You’ve not refuted my point even once, so I’m not sure what you are going on about.
Slaves were not considered to be people, and by giving slave states extra representation based on the slaves that white people owned in those states, that was ensured to not change.
That is what I have said, that is the point I am making, and nothing that you have said has even addressed, much less refuted it.
I don’t really see how that follows from what he said or the wording.
Unless the wording was just that he mentioned the 3/5’s compromise, which you had a knee jerk reaction to jump in and try to “correct” what you inaccurately interpreted.
Thank you for the citation, but not really necessary. I already know that it agrees with what I have said.
Guys, just a reminded that the thread is about the Electoral College, not specifically the 3/5ths rule, so please ensure we remain on the EC topic. It’s drifting away when you start to get into the finer points of what “people” means.
By whom, and in what sense? I suspect that people are arguing past each other because they all have their own meanings in mind.
It refers to slaves a “Persons,” so if “considered persons” means “referred to by that word,” then that’s evidence that they were considered persons by the Constitution.
I don’t know if it’s better to have different parties have primaries to determine their nominee, or for there to just be open runoff elections, like they do in California, where it could end up that your finalists are from the same party.
I’m inclined towards the latter, personally, as I think that anything that reinforces parties is detrimental to democracy, and encourages tribalism.
But just about anything is better than the current setup. Why exactly is the entire country beholden to Iowa and New Hampshire? With the electoral college, I also do not see any reason why a state that is not likely to vote for a party should be given any consideration in who to select to represent the party.
My very last statement on this, as this line came from an apparent misunderstanding of a post that was very relevant, and while the 3/5’s rule is actually relevant to the history and reasons behind the electoral college. I’ll agree that while defining what the founding fathers considered to be people is speaks to their motives in setting up the systems as they are, it is getting to be a bit of a sidetrack.
But I really don’t want to leave your question hanging.
Lets say, people, as referenced by:
So, yeah, if the weren’t given the right to vote, to bear arms, to have liberty or the pursuit of happiness, or due process of law, then they were not considered people, anymore than the ox and mule on the farm were.
I’ll agree that it is generally desirable for the President to have the faith and credibility of a popular vote. Yet I am not convinced. I have a couple concerns about ‘just declaring the winner to be the person with the most individual votes’, and a couple more about getting from here to there.
My first concern involves recounts. If the election is close, how do you go about verifying the results? You tried to answer this in post #87, but I’m not satisfied. I’m not talking about something weird happening in Broward County, I’m talking about a win within 1%, within 0.5%. You can’t just go and say we’re going to look at these few counties, because you don’t know which counties to look at. And don’t say you’ll push it to the House if the winner has a small enough margin, because that just means candidates will sue for nationwide recounts whenever they come close to the margin. The district-by-district proposal doesn’t suffer from this problem, neither does the winner-take-all system most states use now.
Second, I think we may have to disagree on this, but I don’t believe a direct vote is all that desirable. Yes, a direct vote is more democratic. But that’s the difference between a republic (or democratic republic) and democracies. The concept of a Republic (in the American understanding of that term) is literally, we can’t trust the population to make the right choice, but we can trust them to choose people to make the right choices for them. I don’t trust the population to make the right choice. That’s not to say I think the current system operates on republican principles, or that the current system is therefore more desirable than the democratic principle of one person one vote. But it does mean that your main argument in support of a national popular vote is based on a premise which I do not agree with. To me, having the popular vote is only good in so far as it lends the government credibility. This is directly relevant to the original post: some credibility is necessary, but I do not think 47% of the popular vote is nearly low enough to cause anarchy in the face of revolts against an illegitimate government. We have a federal system which lowers the threshold significantly, and I think that is a benefit, not a flaw.
Finally the realpolitik. If you can’t get past these, the debate is academic.
Why would or should small states (or their residents) agree to this? The system as it exists now benefits small states by giving them disproportionate representation, and you need small states to approve of any changes.
Why should swing states (or their residents) like Florida agree to this?
I do not consider “out of the goodness of their hearts” to be a persuasive answer.
That’s silly. Why would you think that? All the votes are still collected and tabulated by county. That information is preserved discretely, it isn’t mingled and lost. If you believe there were irregularities in that county, then you simply go recount that county. The only thing that would meaningfully change here is that Broward wouldn’t constantly be in the crosshairs because it’s a key precinct in a swing state.
This is not a reasoned argument, it’s just more Stockholm Syndrome stuff where we believe that we decided to be a Republic because it’s a superior form of government. In reality we chose it because it was the only way to rope the slave states into the arrangement. We cling to it because we can’t face the fact that we badly screwed up democracy, the thing that America supposedly does better than anyone else.
The realpolitic is that this is a pretty disgusting elitist opinion. But apart from that, I’d point out that the electoral college has a track record of helping some of the population make a terrible choice and force it on the majority.
This is an evasion and I won’t be addressing it further. Here’s some realpolitik, I think everybody who argues in favor of the EC are Republicans who pragmatically realize that Republicans usually lose when we count the votes of actual people rather than people we chose to represent us.
EC doesn’t let us choose our electors. It doesn’t let us choose jack shit. They take my vote and give it to my candidate’s party (when I might not even be a member of that party) and then give it to some other person I didn’t choose who will hopefully vote for the person I chose.
I’m not saying we suspect irregularities in any particular county, I’m saying the election results are very close and so I (or the candidates, or the public, or whoever) want a recount just to make sure we don’t pick the wrong President. Some states already have provisions in law that trigger an automatic recount for statewide elections if the margin of victory is less than some threshold, be it 1%, 0.5%, 2000 votes, etc.
On top of automatic recounts, I believe almost all the states allow candidates or interested parties to petition the courts for a recount of the entire election.
