Assume for the moment that you wanted to prevent future occurrences of the Presidential popular vote winner not winning a majority of Electoral College votes. (Also assume that amending the Consitution is not a politically viable option. )
Could you achieve that goal by going state by state and having the 48 legislatures who have not adopted a proportional Electoral College vote assignment method do so? In other words, leave the Constitutional mechanisms in place, but change how the votes are allocated by state.
Would Nebraska and Maine’s current system achive the goal or would you need a different assignment schema, e.g. assign electoral votes statewide based on popular vote percentage? What do you do with partial votes?
This idea could work, but you would have to have all the legislatures agree. If some of the big states won’t do it, (i.e. California, New York, Texas), then it really doesn’t mean much. It’s sort of like disarmament. Everybody’s got to do it or it won’t work.
I’m not a math expert, but I don’t think it would be foolproof. Since the small states get more electors than they are entitled to because of their population, you could still get a repeat of 2000. As for a proportional system, you would need a constitutional amendment, since the Constitution still expects electors to be real people and you can’t be a .6667 of a person.
How about rounding the partial votes to the nearest whole number?
Assume 11 electoral votes, Candidate A has 55%, Candidate B has 40%, and Candidate C has 5%. Candidate gets 6 votes (6.05 rounded down), Candidate B gets 4 (4.4 rounded down), and Candidate C gets 1 (0.55 rounded up).
It’s not possible to ensure that the winner of the popular vote will always be elected president without amending the constitution.
Requiring all states to allocate their electoral college votes in propoprtion to the statewide popular vote would reduce the chances of the winner of the national popular vote losing the election, but not eliminate them, for the reasons mentioned by BobT. And, in any event, it would be more difficult to acheive than a constitutional amendment, since it requires the agreement of the legislatures of 48 states.
I agree it would take a long time and all the states (all the high population states?) would have to implement to prevent any future occurence, but that still seems easier than a consitutional amendment.
However, if only one additional state, Florida, had had this method in 2000, the outcome would have been changed.
Changing the Electorial College would have to be done with an amendment to the Constitution. This requires that 2/3 (or is it 3/4) of the state legistatures ratify the amendment. So the answer is that it can’t be fixed without the state legislatures.
I saw a book review on C-Span, where the author discussed the fact that the Electorial College is outdated. It was originally developed, because back in the late 1700’s, George Washington and Ben Franklin were the only two people that everyone in the colonies had heard of. So basically the idea was to send electors that you trusted to listen to the candidates and then vote for the best one. Today that problem no longer exists, however some people think it favors the smaller states. Therefore, it will be tough to get enough votes from the state legislatures.
But why would one state do this? It would weaken its standing in the general election, as no candidate would campaign very hard there. At best, they’d get 60% (or so) of the electoral college votes if they won, and 40% if they lost. Why expend money and campaign time on a state with marginal return? If they did nothing they’d still get about 40%.
California, being a large winner-take-all state becomes a huge battleground if its close. Granted, if the state is hugely inclined to one or the other candidate, the remaining candidate usually writes the state off and doesn’t campaign. A proportional electoral college would give them incentive to spend some time there, but not as much as going for a winner-take-all state where they stood a chance.
If all states went to this model, the picture is very different, but if only one or two go, they become marginalized.
To clear up one misconception–Nebraska and Maine most emphatically do not allocate electoral votes by proportional representation. They have winner-take-all systems at the district level. In Maine the winner of each of its two House districts gets one electoral vote, and the statewide winner gets two more. In Nebraska the process is the same except that there are three districts instead of two.
Regarding the origin of the electoral college–under the federalist system envisioned by the framers, direct popular election of the president would have been all but impossible. The states had hugely different suffrage requirements in 1787, and the states with restrictive requirements never would have agreed to a direct popular election which would have reduced their influence.
To answer the OP, yes, it is possible for all 50 states to change the manner in which electors are elected by state law. But no system can ensure that the popular vote winner will win the election–if nothing else, the electoral votes are not allocated proportionally by state, because each state gets a baseline of two votes for its Senate seats. And, as has been pointed out, no state has any incentive to begin the process. Furthermore. not everyone would agree that the popular vote winner should always win.
True, but in the OP, I made the assumption that the goal of this effort was to ensure just that outcome.
On that tangent though, jklann, are you arguing that the current system is better than direct election of the president?
To answer why a state would adopt such a method – well, Nebraska and Maine did. I agree that state legislatures may feel their leverage in a presidential election would be reduced. How about going around the legislatures and introducing an initiative/referendum?
Either include a law as part of the proportional vote assignment, like those in 27 states or districts that bind an elector to vote for a specific candidate or ignore the problem, like the current system.
