Utah remains quietly taken for granted, again

The U.S. presidential election is just seven weeks away and Utah, again, finds itself in a familiar position: Ignored, taken for granted.

Yes, once more the GOP nominee — President Bush this time around — doesn't bother with Utah because he knows it's safely in his column.

And the Democratic nominee won't give us any time, either, because he knows he has absolutely no chance here.

Oh, sure, Vice President Dick Cheney came through this year on his way to his Wyoming home for a vacation — and generously gave a 15-minute speech for a U.S. House candidate at $250 a pop.

That's what we get here, a quick visit by a vice presidential nominee (if we're lucky) or more likely a visit by a candidate's wife, daughter or son.

In 1992, Hillary Clinton came through for a quick press conference, if I recall.

When a race is not that close, we have gotten presidential challengers coming through early in a race. But usually it's to hold a big-shot-only fund-raiser, maybe a quick press conference (incumbent presidents never hold press conferences in Utah), and then they're gone.

And Utah is once again out of sight and out of mind.

There are two words that describe our situation: Electoral College.

You see, if you are a Democrat in Utah or a Republican in Massachusetts, your presidential vote doesn't count. It is counted, yes. But it really doesn't count.

That's because in the winner-take-all Electoral College, whoever gets the plurality of votes in a state gets that state's Electoral College votes — which is the number of U.S. senators and House members from that state.

So if you live in a state that heavily votes for one party or another, and you happened to vote for the other party, you might as well not have voted in the presidential race.

Utah has not voted for the Democratic Party's presidential candidate since then-President Lyndon Johnson won the state in 1964. So if you'd been voting for Democratic nominees since, your vote really didn't matter here.

You need 270 Electoral College votes to win the presidency. As we all know, then-Democratic Vice President Al Gore actually got around 500,000 MORE votes across the nation than did Bush in the 2000 election. But because Bush won Florida (the U.S. Supreme Court ruled), he got more than 271 Electoral College votes and sits now in the White House.

I'm no constitutional historian, but various articles I've read say the college was more or less an afterthought by the drafting Founding Fathers — a compromise between those who wanted a popular vote for president and those who wanted Congress to pick the top executive.