Beruang: sadly, we’d never make it past the starting post. Those darn Electors would probably want to try to do something that’s prohibited by the Constitution. Why should Congress be the only outfit who gets paid to do something unconstitutional?
What I have found about the Electoral College is that the unstated purpose is to keep the states’ power in an election. When I got a letter criticizing the electoral College printed in a local newspaper in the early 70s, another reader replied, all but calling me a Big Brother’s dupe! His point seemed to be that “We the People” actually means “We the States.” A direct popular election would take the state’s electoral power away. I don’t know who created the unwritten rule that the candidate who wins the Presidential election in one state gets all of that state’s elctoral votes–“winner-take-all”–got started, but to my way of thinking it thwarts the will of the majority (of voters, not states).
There have been a number of other rules to how to elect electors. (That’s another problem with the electoral college, you sound like you’re stuttering a lot.) The only state(s) which depart from the plurality winner-take-all rule are Maine and possibly Nebraska. Maine’s rule is two votes for the statewide leader, and one vote for each Congressional district’s leader. So Maine’s vote could go three ways, if, for example, George W. got four votes in District 1, George Clooney got four votes in District 2, and George Burns got three votes in each District.
In a more realistic example, in the 1824 election, New York split its electoral vote three ways: Andrew Jackson, John Q. Adams, and Henry Clay, if memory serves (all the candidates were Jeffersonian Republicans … don’t know if that’s relevant).
States have gravitated towards the winner-take-all system because it makes them more important. What really counts is the margin a state provides, and a 54-vote winner-take-all state always provides a 54-vote margin. If those were all single-member districts, the margin could be as low as zero (say, if the state were split in half); the same would be true, for different reasons, of a state which allocated its electors proportionally.
Two evenly matched candidates would be likely to pay tons of attention to a large winner-take-all state (witness all the attention heaped on California and Texas); the same large state might be totally ignored if it were “winner-take-some” (i.e. if its electors could cancel each other out). This is why all the states tend to like winner-take-all systems: it maximizes attention on the state (it would be great if your big neighbor would split its vote, but they choose their own process).
The only way to kill the winner-take-all system would be to ban it nationally; states have no incentive to do it. To do it nationally would require a Constitutional amendment, since states currently get to choose electors how they please. I’d rather just kill the college outright, with a Constitutional Amendment. Eugene McCarthy, in contrast, recommends a system of several thousand small districts, each with a single elector, who is intimately familiar with her or his constituents’ Presidential preferences. The election could stay in the college for several ballots.
So, Boris; what you’re proposing is amending the constitution to say what it already says. Interesting.
I think you’re teasing me in some manner that’s way too urbane for me to follow. I just want an amendment to provide for a direct majoritarian election a la France and Brazil.
Ah, so you’re advocating, as my Government teacher in college does, for abolition of the Electoral College.
There are a few things involved with that stance (not that it’s a bad stance, it’s just fraught with danger as all changes are):
-
Residents of the smaller/less-populated states might be a little miffed if their Electors no longer have a real say in who runs the governemnt at the national level. This country, after all, is a union of different states, a few of those states had been countries in their own right prior to admission to the union.
-
There is still the question of which method of selection will replace the current selection:
a) Direct popular election - see Item 1 above.
b) State Legislatures vote for the Prez & Veep - that’s the way Senators were orignally selected and the Constitution was amended to have direct popular election instead.
c) The Congress selects the Prez & Veep as they do in some countries - heck, they can’t even agree on what constitutes the Decalogue!
d) Replace the entire shebang (Congress & the Presidency) with a one-house parliament in which the government of the day is selected entirely by the majority party - again, see Item 1 above.
I might add that the last item would also require, to make it work, scrapping the current concept of separate states and one union with one mega-state.
Certainly there are some people who are against one-vote-per-voter systems, and will argue against them in a hundred ways. In a direct system, each Wyoming voter would have the same power as each California voter. It doesn’t seem that alien to me; plenty of federal systems use direct national elections. Every election in America was mandated by the Supreme Court to be “one-man-one-vote” except U.S. Senate and Presidential elections.
I still don’t know why geographical distinctions matter so much more than other distinctions. We could have any number of electoral colleges. The winner of a plurality of the voters aged 20-26 could get a big chunk of electors; an age-based college would just make all the candidates craft their campaigns to appeal to as many age cohorts as possible instead of as many states as possible. Minor parties would be considered important if they could concetrate their votes in a small number of age groups; those that appealed uniformly to people of all ages would be ignored. This system is no goofier than the status quo, but we are used to pundits talking about whocanwinCaliforniaandTexasthisyear and not whocanwintheelderlyandnewvotersthisyear.
Boris,
the reason geography matters is that the U.S. is a federal system, not a unitary state. A federal system, almost by definition, says that some matters will be decided purely on popultion grounds, while others will be influenced by geographic considerations - i.e. decisions at the state level, rather than at the individual level.
I don’t see why it’s so unusual to say that the only two elected members of the federal executive should be chosen by a method that helps to ensure they try to get support from across the country, rather than just concentrating solely on certain groups of voters. (my personal reaction; can understand others may take a different view.)
jti
Is see your point about Federal systems and the desirability of Presidential candidates seeking votes across the country. I just don’t see how the electoral college serves that end. A candidate could win in the electoral college with the 11 largest states. Campaigns focus on the big prizes - granted, they don’t all sit in the same region (California, Texas, Illinois; for some reason they ignore Pennsylvania and Ohio …).
Examples of truly Federal executives include the European Commission and the Swiss cabinet (I think it’s called the National Council).
The most sectional President ever elected was Abraham Lincoln. No other Presidential election provoked a civil war. Lincoln won 39% of the popular vote but - and this is very important - he won overall voting majorities in states summing an absolute majority of the electoral vote. I don’t have any thing against Lincoln, I just think it should be noted that if, hypothetically, every anti-Lincoln vote were counted for a single opponent (e.g., John Bell or Stephen Douglas), Lincoln would still have won with 39% of the vote. The loser would have had 61%.
The 1860 election was even more sectional than that, Boris. Lincoln wasn’t even on the ballot in the eleven states that seceded–which they promised to do if Lincoln were elected.
Boris: don’t forget Clinton did not win a majority of the popular vote, either.