Colorado has 8 Electoral College (“EC”) Votes. Of the votes cast for the top four finishers, Bush got 51.3%, Gore 42.8%, Nader 5.3%, Buchanan 0.6%. Breaking the 8 EC votes using this gives Bush with 4.1 votes, Gore with 3.4, Nader with 0.4, and Buchanan with 0.05 votes. We round Bush down to 4, round Gore down to 3, and Nader and Buchanan get zero. That is only seven votes. Do we reward Nader with a full vote for getting less than 1/2 of 1 EC vote’s worth of poll votes? Same problem arises with Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, New Jersey, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Utah, and Wisconsin. The OPPOSITE problem, rounding giving TOO MANY votes, occurs in Minnesota and Ohio.
By the way, if the Electoral College Votes could be awarded in fractions, exactly in proportion to the popular vote, Bush wins 256 to 255, with Nader getting 15, Buchanan 2.
[sub]As long as I didn’t have any keypunch errors.[/sub]
Rillian, many legal scholars doubt that it is possible to require that an Elector vote for some specific candidate absent a change in the US Constitution. You’re basically dealing with two issues that seem to pull in opposing directions with equal strength: (a) the text gives the state legislatures control of the “manner” of appointment of an Elector–presumably allowing a state to pass a law requiring that an Elector vote according to some standard; however (b) it’s one thing to require conduct, another thing to enforce violations thereof. The whole idea of the EC was to have Electors–meeting in their own states, not all together–exercize an act of judgment as to who ought to be the Prez. If Electors could be legally constained in that judgment, why bother with the “office of Elector” at all?
Is the Electoral College a good thing or a bad thing? In the somewhat-less-than 200 years that have passed since there really was such a thing as a national popular vote, there have only been three instances in which the candidate with the short end of the stick did not end up with the office. In the two cases from the late 19th Century, one was simply a straightforward instance of the EC coming to an arithmetical result that contradicted the popular totals, and the other a complicated question involving competing groups of Electors from several states, an issue decided by Congress. The third case was, of course, the 2000 election.
It is important to note that in each of these cases, the popular-vote percentage totals were very close. We’re not talking about an Alf Landon or George McGovern being inserted into office over the express will of the people, but rather a very closely divided populace having a decision made on their behalf by a special element of the elections system.
Democratic purists–majoritarian extremists?–are offended by this. I have yet to comprehend how someone who gets 50.1% of the vote is obviously more deserving of political sanctification that the one who received 49.9%. Seems to me that when there’s less than a 10% point spread (I would take into account only the top two candidates), democracy would be just as well served by flipping a coin.
Note also that the EC encourages candidates to mount truly nation-wide campaigns, as opposed to highly regional favorite-son candidacies. (Nowadays the relevant regions are not, strictly speaking, the points of the compass, but a-the high-density congressional districts that abutt the national border all the way around, versus the broad midlands of the country, with a southeast-ward extension.)
If I were rebooting the system with my magic wand, I would prefer a REAL Electoral College of independent, uncommitted Electors, meeting all together as a group to debate the selection of a President.
T’ain’t gonna happen. What we will have, in a generation or so, will be such things as (1) a national primary to select two candidates for President (2) a national election to annoint one of those two by direct popular vote (3) a technically “nonpartisan” presidency (4) direct national plebiscites on legislative matters of real controversy. And other fun stuff.
Of course Bush would need 270 to take the White House, so that system either punishes the third party candidates, or we need to re-write the rules to a simple plurality.
One trend in elections since ~1960 is that candidates (on both sides) completely ignore those states that one of the candidates has “locked up”. The perception of “locked up” is affected by the size of a state. Leading by 10% in California is not as significant as leading by 10% in S. Dakota. Hence smallish states almost always get ignored. That’s why the two that have apportions are small. It would be a real good idea if more states do this. Expect this to happen more in the some Southern states, e.g., where Rep. win the state in the Pres. election but Dem. control the state govt.
Note that one of the Big Rules of Electoral Reform is:
Third party candidates have to be shut out.
(Not my rule, but obviously that of the 2 big parties.) Hence, a proportional system where Nader would have gotten an electoral vote or 2 in California is a Non-starter. The big dread is that the election ends up in the House where all hell breaks lose. (Think 2000 was bad? Think again.)
I think it is in the best interests of 20+ states to go apportioned.
Before you all start beating me with spoons could you stop and think. Yes, the American system is unfair, yes George W lost the popular vote. Yes to all of the other objections.
But, in 220 years, the US has had one civil war. No military coups, no invasions, no (major) suspensions of the constitions, no military governments, elections every four years without fail. No prsident refusing to leave office.
So weigh up the choices. It’s electing another George W or stepping into the great unknown. Take the easy solution guys.