Those laws have never been tested, and would be thrown out in a split second if they ever are. The Supreme Court ruling was in regard to a party requiring a pledge from its candidate for the Electoral College, in other words, the selection of electors.
There is nothing in the Constitution forcing an elector, once properly selected, to vote at the direction of his state, and the state cannot control, direct, or punish his vote.
I’m sorry, which of: Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, South Korea, and Taiwan are “major Western countries”?
Maybe Brazil, depends on how you define Western. The rest definitely not.
If we’re choosing between being more like Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico or being more like Germany and the United Kingdom I can tell you which is more appealing to me.
You know who else thought Germany was more appealing? 
So we should switch to a parliamentary system? “How many other Western countries do it?” is a pretty silly way to decide on systems of government.
Sometimes they’re in the State constitution, but in many cases they’re just set by the legislature, and there isn’t any legal reason the legislature couldn’t about-face at the last minute, the federal Constitution explicitly gives them the power to do so. They don’t because even in hyper-partisan times, people wouldn’t stand for last minute changes in the rules.
For the first election that might be true, but it would pretty quickly change. And as a practical concern, the popular vote and the electoral vote differing only happens once or twice a century, so in all likelyhood, but the time it came up, the fact that it was ever done another way wouldn’t be much more then a trivial pursuit question.
After all, how many news networks keep track of who would’ve won the Presidency if selection was still done by State Legislators? Or if states still had electoral districts for Electors? Or if Maine and Nebraska no longer split their votes? Or if the second place winner in the electoral college still got to be Vice President.
So, you are saying the Supreme Court said it is ok for a state to require a pledge from an elector but, if put to the test, the court would say that pledge in unenforceable?
Seems to me if it went to court and it was decided an elector could not be punished for violating his/her pledge then that would be tantamount to gutting Ray v. Blair. Of what use is the pledge if no one can make you own up to it?
They might, you never know, but I wouldn’t want to be the elector testing it.
My ideal system, although I haven’t found many that would like it, would be to have a set number of electoral votes per state, regardless of state size or population. Say, 10 electoral votes per state. It is up to the state to decide how to distribute the points based on the popular vote within that state - either winner take all, split based on popular vote, set up 10 electoral districts, etc.
I think this system would require candidates to campaign and deal with issues important to ALL (or most) states as opposed to the most populous ones, or swing states.
Most people I have told that to don’t like it, which is fine. But I do like a system where each state has an equal say in the process.
I’ve been against the Electoral College since I learned what it was back in school. I’m old enough so that was way before Bush v. Gore, so no incident sparked my dislike. IMO, the Electoral College is an antiquated Constitutional relic similar to 3/5ths of a person and the Senate being elected by state legislatures. In the 21st Century, it doesn’t make sense to me why the President isnt elected by popular vote. We are one big not country. Few people these days have loyalties to their states, so the President shouldn’t be elected by them.
America, in its infancy, was an incredibly diverse group with very little in the way of nationhood, we were a bastard stew of illiterate cast out hicks, not once in 1700 odd years had a nations leader been picked by the unwashed masses and even when Greece did it they were small communities with common cause and culture.
Who the hell knows what would have happened here, better have a ‘safe word’ of sorts.
It made sense then, but I think we’ve grown and can take the training wheels off now. The President of the United States should have the majority of the votes. Full stop.
In baseball, the team with the most runs overall wins the game, not the team who won more innings.
There’s nothing inherently right about an electoral system, yet it introduces a number of unpleasant side effects. Most infuriatingly, an unequalness in the power of each voter. Slightly less infuriatingly, a complete disinterest in states that aren’t “swing” states.
Ah, but in golf, the player who wins the most holes wins, not the one with the overall lower number of stokes.
In match play, anyway.
Can some non-US doper explain the parliamentary system to me? As I understand it, you vote only for your local MP, then the parliament gets together and votes for a Prime Minister. The Prime Minister appoints ministers of various departments and is a *de facto *chief of the executive branch.
Does this mean that a party can roll up huge margins in a few districts and, in fact, win a majority of the votes cast, but not win a majority in Parliament? And that party could be shut out of a coalition government?
Do other countries go through the same howling that their government is set up so that the party that wins the most votes may not, in fact, end up in control?
Well, the individual parties select their leaders, who will become PM if that party secures a majority in the House of Commons (or, as has been the case in Canada lately, is the biggest party that can cobble together a coalition that collectively forms a majority).
