I think there’s good reason why they shouldn’t, and it’s because of the rather entrepreneurial style of our Presidential politics.
Unlike in a parliamentary system where the next PM will have been the leader of his party for some time already and a familiar political figure (and where you’re voting for a party anyway, more than a person), we’ve got a system where people can run for their party’s Presidential nomination when they’re largely unknown to the wider public, even if they’ve been a Senator or governor for years. It takes time for the voters to figure out who the players are, and which ones they think are qualified and would represent them well.
But by the time they’re nominated, the public has a pretty good idea who they are. A relatively short general election campaign, ending in a single day, works in this situation.
Another reason it’s a bad idea is that you’ve just guaranteed there will be no majority if you have a lot of viable candidates. So you’d have the party running someone who most people didn’t vote for.
Sure, you could use other voting systems, such as intstant runoff, but the current system gives time for people to get on board, giving a better turn out in the national election.
You could also do a non-instant runoff, as in France and Louisiana. But there is no voting system yet devised that perfectly avoids Condorcet perversity, unfortunately.
At the very least, I think it’s only fair to change up the order. There is no reason why a relatively small number of people in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina should get such disproportionate power.
Considering how early in the primary season Super Tuesday is, isn’t that a possibility now?
Then again, I wonder how many states had early primaries but moved them to a later date because they realize there’s more of a chance to be the “decider.” I have a feeling this is a big reason California moved back to June after a brief period of being part of Super Tuesday. (Plus, I think one, if not both, of the parties gives states extra delegates for having primaries after April 1, with the bonus being larger in May and larger still in June.)
Ahhh…that extra delegates bonus is a great idea–I hadn’t heard about that. And indeed, in a crowded field it could actually give a state more power in the end.
But I disagree with the initial premise. In a constitutional republic that has a federal system with states having a good deal of sovereignty it isn’t necessarily a good idea to elect the president by a popular vote. Especially with how ignorant our electorate actually is.
I sort of like the current system which is a compromise of many principles.
If I could wave a magic wand and change the environment I’d change the voting system to one in which you’d vote by ranking each candidate on the ballot with a number 1-n and whoever had the lowest total score would win.
Hopefully that’d change the voting dynamics enough that 3rd party candidates would be viable.
Wowsers, have you really thunk that out?
You’d make POTUs some guy who only picked up 3 votes from himself, his wife and his mum?
You’d viritually silence the campaign because there’s be a total disincentive for any “get-out-the-vote”. Any issue that motivated people to actually go to the polls would be a campaign killer. A candidate’s best chance of winning would be to encourage lots of people to vote for their opponent.
Not that I’d be in favor of such a system, but your objection could easily be dealt with by automatically assigning the remaining values, or an average of them, to the candidates not voted for. For instance, if there were 14 candidates running, and you only gave your preferences for 3 of them, those 3 would get 1, 2, and 3 points, and the remaining 11 would either be randomly assigned 4 through 14 points, or they’d all get 9 points, being the average of 4 through 14. Under such a system, candidates not voted for would be worse off than those voted for.
So FPTP gets replaced with mandatory preference voting (STV), possibly exhausting preference. (good start, that covers bias in the ballots that are cast. )
But as I understand it the US elections are matters of state concern and so a candidate who only stands in say Vermont will have a profound advantage in accumulating that target of the lower number of votes than a national candidate.
So to remove that inequity there will need to be a national ballot. Which would in turn need to be administered by a national and non-partisan body (and while they are on the job in that regard they might as well manage all the House and Senate and adjudicate on the boundaries but I digress).
And were it possible to do such tinkering without violating numerous articles of that clever constitution you’d have an electoral system that would look remarkably like the one used on this side of the puddle … and we still decide elections based on the rooster who collects the most votes.
penultima: I started off my post by saying I wasn’t indicating support for the general idea. All I was saying was that that particular flaw you pointed out in post #33 could easily be patched. I have no interest in arguing for or against octopus’ proposal in general.
The funny thing is, shouldn’t candidates concentrate on where most people live in a democracy? Who cares what state they live in? Most voters don’t vote based on “how will it help my state,” but rather “how will it help me.” In a modern mobile society, states don’t really matter all that much.
We DO elect the president by popular vote. We just count the votes in a convoluted way. Only very rarely has that resulted in the popular vote count not going to the winner, and it has never has anything to do with wise old men choosing someone else because the people picked someone stupid.
The Electoral College wasn’t about keeping the popular vote at bay. It was invented because the idea of counting voters across state lines was problematic. It meant states with more liberal voting qualifications would have more votes. States that wanted to keep more people from voting would be screwed, especially those who had made a deal to count some of their people as 3/5ths of people while giving them no vote at all.
Anyone can vote in a primary. In most states, the only qualification is that you be registered as a member of that party, which makes perfect sense, but some even have open primaries. Where you get this notion that they are private clubs is beyond me. The whole point of primaries was to open the system up.
