OK, right now, we have, of course, the electoral college which a lot of us think is outdated, and can lead to a candidate winning an election, even if he doesn’t win the popular vote.
I’ve always been for getting rid of it and going straight to popular vote (well, I’m not complaining about the 2000 elections ) but on the radio, I heard a pretty good argument against it, and that being that then only a handful of the largest states would choose who’s President.
So I thought of a solution that would give each state an equal say in who’s elected President. All candidates would campaign in each state, whoever got the most votes would win the state and get one sate vote. At the end, the candidate with the most states voting for him (and hopefully someday, her) would win the election.
So, if two competed, and one had 26 states, and the other had 24, the one with 26 states would win. This would force the candiates to try to appeal to voters of all states, instead of the current system of campainging in the important states, and skipping the rest, or just lightly glossing over them. This in turn would lead to more people feeling that their vote counts. And this in turn would hopefully lead to greater voter turn out.
OK, that’s my idea, no go ahead and shred it into the ground by telling me all of its faults and flaws.
This is the same thing as the electoral college, except each state would only have 1 electoral vote each instead of several, depending on their population.
I kind of like the idea of California being no more important in the election than, say, West Virginia, where I live. Candidates only pay attention to us when things look shaky for them in other states.
Isn’t this worse than the electoral college? Wouldn’t it be possible then to win the 26 least populated states and take the presidency with far less than the majority population of the U.S.? If you’re campaigning in Wyoming, your campaign war chest goes a lot further than it does in California.
The 26 states with the lowest populations total 47,346,251 people. So you could win the presidency by only 26,673,152 votes. How is that at all fairer than the electoral college?
I’m a little confused. Are you saying that the winner of those states would only have 26,673,152 votes, because if this is the case, then you’re right, it would be unfair and my idea is complete crap, or that they would win with a 26,673,152 lead, in which case, what’s wrong with that? If they win by a majority, even a small one, it would still be a legitimate win, would it not?
Sorry, on rereading, it wasn’t clear. The president could win by receiving half the votes of the 26 least populated states, plus 26 (1 for each state) giving him 50% + 1 votes in 26 states, for a total number of votes of 26,673,152 out of all votes cast. Even if there were 200,000,000 votes cast in the election, the president could win with only that many votes, properly distributed.
That sounds much, much worse than the electoral college.
That’s not a good argument. A popular vote is a vote of people. No states can control such an election because states aren’t people and wouldn’t have any vote at all. The winner will be the most popular candidate and he or she will get some votes from here, some from there, some from everywhere. The only way for states to control an election is if there is a vote of states. We have such a system now. The 11 most populous states between them control a majority of the electoral votes. If they all agreed beforehand to pledge all of their Electors to a singular candidate then that person would win no matter what and everyone else would have no say at all in who would become president. So if you are worried about some states ganging up on others in presidential elections then you should support getting rid of the mechanism that makes this possible: the Electoral College.
As for your “One State, One Vote” plan… it’s even worse than the crap we deal with now. It magnifies the problems of the Electoral College rather than solving them. Since there is only one electoral vote per state your plan mandates a “Winner Take All” system which leaves the minority opinion in each state without any Electors to represent them. At least now individual states can choose to assign their Electors proportionally though none do. The disparity in voting power between states would become even more disproportionate. Outside of the states everyone that doesn’t have a vote now remains disenfranchised and the residents of the District of Columbia would join them. Bad, bad, bad.
If you want candidates to try to appeal to all voters then the answer isn’t to create a vote of equal states but a vote of equal people. When each individual has the same vote then candidates have the same incentive to appeal to each individual.
That argument is completely stupid in that which state people live in does not have any significance in the popular vote. If 95% of the peole lived in Rhode Island, and they all voted for Candidate X. And the other 5% of the peole who resided in the other 49 states voted for Candidate Q. That doesn’t mean that Rhode Island elected the president. It means that 95% of the population voted for Candidate Q. Period!
If 51% of each state voted for Candidate X. Candidate X would win because he (or she) got 51% of the total vote. If everybody who lived in California moved 30 days before the election (enough time to register elsewhere, I assume), I doubt they would change their votes because they lived in another state. The resulst of the popular election would be the same. State size (relative or absolute) has nothing to do with popular elections.
I remain a big fan of doing away with the ‘winner take all’ system of statewide electors.