And, yes, it is possible for a party to get the most votes and yet not have a majority in the Commons. It’s happened five times in Canadian history (1896, 1926, 1957, 1962 and 1979) to no lasting ill-effect I’m aware of.
This is actually exactly what I was referring to. The mathematics behind that analysis is sound, and what it says is that the electoral college increases the chance of the Presidency being decided by a single vote. Where the analysis goes off the rails, though, is the assumption that the election being decided by a single vote is a good thing.
The big problem with electoral college system today is not that it gives excess power to small states, but that it gives excess power to swing states. Ohio and Florida decide Presidential elections today. (A vote for President in California or Texas is completely worthless: if California’s race is close enough for your vote to matter, the GOP is winning a landslide; the Demos are winning a landslide if a Texan’s vote matters.)
It’s hard for me to get worked up about someone winning with 49.1% of the vote when another has 49.2%. A much bigger problem is electing incompetent, corrupt or evil candidates; to focus on 0.1% of voters (most of whom are confused) is to get side-tracked.
You are saying winning the majority of votes is all that should matter as opposed to winning the majority of states (or rather electors from those states).
If all you need is a raw majority then you can easily ignore whole swaths of the US. Chum up to northern factories and fuck the farmers (as an example).
By demanding candidates win states the candidates must consider the concerns of those in Iowa as well as the concerns of those in (say) Mississippi. Likely the concerns of citizens in those states will be different in many important (to them) areas.
With a raw population vote you only need to suck up to 50% +1 of the populace.
I do not see that as a good thing.
They already do, it’s called not being a “swing” state. Except, the swing states are 10% of the population, not 50% +1.
Make it a popular vote, and Dems will be interested in Red states, because every vote there helps, Reps will be interested in Blue states because every vote there helps them, too. They’ll also stay interested in their own strongholds, because every loss there hurts them.
Define a swing state to me.
Show me one that has been a swing state for a substantial time.
Things change. Today’s swing state is not necessarily tomorrow’s swing state.
Give McCain Florida and Ohio in the last election and Obama is still the president (doesn’t even make it very close).
Ignore the rest of the states at your electoral peril. If you think you can tell a candidate to go for “those” 270 electoral votes and fuck the rest of the states I doubt you will have a successful campaign.
That is essentially true.
[The Australian situation is a bit easier to describe if you consider the LIB/NAT coalition as effectively being one party.]
It isn’t unusual for the party that won the majority of seats to have less than the majority of 1st preference votes, or the two party preferred. LAB has tended to be stronger in the more densely populated main city electorates.
But how many votes are cast for a party has no relevence to whether they form the government. The party/ that wins the most seats has that right.
In 2010 the LIB/NAT received 44% of the primary vote, LAB received 38%.
After allocation of preferences it became LAB with 50.12% v LIB/NAT with 49.88%. In terms of seats it was 72 each plus 6 independents.
So with neither major party holding a magority, nor even the most seats and therefore not being able to claim first dibs at forming government, it was left to the independents who came from all the way across the political spectrum. One went LIB/NAT and the other 5 went with LAB for 5 different and complex rationales, but how many votes won in the election would not have a factor.
There is zilch angst that the Guillard is not the legitimate government, and that remains for exactly as long as they maintain their slim parliamentary majority. If the compact breaks down, or LAB loses a by-election to LIB/NAT the government will change.
Certainly not here. In extremis, a stable coalition of 10, 20 parties that command a majority vote can govern for a full term against a single party opposition with 50%-1 seats.
Correct, but the leadership team is usually thoroughly well established prior to the election.
The upcoming Queensland election, due before mid-June, has an interesting example.
Queensland has a LAB government lead by Anna Bligh. The leader of the Liberal National Party (LNP) is Campbell Newman, who is not a member of Parliament. Jeff Seeney is the parliamentary leader of the LNP and hence is the Opposition Leader. Newman was until recently the mayor of Brisbane. He is standing for the seat of Ashgrove.
So if the LNP win the election Campbell Brown would be expected to endorsed by the parliamentary LNP and sworn in as the new premier. If he doesn’t win a seat then the LNP will elect somebody else from the parliamentary party.
In theory, after winning both the election and the seat of Ashgrove the LNP parliamentary party could say to Newman “Thanks for all your help in winning the election, but we’ve decided to stay with Seeney”, but that would cause one ripper of a riot.
You can ignore larger swaths of the US under the current system. While it’s true that it’s not always the same swath, it’s still always a very large one.