Does the U.S. Constitutional System Scale

When the United States Constitution was written, the population of the country was about three million, and voting was essentially restricted to white men who owned property. The population has increased 100 fold and suffrage has been extended to all adults and the economic, military and political power of the nation has similarly increased. Why should we assume that the indirect election of presidents and direct election of Representatives and Senators created 200 years ago scales up to to the current national needs?

There are of course signs that problems exist, such as the difficulties in the current primary process for selection of presidential candidates, election fraud charges, the failure of the process in the 2000 presidential election, the fact that most people who might vote either do not register or if registered do not vote, and the ignorance of the average citizen about the major issues faced by the nation.

We could move toward direct elections of the president, and we could unify the process for party selection of presidential candidates. We could in fact add a new level of representative government, selecting electors from the population and asking that they fully prepare to elect members of Congress and the President. Our current knowledge of statistics suggests that we can very accurately predict the outcome of an election with a relatively small sample of the voters, and we know that the current electoral processes not only are open to the efforts of the unscrupulous to exclude some kinds of people but are simply inacurate (e.g. chads sometimes interfere with the count of a vote in electro-mechanical card readers).

Perhaps we could do better by a well thought out system, both in the more thoughtful selection of better representatives and indeed in giving the average citizen the feeling that the process is responsive to his/her interests and is fair.