistan Assembly has 65/65 = 1 vote.
But the similarity stops there because Article 41(3) of the Constitution of Pakistan prescribes who the members of the Electoral College are. They are "(a) the members of both Houses; and (b) the members of the Provincial Assemblies." In the case of the US Electoral College, in sharp contrast with that of Pakistan, no senator, representative, or other person holding a place of trust or profit under the United States can be of the number of the electors.
In the United States the drafters of the Constitution made extra efforts to ensure the transient existence of the electors and their detachment from the influence of power, in that the US President is the chief executive of the nation, but in Pakistan it has a parliamentary system of government where the Prime Minister is the head of government. The power of the Pakistani President is not the same as that of the United States.
From a disengaged observer's perspective, there seems to have developed a discrepancy between what was originally intended of the role of the President of Pakistan and what has become of it as a result of military coups. For some reason, changes made to the Constitution by various military regimes that have substantially altered the powers and privileges of the President have remained more or less intact despite the subsequent return of civilian governments.
Now that General Pervez Musharraf resigned as President and Mr Asif Ali Zardari, a civilian, was elected Pakistan's 13th President since 1956, in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution, I wonder whether it is high time that the National Assembly consider the need for the comprehensive review of the power of the President that has been augmented by various amendments and restore the legitimate power of the Prime Minister as the head of government. Pakistan is a parliamentary democracy in which the Prime Minister exercises actual powers. After all that was the legacy of the late Mr Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.