I understand that when the founding fathers wrote the constitution there was a need. That all states get at least three electoral votes, even though on a straight population basis some might be entitled to only one or two. Otherwise the small population states might feel they didn’t have enough of a “say” in picking our nations leaders. They then might feel a need to strike out on their own. This was at time when we needed every possible state and person in our young nation. So this was opted, so they would have some “say” and remain a part of the good old USA.
So I pose the question now, why do we need the Electoral College? Why not go to a direct vote? I really don’t think any state is going to leave the Union now! Even the one’s with smaller populations.
I feel like the rest of the world is laughing at us after the last fiasco. Gore winning the popular vote but Bush winning election!
I don’t know, I think they did, but when we (the US) set up elections in Iraq, did that election use a popular vote? If they did, why is a popular vote good enough for them but not us?
I don’t what a heated debate, just some insights, thoughts and comments.
That’s why I’m putting it in IMHO. IMHO I think we should dump the Electoral College and go to a direct vote!
You are one election off in your example. Mathematical studies have demonstrated that the Electoral College system gives each (all) votes more weight and a chance to sway an election. On a more philosophical level, did you ever think about the name “The United States”? It is a collection of somewhat sovereign states and our method of electing the POTUS reflects that. Going to a direct vote would alter the fundamental structure of the country and this isn’t necessarily a good thing. In addition, going to a direct vote could allow a handful of the largest states to lock a Presidential election and make the majority of the state’s votes completely irrelevant. This isn’t purley theoretical. The liberal voting population of California and New York would have undue influence. You may consider that to be a good thing but many voters are voting from the perspective of only their own region and lifestyle and this country is very large and diverse. The current system ensures that the whole country (even rural states) get a say in the outcome.
You must also realize that any discussion of abolishing the Electoral College is purely theoretical and could never happen IRL. It is part of the Constitution and designed to be very hard to change. An amendment to change to a direct presidential votes would have to go through a series of difficult steps ending with ratification by at least 3/4 of the states (see, there is that notion of the state’s rights again).
However, individual states are free to choose their electors anyway they want. The only realistic way to get a more direct vote is to lobby individual state legislatures to choose electors proportionally.
Sorry… by last fiasco I ment the last time a persident lost the popular vote.
Not the last US election. I should have been clearer.
I realize this probably will never and that it would be really hard to do.
As for the large populations states like NY and CA locking the election.
I don’t know about that! Gore didtn’t win the poplual vote by all that much.
Gore 50,995,582. Bush 50,456,062
This is becoming something for the GD forum (if it wasn’t to begin with), but can’t you take this argument and turn it 180 degrees around, and say that under the Electoral College system, residents of the densely populated states (whether they are currently “liberal” or not should not be relevant) are essentially relatively robbed of influence?
Never mind the Electoral College, what about the fact that each state gets exactly two (2) Senators?
The median population for a State in the USA is four million people (per the last official Census of 2000). Is it right that the the contiguous states of Wyoming (493,782), North Dakota (642,200), South Dakota (754,844), Montana (902,195) and Idaho (1,293,953) had a total population of just over 4 million, yet are divided into 5 separate states? These states in aggregate get TEN Senators (comprising 20% of the Senate) and had 3+3+3+3+4 = 16 Y2K Electoral Votes (or just under 6% of the number needed for the Presidency). Yet such an aggregate state would have ranked right around the middle of the list of states by population.
Of course in real life, no state would vote to merge with another, as this would only reduce their political influence under the Constitution; and similarly, there is no incentive for other states to ratify the “balkanization” of another state (e.g., diving Northern and Southern California, or Upstate and Downstate New York), as this would only dilute their influence.
That doesn’t mean it is an equitable system.
I’m someone who tends to avoid GD for reasons of time, so I don’t know if these points have been made before… But I assume they have been, so I’ll stop now.
I don’t think the debacle was at all the result of the EC but rather poor election machinery and very close votes. I kinda like the system as it is. The reasoning for the EX I think of like this.
We all get 2 votes because we are all double citizens. I am a citizen of the USA and so have a say in the presidency that way. I am also a citizen of Hawaii and we all collectively have a say in the presidency. From the former my vote is 0.000000003367% of that section. From the later it’s 0.00000165%. That’s fine with me.
Our problem is using the House of Representatives to estimate the weight of our vote as a citizen of the US is inaccurate and unnecessary. Surely we could make it very exact nowadays. Hmm, that is estimated out for me at 0.000000003795%. A slight difference with the earlier number, provided I’ve done everything right. The only difficulty would be figuring out how to divide that weight. Per American citizen? Per voter? Probably the former would be the best using the numbers given by the later census.
So you’d see each state get a votes worth 2 points for a total of 100 possible points. And then the popular vote could be worth 435 points or 0.00000146 points per person. I like it because it’s mathematical (no need for the actual electoral delegates which I can’t say as I like), it seems fair (we can jiggle the balance between 100 and 435 to something more reasonable if you think it isn’t) and it eliminates the possibility of a tie (almost, I mean it is possible that the each candidate would get the same number of votes).
