Missed the edit window. Come to think of it, you would be in a pickle now if both the Prez and VP elect died AFTER the EC met. Let’s say that on Dec 20, 2008, Obama and Biden were both shot in the back by jealous husbands, who would be sworn in on Jan 20, 2009?
Nancy Pelosi? For a full 4 year term? That seems silly. It would be even more silly if the GOP had control of the House. The voters voted for Obama/Biden and get a President Boehner?
Yes, I and many others will be willing to go to another Civil War if there were events that led to the abolishment of the Senate. I DO NOT believe in pure democracy ruled by people that have very different experiences because of the population density of where they live. Tyranny by the majority is still tyranny. States like Wyoming and Alaska have some influence because of the intentional design of the Constitution that allows that. Without that advantage, a huge portion of the land area of the U.S. would have little influence.
The same goes for the electoral college. This question always pisses me off when it comes up because it shows a lack of understanding of how the U.S. is supposed to work. The President of the United States is supposed to be the president of the states at the federal level and not every single person at an individual level. The former is the way it shifted over time but there is no requirement that individual citizens get to vote for President of the United States at all. The states can each come up with their own method.
They didn’t have fancy statistical tools when the Constitution was written but recent analyses have shown that the electoral college gives individual voters more power, not less to sway an election. That may be good or bad from your perspective but individual power is a feature of it.
The Electoral College also has one extremely good practical feature. Problems with vote counting due to simple errors or corruption are isolated so that they can’t affect other jurisdictions. You can put 100,000,000 votes for a given candidate for a Democrat in Illinois and it won’t change the overall results one bit. Illinois is only allocated one set of Electoral College votes and that is all they get. Imagine a really close election where you had to sort out disputed results not just in one state like Florida but for every single jurisdiction in the U.S.
I do sleep tight knowing that the Constitution is very hard to change by design and the states that would never support such a move would be required to approve it so the whole argument is strictly intellectual.
We’re coming up on re-election day.
That is the best reason for keeping it assuming that getting rid of it was even remotely possible.
There is a mathematical quantity associated with each voter that increases under the Electoral College. One could call that mathematical quantity by any name one chose. For some reason, the mathematicians who study such things have decided to use the word “power” to describe that quantity, even though it bears almost no resemblance to the established meaning of that word. Under more reasonable definitions for the word “power”, it’s either completely impossible to increase the power of the average voter, or the Electoral College decreases the power of the average voter.
A unicameral government is hardly pure democracy. It’s representative. It has seperation of powers and judicial review among other nondemocratic features.
The last sentence there is an invitation to chaos. The population is nowhere evenly distributed. You could use this principle as a blanket justification for rebellion. Are the rural (or urban or suburban) residents of (unicameral) Nebraska entitled to secede? And if the principle applies to location what about more significant social factors? Are people entitled to rebel based on being in the minority by race, religion, class, wealth, gender, ethnicity, and the like?
Tyranny is always tyranny. A benefit of majority rule is that it makes tyranny less likely than in any other system since it spreads political power more broadly.
The people of Wyoming and Alaska would hardly be disenfranchised with the loss of the Senate. Each would (theoretically) have the same influence as any other American. What is it about land that magically imbues it with the right to be represented in the governing of people?
Who are you that others should automatically accept your conception about how government should work? Disagreement is not the same as a lack of understanding.
Bullshit. Natapoff is a tool. Elections are a zero sum game. Unless and until they can determine more than who will fill particular governmental roles there is no way to increase one person’s influence without decreasing that of others. Analysis that ignores this basic principle is worthless, no matter how pretty the math or compelling the conclusions.
This is backwards. Imagine an election where a handful of votes in a particular state could change the outcome of the election. Oh wait, you don’t have to imagine it because it happened in 2000. The Electoral College doesn’t contain tainted results within states because elections can turn upon those results.
