This is just a half baked idea, but if we can’t/won’t/shouldn’t get rid of the electoral college system, what if we at least awarded the popular vote x amount of votes?
I’m imagining it acting as the cherry on top that tips the sundae if it wasn’t already clearly leaning in one direction or the other.
Depending on the value of x, I can imagine it say changing the outcome of the 2000 election, but not so much in 2016.
To take it further, say the winner of the popular vote gets 30 electoral college votes. In 2000, it would have tipped it for Gore. In 2016, Hillary would still be 11 votes short. Would that soften the blow, or make it more contentious?
Because it would take the same degree of effort to enact your proposal as any form of “getting rid of the electoral college system”. Number and apportionment of electoral votes is per strict Constitutional rules; there’s no freedom to squeeze other votes in.
So, a full Constitutional amendment process, regardless of which alternative you want. That’s why not.
It’s a counter argument to current constitutional principle of how electors are determined today.
Your solution is like saying you get 6 points for a touchdown, 1 point for the kick after, and 3 points for a field goal. But if you have the most number of scores, you get an extra 5 points.
There’s a reason that different scores have different points for the type of score, just as there is a reason that each state regardless of size has 2 electors.
This is false. Each state has as many electors as it has senators (2) plus however many house of representative members it has. Wyoming has 1 extra elector for a total of 3. California has 55ish extras for a total of 57ish. I say “ish” just because I’m too lazy to look up the actual number at the moment. Whatever the number is, it’s a fixed number at least until the next reapportionment of the House of Reps.
Electors are determined based on the size if each state’s Congressional delegation - Senators plus Representatives. Since every state has two Senators and every state has a minimum of one Representative, that means each state gets a minimum of three Electors.
I think if states split their electoral college votes between all candidates based on number of votes, the system would be more fair.
In any state with a close race, say 46% to 48% (which happened in 2012), 46% of the voters go completely unrepresented in the electoral college. Also gives voters a reason to vote even in areas where they are outnumbered by the other side.
Why should a vote count less just because the rest of your state disagrees? You’re not voting for the state’s leader, you’re voting for the country’s.
Of course, getting rid of the electoral college would work but this might require fewer drastic changes to the political system.
I would favor some version of the original idea, where electors would be chosen from individual districts, without any binding pledge bullshit, to convene and choose a president. I would like to see it extended to include the Speaker of the House, and get rid of the VP: the Speaker would handle the Oval Office until the existing electors had a chance to reconvene and select a replacement. The national election of electors would be every two years, and they would be required to reach a majority in order to replace a sitting president in non-term-limited years (I would like to see the term limit made non-absolute, so that a president could be brought back after four years out). Such an arrangement would drastically change the shape of presidential elections, possibly for the better (parties would lose a lot of influence).
In looking at history, no Democrat has won the electoral vote without winning the popular vote, so I would not expect a Republican Congress to respond to a call for change.
The Electoral System is designed to give some weight to the rural voters who would otherwise be dominated by urban voters. It is the American system. This time it screwed the majority but it did work as intended. No need to go changing anything.
If things were different, things would be different. There has never been a popular vote for POTUS in the U.S.A… However, if there were a popular vote, I suspect that people might vote/not vote differently than they currently do.
Many Republicans/independents in Illinois don’t bother to vote for President because the Democrat machine in Chicago produces such overwhelming numbers. Currently, all 20 electors from Illinois will always go to the Democrat candidate. And I suspect there are other states where the situation is reversed.
If there were a national/popular vote for POTUS, I assume there would be many more Illinois votes for a Republican candidate.
This is why winning the popular vote is an exercise in futility. (It’s a moo point. You know, it’s like a cows opinion. It just doesn’t matter.)
However, the Electoral College falls under State’s Rights. The states never surrendered their ability to vote for a President, as they see fit.
This suggestion comes up basically every four years, but it’s not a change that accomplishes much. It essentially amounts to using the popular vote, but with weird rounding errors and corner cases.
It’s still possible to win the popular vote and lose the electoral vote. And it still gives voters from small states more weight to their votes. It doesn’t really solve any of the problems of the current system.