Although I’d much rather clean up the primary system first. It seems designed to give us the 2 final candidates without really giving us a chance to decide. You can divide all the states into 4 groups with each roughly the same pop. and EC weight and geography (NE, South, Midwest, West) then force each group to have primaries on the same date at two week intervals. Each POTUS election the 1st goes to the back and the rest move up.
There is an argument that not only are the number of people important but also geographical area and resources. People living on Long Island and Cape Cod for example are especially in tune with certain issues just because of geography. Other issues face different areas. That huge land area of say Montana needs people that understand and have a voice in the issues of that geographical area even if it is sparsely populated. This is especially true for Alaska and Hawaii.
I tried to come up with a way to quantify this and then it hit me that the fact that the United States is built around, well states, takes care of this on its own. Its not perfect, but it does ensure that each geographical region is represented.
The fundamental point however, is that the United States is a collection states and changing the Electoral College to a popular vote means that you need to take a look at other Constitutional principles like the make-up of the Senate. At that point, you are starting to overthrow the existing government. One can’t predict the effects but I am not willing to take that chance with a document that brought us from a post-colonial backwater to the most prosperous and powerful nation on earth.
I’m inclined to leave some threads like this in IMHO simply because some folks do shy away from GD. However, this particular one has turned into a healthy debate.
Remember the shitstorm in 2000 when Florida came down to only a few thousand, maybe a few hundred votes?
Imagine the shitstorm in some future election when the national vote comes down to a few thousand, maybe a few hundred votes. Everything that happened in Florida happening in every state across the country.
By which Shagnasty means, a DISPROPORTIONATE say in the outcome. Rhode Island for example, wouldn’t make a decent-sized county in most states. Yet it has its own Senators and representatives.
Our present system is extremely unjust – voters in populous states don’t get the same recognition that voters in small states. The Electoral College must go.
And as a native of Hawaii, you feel you have no, absolutely no disproportionate influence compared to me, a resident of Georgia, a state which has its own islands as well as a mainland.
Well, there was a lot of rhetoric at the time insinuating or stating outright that the rest of the states would be better off without “Rogue Island”. But yes, as a student of that particular historical period as well as someone who is contemplating writing a book on the Electoral College I would say that this is essentially correct. Although if I were explaining it I would emphasize that back then the United States was still in the process of becoming a single nation. The system for electing the chief executive produced in the federal convention of 1787 was thought to be a workable compromise designed to give every state something if not quite everything they wanted.
There are other views, of course. In Creating the Constitution Thornton Anderson argues that the large state nationalists ( led by Virginia and Pennsylvania in the form of Madison and Wilson ) attempted to put one over on the smaller states. If you are interested I am willing to explain in more depth his position which I find compelling, if not completely persuasive.
In any case, we should remember that the presidential election system proved NOT to be workable. It’s flaw in failing to anticipate prior interstate collusion on candidates ( that is, the growth of “nationwide” political parties ) caused problems with the first election in 1788 and by 1800 led to outright crisis. The Electoral College stands out as the 2nd most immediate failure of the Framers. ( After the failure to include a declaration of rights. ) This was fixed by the 12th Amendment to allow for seperate balloting for president and VP.
I would, and will, argue that we don’t need it. No, states are not going to leave the Union. That question was solved during the Civil War which was when the aforementioned nationhood process was completed.
Begging to differ, because I think it’s essentially not correct, and I urge you to explore this thoroughly in your book. (I’ll buy it, by the way.) It’s true that the allocation procedure for the EC favors small states, by granting EV’s for Senators, but that isn’t the reason for the College itself. The reason for the college is that direct election would have been impossible given the vastly different suffrage requirements and degree of democratization within the states in 1787. In a direct election, states with easy suffrage (which could be either large or small) would have been grossly over-represented.
Given the necessity for an EC, discussion turned toward how the votes should be allocated, and the Senators+Representatives formula evolved as an extension of the compromise over the structure of Congress.
Of course the EC should be scrapped, it’s a relic of the early republic when the Union was much weaker and states much stronger.
However, it’s not going to happen, since it would require ratification by 3/4 of all state legislatures. Smaller states benefit from the EC, it just takes 13 states who believe that they benefit and the constitutional amendment is dead. So it’s a moot point. We’d be better off without it, but we can’t get rid of it.
The only reason to rid the country of the Electoral College is if you accept the concept that a “state” should have little meaning besides being an easy way to break down administration of governmental duties into districts. If there isn’t supposed to be any difference to being from California than to being from Wyoming, the Electoral College makes no sense at all.
On the other hand, if you still believe that a person from California should feel that they have something about that fact that makes them different from a person from Wyoming, if you believe that a “state” in this Union is still a political entity of its own, which is entitled to having its say in who is elected President, then the Electoral College still makes sense. Remember, it is only the fact that states themselves have decided to allow you to vote for the electors and that the states have (for the most part) decided to award their electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis that the Electoral College works the way it does.