Imagine an electoral system that wasn’t a byzantine hodge podge of state laws but under a single standard that applies to everyone and that everyone who cares to can familiarize themselves with. Where responses to ambiguities and other problems that crop up in one place resolve the issue once and for all. In that system a clusterfuck like Florida couldn’t happen and a nationwide recount could be handled without undue excitement.
Parliamentary government sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?
It’s threads like this that make me saddest. They’re always started and run by the people who either didn’t pay attention or didn’t understand what they were learning in Government/Civics class.
We get people who think that somehow we’re a direct democracy, and have some sort of ignorant, misguided crusade to “make every vote count” or something like that, and always bring up the Electoral College and the old saw of “why does it matter about the land area?”
The US is a federal republic, not a democracy. As such, it’s a union of states where the states generally deal with the federal government, not the people themselves. That’s why getting rid of the electoral college is bad- if we did, we’d effectively disenfranchise anyone living outside of the big cities, strictly because of population density. By making it state-dependent, it means that states like New York still have electoral effects proportional to their population, but that a state like Wyoming still has some say. It also has the fraud protection already mentioned.
Direct democracy would be a disaster; it would be the classic “bread and circuses” problem writ large.
If the issue is the all or nothing nature, that’s a matter of how the individual states do things, not the Federal government’s problem. Just because you don’t like it that way or you think it’s unfair, doesn’t mean that the residents of those states give a crap and want to change the system.
The only event that could lead to the abolishment of the Senate as it exists now would require ((( a 2/3 vote of the House of Representatives, and a 2/3 vote of the Senate) or (a call for a convention by the legistlatures of 2/3 of the states)) , and ((the legislatures of 3/4 of the states approve) or (a 3/4 of the conventions called in the states approve)), and (all of the states that would lose equal suffrage in the Senate approve)).
You’d still want to start a civil war?
bump:
As the one who started the thread, I take exception to that characterization.
I think the electors still serve a purpose. They act as a backstop for the electoral process. In the general election with millions of voters there are always going to be disputable issues. But ultimately we can say those issues don’t matter. The real election is the one held in December and the results of that have always been clear and unambiguous.
For example, many people may have had issues with the results of the general election in 2000. But when the electors got together and 271 of them voted for Bush and 266 of them voted for Gore, the issue was settled - George W. Bush had been elected President.
If this clear procedure didn’t exist and the general election was the deciding election (even if we had the same electoral vote by state procedure) it would open the door to ongoing challenges to every Presidential election. Every President would have his legitimacy challenged in court and every President would only be the “provisional” President as the lawsuits went back and forth.
Oh this is rich. For you to share in the joke of you preaching against our ignorance go look up the definition of direct democracy.
The irony continues. Feel free to familiarize yourself with the basic terms of the debate. Those terms are not exclusive.
People say this over and over but it doesn’t make it so. Giving everyone an equal vote is the opposite of disenfranchising them.
These are both safe states. As such presidential elections barely touch them. If we ditched the Electoral College candidates would actually have a reason to seek the votes of Wyomingites and New Yorkers.
So you are ignorant of recent electoral history as well. You could read my last post where I destroy this quaint notion.
No one is proposing a direct democracy.
You are entitled to your opinion on which issues the federal government should concern itself with and which should be reserved for the states. That’s the great thing about a democracy.
And vice versa. Are you aware that the Electoral College is generally unpopular?
Only if you accepted that all of the 271 Bush electors held their office legitimately. Presumably a lot of people thought that only 246 of them did.
I don’t think it’s an issue. The Constitution doesn’t specify how the state appoints its electors. So the possibility that Gore received more votes in Florida than Bush did doesn’t invalidate the appointment of the electors who were chosen.
I’ll readily grant that the Supreme Court decision in Bush v Gore was questionable in its legal foundations. But once the state of Florida accepted that decision (and I don’t know what practical alternative they had) and appointed electors based on it, the electors were legitimate.
