It’s not supposed to be persuasive. It’s my own opinion, and I stated it from the outset. In politics, I generally don’t change for the sake of change. The electoral college isn’t perfect, but it isn’t so bad that I live in fear of insurrection every four years. And that is the threshold at which I throw out the electoral college for something that I don’t necessarily think is better, where I’ll be willing to change by default.
~Max
Sure, but are the local elected representatives less impressive than the average voter in their constituency?
If the ‘first republican principle’ is trusting the public to choose competent representatives from personal and next-to-personal knowledge, and not trusting the public to choose competent representatives from distant knowledge,
and if a national public vote is consistent with trusting the public to choose competent representatives from distant knowledge,
does it follow that a national public vote is consistent with the first republican principle?
~Max
I can understand this to some extent- but as things stand now, I don’t think most people know the electors that they are voting for on any level, much less a personal one. Looking at the 29 electors for NY in 2016, I had only heard of 18 of them. And by “heard of” , I mean their names were familiar. It doesn’t mean I knew any more about them than perhaps they were a Democratic mayor of a city I don’t live in or the president of a labor union.
I mean, maybe that wasn’t the original Idea, and maybe that’s not how it originally worked. Maybe way back when , people actually knew the electors and voted for people they trusted to make the decsion. But it isn’t how it works now, and since all I’m really doing is voting for a slate of people I don’t know who have pledged to vote for the candidate of my choice , it seems to me if we want to continue to have an electoral college, that the 27 Representatives and 2 Senators should cast the electoral votes without bothering to hold a popular election that is meaningless. After all, the people who elected the representatives presumably know something about them and they already voted for these people to represent them. The whole "popular vote " is really just a very expensive show
I’m definitely in favor of ranked choice, probably for a different reason than you. I think this might help. If there were technocrat candidates in addition to dems and GOP candidates (let’s just ignore other parties for sake of argument) I’d imagine most people would vote 1. Democrat, 2. Technocrat, 3. GOP, or 1. GOP, 2. Technocrat, 3. Dem and some would vote Technocrat first. There might be some states where technocrats manage to win out and would be able to either choose the more experienced/capable/moderate candidate out of the main two parties when they go to the EC.
The thing I think would happen long-term is that if technocrats ended up swinging an election, and the president they chose did something unpopular, the public would be at a crossroads of whether they were really fine voting for people who don’t sell their own political views to the electorate. My guess would be that most voters would turn against the technocrats in this instance.
Having state legislatures vote on the president I think could legitimately achieve what you want (and might get democratic voters to actually vote on state elections which would be a plus). I think the problem with the electoral college is that the electors literally have no job other than to choose the president. If they were elected officials who actually were expected to represent their states I think even if all the dems vote for a democrat and vice versa, they would still be negotiating within the party to try to choose the best party leader rather than it being a popularity contest based on how charismatic the individual candidates were. You would probably also have to do something about gerrymandering though.
I agree with this part.
I don’t understand what you mean here. The popular election in a state usually determines which slate of electors casts their vote. So it is currently very important. Also, federal Congresspeople can’t be electors. Art II section 1 “no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector”.
~Max
The popular election in a state determines which slate of electors casts their vote- but nationally the popular vote is meaningless as the candidate who wins the popular vote can lose the election.
While I know that Senators and Representatives can’t be electors, I’m not sure that ever made sense - I vote every X years for a Representative/Senator to represent me on any number of issues which I don’t directly vote on and then every four years, I vote for a slate of electors to represent me based on nothing other than whom they have promised to vote for. It just doesn’t make sense to me to have both- if I’m voting based on who they promised to vote for , why not let me vote for President directly? And if I’m voting for people to represent me, why not let the people elected to represent me on every other issue also represent me on this one?
You can’t have Congress elect the President because they would just sell their votes for political concessions.
~Max
But isn’t that what happens when there’s no majority or a tie in the EC? In both of those cases, the election is decided by the House, and each state gets one vote.
I don’t know the specific answer, but when the west coast is on fire, the world turns orange, and the air smells like cancer, and nobody gives a shit because none of the electoral votes are in play, we are certainly on the wrong side of it.
If Florida was on fire and orange, this would be a campaign issue, I think.
If electoral college electors weren’t chosen for party discipline, they would do the same thing. If we had an election where a significant enough membership of the EC wasn’t committed to any party or candidate but would decide among themselves, there would be as much horse-trading as there is if the legislature votes for the president.
Ultimately, the only options are for the public to vote directly for candidates or for them to vote for intermediates who are free to turn it into horse-trading. I personally think horse-trading is much better, which is why I think parliamentary systems that encourage multi-party coalitions work better than anything else.
