Although in this race my candidate could very well stand to lose without the electoral college, I still support it’s dissolution. However, it’s very clear that Bill is a democrat. So America has progressed, huh? Economically, perhaps. Heaven forbid that under George Bush America should ‘go backward’ to such outdated concepts as integrity, loyalty, truth, your word as bond, character and moral responsibility. Heaven forbid we should recognize and hold sacred the institute of marriage, or that we should respect and honor the very tenets this nation was founded on.
We are not a perfect nation, but we are the best game in town. It’s clear to me that 8 years of situational ethics and prevarication are enough. We need a leader in the white house, not another poll follower and global laughingstock.
Popular vote: Winning candidate receives most votes from populace.
EC: Winning candidate recieves most votes from populace, but must also satisfy a geographical distribution constraint as well.
If different attitudes range roughly according to geography, but populations are unevenly scattered then scheme 2 is clearly better as this forces the majority to be diverse.
I would wager that this geography factor is much less significant today than, say, back around the Civil War, but not so insignificant that it yet could be discarded (case in point)!
People wanting to have a predictable winner by 2130 EST next time will whine loudly, the more so if Florida’s votes are eventually assigned to Bush, or if an end run around the whole problem is attempted by letting the election go to the House.
At least five amendments abolishing the EC will be introduced in the 107[sup]th[/sup] Congress. It will quickly be found that, whilst there is widespread support on abolishing the EC, there is no consensus on what means of electing a President should replace it. An amendment abolishing the EC and allowing the Congress to “prescribe by law the manner, time, and place of electing a President” will be approved by the Congress in late 2002.
The leisurely approval by the several States (as we pedants like to say) will mean that the President of 2004 will still be chosen by the EC, but it will have been abolished by 2008. Future Congresses will try several schemes for choosing a President by something approximating the popular vote; at least one will be struck down by the SC as being incompatible with the rest of the Constitution, and all will condemned as “undemocratic”, especially by those who don’t like the results. The matter will not be resolved in the first quarter of the 21[sup]st[/sup] century, and perhaps not in the first half.
By 2060, a law allowing the House (each Representative voting as an individual) to select a President will be passed. It will be again condemned as undemocratic, but weariness with the whole mess combined with the perceived increase of power by the House will cause Congress not to care, and, in fact, few people will consider this a “litmus test” for voting for Congresscritters. During the preceding decades, however, effective authority will have shifted down to heads of “alphabet soup” agencies, and the President’s role in governing them will be limited to proposing names to the Senate for confirmation (a new Tenure in Office Act will be passed in the 2020’s, and possibly several times thereafter, with minimal changes, each time the SC declares it unconstitutional; eventually, a President who is so much the Congress’s creature that he doesn’t challenge it will be chosen, and it will become hardened custom, if not good law).
Absolutely. In fact, as the returns were coming in there were several occasions when the talking heads said “If states X, Y, and Z go to Bush, and states A, B, and C go to Gore, it will result in a tie.” In that case, the President is elected in the House.
Have you seen those national maps showing the breakdown of the presidential vote by county across the U.S.?
With the exception of a few blue blotches around big cities for Gore, the entire continental U.S. was a vast swath of red for Bush.
And look at the mess that still leaves us in.
But what that says is, Americans populating about 80 percent of the country’s land mass want Bush for president; resident of big cities, particularly in the Northeast and West Coast, want Gore.
At least with the electoral college, the smallest states still have the electoral value of at least 3 or 4 votes. Completely ignoring them can leave a candidate vulnerable (eh, Gore?).
Do we really want to have presidents of the United States who get elected and cater their policies to only New York City and L.A.? Without the EC, a guy could win with just those two and only a few other big cities.
Not a very representative federal government, in my opinion.
Still, with all those states going for Bush the EC votes is a very close thing.
I submit that reaplacing the popular vote with the EC does not work. If states really had the power over people, than Bush would have a landslide given the number of states he carried.
Arranging the EC so that Bush can carry all those states and the EC vote still hang on 300 votes and some thousand absentee votes if FL is trying to have it both ways.
If the EC was established because of delivering votes across the country on horseback, let’s dump it. If it was established to let the guys who run the states decide who will be President, let’s dump it. If it empowers the smaller states, let’s improve it; perhaps a cenus before a Presidential election.
