End Run Around Electoral College

Great Debates
41

I personally am against the idea of abolishing the Electoral College. (But then again, I want to repeal the 17th Amendment, so there you go.)

I think there is entirely too much power and focus concentrated in the Federal Government. The misconception that many hold that the popular vote determines the president serves to continue this focus on the idea of the federal government running the whole show, rather than having the job of governing the union between the sovereign states.

Rather than an idea that has been tried and found wanting, I think the EC is an idea that has been found odd and not tried.

I’ve proposed this solution before, but here it is again.

California has 52 Electoral votes. I propose that 1/4 of these be elected every year to a four year term. In this way, a candidate (particularly an incumbent president) would have impetus to pay attention to California every year, in order to try and sway that year’s Electoral vote. Each year would essentially a referendum on the Presidency, which I think would be welcomed by the voters.

There is nothing in any law that I’ve found that says the Electoral College meetings have to be secret, or that they are not permitted to deliberate. So you televise the proceedings and a role call vote, to maintain accountability.

The only hitch I can see to this being constitutional is that the Constitution gives Congress the right to declare the time of choosing of the Electors, and they have selected the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November as Election Day. But then again, as quoted several times here, the legislature decides how the Electors are chosen, so a state law could be passed to declare that “choosing the electors” will consist of the Secretary of State of California listing the majority vote-getters in the previous four elections, ending with the one held on that Election Day.

The Founding Fathers created a decent buffer zone between the shifting whim of the electorate, but then did not have the courage of their convictions, placing elections every two years. Yearly elections may go toward reducing voter apathy*. I don’t believe it wil equalize turnout in midterm elections, but then again, that would be its selling point. Parties get the base out during these times to vote for candidates and propositions of particular interest, and these elections would be a chance to influence the next presidential election, as well.

*In California in particular, where we have already seen the expenditure of completely unnecessary “special elections”. I say pass a law saying all elections are held on Election Day. Party primaries? Let the parties organize and pay for them.

42

OK, you’re seeing this one.

Or at least you’re posting in it; I guess that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve seen it, now that I think about it. Which is the only thing I can think of that would explain your saying that in this thread.

IYHO.

The problem is, I can tell you already - and you know it’s so - how most of those ‘small elections’ will go in 2008. There’s little point in a Dem going to Texas or Georgia to try to swing 100,000 swing voters, or a Pubbie going to California or Connecticut to do the same, when it’s the 100,000 swing voters each in Ohio, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, and Montana that are going to determine the election. Although it’ll be more like 10,000 voters in Montana.

Forget 2000, if you can get over it for a moment. I remember such arguments as there were for the EC before 2000 came along and locked a bunch of people into positions that they’d never felt strongly before. And I know how things are now. And it’s hard to see a good argument for the EC in either time.

Before 2000, I can’t recall talking with any EC supporters who disagreed with:

  1. The President should be the guy with the most votes.
  2. The EC has come up with the same result for a century or so, so stop worrying about it.
  3. If there’s ever a really close election, the EC will at least give us a more clear-cut, easy-to-resolve outcome.
  4. It isn’t worth the hassle of amending the Constitution anyway.

Obviously, (2) and (3) kinda bit the dust in 2000. But really, in the pre-2000 landscape, the handful of people out there who really believed that in a split election, the EC was somehow more ‘right’ than the popular vote were, quite simply, marginalized cranks. Only the GOP’s position of convenience in 2000 (recall that it was at least as prepared to argue the other side, if it had come to that) brought them into the mainstream.

So that’s pre-2000. Now we’re in a world where the next Presidential election, if close, will be determined in a diminishing number of swing states. Maybe a few more will join that list - maybe Virginia or Florida will be less red than last time, or maybe Pennsylvania or Oregon will be less blue, or maybe New Hampshire or West Virginia will start behaving more like they did in the past. But most of the country will be sidelined in the next election - living in states whose electoral votes are predetermined, so no point in wasting any campaign stops or ad buys on them. If you’re in Kansas or Rhode Island, let alone Texas or New York, it’ll be as if the Presidential election is happening in a different country.