I can’t wrap my head around a national popular vote that provides for a similar recount without recounting the entire national vote. The existing system works because we actually have a bunch of different winner-takes-all elections, so if any of these come close you only have to recount that one state, or in the case of district-by-district, that one district. Maybe you can explain how it would work on the national level when no particular county is suspected of making errors?
That’s a shame. I don’t mind academic debates, though.
I’ll own it, to an extent. But I don’t think it makes sense the way you used the word realpolitic. It’s like you’re saying that, from a pragmatic and amoral viewpoint, my political opinion is immoral.
There aren’t any “democracies” by this odd definition. No country in the world simply puts everything to a vote no matter what; all democracies, of which the USA is one, have constitutional limits on the power of the heads of state and government. (Not all of those countries are republics, though.)
I don’t think you’ve thought through what this would mean in choosing between an EV system and a popular vote system.
I didn’t mean to imply there were. I was elucidating the difference between democratic and republican principles. I understand that this usage of republic is somewhat unique to America. I won’t find it in Machiavelli, for example.
To state what should be obvious, if we don’t think anybody screwed up, there’s slim to no justification for a national recount.
Another obvious (perhaps more satisfying) answer is that states would still administer voting, counts, and recounts, as they already do. Candidates could challenge states individually if there’s some irregularity or they triggered a statutory recount. When we perform recounts, we do not recount electoral votes, we recount the popular vote (or people votes, or real votes, or whatever term you choose). That shouldn’t need to change.
Here’s another answer, maybe less satisfying: make every single county in the US recount their votes. It sounds like a big job, but if so many states have mandatory recounts within the margin of error, then can we not infer that each and every county is prepared to recount? I propose that’s a valid inference, and any county who reports inability to perform a recount should be investigated by the DoJ for civil rights violations.
So, we should be able to do a nationwide recount, but I’d argue that we don’t need to.
Would you say the existing statutory recounts have slim to no justification? I justify them with the credibility of the incoming administration and the electoral process.
I don’t think that would work. The reason we do recounts at a state level is because doing a national recount only involves going back over the 538 electoral college votes. If the EC vote is close I imagine we would all approve of recounting all 538 votes, which is cheap and fast and unlikely to yield any changes because of the heightened scrutiny there. By contrast a recount in a close Florida election could flip up to 29 EC votes. Once you remove the electoral college, it makes no sense to recount Florida even if the popular vote in that state was close. If you hope to flip ten thousand votes by recounting Florida, but your candidate lost by one hundred thousand votes, why would Florida bother recounting? Wouldn’t they just say it’s unfair to single them out when the whole national vote is close?
It’s a valid inference in theory, but not in practice. Bush v Gore comes to mind, and remember the DoJ is on the winner’s side so how credible do you think that investigation is going to be?
But the whole point of advocating for an EC system over a popular vote system is the opposite of this; the EC implies the people cannot be trusted to directly choose a President to make choices for them. If trusting the people to choose the people who’ll make the choices is a virtue of a republic, the EC is not consistent with that. What would be consistent would be letting the popular vote decide.
What I mean to say is twofold: individual voters aren’t experts on everything the government may or may not be involved with, but they can be relied upon to judge the characters among them. I’m talking about personal knowledge, not some television candidate from the other side of this continent who you see once at a rally.
Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election though she won the popular vote by 3%, which is bigger than most states’ statutory recounts. And Bush in the 2000 election by 0.51%, larger than some states statutory recount. If you reacted to these events by saying “oh well, that’s the system”, then this contradicts your stated concern about election credibility.
We already live in a world where we can discard the nationwide popular winner by a margin of 3%. We’ll live with tighter margins. But note again, I’m not saying get rid of recounts. Just recount whatever states are irregular (inside that state’s recount limit, or evidence of wrongdoing). If the candidate wants to challenge all 50 states just to get a higher result in the absence of any suspicion, it’s unlikely to make a difference, but it’s their campaign’s money to blow.
This statement makes no sense at all. We do recounts at a state level because elections are administered by states. AFAIK we have never recounted the electoral vote, simply because it’s a parliamentary procedure where everyone is watching and participating.
This is a feature, not a bug. There should be only one motivation for a recount - when there’s cause to doubt the first. count, whether by closeness or evidence of wrongdoing. Goodbye to the days of candidates planning to strategically use bad-faith recounts in battleground states simply as a gamble that might tip the balance. They will either budget to recount the entire shooting match in all 50 states, or they will have to be honest and only mount challenges that they really expect to win.
Can you confirm that in normal times you vote Republican? I’ve never seen an EC supporter who wasn’t a Republican trying to perpetuate a system that’s given them a consequential advantage twice in the past 20 years alone.
Without reaching toward the internet, can you provide the names and character descriptions of any of the electors who voted on your behalf for your last winning candidate? Can you provide names and character descriptions of every person who chose your electors? Can you describe the process by which that happens? (Again, without looking to the internet).
More importantly, can you provide the names and character descriptions of any electors who voted on your behalf for your last losing candidate?
You didn’t choose electors based on knowledge of traits and character. You voted for a party. If your party didn’t win, too bad, you didn’t choose any electors. If your party did win, well, you still didn’t choose any electors. You chose a party because that’s effectively the only choice on offer.
Right, although in Florida the margin was 537 votes or 0.009%. In my opinion, a national recount of the popular vote would be in order if it determined the presidency and the margins were as close as 0.009%. I would have justified a recount of the 2000 presidential election in Florida for the same reason.
I looked at it for a brief second before filling out my sample ballot. It was four years ago and the only one I remember is Andrew Gillum on Clinton’s slate.
Right. I didn’t expect the electors to use their individual judgement.