I’ve been holding off because 2sense and I have been repeating our arguments to each other, and I’m trying to think of a way to break that deadlock. However, there’s one fact that needs to be remembered when evaluating the EC as an institution in this election: it’s a close one, a really, really close one, by popular vote or electoral college. There are arguments to be made either way (Gore won the most votes vs. Bush won across a wider spectrum), but any conclusions you draw based on this election will be tainted by an extreme example.
I’m going to jump in here with another benefit of the Elcetoral College system. As in the past, it reduces campaigning costs. Clearly, the current system of campaign finance already needs reform. Imagine if there was no Electoral College. Candidates would not so easily be able to concede states and concentrate their efforts in the “battleground” states. A candidate couldn’t afford to lose the big states by big margins. So you would really have to campaign everywhere and the costs would increase. Also, a candidate couldn’t afford to lose entire regions by wide margins. It would totally change campaign strategy. Seems to me it would make campaigning even more costly than it already is…
Dismantling the EC would require a Constitutional amendment. That, in turn, would require the approval of 2/3 of the states. Most states benefit from the electoral college. That is, they carry more weight in Presidential elections because of the EC. Why would such states vote to reduce their own power?
It’ll never happen.
A proposal to abolish the EC wouldn’t even make it out of the Senate, because the Senators from small-population states would oppose it.
Yes, the EC does try to have it both ways. That’s the beauty of it. It combines the will of the people with the will of the states. Exactly like Congress.
spoke-:
Actually, the EC benefits all states, large and small. True, it usually benefits the smaller ones more. But that’s well in keeping with the American tradition of fair play – making sure that all parties get a seat at the table. If that means giving a little extra help to the weak, so be it. It’s well worth it to maintain a society as diverse as ours.
Actually, we’re seeing what is probably an unintended benefit of the EC in this election: its ability to break a tie. This election is a tie in every sense, but because we have the EC, the rule of who wins is clear: whoever gets more in the EC. Makes things clearer and easier. Otherwise, we’d be having to recount the entire US of A. Wotta mess that would be.
I believe that my assumption that the election is a zero sum game is correct, in context. I voted for Algore and so did 49,222,338 other people. 222,879 less people voted for Dubya and yet he has won. If all votes were equal then Algore would have won so my power must have gone somewhere. You can argue that other considerations outweigh this inequity but you cannot deny that it exists.
In a later argument you point out that there are plenty of other antidemocratic provisions in our Constitution. This should come as no surprise since the EC is laid out in that document. I don’t see how this helps your position. Those favoring election reform are seeking to change the Constitution ( most of them anyways, there are some proportional electoral vote supporters ). Obviously they don’t agree that it is the best way of doing things.
Also, it turns out that you were mistaken. It takes a ratification of 3/4 the states to amend the Constitution.
Thrasymachus:
Your thesis is flawed.
The EC does not require a popular majority, as this election shows.
Milossarian:
I haven’t seen a map showing voting by county but would like to. Got a link?
Anyways, those are just as deceiving as the electoral map on CNN. They once again represent a winner take all scenario. Not all rural folks voted for Bush, not all urbanites voted for Gore.
My still unanswered question is, “Why does it matter where people live, aren’t we all Americans?”
To the question: No.
To the assertion: Bullshit.
It is the district voting system which focuses geographic power. Gore carried both California and New York. So the electoral power of all of those people went to him. In a popular election a candidate wouldn’t be able to ignore the rest of the country because s/he was going to have to split those urban votes with the opponent(s).
hansel:
I have been holding off for the same reason. I would still be interested in exploring your justifications for inequality. My jabs were intended to point out that this is a delicate proposition.
sublemon:
Reduces the cost by how much?
Enough to empower the average citizen?
The candidates come from the privileged class.
spoke-:
I agree, though see the end of my reply to Beruang.
Some states will see no benefit to giving their power back to the people.
pantom:
What’s the problem with recounting all ballots?
Is democracy not worth precision?
As we can see, Milossarian exagerated a bit.
Here is a helpful statistic, land mass of counties won:
Gore - 580,134 sq. miles
Bush - 2,427,039 sq. miles
All right! This is much more telling than Gore’s 49,222,339 votes to Bush’s 48,999,459.
As a person who enjoys maps, I would be interested in a map that showed gradients of color for percentage of votes won by the winner in each county. Having each county on that map be sized according to population would be nice too. Any map wizards out there?
Without the electoral college, people like me, who live in California, would have been forced to watch many more presidential campaign ads than I did this year. I think I saw a handful of Bush ads and no Gore ads at all.
I enjoyed this. My brother who lives in Michigan had the opposite experience.
