Thursday, October 30, 2008

Poll: Keep Electoral College, Get Rid Of Presidency

87 percent of Americans surveyed in a recent CNN-NBC-ESPN-Hustler Magazine poll indicated that they would like to see the electoral college remain in existence but that the country needs to get rid of the Presidency.

“An increasingly high number of Americans now views the Presidency as an outdated, anachronistic, potentially dangerous institution,” Augustus Thompson, a spokesman for the poll, told a hastily assembled Washington, D.C. news conference.

“The Presidency is an 18th century concept that has no place in a 21st century world,” Thompson said. “At least that’s what we’re hearing from registered voters.

Thompson said people who answered pollsters’ questions agreed that the electoral college “has never sent this country into war, has never created a scandal like Watergate or Iran-Contra, and has never been caught having sex with an intern.”

The electoral college, Thompson said, “is pretty much the only respectable political institution left.”

Many have criticized the electoral college because it reduces the Presidential contest to a handful of battleground states, but “few voters seem to mind that their votes don’t count,” Thompson said. “They feel that if they’re in a non-battleground state, at least their consciences are clean, because they didn’t put yet another yahoo in the Oval Office.”

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