Intellectual deceit and simplistic analysis

Mar 09, 2012 Letters

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DEAR EDITOR,
Nigel Hinds engaged in intellectual deceit claiming Granger would have won the election using the US system (“Under US election guidelines, Granger would have won the presidency”, SN, March 5, 2012). This kind of intellectual fraudulence must be arrested at first sight. Who in their right mind would compare the US electoral system to Guyana? It is apples and oranges.
Firstly, the US operates a complicated electoral system with state and national elections based on first-past-the-post and an Electoral College, whereas Guyana votes on a basic proportional representation system.
Secondly, the US presidential elections are different from the US Congress elections. No such distinction occurs in Guyana, since the President and the Parliament are elected on the same day.
The US president is elected based on Electoral College votes, which is an indirect vote compared to Guyana’s direct vote. The US Electoral College comprises a determined number of representatives of each state fixed by the US Constitution.
What Hinds connivingly forgot to mention in his tomfoolery of an analysis is that under the Electoral College system, all the votes of that particular state’s Electoral College go to the presidential candidate winner of that state in a winner-takes-all system. Therefore, if a presidential candidate wins California by a margin of 50.1% to 49.9%, that candidate gets all 55 Electoral College votes from California. That is a fundamentally unfair system. The individual US states conduct elections to determine Electoral College votes within that state. In Guyana, the regions do not conduct their own elections. There is one general election. Guyana does not have a state system like the US.
Thirdly, Nigel Hinds’ simplistic analysis that determination of who becomes president depends on the state’s population egregiously fails to reveal one startling fact; that smaller US states have inordinate influence in the US Electoral College system. For instance, the lowest populated state, Wyoming, with a 2011 population of 560,158 has 3 Electoral College votes, which translates to 1 vote per 186,719 residents. California, the US’ largest state, has a 2011 population of 37,691,912 and 55 Electoral College votes, which translates to 685,307 persons to one Electoral College vote.
Using this arithmetic, it is obvious that the PPP’s win and PNC/APNU’s losses in the smaller regions would negatively impact the PNC/APNU. It is clear the creators of the US Constitution deliberately implemented this imbalance in voting power to grant smaller states a right to have a say at the table.
Fourthly, Hinds compares the PNC/APNU’s won regions (4, 7, 10) equalling 52% of the entire Guyana voting population to the 53% of the US electorate residing in California, Texas, New York, Florida, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Georgia, and North Carolina. Hinds claims these states determine the US presidency.
Hinds is lumping Democrat and Republican states in that list, a dangerous tendency. Furthermore, these states account for only 256 Electoral College votes when 270 is required to win the presidency. If we are to equate those US states to Regions 4, 7 and 10 in Guyana, Granger is still short by some 14 Electoral College votes.
Again, this calculation exposes the simplistic nature of Hinds’ calculus and argument.
Admittedly, the PPP could get less seats and the PNC/APNU more in a US electoral system. However, the PNC is currently 6 seats less than the PPP in Parliament. If we extrapolate this difference of 6 seats to the US system where 538 seats are involved, it would mean that the gulf between the PPP and PNC/APNU if they were pursuing 538 seats in the US is the difference between 215 seats and 264 seats, a whopping 49 seats.
Even if the PNC/APNU manages to gain some seats from the PPP because of the changed nature of the applied US electoral system, it cannot ever overcome 49 seats, not when its core voting constituency is around 30% of the population.
Fifthly, Hinds has missed the glaring truth that the PNC/APNU failed to win 50% or more in any of the 10 regions. This means that a coalition of other parties forming the majority could take all those region’s votes away from the PNC/APNU in a US-style electoral college system, despite the PNC/APNU’s plurality of votes in those regions. Even if by some miracle, the PNC/APNU would have won the presidency in Guyana using the US system, Hinds forgets that there is a separate election for the Congress (which is our Parliament) and considering the population dynamics and race-based voting, the PNC/APNU could not ever win the Parliament when voting is done by voting districts or constituencies. The PNC’s repeated failures from this type of voting in 1957 and 1961 led to the implementation of PR voting to stymie the PPP in 1964.
If the PNC/APNU wins the presidency by some miracle, this would lead to a reverse of what is happening to the PPP now, where the PNC/APNU has the presidency and the Parliament is controlled by the opposition led by the PPP. This is what has happened since 2010 to Democratic President Obama with Republican control of the House. Nigel Hinds needs to come down from Mars back to Earth.
M. Maxwell

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