I don’t share Little Nemo’s concern but if he’s right it’s an easy fix. Just elect a person with the right to name themselves POTUS. From this perspective one Elector is no different than many it seems to me. But I don’t think that would be necessary. With a clear and comprehensive election law, lawsuits are less of an issue since once a point of law is decided there is precedent for all future elections.
Why would this need to happen?
Plenty of (all?) other democratic countries can count the votes and determine the result of disputed elections for the head of government without resorting to duelling lawsuits and “provisional” HOGs.
IMHO the only change required to the EC is to appoint the electors proportionally rather than winner take all.
I don’t understand people who think that politicians will campaign more in smaller states if everything is by population. People in the smaller states currently have more power than the people in the larger states. Making that power imbalance worse means that your state is even less important.
Can you really not see this? Fine, I’ll show the pretty obvious math. Wyoming, as the least populous state, has a population of 544,270 as of July 2009, and 3 electoral votes, out of a possible 538. To get the votes in percentage form, we divide actual by possible.
3 / 538 = 0.557621%
Now, since we want the number per capita, we divide this result by the population.
(3 / 538) / 544 270 = 1.02453e-8 or 1.02453% per million.
Under a population-only system, we only need the population of the U.S., which is 307,006,550 again as of July 2009. And since this is per each person, we divide 1 by that population.
1 / 307 006 550 = 3.25725949e-9 or 0.325725949% per million.
This means that the vote of a person in Wyoming is now worth a third of what it was. To put this another way, lets put that back into electoral votes. Wyoming used to be worth 3 votes, and now would effectively be worth only 1. If they don’t campaign there now, why in the world would the campaign there under the new system?
This will apply to any state that has a population below the average. Any state with less than 6.14 million people will matter less, and thus likely get less campaigning. That’s 33 states (and one district) that shall see less campaigning.
Compare this to California, which will now be worth the equivalent of 65[sup]†[/sup] electoral votes, rather than 55.
[sup]†[/sup](36 961 664 / 307 006 550) * 535
You’re missing the point; the people have never directly elected the president; you actually are expressing your choice for which way your state’s electors should vote. It’s really a state vote, not a direct popular vote, which WOULD be direct democracy, however you slice that.
That’s the issue at hand here; people don’t get that it’s not a direct vote, and go off whining like bitchy children about how they’re disenfranchised, blah, blah, blah, despite getting an equal say in how their state’s electors vote. Yes, smaller state voters are disproportionately represented, but that’s by design; again, it’s a state vote, not a direct popular vote. Each state is guaranteed the same number of electors as they have congressmen (house + senate) , but how their electors are to vote (all-or-nothing, proportional, etc…) is up to the states. If the Electoral College is so unpopular, why is it that something like 48 out of 50 states have all-or-nothing elector voting? The people can change that, but they’ve chosen not to.
And I’m not "entitled to your opinion on which issues the federal government should concern itself with and which should be reserved for the states. " That’s in the Constitution, which any half-literate person in this country ought to know. The fact that it’s NOT my opinion or anyone else’s is the great thing about the Constitution, not direct democracy.
And I used New York and Wyoming as more or less hypothetical examples, not as concrete examples of “safe states”. What I was trying to say is that Wyoming still gets 3 electoral votes as a state, which is a hell of a lot more than 563,000 people would get in a one-man, one-vote system relative to New York with 19.3 million people, of which well more than half live in the NYC metro area. Yet New York still gets 19.3 million people’s worth of electoral votes.
It’s the Connecticut Compromise at work; small states get consideration and so do large states, which is how it should be.
Preach it brother!
The Electoral college is a necessity! Without it, the U.S. will not exist in 100 years. It would fragment.
People in low density/high land states are already distrustful of ‘the coasts’* as it is today. Take away essentially all their political power and they will begin to look to go their own way.
In an election with 538 people voting, you can be virtually certain that every vote was counted and the outcome was accurate. You think you can design a system for 130,000,000 voters where you can say the same?