I believe that previous to Nov 8, I would have been capable of looking myself in the mirror and saying both
“If Hillary Clinton wins states totaling more than 270 electoral votes, but sufficient electors decline to vote for her such that she is not elected President, I will accept this.”,
and the analogous statement substituting ‘Trump’ for ‘Clinton’.
How many of those signing this petition do you think could truly say the same? I bet most would not even be sufficiently irritated by their inconsistecy to falsely claim so. I don’t think is would be wise for the EC to elect Clinton, but it would be constitutional. FWIW I would accept it.
It’s America. Someone has to win, someone has to lose. It would be bad bad bad to do an end-run around the system, as much as I dislike Trump. American institutions are under enough pressure as it is.
I am not so sure abolishing the EC is a good idea either, even though it is working against my wishes this time. It ensures that the less populated parts of the country aren’t altogether ignored during elections. And isn’t less populated parts of the country feeling (or actually being) neglected, left behind, what have you- isn’t that one of the main themes this cycle?
The electoral college is an unmitigated disaster. It has two roles, according to its defenders:
It lets states with fewer people have outsized influence–in other words, acreage, not population, ought to determine our leadership. I’m not sure what the right term for this sort of government would be (terracracy? Acreocracy?), but it ain’t democracy.
It acts as a check against the will of the mob, allowing enlightened heads to stop it when the people make a truly egregious decision. Well, if that time ain’t now, I don’t know when it could possibly be.
Overall I’m in favor of nuking the electoral college from orbit, but if can’t happen, I’d have no objection to the electoral college deciding in this case to respect the will of the majority of voters.
Well, there’s also the argument from history, i.e. “it’s a legacy from back when it was impractical to have direct voting and the country was much too large to cross by horse on election day”.
One answer to that is of course “you realize we have cell phones today, yes ?”, but then *that *argument leads to the notion that the Constitution is up for grabs because the world has changed a lot since it was penned down, and it’s become increasingly irrelevant and out-of-date.
Down here in France we’re down to our fifth Constitution, so I’m okay with that notion implicitly, but many Americans pride themselves on never having scrapped theirs, and point that “well if that’s a problem, it can always be amended”. But it hasn’t, and won’t be, not on the EC anyway.
Barring some major changes in technology and economics somebody is going to have the live in the middle of fucking nowhere farming the land, running the forest, mining shit, and running Stuckies filling stations as the great urban elite recharge their Tesla’s as they cross the great barren middle back of America.
These regions do IMO deserve some representation that is slightly out of proportion to their population.
The House and Senate mechanism is based upon the same sorta thing. We do NOT pass laws just based upon popular vote. And for that matter many things governing wise ALSO do not follow that model.
Or we can just say fuck it and just elect a president by popular vote and he totally gets to decide shit.
Or fuck it twice and just do everything by popular vote by internet and avoid any middleman at all.
Or we could be fucking adults with half a brain and realize there might just be some reason some variation of the EC college ain’t just some fucking retarded shit.
I’m a bit surprised you feel that way. Weren’t you a fairly ardent Trump supporter? As for me, I think it’s a horrible idea even if it results in Clinton’s election. The electoral college is a stupid anachronism when it functions as we expect it to. When it doesn’t, it will be even worse. If there is one thing that should be guaranteed from a democratic system, it’s predictability (that is, faith that the result will be the result, not necessarily that the result will be the one everyone predicted).
Or we can fucking remember that not even all the founding fucking fathers agreed on the fucking electoral college, and that it was a fucking compromise. James Fucking Madison himself was fucking against it (See Fucking Federalist No. 39.).
Or, we can just keep saying “fucking” for the next four fucking years.
As a non-American I find the Electoral College system quite strange - I sort of get the idea that you need to ensure sparsely populated states aren’t ignored but personally I don’t think that’s the way to do it.
Why not elect the president based on how many seats their party members win in the house of representatives? That’s how the UK/Australia/NZ elect their Prime Ministers and it works pretty well.
Electoral votes are assigned to the states on the same basis that seats are assigned in the House and Senate (house seats by proportion of citizens, senators two per state). So it’s essentially the same thing.
The practice of allocating all electors to the candidate that got a plurality of the popular vote is a State law. In fact Maine and Nebraska don’t do it that way. (Don’t we all know that by now? Those little funny boxes for Maine 2nd district, Nebraska 3rd district on sites like fivethirtyeight.com ?)
The problem is that no state that wants to switch will switch until they don’t want to switch, and then they won’t switch. Right? Clear?
In 2016 would Michigan want to switch so that in 2020 they would allocate their votes 8/8? No, GOP won and they want all 16. California not be a trove of 55 dependable votes? The bargaining it would take to fix all this is next to impossible. Somebody should have been taking better notes when we were all behind Rawls’ veil.
That’s how a Parliamentary system works. We don’t have such a system. In fact, that would be counter the idea of “checks and balances” built into the constitution. Americans are fond of situations where the legislative and executive branches are in the arms of different parties. And if not actually in the arms of different parties, at least having the ability for that to be so.
Minor enhancement, if I may. The Prime Ministers of these countries (and my own) is not precisely analogous to a president. If, say, the American executive was the House Majority leader and he or she would assemble a cabinet out of other Representatives and some Senators (who would now have double duty as both heads of departments and representing their district/state constituents), that would line up better with the parliamentary system.
The Prime Minister is the executive head of government, but the (largely ceremonial) head of state in the U.K. is the Queen, and though historically the monarch would choose a viceroy (a “Governor-General”) to act as her representative head of state in each commonwealth nation, in the last century or so these positions have been appointed and approved by the individual countries’ parliaments (with a rubber-stamp from the Queen). They have limited official powers.
Truth be told, I often forget who the Canadian Governor-General even is and have to look it up. … David Johnston… huh. Well, he seems like a decent sort. I see he was once principal of McGill, cool.
It’s the same in Australia - but at least our current Governor-General (Sir Peter Cosgrove) was a high-profile military officer before becoming G-G, so quite a few people have heard of him.
