There’s no plausible scenario in which a “few cities” on each coast can prevail against a consensus within the rest of the country. The numbers just don’t add up.
I’m not even getting into the issue of how this silly electoral system undermines “one person, one vote.”
This is a common right wing trope.. Somehow the logic is that the more land that your voters are spread over, the more your vote ought to count. It’s a bunch of crap, and its proponents can’t even get the facts straight.
Christ. Counties don’t vote. Land doesn’t vote. It’s the people who vote, but this current system gives rural votes much disproportionate power than what they should have.
If you want to have a system of weighting rural or state votes versus urban voting, that’s one thing. What I’m telling you is having 538 electors completely free to do whatever the fuck they want once they show up to cast their ballots on behalf of millions of voters is a powderkeg and a fuse looking for a struck match.
Now that they have a green light to do as they please, do you think Democrats can win any close election? If Democrats win <300 EVs, you can bet that millions will be given to enough faithless electors to change the outcome.
Maybe this would encourage the parties to make sure they chose electors who would have something to lose if they were faithless. Off the top of my head one suggestion is that the electors for each party be the most senior members of their state delegation (state senators, or representatives if their aren’t enough senators).
It’s only a problem is you don’t believe in democracy.
Democracy is supposed to be whoever gets the most votes wins. If sixty percent of the people live in cities, then they should be winning elections. We shouldn’t have a system that’s rigged so the forty percent who live outside of cities win.
You could substitute federal judges for electors in that post and it would be equally true in theory. But then we can look at the reality of judicial appointments.
Yes, if someone bribed electors into voting unfaithfully, it would be under federal jurisdiction. But it would also be under state jurisdiction. Both the Feds and the state could pursue charges, even if the other decides not to. Our system is weird that way.
Back to the OP, I think our system for electing the President is completely whack, but given the system we have, and the Constitutional language that laid it out, I think that this decision is the only valid reading of how it works. If you don’t like the implications of this decision, the proper response is a Constitutional amendment.
All states have “one person, one vote” as far as I know.
If the US was like Peru, where you have NO idea which party will win or even exist in a year’s time, you’d be right. In the US, something like 80-85% of the votes are already in, no matter the candidate. So, yes, a relatively small number of people can shift elections.
[/QUOTE]
The US is a republic, not a democracy. “One man, one vote” still exists, by the way, with the EC.
Since i haven’t made such a claim, I don’t feel the need to say anything about it.
Yup, it’s a sort of electoral affirmative action, it’s a feature, not a bug.
The expression “cities vote” has a clear meaning that is clearly understood. You just want to obfuscate.
That’s why the selection of such people is of utmost importance and it should be done carefully. However, they can vote as they see fit, that’s how it was designed. The US electoral system is astonishingly strong and it has produced the most stable one.
Since the US is a republic and not a democracy, it shouldn’t be a problem.
I didn’t think anybody actually said this in real life. Mostly because it’s absolutely not true.
The U.S. doesn’t meet the definition of classical democracies. So what? Words change their meaning and accrue new ones all the time. The U.S. begat a new definition of democracy. It is now the dictionary definition of what a democracy is. When you need to point at something called a democracy the U.S. is what you point at.
Can one also call it a republic? Sure. Totally accurately, too, given the modern definition of a republic.
This ruling is unfortunate and I hope it is overturned. These laws are the least-problematic solution, within the confines of the constitution as currently written, to what could one day cause an actual constitutional crisis (not the kind cable news declares every 48 hours, the actual kind with tanks). We’re not immune to that kind of thing, as a country, and we should be mindful of keeping out of situations where it’s very difficult to get out. The vote of a faithless elector is nothing short of an attempt at a coup d’etat, and the legitimate responses to that kind of thing can be much worse than some party activist being kicked out of a ceremonial office; I wish the judges hadn’t decided we would have to g eveno farther down that road to solve this problem in the future.
It is screwy, and unfortunately I haven’t heard much about states and parties locking this process down after the warning they got in 2016. The Washington Democratic Party did change its rules to give the party officials more control over the selection process (it had four faithless electors) but that’s the only change I’ve heard of.