Our system makes some votes worth many times what other votes are worth. Why should I get over that? To me, that’s a real head-scratcher.

43

Two things:

(1) Why do you consider it a problem that due to the EC system the winner of the popular vote may not win the election?

(2) Wouldn’t that compact idea violate Article I, Section 10, of the Constitution?

44
  1. The great thing about the Compact is that <i>there is no compact</i>; there are only individual pieces of legislation in different states. But there is no treaty, no compact, no memorandum of understanding between the different states involved. Not even so much as a meeting, AFAICT.

So it may violate the spirit of “No State shall…enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State…”, but it certainly doesn’t appear to violate the letter of the law.

  1. Why wouldn’t I?

When we elect every other public official who is elected and not appointed, from dogcatcher up to Senator and Governor, whoever gets the most votes wins. Pure and simple.

The Presidency is the sole exception, and it is the way it is for reasons that have been historical artifacts for nearly a century and a half. One motivation for the EC was the hope of interposing a layer of ‘wise men’ between the voting public and the choice of President; another was to provide a mechanism for the balancing of the political power of free and slave states in the Presidential choice as well as in the Congress.

There’s an obvious rationale for giving a public office to the person who gets the most votes. (I’d personally prefer a runoff in cases where the top vote-getter doesn’t pull 50%, but that’s an issue for another thread.) There’s not any obvious rationale for giving the office to the candidate with the second-highest number of votes.

Nor is there an obvious rationale for saying that in weighting the votes of the citizenry, we should weigh the votes of citizens of low-population states more heavily, and we should weigh the votes of citizens of states whose citizens are more closely divided between the two candidates more heavily, than we do the votes of other citizens. Which is what the EC does, in instances where it might potentially differ from the popular vote totals.

So, why shouldn’t the winner be the guy (or gal) who gets the most votes? Why should the ‘judgment’ of a kludgy, archaic mechanism be substituted for that of the actual voters, in the election for just this one office? If it’s so great, why shouldn’t each state, each Congressional district, have something like it, some set of subdivisions with different numerical counts given to the winner of each subdivision?

We wouldn’t think of concocting such a cockamamie scheme. The only reason the EC is tolerated is that we’re used to it, and it takes too much trouble to change it.

45

…and thus the President elected by the system is NOT the President of the whole country, but the President of the 27 states where he won a slight majority of the popular vote?

Winning a majority of the 50 states is not how it works, that would be even worse: that would say that winning Montana was equal to winning California.

Remember that the winner of most states’ electoral vote is the one who wins the majority of votes in that state. If a state goes 50.00001% to one candidate and 49.99999% to the other, the winner gets 100% of that state’s electoral votes. So, a candidate does not even need to win a majority of the states, he/she only needs to win critical states.

I agree with this up to a point. The point is that there is a cap on the number of Representatives and therefore on the Electoral voters. No state has fewer than three electoral votes, but there’s a maximum number of votes. Thus, the “proportion” between Wyoming and New York is greatly distorted: each elector in Wyoming represents (roughly) 150,000 people while each elector for New York represents (roughly) 650,000 voters. The system doesn’t reflect “balance,” it reflects a high imbalance that favors the mass of small states.

46

Why do you think that by removing or altering the EC that these votes would change? Do you really think that the candidate won’t still take certain regional votes for granted? California won’t see any more campaigning than they already do unless they prove themselves capable of changing their mind, nobody believes that they will, and any dramatic, election effecting change would be seen by either party as turncoat voters, thus giving them less incentive to deal fairly with that particular portion of the electorate.

47

I don’t understand why candidates would necessarily start coming to California in a big way. If our electoral votes would go according to the national vote anyway, who cares how we vote? And if our vote, as a state, were all that important to a candidates popular vote they would already be streaming out here. One in 10 in the US lives in California. And if they come out here to raise money, they waould aleady be doing that.