Yes, that is what happens, but only in cases where the electoral college fails to produce a winner.
~Max
Mind you that the electors meet in the capitals of each state, on the same day, with the clear and even explicit intention of obstructing external influences, cabal, and corruption. I would go so far as to say secret ballots are in the spirit of Article II and Amendment XII.
~Max
I’m really struggling to see how you could prevent horse-trading in a remotely effective way.
In your system, electors themselves would be campaigning to get elected. They could either privately communicate with each other and form electoral alliances, or if you somehow managed to prevent them from having any private communication (which is probably impossible), they could always publicly muse about how they’d love to vote for someone who wants to renovate a bunch of highways in their state and see how the political parties respond with their messaging. They could even speak to each other in plausibly deniable ways - they could mention that a lot of electors support Obamacare but that support for gun control is more fractured, so only a coalition of electors unifying around a candidate/platform that was pro Obamacare and anti-gun control would be able to put a Democrat in the white house. They’re not saying that they’ll only vote with the democrats if they drop their gun control policies; they’re just theorizing that when the electors come together, if they aren’t able to agree on an anti-gun control Democrat probably a Republican will end up winning.
And then you get into the relationship between the candidates for president and the electors. If the parties still nominate their own candidates for president and vp, it allows the parties or candidates themselves any group that supports one of those candidates to campaign directly to the electors that look like they have a good chance of nomination. If instead the electors are supposed to pick out of the best and brightest without the major parties telling them who to vote for, and you actually succeeded in preventing the electors from colluding among themselves or with anyone else, they would all end up voting for different people and it would get kicked to the house anyway.
And of course all of this says nothing about the fact that electors would need campaign contributions in order to campaign, so they could even be financially influenced by a special interest group.
So in that case the Representatives wouldn’t sell their votes for political concessions?
Your argument is inconsistent.
The idea is that electors are under less influence than the existing representatives in Congress. Of course the winning candidate will pander to the electors, that’s the goal. The concern I have, which I think the founders shared, is about electors pandering to candidates. I think the main reason states can’t delegate their electoral college votes to (federal) Representatives and Senators or federal employees is to alleviate this concern.
Of course, a national popular vote doesn’t raise this issue. In practice, neither does the electoral college.
The relationship between electors and special interests is a separate issue, and I think the severity of that concern is dependent on how electors are selected.
~Max
Yes, they might.
In case it’s not clear, I have to backtrack on “you can’t have Congress elect the president […]” and say “the reason we don’t let Congress elect the President every time is because the electoral college, when it produces a winner, is better”.
~Max
But there’s no way to stop the electors pandering to candidates or parties. Like I said, even if you took away their phones or whatever they can just comment publicly about how great or horrible something going on in politics is, or how they think it wouldn’t be possible to get a majority for one issue without their help or whatever. Everyone would know what they’re saying.
The current makeup of the EC doesn’t have this problem, but you’re defending the system you want which would try to prevent the EC from just being party loyalists.
I mean I don’t think there’s any case to be made that the EC as currently constructed is better than direct popular vote. Both avoid horse-trading if you’re concerned about that, but one is just an arbitrary and unfair way to accomplish the same thing as the other.
How? As long as they have to campaign for votes, they’re going to need money.
Not to mention Verizon or whoever could just run their own lobbyists or executives.
You remove most of the incentive by making the electoral college a temporary body with no other responsibilities. For example, the electors don’t have to worry about the President vetoing their bills out of personal spite for the cosponsors.
The larger the election, the more money you need. With smaller elections, a grassroots campaign becomes more and more viable.
~Max
Ooh, I actually can.
For one.
In 1992.
He was a family friend.
And now that I think about it, I don’t actually remember his name.
Right. The recount in Florida was done within 3 days of the election.
I personally think that we should always do a recount. Just to make sure, why not? If democracy is important, then it’s important whether or not a particular campaign makes a big deal out of it.
The recount of Broward county is what took longer. Specifically because there were discrepancies in the vote, not because of how close that county was.
Then your entire argument of selecting someone wiser than yourself is undercut by your own statement.
You know, I’m just old enough to remember
back when Republicans claimed that we were a democracy, and that was what made us better than places like the USSR.
Now that Republicans support Russia, they all seem to have the same exact talking point that we are not a democracy.
I can get behind that. Two 2 year terms? or one 4 year term?
What is more likely? That a single state is close enough to trigger a recount? Or the entire nation is close enough?
There would have been no reason to recount Florida at all in 2000 with a popular vote. Who would have cared that the state was close when the overall vote wasn’t?
Even more so in 2016, where we recounted a few states, none of which would have mattered in the popular.