As Steve MB alludes to, all the votes already have all the weight so it is impossible for them to have any more. There is no more. But by all means, bring in the Hively article and we can critique Natapoff’s work.
Actually, it wouldn’t alter the fundamental structure of the country. We have a system of presidential electors now with our somewhat sovereign states and if we eliminated them we would have a direct vote while retaining our somewhat sovereign states. The states would just be a bit less sovereign and the people would be a bit more sovereign.
No, it’s not theoretical. It’s not even simply wrong. It turns reality completely on it’s head. The liberal voting population of California and New York have undue influence now. They, by virtue of being the majority of their state’s electorate, control all of their state’s electoral votes. That is, they have the voting power of not only themselves but of the conservative voters and all those people who don’t vote at all. Here’s the numbers from the last election:
( For simplicity sake I’ll just do California. )
Kerry, the main standard bearer of the liberal voting population, received 6,745,485 indivdual votes in the state out of 122,284,939 nationwide. That’s 5.5%. Because he got more votes than anyone else in Cali he got all of the state’s 55 electoral votes out of 537 total. That’s 10.2%. As we can see, the Electoral College nearly doubled the electoral influence of Kerry voters in California.
The first part of your statement is equally backwards. Since there is no bundling of electoral power within states in a direct vote large states can’t collude to make votes elsewhere meaningless. But it can happen under the current system. In the Electoral College the 11 largest states between them control a majority of the electors and are allowed to decide how those electors will be appointed, essentially controlling how they will vote. They don’t even have to hold a popular election. The state legislatures can just agree amongst themselves on who is the best candidate and let that person pick the electors and, bingo!, there’s the “election”. No matter how many millions of people in the other states and DC vote for someone else, Big State Boy wins every time.
No, I don’t consider allowing some to have a disproportionate say to be a good thing. I consider equality a good thing. I don’t have a problem with people basing their vote on a regional perspective. The problem is that the whole country doesn’t have an equal say. Some Americans, depending on where they live and how they vote, have more of a say than others.
I disagree. Certainly the Constitution is difficult to impossible to amend in the face of a determined minority opposition. Certainly that opposition exists against abandoning a presidential electoral system that benefits some at the expense of their fellow Americans. But all is not lost because there is the example of the 26th Amendment. There were plenty of people against the idea of enfranchising 18, 19, and 20 year olds back in 1971 yet the amendment was ratified by the states in a mere 100 days. Why?
The reason is because a few months before the Supreme Court decided in Oregon v Mitchell that while the Congress couldn’t tell the states that 18 year olds must be allowed to vote in state elections they were empowered to do so for federal elections. State legislators, not wanting the expense of 2 seperate voting rolls and fearing the wrath of young voters should they run for higher office, decided it wasn’t in their best interest to oppose it. Thus, facing a fait accompli potential opposition evaporated rather than deal with a problematic situation where their advesaries got most of what they wanted anyway.
If we can create a similar situation for presidential voting history is likely to repeat itself. Here’s how to do it: Have the Congress pass a bill to standardize the election of presidential electors ( the courts have ruled that Congress has authority over these elections too though I would have to go look up the precedents if anyone has doubts ). Include in the bill incentives for states to assign their electors not to the most popular candidate within each state but rather to the most popular candidate nationwide. By “incentives” I mean that the federal government will subsidize the cost of elections so long as states play along and perhaps even withhold federal highway funding if they don’t.
As soon as enough states agree, enough so that a majority of presidential electors are assigned in this fashion that is, you have a de facto popular vote. Whoever gets the most votes nationwide will win every time. Once that happens the opposition is again facing fait accompli and should be willing to allow an amendment to eliminate the remaining problems ( such as deciding how to handle situations where the plurality winner doesn’t gain a majority and to get a share of the electoral funding ).
Certainly there are theories that representation shouldn’t be based strictly on population. As Professor Anderson points out in the aforementioned work, there was no consensus in the federal convention in favor of basing representation ( congressional and, by extension, presidential ) on population instead of on wealth. But since then equality has become an important American value. Most Americans believe people are “created equal” and thus deserve equal representation. If you would care to offer the specifics another theory I would be happy to discuss it.
My theory is easy to quantify. “One Man. One Vote.” I see no reason that someone else’s opinion should be more valuable than mine.
You act like this is a big deal. It’s happened three or four times in the past. The other times were the elections of 1824, 1876, and 1888. The election of 1960 is up for grabs, as there appears to have been a fair amount of fraud perpetrated to get JFK elected.
Direct election just won’t work. I’m not even sure it would work with a multiple-choice ballot system. The Founding Fathers had solid reasons for establishing the EC, and I don’t think we’ve come up with a reason good enough to do away with it. I realize the libs think that the fact that Bush got elected is reason enough, but it’s not, guys - sorry.