And if the proposal is a California idea the proposers are nuts. Who wants candidates out here anyway? We can get their take on things without them actually been in the state.

48

So it runs counter to the “tyranny of the majority”? I suppose you support issues like gay marriage, so why would you argue that the minority should be protected on the one hand but cast aside on the other?

49

The few state laws requiring electors to vote a certain way have not been constitutionally tested. I believe they are not constitutional. An elector is free to vote for any person they desire.

Also, there is no “second round” in the electoral college. Should the college not select a president, the election goes to the House of Representatives, where the voting is… by states.

50

Maybe we’re talking about two different Californias.

You seem to be talking about a California that’s 100% liberal Democrat, with few if any exceptions. Then there’s the real California, which has plenty of genuinely conservative areas, and (given a state population of 36 million or so) probably a couple million persuadable moderates.

Right now, those millions of persuadable moderates are of no electoral use to anyone in a Presidential campaign. But in an election decided by popular vote, each of them becomes as important as each voter elsewhere, and (as a group) more worth wooing than a few hundred thousand persuadable moderates in Ohio, because there are more of them, and no one set of voters is more strategically valuable than any other set of voters anymore.

51

Count me among the marginalized cranks, then. The purpose the EC served, and still serves, is to make sure that the individual interests of the states are not completely left to the national majority. If so, the outcome seems predictable.

If Idaho and California have conflicting interests (just to focus on a subset), then to the extent that these two states affect the outcome, California wins. Every time. Now the EC doesn’t eliminate this effect. But it does minimize it, and in a way that I think is fair and that recognizes this whole “Union of States” concept. I recognize, of course, that this is a judgment call and the opposing position is a legitimate one.

I guess I just miss this–or, rather, it seems like an unusual spin. The fact that a given state typically decides that its interests are best served by a given party doesn’t eliminate their power. It simply means they aren’t part of the election night drama involving certain states who aren’t quite as certain. Ohio didn’t decide the last election more so than California. As a matter fact, it had less of an effect. There just wasn’t any question about which way California would land.

The moment California collectively feels taken for granted, it’ll become a swing state. And the EC votes allotted won’t change, and the total impact each state will exert will likewise be same. Just different drama on election night.

52

The ‘minority’ in the case of gay rights are flesh-and-blood people. People matter.

The ‘minority’ you refer to in the EC case consists of states. While I believe in states’ rights to an extent, I can’t see any reason why states should choose a President, or that they should have any rights in need of protecting with respect to that choice. People should, states shouldn’t.

IMHO, small states already have sufficient political means of holding their own, the foremost being the two Senators representing each state, regardless of size. That distorts American politics quite well as it is, thankyewverymuch. (See farm subsidies, distribution of Homeland Security funds, etc.)

53

I can’t argue with what you say; I can only disagree. If states’ rights, rather than the rights of people, are viewed as paramount - if that’s the prism you feel we should view this issue through - then your conclusions follow.

But I disagree with your choice of prism. To me, the rights of the citizenry are what’s important. To the extent that states’ rights protect the rights of the citizenry from being trampled by an all-powerful Federal government, then states’ rights are a good thing. To the extent that states’ rights allow for, say, oppression of local minorities, then they’re a bad thing.

In this instance, what they do is arbitrarily magnify the effect of some citizens, and equally arbitrarily discount the effects of others, in choosing a President. Through my prism, that’s totally irrational. Screw that shit.

54

Well, I don’t think either position is irrational necessarily. It’s a judgment as to what best serves the most important interest. But I hear ya.

55

“Marginalized crank” checking in. :slight_smile: That’s simply not true. As people have noted, the EC is part of the rules of the game. There is no reason to believe that if the EC were not part of the rules that the popular vote would have come out the same since the candidates would have campaigned differently. Further, the election might have been closer, and we might have been looking at a Florida-type fiasco on a national scale-- every district in the nation could be subject to “recount politics”. Be careful what you wish for, grasshopper!

