A story on NPR this morning about ballot initiatives got me to thinking about the fact that we still have a loaded gun pointed at the pointed head of our democratic system, namely the electoral college.

Come again? What do ballot initiatives, the purest expression of direct democracy available to Americans, have in common with the electoral college, a relict of the 18th century's fear of democracy and mob rule?

Exactly.

The idiocy of the way we elect our presidents is too well documented to need further comment. Suffice it to say that a system loosely based on the way the Holy Roman Empire chose its emperors is not exactly an inspiring role model for a democratic state with hopes of longevity and vigor. The mischief inadvertently caused by the Populists and Progressives who introduced the ballot initiative, or popular referendum, into the state-level polity of our country is less self-evident. The NPR story made clear what observant people have known for decades: that it is a system designed to hamstring and hijack government, to give organized special interests of all sorts a de facto license to wreak all kinds of havoc.

When I was a politically active teenager in Masachusetts,  the beverage industry and their allies (or captives), the small mom and pop corner grocers (this was in the days before convenience store/gas station hybrids like 7-11, Pepperidge Farm or Circle K) used the ballot initiative to prevent the reintroduction of deposits on glass bottles for about a decade. If the legislature punted the issue to the voters and putit on the ballot, it was child's play for an organized lobby to spread enough disinformation to kill it. And that's what happened, time and time again, until changes in soft drink packaging rendered the issue more or less moot.

My point, if I have one, is this: that the same people who play the ballot initiative system like a fine Stradivari do it for the same reason that the Bush/Rove team gamed the federal Electoral College in 2000, namely to obstruct actual democratic rule. The anti-tax, anti-abortion, etc. lobbyists who portray Populists locally play Hamiltonian Federalists nationally, using any device that comes to hand to thwart the system of government we all learned about in school; you know, where the legislative branch bloody well legislates.

Commentators who caution us that another electoral vote problem may loom next week, if things don't go as well as they should for Obama in a few key states, make me worry about the electoral college, but also remind me of its evil twin, the ballot initiative. We all need to think about both of these problematic features of our political landscape as we clean up the mess left by the Bush/Cheney years and restore the checks and balances that served us reasonably well for 200 years.