I don’t think we should have direct popular voting. I like to think that the people in the EC are a little bit more educated than the general public. You say that we’re educated enough now… I say you haven’t been talking to the right people.
Occasionally, one of the people in the EC will vote out of conscience - that’s why we occasionally get that one rogue electoral vote. I’d like to see a lot more of that. Just imagine if there was an electoral college in the state that elected Jesse Ventura. Not that he’s doing a bad job, but if you had compared resumes with all the candidates, he wouldn’t have been called back for an interview.
[quote]
While a U.S. citizen living overseas can vote by absentee ballot, if s/he doesn’t have a permanent residence in the U.S., how does the absentee vote count toward an electoral college vote?
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If you are in the military, you must have a home of record. You don’t have to have a house there or own any property there, but you have to pay state income taxes there and you vote in whatever district you once lived in and your vote is counted for that state. This is true if you are overseas or just in another state. So when we lived in Germany we voted in San Antonio TX elections. When we lived in Maryland, we still voted in San Antonio. Now that we have moved to El Paso we changed our voting registration to here. If we move to Hawaii in a couple of years, we have the option of maintaining El Paso registration, or switching back to San Antonio.
PUN
RealityChuck
Member posted 05-06-99 10:10 AM
Ah,Reality! You’ve ignored your namesake. The truth of the matter shows your assertion to be wrong.
The link I posted above is the Electoral College’s own web page. Here are some box scores from it (between the quoste lines; I’ve indicated my observations as such):
*My observation:
Votes for winner: 44,808,254
Votes for other than winner: 58,843,408
Winner received less than 50% of popular vote but more than 50% of electoral vote.*
*My observation:
Votes for winner: 45,590,703
Votes for other than winner: 45,682,591
Winner received less than 50% of popular vote but more than 50% of electoral vote.*
“It’s been a long time since the Electoral vote didn’t match the same result in the popular vote?” I’d say in the last two presidential elections, that’s all it’s done!
It seems to me disbanding the Electoral College would encourage third parties. This would make it more likely the election could be thrown into the House for it to decide.
The idea of making election day a national holiday is the best idea I have heard in a very very long time!!! Give the kids a day off, use the schools for a polling place, the parents will be home to care for the kids who aren’t in school. I don’t know if this has any real momentum in congress, or if its just one off handed idea, but I really can’t think of a downside. Loss of productivity yadda yadda yadda, i don’t buy that, we can do without another holiday if need be, combine Presidents Day (I assume that the Lincoln-Washington’s B-day combo is nationwide) with this voting holiday. I don’t know if I’d make it a yearly holiday or not, but if not then the productivity arguement really loses steam. This needs to get done.
Sadly, i really don’t remember all the electoral college stuff, I hoped by reading the thread I’d understand it well, but no luck.
If anyone has the patience to explain a few details to me I’d appreciate it, I just don’t have the gumption to do a web search and sort through the porn links to get to some legal/constitution docs that I will need to decipher.
- IIRC, New Hampshire and Iowa are very important states in the EC for some reason. I’ve never understood this, why is it so, it certainly isn’t the number of EC votes?
- The canadate gets all or none of a states EC votes, T/F?
- Popular vote determines who gets the states EC votes, T/F?
- How are the number of EC votes determined for each state if not directly by population ratio (as per Undead Dude)?
- Is the EC made up of people? (I didn’t think so) If so who are they and what bearing does the popular vote have on them?
- Is there really a reason why all the states results get in at different times? It seems to me that the fact some states polls close earlier than others is inherently bad. For the sake of parity and fairness why don’t they all just close at the same time and open at the same time? (Not clock time, true time 10AM-6PM EST/7AM-3PM PST) As long as everyone has the day off this should not pose any logistical problems that exceed those now in effect.
Finally I have no doubt that reform is needed in many aspects from campaign spending, to the process of getting on the ballot, to exit polls, but these issues about the voting day procedures seem non-partisan, very positive, and easy to alter. Is it just the fear of change that makes us cope with them today?
