Bingo. The closest election we’ve ever had with respect to popular vote was Kennedy-Nixon in 1960, with a difference of about 112,000 votes.
In Florida, one of our largest states, in 2000, the final difference was 537 votes, and at most a few thousand votes were being debated. Extrapolate that to the entire country, at the same ratio of votes in question to total population, and you’d get maybe 50K votes in question nationwide. That wouldn’t have been enough to reverse the popular vote outcome in Kennedy-Nixon, let alone Gore-Bush where the difference was over a half-million votes.
I’m a strong federalist too, but I don’t see where the EV compact affects the distribution of power between the federal government and the states. Changing (or abolishing) the EV changes the mode of election of one officer of the federal government, not the powers of the federal government.
In the run-up to the 2000 voting, the Bush people were concerned about the reverse of what actually happened - that they would win the popular vote, but lose in the EC. They were planning to argue to electors that they should change their votes to give the election to Bush who really deserved it, since he won the popular vote.
You don’t want a system that can be gamed that way.
Certainly there are. There are 50 of them, plus D.C. This whole compact thing is based on the idea that a state law can control a Presidential elector’s vote. That is not so.
Right. One does not vote for a Presidential candidate, one votes for a slate of electors, currently (as Whack-a-Mole mentions) chosen for their faithfulness to the party.
In a compact situation, one would be voting for a slate of electors not tied to either party, but instead one that is supposed to vote for whoever won the national popular vote. Since states cannot order their electors to vote a certain way, and the element of party faithfullness is gone, there’s a great opportunity for craziness.
The electors will still be those nominated by the party who won the popular vote. So they won’t be any more or less likely to be faithless then is currently the case, they’ll be the same “party faithful” as always.
Plus if someone wins the popular vote, then they probably won a few states outside the compact as well, so chances are there will be a sizable “buffer” of electors voting for the popular vote winner should a few go rouge. And the number of electoral votes in the Compact are unlikely to be exactly 270, so there to there will be a buffer against faithless electors.
For all the talk of the horrific nature of having a President not be directly elected by the entire country, how many Western democracies actually elect their Head of Government that way?
Any Westminster system does not, and those systems often have men in power who would not win a straight up and down popular vote (David Cameron, for example.)
As for that Interstate Compact, I think it’d work right up until the day it would result in New York or California being forced to give their ECs to a Republican (which it would have done in 2004, for example.)
You still make it sound like there would be more of a risk under the compact. There wouldn’t be. The electors would be hyper-partisan hacks the same as always. Close elections requiring electors to be faithful are possible under the current system.
Once the compact is in place, nobody will care about electoral votes any more. The campaign and the election night coverage will be all popular vote, all the time.
With such a powerful crystal ball I suggest you make yourself a fortune in the futures market.
The moment the first election came about where it looked like liberal states would be forced into voting for George Bush of the 2050s they’ll break out of the compact.
Why wouldn’t it work then? As Freddy says, no ones really going to care about the distribution of EVs if the Compact passes. Plus state legislatures suck up and deal with having to assign Electors to the opposite party all the time under the current system. Florida’s GOP dominated legislature sent Obama electors to the College in 2008 while New Mexicos Dem controlled state legislator did the same for Bush in '04.
Technically, the State legislature could change the rules at the last minute to favor their guy regardless of what system is in place, but as a practical measure, they never do.
You’re the one who thinks he has a crystal ball. We should implement the compact, then, and when we abandon it four years later you can point and laugh and say, “I told you so.”
I said it wouldn’t work because big states would rebel the moment they clearly favored one candidate but the compact forced them to vote against that candidate.
Saying people will not care about distribution of EVs is absolutely incorrect. This will be an immense change to how we pick the President. It will be covered by the news 24/7/365 probably for two years running up to the election. Every station from Fox News to PBS will cover what the break down would have been under the old system.
State legislatures now certainly do not have to “suck up giving their EVs to the other guy.” Firstly, they have by and large given up any control over EVs, and instead gave it to state popular vote. That is fundamentally different from the state legislatures giving up that power to national popular vote.
The reason being is simple. One way or the other State legislatures had better respect the overwhelming popular vote of their State. Even if the legislatures just select electors directly, if they selected individuals who were supremely unpopular, the State legislature would lose its job.
With giving the vote over to State electoral vote, the legislatures were basically removing something that had the potential to make them unpopular at the State level (the only level that matters for State legislators.) By giving the vote over to national electoral vote, you would have say, the California democratic party going fucking ape shit the moment all of California’s EVs went to a Republican. California is a majority Democrat state, they would probably have a majority Democrat legislature. Backed by mass popular support the legislature would remove itself from the compact and that would be the end of it.
As for technically being able to change things at the last minute, that isn’t really the case. Every State I’m aware of elections have to be sorted out well in advance and there are timelines as to when statutory changes can apply to upcoming elections. These are sometimes hard coded into State constitutions are are precedent set in State Supreme Courts.
Of course no one has a very compelling reason for why we need to change at all. As I said earlier I can’t even think of any major Western countries that directly elects their Head of Government, our system is probably the most direct of any.
I’m not so sure. Since 1900, it’s true that only three elections have been decided by a difference of less than 1% of the popular vote. But, and this is a big thing, there have been *five other *elections where the winner got less than 50% of the popular vote. That’s more than one-third of elections where a small swing in the national vote would have changed the result.
With a state-based electoral vote, manipulating the vote in even a large electoral state like Texas would only have a limited effect on the national trend. And, at least in theory, using human electors instead of a strictly mathematical calculation, cuts both ways. While they could be influenced by the powers that be to cast a crooked vote, they could also be the last stand against widespread vote-stealing.
As that page notes faithless electors have never overturned an election and clearly in recent times (last 60 years) they are so rare as to not amount to any concern.
Because we have an election in which a candidate with fewer votes can defeat a candidate with more votes. That’s wrong.
Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, South Korea, taiwan. The important thing is, of those countries that do elect their President, none except the United States structures the election such that a candidate with fewer votes can defeat a candidate with more votes.
Well, as wrongs go, is it that big a deal? So the 49.6% candidate loses to the 49.1% candidate. The number of annoyed, disappointed people is about the same.
Yeah, I forgot. The president is just one guy. No big deal. :dubious:
And it’s not only about the powers per se, but how they are used operationally. Smaller states would get much less say in how those powers are used to affect public policy.
No, it’s not. The team with the most games wins the World Series, not the team with the most home runs over the series.
There is nothing inherently wrong about an electoral system that is weighted in favor of states instead of voters.