The Electoral High School was conceived about 200 years ago. Back then before the telegraph, any communication between the parts of the county would have to be done through a guy on a pony. That takes time, so the Electoral High School was formed. Now instead of counting the votes, a small group of people gather together and vote the way they think their state would. It's based on how the actual people voted, kinda.
They don't need to know the totals, unless it's really close. 99% of the time, all they need to know is who won. All of a town's votes are going to whoever wins, so if I win by one vote in two towns and the other guy gets 100% of the vote in the third, I win even though he gets more votes. And vice versa.
I had more votes, but I lost. It sucks, I know. I won the towns like New Jerseyburgh and California City by big margins, so I had plenty of extra votes which got wasted. Shrubbery won more towns than me, but a lot of those were just by a few votes. If only some of those California Citigoers and New Jerseyburghers moved to Floridaville.
My whole campaign strategy was based on winning the Electoral High School. Winning the popular vote's a nice consolation price, but no one who lost Jeopardy went on the show for the free case of Rice a Roni. I didn't bother campaigning in Utahtown. I knew it was going to Shrubbery, and it would be too much work to win it, so I left it alone. If my supporters in Utahtown really supported me, they'd move to Floridaville.
Similarly, I didn't campaign in Massachusettswood much either. I figured I was going to win it, and I did, but my efforts would be better spent with the swing towns. The Electoral High School sure makes it easy to campaign. Most of the county I don't even have to visit! It's just where the town's at 50/50 that I have to get off my big dogcatching butt and talk to the public.
In those few towns I do visit, I bet you can't tell my speech from Shrubbery's. We're both for putting dogs to sleep, both against have two dogs of the same sex live in the same house. We both like giving dog food companies big tax breaks, despite them shipping their manufacturing plants overseas. At the second dogcatching debate, we agreed with each other 42 times! I didn't mean to, it's just that I don't often meet someone who agrees with me so much.
It's the year 2000 now, and we've had many technological advances in ponies. Cellular ponies can now go from one part of the county to another instantaneously (so long as it's in range). We don't need the Electoral High School still on the books. As a matter of fact, I can point to this law as why I'm not the 43rd County Dogcatcher of the United States. But I'm not going to change it.
Why? Because it helps me more than it hurts me. It made me lose to the other guy, but at least I have the security that there ONLY IS ONE OTHER GUY. And if Shrubbery's party and I work together (he's a uniter, not a divider, from what I hear) we can keep just our two parties in power.
There's plenty of third party dogcatchers out there. Ralph Zenith, Pat Cannonball, Lyndon LaWoof. Plus the Natural Leash Law Party, the Socialist Bone-Sharing Party and a bunch of other runts. The ballot gets loaded with these little guys. Most of you haven't heard of them, and don't even look at the bottom part of the ballot (assuming you're in the minority who actually votes for dogcatcher). One part of Floridaville put Pat Bucannonball as the second guy on the ballot, and he got an election-flipping 3000 votes that even Pat says should have gone to me!
The third parties are all small, and Shrubbery and I are big. You'd think that means the county loves us. Nope; they don't even want the two of us to HAVE a dog, much less control the executive branch of county doggie power. But they all hate one of us more than the other. And all we have to do is harness that hate toward one of us and make sure it turns into a vote for the other guy.
We don't mention the third party dogcatchers when we talk. Ever. Our campaign strategy is to pretend they don't exist. Shrubbery's dad tried the same thing ten years ago, pretending a recession wasn't there when it actually did. It worked, until that Persian Cat Gulf War was over and people realized they spent their last five bucks on yellow ribbons to tie around trees.
We arranged the debates to block third parties out. Ordinarily the League of Bitch Voters run them, (don't get offended, female dogs are called bitches) but they let Ross Sparrow in during the 1992 election. That was mostly because he was a multibillionaire and could afford a big campaign like the two of us, but that could open doors to non-multibillionaires in the future. So we made the Committee for Dogcatcher Debates, which wouldn't let anyone be on stage unless they had 15% of the assumed vote. That stopped Ralph Zenith from being on stage, since he was looking at the debates as a way to raise awareness of his party (and to call Shrubbery and I on all that stuff we agree on). Zenith had a ticket to watch, and we wouldn't even let him in the building! He filed a lawsuit about it, but if lawyers can't help me out, they ain't doing a flea's damage for him.
We also love blaming the third parties before the election. We had so many of my guys say that Zenith was going to cost me the election, some of them switched their votes back to me. Zenith honestly won all the votes as much as I honestly lost them, especially since he didn't have half the county naturally assume they were voting for him. But my people said Zenith was stealing votes all the same. I didn't say anything of course, because I pretend he doesn't exist.
That's the one problem the third parties currently give us. Sparrow took a lot of votes away from Shrubbery's dad in 1992, enough so my buddy Bill Hounddog could win. If third parties got bigger, they would only give us more problems, so we're content with this one minor problem as the lesser of two evils. Plus, there's a 50% chance that the third party will work in our favor, just like the Electoral High School. I guess this election and 1992 make us even.
Look at the five weeks of recounting, and all those lawyers I hired. Did anyone you know mention Zenith much? If it wasn't for Bucannonball's ballot thing, he's wouldn't get a mention. And those other third parties are still waiting for the first TV camera to find them. Our strategy worked: no one remembers them.
And this is why I love the Electoral High School. A party doesn't go from little guy to big guy overnight. It takes a middle guy step. But the EHS is prejudiced to favor BOTH of us big guys, to the point where third parties can't reach that middle guy step. They can't even stick in most people's heads! Man, we're smart! We'll be in power forever!
There might be talk by a few rogue dogcatching legislators to abolish the Electoral High School. It'll get shot down by more right-thinking party members, of both parties. Even sensible options short of abolition will be shot down.
Take this example. Every town gets at least three EHS votes, all going to whoever has the majority of the vote. Why not split them up? It makes sense, it'd be easy to do, and we're naturally completely against it. That would lose us all our campaigning power. We'd both have to visit every town, even little wiener towns like Nebraska Village. Plus, guys like Zenith might win one of the EHS votes in California City or someplace, and that's be a step toward legitimacy none of us want for him.
We�ll have this exact same election in four years, thanks to my and Shrubbery's parties. Me versus him again, and since most people don't like what the dogcatcher does no matter who is it, those hate votes will swing back in my column. And in eight years maybe they'll go back to him. We'll blame third parties for stealing OUR votes while pretending they don't exist, and we'll never mention how the Electoral High School robbed me. Because the status quo gives each of us a 50/50 shot, and third parties will just eat into it. We're the big dogs, they're the hydrants.