Omniscient asks a goodly number of questions:
They’re not important in the Electoral College, they’re important (or considered by politicoes to be so, which I guess comes down to the same thing) in the nomination process.
Not a Constitutional requirement, although I believe that it is currently the case in every state except Maine.
This is basically a political decision. That my own state of Connecticut give eight electoral votes to whoever takes a plurality is thought to wield more power than splitting those votes.
In Maine, IIRC, one vote is given the winner of the plurality in each Representational district, and two to the winner of the statewide plurality (see below).
Again, not a Constitutional requirement. Currently, every state does choose electors by popular vote; before the Civil War (or War of Northern Aggression, as some would have it), South Carolina’s electors were selected by the state legislature.
Additionally, the courts have ruled (I don’t think that such a case has ever made to the SC, although I could be wrong) that electors canot be bound in their votes by laws, oaths, or the willadapeepul, but are an independent and freely-choosing body, in principle. They almost always go with their pledges and party affiliation; in each presidential election of the past few decades, however, one or two have “voted their conscience”.
Number of Senators (*i.e.</>, two) plus number of Representatives (more or less in proportion to population, but every state must have at least one). That’s a Constitutional requirement.
At the time of the adoption of the Constitution, the smaller states feared that a government selected by proportional representation would ride roughshod over the rights of those states that happened to have smaller populations. I’d say that they were prescient in that regard.
Yep, real people. A dirty little secret in this so-oh-democratic age is that we don’t vote for a president, we vote for presidential electors of that party (in some states, this is explicitly mentioned on the ballot; in others, the fact is swept under the rug).
As mentioned above, the EC is theoretically an independent body, and can vote for whoever they damned well please. 99.9+% of the time, though, they vote for the candidate that they pledge themselves to.
Because no one in California is dumb enough to get up at 03:00 to vote, and no one in New York s dumb enough to stay up until 23:00 to vote (around here, the polls are open 06:00 - 20:00, not 10:00 - 18:00).
We just have to deal with the unfortunate fact that the U.S. spans seven time zones (counting Alaska and Hawaii, although I think that they only have seven electoral votes between them), and that anything convenient for the left coast is inconvenient for the right coast, and vice versa. The population (and thereby the political power) has historically been in the East, so Easterns have called the shots. With population shifts westward, California and Texas may force polling calculations my Mountain Time (as a compromise) early in the next century. They won’t care what New Yorkers think anymore than New Yorkers have, traditionally, listened to them (heck, a lot of them are transplanted New Yorkers).
“Kings die, and leave their crowns to their sons. Shmuel HaKatan took all the treasures in the world, and went away.”
Does anyone recall a mathematician who tried to prove that your single vote is more powerful in a system with an electoral college? I read an article on the web a while ago about him; his claim was that, mathematically, your odds of casting the swing vote were greater with the electoral college system, and casting the swing vote is the only time your vote really makes a difference.
Let me say a word in defense of the Electoral College. If you think it’s some dusty abstraction from the Founding Fathers, take a look at recent history.
Three times in the last 10 presidential elections (1960-1996)the electoral winner did not receive an absolute majority of the popular vote (1968 - Nixon vs. Humphrey and Wallace, and 1992 and 1996 - Clinton vs. the Republican and Perot both times). In two other elections (1960 - Kennedy-Nixon and 1976 - Carter-Ford)the popular vote was so close that the loser could have legitimately demanded a recount in one or more states.
That’s five out of ten times in my lifetime alone where an election decided by popular vote alone could have been thrown into the House of Representatives or tied up in the courts. (Throw in 1948 and it’s six times since World war II.) It could have been 1824 and 1876 all over again. I think the fact that real, live electors are on the job helps ensure that somehow, some way, the candidate who gets the most votes is going to wind up President.
Akatsukami as usual your response raises more questions.
- Are the electors the senators and representatives? Or is there just a concurrent number of individuals.
- If not who are they literally?
- If the electors are party affiliated then when are they selected? It seems to me that the electors must be selected before the election and if they vote their party 99% of the time the actual election doesn’t do anything. The selection of the electors is obviously the important issue, yet I (a fairly well educated, aware, intelligent person) have no idea when it occurs. Why is it never discussed by the canadates?