Allow each congressional district to be an electoral vote. Take a majority in a district? Get a vote. Throw in 2 senatorial electoral votes for whichever candidate receives a plurality of the votes for that state.
That would go a long way towards keeping them honest.
Sure, a candidate could still win quite a few votes by winning (for example) Chicago and environs. But they’d also be losing quite a few downstate.
Or Maryland. Winning the DC suburbs to Baltimore axis would do you well…but you’d still have to content with 3 or 4 electoral votes up for grabs in the panhandle and the eastern shore.
Make 'em rack up the frequent flier miles! That’s the ticket!
Frankly, I like a “lottery” system. Everyone over the age of 18 is eligible for a “public service” draft. If you’re selected, then you have to serve in a local office for one term. At the end of that term, the public votes to either keep you or draft someone else. If you manage to serve a second term in that local office, you’re then put into the draft pool for statewide office. You serve one term, the electorate decides if you serve a second term, assuming you survive that, then you go onto federal office.
This system would help to eliminate the power of special influence groups, plus help ensure that everyone got a better education. I realize that sounds crazy, but think about it for a moment, you’re a teacher and you’ve got a student in your class who isn’t performing well, knowing that this guy could one day hold public office, and thus have the power to really screw up things, you’ll be more inclined to make sure that he gets a good education, than you would knowing that the best he could hope for if he dropped out was a job a McDonald’s.
A disaster waiting to happen. Whatever you say about American democracy, it does have the effect of keeping the very worst people out of office. If we randomly chose local officials, we would risk having neo-nazis, communists, Islamic terrorists, and various other flavors of nuts in office. And while it’s true that your system would still keep them out of state and federal office, there’s plenty of potential for damage just by letting them in at the local level. Besides, there are some people who just aren’t suited for certain offices. Some people believe that there should be no public schools. What happens if such a person gets drafted for school board?
Yeah, scary thought, isn’t it? Which is exactly my point. Everyone suddenly has to learn tolerance. The bigot has to accept that a minority could hold public office and there’s not a danged thing he/she could do about it for at least the first term, and intelligent folks have to learn that there’s the possibility that someone who holds ideas which are totally repulsive to them could hold public office. Ideally, folks would learn to get a long with one another, in reality, though, government would probably grind to a halt (though this would be appealing to some folks out there).
Master Control, certainly would inspire mental health professionals and pharmacutical companies to ensure that folks got proper treatment, now wouldn’t it?
Define “too far gone.” See, the problem is, that when you get to rooting around in the various descriptions of “mental disorders” and you’ll find that we all “qualify” for one sort or another.
There’s lots of medical conditions out there (both physical and mental) which get very little research done on them because the condition isn’t life threatening or only a microscopically small portion of society will ever contract the condition. There’s a couple of ways to change this, one could legislate that all medical conditions get equal funding, the pharmacutical companies could decide to pour billions into researching conditions that only an insignificant portion of the population could be expected to contract (or aren’t life threatening) out of the goodness of their hearts because it’s the charitable thing to do, or they could do it out of sheer terror that if they didn’t, some “nutjob” would be put into a position of power. Pick your poison, as they say.
I don’t understand how you think this would make anyone more honest. I think the district system is no more harmful than the general ticket system when used in homogenous states with only a few congressional districts like Maine and Nebraska but would cause problems if adopted by more diverse and populous states because of gerrymandering. Entirely too many House districts are “safe districts”. Enough Democrats or Republicans are packed into the district to prevent the other party from winning it under normal circumstances. The influence of voters in safe districts will be limited to their ability to affect the 2 statewide electoral votes. Assuming, that is, that they don’t live where the whole state is already conceeded to one side or the other. And, of course, raising the stakes of gerrymandering isn’t going to make the district lines less squiggly. Likely we would see more of the antics we saw in Texas.
Oh please, do educate us. Teach us why we should accept the notion of voting power as the probability of each vote being the single vote that turns an election rather than the actuality of how much each vote affected the outcome of an election. Tell us why a voter would want to gamble the certainty of an equal vote for the possibility of a higher but still infinitesimally minuscule chance that the rest of the voters will tie leaving the decision to you. What is it exactly that you believe Natapoff has proven?
) but on the radio, I heard a pretty good argument against it, and that being that then only a handful of the largest states would choose who’s President.
OK, now I’m confused. What I proposed, was this.