Truck drivers who voted in the Nov. 7 general election appeared to be as frustrated as any other group of Americans that three weeks after the balloting no one knew who had won the presidential race.
Transport Topics’ informal survey of truck drivers — taken as the Gore and Bush campaigns continued jockeying for legal and public positions on vote counting in Florida and the meaning of “one person, one vote” — showed that many think there ought to be a better way to run an election.
For one thing, the electoral college seemed to some drivers to be a barrier to democracy, if democracy includes the principle of direct election.
“I don’t know if I will vote again if they don’t do away with the electoral college,” a driver from South Carolina said. “Seems the vote of the American people doesn’t count any more.”
The vote of the people has never counted directly in a presidential election. Historians say one of the motives of the republic’s founding fathers in setting up the electoral college was to avoid letting a “mob-ocracy” choose the president in a emotional rush to judgment fueled by demagoguery, ignorance and money. The first leaders were not confident they could trust the general citizenry to render a wise and true decision.
Today, the tables are reversed, if you ask some of the drivers who responded to our unscientific polling.
For the full story, see the Nov. 27 print edition of Transport Topics. Subscribe today.
