Presidential Polls Map Will Become a Nightmare if Neither Candidate Reaches 270 Electoral Votes

There is a lot of talk about an electoral college and popular vote split wherein a candidate (Obama in this instance) does not get the most actual votes but obtains 270 electoral college votes and so becomes president. 

There is also talk of the candidates tying with neither of them getting 270 electoral college votes thus letting the decision of who becomes president go to the Republican controlled House, in which case Romney would be elected. 

The criticism of these things comes down to them being “undemocratic.” But at base being democratic is to be able to take responsibility for your government. We certainly don't want to do that. We don't want responsibility. So we shouldn't pretend to care when the veil of it is pulled away.

We defer away from democracy as soon as we choose our representatives. Our representatives make our choices for us and when those go wrong we blame the politicians. Even though the decisions that went wrong were often the ones we wanted. Even California with its ballot-initiatives, you never hear them blaming themselves for their economic crisis. We don't want things to be our fault.

Now that Citizens United has changed the money-game in politics we get to take even less responsibility. Even better we get to take less responsibility and possibly be even more involved. Secret donors have skyrocketed since the landmark court decision that means we don't even know who has to take responsibility for the hundreds of millions  of dollars worth of messages being thrown at us. We can't feel in control if we don't feel responsible. We can't feel we are being represented equally if we don't know who is being represented and how.

We don't want responsibility for our government or its decisions and things aren't very much in our control anyway. A president that didn't get the national majority of votes wouldn't be the first or the worst travesty against our purist mythical notion of American democracy. The Congress electing the president would merely be a deferment of yet another judgment from the populace. After all, our flag stands for a republic and not a democracy. Maybe if we treated our system and responsibility within it as the intricate multi-layered republic that is instead of the mythical democracy it never was we would start to make better decisions.