Not really – Winning the popular vote usually means you win the Electoral College.
Look, it’s just not possible to make a change. The Constitution right now is basically un-amendable. The last amendment to be added from scratch was in 1971.*
Things are too partisan in Washington to get the 2/3rd majority to pass an amendment through Congress. And you can’t get enough states to sign on before it expires (amendments these days usually have a time limit). It’s especially unlikely for something as partisan as the Electoral College, and too many states would feel the lose power if it’s abolished.
It’s just not going to happen. We’re going to have to live with it.
*The 27th Amendment was ratified in 1992, but it was sent to the states two centuries earlier with no time limit.
I agree. Not to single out the OP, but this question comes up so regularly that it makes me question people’s basic understanding of the U.S. Constitution at even the ‘C’ level of a high school Civics class yet even supposedly educated people make these fundamentally flawed types of speculation all the time. The Constitution isn’t just some old piece of paper. It is the supreme law of the land that forms the foundation of all U.S. government. You can’t just ignore it or try to work around it especially on procedural matters like Presidential elections that aren’t up for much interpretation.
If you don’t like something in the Constitution whether it is the Electoral College, the 2nd amendment or anything else, there is an amendment process. It is just notoriously difficult by design. If you want to change the Presidential electoral process, the only factual answer is that you have to draft an amendment, get it passed by 2/3rds of both the House and the Senate separately and then have it ratified by 3/4 of the states (38 out of 50).
See, its easy. If people don’t want to go through the whole process, it is a waste of time to talk about because that is the only way to do it.
Agree with iamthewalrus(:3= that dunkleosteus’ proposed solution is half-assed. Not that he invented it; it’s a perennial chestnut of US politics.
But ref RealityChuck’s good point that the constitution is unamendable, the multi-state pact to use proportional EC voting (see National Popular Vote Interstate Compact - Wikipedia) gets us maybe 80% of the way to a popular vote for president without the need for a constitutional amendment. Albeit, buying into the problems **walrus **says. In politics, the perfect is often the enemy of the good enough.
Speaking for myself, I’d rather fix the overrepresentation of rural small states than the winner takes all nature of state-level EC votes. But if we fix anything, we make progress.
And this “we” you’re talking about is… the 100% Republican-controlled legislative, executive, and judicial* branches of government that seem to be benefiting from the current system, right?
So many people talking about this right now because they think it would help the Democrats, and yet they seem completely oblivious to the fact that they need the government to push any changes through.
Another point is the the popular vote in all states is a compromise already. It is the states themselves that are voting for President, not individual U.S. citizens as a whole. The popular vote didn’t even exist in the early days of the country because the states were free to choose how to select their electors however they saw fit. The popular vote was added on a state by state basis much later.
That may sound like it is extremely undemocratic and it is - by design. The United States has never been a democracy. It is a confederation of semi-sovereign states bound together by the Constitution and a Federal government with supposedly very limited powers. Each state is the one that is supposed to vote for President at the Federal level, not each individual equally. What you see now are the various hacks and compromises implemented within each state but there is no way to make it completely democratic without a Constitutional amendment.
A lot of Americans and most foreigners only have a tenuous grasp of the concept of a Representative Democratic Republic but that is what the U.S. is. That means that states are the primary unit of government and they grant powers not stated in the Constitution to the Federal government and not the other way around. There is no requirement that individual citizens have any direct input into the makeup of the Federal government including the President unless they are granted by individual states.
The multi-state pact cannot be rated a “best buy” because it’s unenforceable. A state can just drop out if the legislature is run by a party that would lose the election because of it. They can revoke any law binding them. Party politics is bareknuckle and parties use every avenue to gain and keep power.
Allocating electoral votes by Congressional district (like in Maine and Nebraska) might work, but it has to be used in every state, otherwise things will be skewed. And of course, gerrymandering will also skew things; that would have to be eliminated.
Given the politics in the US, there is no solution that can be put into place to replace the current one.
Counting millions of votes was not technologically possible back in the “pony express days”.
It is possible now with modern computers/electronics to count hundreds of millions of votes and know in hours who won. Just a matter of changing things.