System must change first

Your voting on the candidates offered to us by either of the two power groups will just continue the traditional oppositional gridlock that has evolved these past years. It won’t change much. What has to change is the update of the 18th Century Agriculture Age voting system to the 21st Century High Technology-Innovation Age voting system.

However one looks at it and in spite of the various candidates’ rhetoric, what can they change? The Democrats were supposed to make big changes when they took over last year but not much happened. After the November election no matter who wins, the present bureaucracies will remain in power and the usual political retreads and lobbyists will still be in business as they always have. It seems that the two political power groups spend more time not allowing each other to get ahead of them than to get on with their duties to serve the public.

Entitlements in the federal budget including interest on the public debt, Social Security, health care, veterans’ pensions and a few others, amount to some 98 percent of the federal budget which we as taxpayers pay for, one way or another. That leaves 1 or 2 percent of that budget to the new president to make the necessary changes he or she argues is necessary.

Politics is all about the acquisition and exercise of power and in our forthcoming election it is the usual war between two power groups and this year a war between two power groups in the same power group.

The presidential nominees that received the majority of the public’s votes in the past two national elections were not the nominees who became president. So, as I say, under the present election system your vote really doesn’t matter.

In November we should be voting on changing our election system so that our votes do matter and are independent of the two political power groups.

Give some thought about how America can change the election system, rising above the two power group system, eliminating the 18th Century Agricultural Age Electoral College and eliminating vice-president nominees that are selected by 18th Century methods whereby presidential nominees appoint the vice president to run with him.

James Riford Johnston

Oak Harbor