- OK, NH and IA are important for primaries (selecting the canadates) but why is that so?
Last time I voted for Prez (which was in Arizona), the electors were definitely on the ballot. It made the selections for the presidential candidates rather large, because they had to squeeze in these names in a small font. Incidentally, those names were definitely NOT incumbent senators/representatives. They were just unfamiliar names from my point of view.
That’s because you’re using a different definition of “match” than the original poster did. Clinton got more popular votes in both those elections than anyone else did. He also got more electoral votes than anyone else did. Sounds like a match to me.
It’s possible (in fact, it’s happened) for a candidate to get FEWER popular votes than another candidate, but still get MORE electoral votes. This is, obviously, NOT a match.
Actually, there’s nothing in federal law or the Constitution requiring that the electoral votes for a state agree with the popular vote for that state (there are two counterexamples cited on the Electoral College website mentioned above, and I think I remember hearing of at least one more).
No. Actually, the Constitution specifically forbids them from being electors.
Well, they can’t be anyone holding “an office of trust or profit under the United States”. Other than that, I think that exactly how they’re selected is left up to the individual states.
Generally there will be a “slate” of nominees for each candidate, chosen by that candidate’s political party. The nominees whose candidate wins the popular vote become the electors for that state.
They’re most likely to vote for “their” candidate, but as noted above there have been times when they didn’t. The electors don’t vote until December, so there’s a month (actually a little over) where there is a theoretical possibility of a surprise upset.
A couple of states (Maine and Nebraska) do things a little bit differently in that the slate of electors is not chosen statewide, but in the same way that Senators and Representatives are (two statewide, and one by each Congressional district).
Why would they want to? As you’ve no doubt noticed, this is a horrible mess. I doubt that a detailed explanation of how the electoral college works is going to cause John Q. Public to change his vote, so as far as they’re concerned they’d be wasting their time to discuss it.
New Hampshire and Iowa have their primaries early in the process (I don’t remember noticing Oklahoma having any particular importance in the primaries, so someone else will have to answer that question… is theirs also early?). It’s mostly a matter of “momentum”; someone who wins in those states will get news coverage as “a winner”, others won’t (and may decide to drop out after seeing how pitifully small their support base truly is).
The election of 1876 is the centerpiece of every discussion of the Electoral College. The story: Hayes won the Electoral College by one vote, even though his opponent, Tilden, won the popular vote by nearly a quarter of a million votes. There were large questions about the legitimacy of the votes in four states, three in the South plus Oregon. Congress established an electoral commission to pass on the disputes. With 8 Republicans and 7 Democrats on the commission, every dispute was settled in the Republicans’ favor by an 8-7 decision. So Hayes’ one vote Electoral College victory was confirmed.
What the story doesn’t explain is how Hayes could have won in the first place if Tilden had a quarter of a million votes more. Tilden’s margin was not reduced by the disputes. If they had been resolved in his favor, his margin would have been even greater.
What put Hayes over the top were 3 Colorado electors appointed by the legislature without a popular vote … all perfectly constitutional. Colorado was admitted to the union in August, 1876. The state legislature, to save money, decided not to hold a presidential election (true story!) They simply appointed electors who voted for Hayes. So what put Hayes over the top were 3 electors not chosen by the public. This was all perfectly constitutional, and it did not figure in the controversy over disputed electoral votes.
Was it just a coincidence that Colorado was admitted to the union right before the closest electoral vote in history? Probably not. Colorado was the only state admitted to the Union between 1867 and 1889. According to Daniel Boorstin, Congress wanted to hold on to the patronage jobs in the territories as long as they could. So admitting a state to the union was quite an extraordinary event, and perhaps the expectation of three additional Republican electors was a motivating factor.
The above was from Avagara Productions
Sorry it should read
“Okay, NH and IA…”
hee hee
torq answered Omniscient’s second round of questions, at least as well (if not better) than I could have. I’ll only pick a couple of nits.
