While the 2000 popular vote was close, it wasn’t close enough to need a recount. Everyone knew, and nobody disputed, that Gore had more popular votes than Bush did. If we hadn’t had the Electoral College, no recount would have been necessary to determine the outcome. As it was, though, a recount was needed to determine the outcome, and because there wasn’t enough time to complete the needed recount, the election ended up being decided by means other than the actual votes.
Before anyone else bothers to slog through the link that Whack-a-Mole posted, it’s just this same argument again: Defining “power” as the probability of an individual voter swaying the election, and then asserting that this is a good thing (though the article doesn’t actually bother to say what it’s talking about until halfway through). It’s absolutely true that the electoral college increases the probability of such a result, but you can’t mathematically prove that that’s a good thing.
Gore only won the popular vote by 0.5% , that’s not a lot. I think that margin would qualify for a recount in some states if it were just a state wide election.
The article details how we are actually used to and accept similar methods of winning in other things. E.g. we are fine with a football team having to win individual games and not by adding up their total points over the course of the season to see who wins.
As to why it is a “good thing” is speculation but nothing hard to grasp. If all a candidate needs is the most votes out of the popular vote then candidates can ignore whole swaths of the country. Just appeal to (say) white people and screw everyone else. With the current system candidates must travel to even small states and they must appeal to a wider audience.
In a representative democracy I count that as a good thing.
Same thing applies in statewide races right? They ignore small towns and just go to big cities. Should each state have an electoral college for statewide races?
I live in Illinois which is one huge metro area and the rest small towns. Candidates here do not ignore the small towns.
Also I think the issue is magnified the bigger the election gets. You could do it for a state and perhaps it would make sense. Chicago dominates Illinois politics and is something the people in the rest of the state are not happy with. Northern California considers itself almost completely divorced from the rest of the state and it bugs them.
In the end though it is up to the people in the state to choose for themselves how they want their elections run.
Err, if we didn’t have the electoral college then both Bush’s and Gore’s teams would have changed how they campaigned which would have changed the vote totals. I mean if you change the rules to how the game is won all players are going to update their strategy to reflect that. (It’s weird to suggest rule changes and then suggest that players play as though the old set of rules were in effect.)
Gore had EVERY recount state law required, he got every recount state law allowed on request after the required ones, then he went to the Fla. supreme court and got them to grant him still more (which was arguably unconstitutional), and finally went to the US supreme court to ask for still more. Contrary to what his supporters like to claim, the Supremes did NOT decide who would be president. They merely said that Fla. already gave him more than Fla. law allowed, losing every one, so he couldn’t get any more from them.
Under the current system the presidential candidates spend most of their time campaigning in swing states, regardless of size. I live in California, the most populous state, and thus the one with the most electors. The state votes Democratic by a pretty wide margin in presidential elections, so the candidates don’t bother trying to appeal to California voters. They spend little time here except to raise money, don’t run campaign ads, don’t hold rallies here. . . I assume the same is true for other states, such as Texas, where everyone knows in advance who’s going to win.
This isn’t a result of the electoral college per se, but of the fact that most states use a winner-take-all system for assigning electors. That is, whoever wins the popular vote in the state wins all of that state’s electors. This is not in the Constitution, and two states, Nebraska and Maine, don’t use the winner-take-all system.
BTW, a professor at Stanford (I don’t remember his name) has figured out that the big states (such as Texas and California) could force the winner to be the one with the most popular votes without abandoning the electoral college. If several of the biggest states agreed to assign their electors to the winner of the national popular vote, that’s who would win the election regardless of what the smaller states did.
Um, Bush went to the Supreme Court to challenge the decision of Florida Supreme Court to perform a state-wide recount. The SCOTUS halted the recount, then decided that no such recount could be completed prior to December 12th, effectively ending the election.
The notion that Gore got “more than Fla. law allowed” flies in the face of the Florida Supreme Court decision, the members of whom I would argue know more about Florida state law than you do.
Yeah because the SCOTUS felt it was so firmly on the side of the law they explicitly declared that the case was not to be used as precedent. That whole stare decisis thing is just a fiddly nuisance. :rolleyes:
A problem that I haven’t yet seen mentioned is that the EC gives some citizens a more heavily weighted presidential vote than it gives others.
Consider Wyoming, with it’s three electoral votes. These three electoral votes represent about 500,000 citizens.
Consider California, with it’s 55 electoral votes. These 55 electoral votes represent about 37,000,000 citizens.
So, one elector from Wyoming represents about 166,000 people.
One elector from California represents about 673,000 people.
Thus, being from Wyoming means that your vote, when translated into electors is worth about 4 times as much as a vote from California, in terms of how citizen votes are translated into electoral votes.
There are federalist arguments why this is a good thing. Personally, I believe the undemocratic nature of giving some citizens more votes than others outweighs these federalist arguments.
True. I heard many people lament the fact that Gore won the popular vote but didn’t become president. The truth is, no one ran to win the popular vote and so it is misleading to say that Gore “won” it. The fact the the election was so closely divided, both in popular and electoral votes, indicates that we’ll never know who might have won if the popular vote had been the deciding factor.
Full disclosure – I voted for Gore and was disappointed in the result. But I never worried about it’s legitimacy.
“your vote” needs to be divided by the number of citizens that your state has. Electoral votes are supposed to be representative. Why would a Wyomingite expect to have his vote be represented by more electors than the population of Wyoming has?
Without the EC, a Wyomingite’s vote is worth one vote and a Californian’s vote is worth one vote. With the EC, a Wyomingite’s vote is worth empirically more than a citizen of any other state.
So then by this measure the Founding Fathers were mistaken in setting up the Senate since clearly small state Senators wield more power than they are entitled to.
The Senate is indeed quite undemocratic. However, it is only part of the legislature. If the presidency was somehow able to be bicameral, I would probably be more amenable to the EC.
As I said in my first mention of the issue, there are federalist arguments why it should be this way. I just find the federalist argument to be outweighed by the undemocratic nature of the EC.