The Electoral College is made up of popularly elected representatives who cast presidential/vice-presidential votes for the people of their area. This was originally created because the common person back in the founding days was not well versed in politics, so they would elect these men to cast the votes for the people. In present times information about candidates is widely available, making each and ever person capable of making an educated decision.
The question I ask all of you is it time to go to the popular vote so we don’t have another Bush/Gore upset? Or am I over looking some advantage of this system.
The conventional excuse for the electoral college these days is that it supposedly forces presidential candidates to give attention to small states, or in particular, “farm states”. (We note in passing that this justification for the existence of the electoral college has nothing in common with the original one.) However, this excuse fails for a number of reasons, the number being two major ones.
Follow the candidates during presidential campaigns and you’ll see them spending most of their time in the larger states. The majority of the small states, farm or otherwise, are completely ignored.
The small states already get a disproportionate amount of power from their unfairly large number of representatives in Congress and it’s not good for them or the country as a whole. They use this power to grab extra pork barrel spending, such as agricultural subsidies, as well as contracts for building junk for the military and so forth. If they had less power, they and everyone else would be better off.
I am not a fan of how the number of electors is calculated. I live in North Carolina - my vote should not count more than someone from California, but less than someone from South Dakota, but it does.
On the practical side, direct popular vote is potentially very problematic. Look back at how much commotion was caused in Florida in 2000, then multiply it to all 50 states in the event of a very close Presidential election.
Compromise - each state gets one electoral vote per congressional district, that vote going to the plurality winner in that district, and two electoral votes to the plurality winner in the state overall.
Direct popular election is the most straightforward and logical way to elect a President.
However. . .the EC is a great way to give the local loyalist or high up politico a really cool perk. The EC also has significant power in it’s present form. I don’t believe it will ever go away because of these two reasons.
Most states, large or small, that are not in dispute, tend to be ignored. There’s no reason to spend your time and money on a state when that state’s electors are all but assigned already.
Bryan Ekers idea has some merit, but it still doesn’t change the fact that individual areas tend to get locked into one candidate or another fairly early in the process. There’s no point to entering “enemy” or “friendly” territory to try and swing voters your way, because it won’t help you get the votes you need.
A true popular vote means that every vote is worthwhile, even if it’s from someone who represents a small minority in his location.
The reason you give for the EC is only one of the reasons. Or, was one of the reasons, and it is largely irrelevant today. The reason the EC sticks around is the way electoral votes are distributed among the several states.
The way to get rid of the EC is through a constitutional amendment. If you can’t do that, then what you are saying is that the constitutional amendment process has outlived its time. Because, after all, the government should reflect the will of the people, tempered by the constitution.
Besides, it’s not clear to me that we could eliminate the EC without doing significant harm to the Republic. I prefer not to temp a 2nd Civil War. YMMV.
What would be the point? Why tinker with the system if you aren’t going to correct the fundamental flaw–that a candidate with fewer votes can defeat a candidate with more votes?
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact would effectively eliminate the Electoral College (or at least its relevance) without requiring an Amendment by requiring states to send electors based on the National Popular vote rather then the vote in only their state. Its been passed by several states, including several for whom the current system is an advantage, but it doesn’t take effect until states representing 270 electoral votes pass it.
I suspect if the Electoral College is ever done away with, it will be through that law. I imagine it will pass in CA in the near future (it would’ve passed earlier had it not been vetoed by the governor) which would put it halfway to the electoral votes it requires to activate.
That’s a bug? I thought it was a feature, to give the smaller states a slightly greater influence.
Now, if you wanna say “fuck the states” and go with straight-up popular vote, why not really correct the fundamental flaw and scrap the current state-based primary system?
The reason it sticks around is that a Constitution Amendment would* be required to change it. You’re not going to get 75% of the states to ratify it, when the primary issue is an imbalance of power benefiting the larger number of low population states.
There is, of course, the interstate compact that Simplicio mentioned
Yes, the Electoral College is an outmoded vestige. There is no reason to keep it. However, it requires a Constitutional Amendment to abolish the Electoral College, and a constitutional Amendment requires ratification by 3/4ths of the state legislatures. That means that 13 states can block it. And since there are more than 13 small states would would lose their disproportionate vote, that means they’ll never vote to repeal the Electoral College. That makes it a waste of time to talk about how the Electoral College is an outmoded vestige. Yes it is, no it isn’t going to be changed any time soon, next question.
It’s not the Electoral College that’s the problem, it’s how states choose the Electors that is the problem. The winner-takes-all system means the marginal value of individual votes is zero unless the state is close to the tipping point. That is what effectively disenfranchises voters.
The distortion caused by the mismatch between the number of Electors and the population of the state is small. It’s largest in small states, but small states have few Electors, so they have little overall influence and the effect of the distortion is minimal.
While we could fix the problem by removing the Electoral College, that is hard. Since the problem is due to the method of choosing the Electors, the problem can be fixed by changing the method. Thus we have per-district Elector elections, or the interstate compact.
That’s actually an argument against the Electoral College, not for it. There will always be some votes that are in dispute; what you want to avoid is having the election hinge on those disputed votes. What we saw in 2000 was effectively that multiplied to all 50 states, since the relatively small number of disputed votes in Florida was enough to swing the entire election. That would be much, much rarer in a system based on the national vote total.
Oh, it should also be noted that what Brian Eckers and Pleonast propose for splitting up each state’s electoral votes is already done in Nebraska and Maine. Historically, it hasn’t been very significant (due partly to the low populations of both states), but Nebraska did give one of its electoral votes to Obama in 2008.
Not sure there is a lot of opportunity left for that.
Different states have different rules. I am not sure there are any left where you could get a faithless elector.
Even if places still allow it the electors are chosen by their party for their faithfulness to the party. A faithless elector will lose all his/her friends real fast if they do that (and as mentioned in most cases they can’t even if they wanted to).