Omniscient asks:
When it occurs? Almost certainly your state party conventions (not a pleonasm, necessarily). Why haven’t you heard of it? Well, without challenging your education, intelligence, or awareness…who was the losing candidate for state attorney general in the last general election?
torq says:
I think that Iowa still holds party caucuses (although, not being a resident of Iowa, I could easily be wrong).
“Kings die, and leave their crowns to their sons. Shmuel HaKatan took all the treasures in the world, and went away.”
Actually, the rules stipulate that electors cannot be officeholders. I had a friend who actually was an elector. They are officially chosen by the parties at the state party conventions, but really its just a rubber stamp at that point. You get to be an elector generally if you are an active member of your party in your state. My friend worked on the campaign of an influential Ohio State Rep., and as a reward for his hard work he was selected as an elector in 1984. Unfortunately, he was selected as an elector for * Mondale * and so never got to cast his vote, Ohio (and damn near the rest of the nation) giving their votes to Reagan. BTW, he was 19 at the time and a chemical engineering student at Dayton College. So truly ANYONE can be an elector. I know it wasn’t directly asked, but the electors cast their ballot sometime in December or early January (IIRC). The election of of 1872 is a facinating case summary of what happens when the candidate dies after the popular election, but before the electoral one. Fortunately the candidate (Horace Greeley) hadn’t enough electoral votes to win anyways, but the 66 votes he did get were scattered among a bunch of candidates, making Grant out to be a bigger winner than he was.
Jason R Remy
“One pill makes you taller, and one pill makes you small, but the ones that mother gives you don’t do anything at all”
– Jefferson Airplane * White Rabbit * (Slick, G. 1966)
Jayron:
You seem to think the popular vote and the elctoral vote are inextricably linked. They’re not–they have nothing to do with each other legally. Now as an exercise in observed behaviour, maybe. But the popular vote, in fact, and under the Constitution, does not drive the electoral vote.
God damn you people, are you inentionally trying to be vague and talk over my head?
Akatsukami, what the hell does “not a pleonasm, necessarily” mean. Do you mean plenum???
OK, the electoral college as I gather works as such. At each states’ political parties’ conventions the parties select a group of people to be the electors for their party in that state, the number being equal to that states number of electoral votes. Then the popular election takes place, and the canadate who takes the popular vote’s party’s electors then get the opportunity to vote a month later. And these electors can vote for anyone they choose, but usually vote for the party canadate. Now under this system the canadate who takes the majority of the popular vote will likely take the vast majority of that states electoral vote, but depending on a few rogue electors the could take 51 out of 54 vote in that state. Did I miss anything?
What are you talking about? Where in my post did I ever indicate that electoral vote was linked in any way to the popular vote. My message faithfully reported on the electoral process exactly as it runs, and exactly as it is intended to run.
I said my friend was chosen as an elector by the Democratic Party in 1984 at the Ohio State Democratic Convention. Since the popular vote in Ohio chose Reagan that year (or rather, Reagan’s electors) he didn’t get to become an actual elector. Some guy who kissed some Republican ass in Ohio got to do that. But that guy was no more bound to vote for Reagan than my friend would have been to vote for Mondale should he have been selected by the popular election. The electors are chosen by the parties before the November elections, it is at those elections where it is chosen which electors get to sit in the Electoral College and vote for the president. Many, but not all states, even require the electors names to be listed on the ballots since that is truth in advertising: You are voting for which electors you want to send to the electoral college, not a) who you want for president or b) how you think the electors should vote.
Jason R Remy
“One pill makes you taller, and one pill makes you small, but the ones that mother gives you don’t do anything at all”
– Jefferson Airplane * White Rabbit * (Slick, G. 1966)
When I looked at the names of the 54 California electors for 1996, I noticed that helped to be related to be a member of Congress. I saw a Capps, Eshoo, and a Pelosi in the group.
One of my biggest hopes is to be a presidential elector. It seems like an exclusive club.
However, I wonder if I would have to pay my own way to Sacramento to cast the vote.