So does the Senate. Actually, it’s much more egregious in that respect. And yet the Congress being split into two Houses seems to work quite well-- much better, I think, than if we just had the House. A little elitism isn’t always a bad thing. (Did I just say that?)

56

linky

As noted earlier, the EC does one ballot, and if a majority for POTUS isn’t selected, off to the House.

The reason that there is no imperative to match the popular vote to the results of the EC is that the people don’t elect the President: States elect the President. And states used to elect the US Senators, too. Originally, the only element of the federal government to be selected by popular vote was the House or Representatives.

The idea is that we’re the United States of America, and the states are partially autonomous legal entities with their own say in federal policies. The Senate used to provide this, but with the shifting of the Senate to statewide popular votes, that voice is gone. The Electoral College is the last place where the state legislatures have a say in federal matters.

57

The other issue is that this would tend to give the ‘blue states’ a somewhat more massive throw weight than the ‘red states’… they tend to be far more populated. Heartland completely loses whatever strength it had.
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/

58

[QUOTE=John Mace]
“Marginalized crank” checking in. :slight_smile: That’s simply not true. [\quote]Sez you. :wink:

Well, yeah, but prior to 2000, it was in a “it isn’t really doing any harm, and it’s too much trouble to change it” sort of way for most people.

That’s not at issue here. This isn’t a “we was robbed in 2000” thread. I’ve referred to 2000 for two reasons only: (1) to use as an example in a couple of different ways (seemed easier than making up hypotheticals), and (2) to note that that election had rather substantially changed the nature of the discussion about the EC, with the consequence that when looking at the history of such discussion, one must consider pre- and post-2000 separately.

I doubt that any changes in campaigning approach would have been more likely than not to make the popular vote even closer. As it was, nobody had any idea who’d win the popular vote until the night was getting towards morning here on the East Coast.

(Aside: I told my wife that evening that I was staying up until the election was decided. Needless to say, I reneged on that. 37 days would have been a looooooooong time without sleep! :))

At any rate, what I wish for is not just this one thing, anyway. I’d also like runoffs when nobody gets 50% of the vote, and I’d like universal adoption of the voting machines I’ve proposed on a number of occasions - where you use the touch-screen machine not to do the voting itself, but to print a ballot on card stock with your votes on it. You verify that the card has the votes you intend, then you vote by putting that card in the ballot box.

Well, the Senate itself does that, but in any individual Senate race, all the votes count equally, and whoever gets the most votes wins. But your point is taken.

'Fraid so. Who are you, and what have you done with John? :wink:

59

Who are these States you speak of? Do they bleed? Do they laugh? Do they live?

I’m from Missouri, swingiest of swing states. Seems like most people hereabouts assume two things. First, they are Americans, citizens of the U.S.A., & that’s far more fundamental than some arbitrary internal territorial division. Second, that they live in a democracy, & the government is supposed to represent the people. If there are interests of the State of Missouri, they are the interests of the land & people of Missouri, & can be contrasted against the interests of New Jersey, say. To claim that any interest of our State is to be opposed to the interests of the people of the State is just bizarre.

Now, there’s a clear difference between the will of the people, & the welfare of the people; & a difference between the desires & prejudices of the present, & the needs of the future; but to claim that the State of Missouri has any interest or existence separate from the people of Missouri would sound like a “corrupt politician.”

60

RTF: As you said earlier, it’s really a matter what prism you’re looking thru. I don’t think either position is naturally more correct than the other, but in my case I thinnk Federalism is generally good and would like to see more of it, not less of it. To the extent that the EC contributes to more of a Federalist system, I view it is a value. You obviously don’t. So be it.

Any way, a debate about the relative value of the EC is really a hijack of this thread anyway. I think we should assume, for the purpose of this thread, that eliminating the EC is a desired outcome and whether or not the proposed method is a good way to do that. I think we both agree that it isn’t.