Well, it seems to me that anyone who wants to eliminate the Senate, the EC and any other mechanism that doesn’t conform to selection by a direct popular vote while still maintaining a federal government (instead of deciding every issue by a ntional popular vote-direct democracy) IS advocating a “tyranny of the majority” by the method of a “tyranny of bureaucracy”, and thus does meet the criteria of a “nation where the government can force the populace to do the ‘right thing’”. Do you see it differently? If so, how?
You realize, i assume, that it’s possible (with the appropriate Constitutional amendment) to get rid of the electoral college system for electing the President, and still leave the Senate as it is? Abolishing the EC and abolishing the Senate need not go together.
On the one hand, i’m not especially worried about the EC. In over 200 years of US history, the electoral college has given us the same President as a popular vote would have on almost every single occasion.
At the same time, however, i’m not especially convinced by those who cry about a possible “tyranny of the majority” under a popular vote system for President. It seems to me that a popular vote would be no more unjust than the current situation, where a voter from Wyoming or Nebraska or Montana has anywhere from about 1.5 to 3.5 times as much power in electing the president as a voter from California or Texas or New York. At the extremes, Wyoming gets one electoral college vote for every 165,000 inhabitants; California gets one electoral college vote for every 600,000 inhabitants. I don’t see how that’s any more fair than a popular vote system.
I agree that small states need a place where they have some disproportionate representation, and i think the Senate serves the purpose. I don’t see the need for them to have such dramatically disproportionate per-voter power in electing the President.
Actually, my preference would be to do what a couple of states have done, and what some other states are talking about. Instead of having a state’s electoral college votes allocated on an all-or-nothing basis, they could be allocated proportionally. So, if 60 percent of Californians vote Democrat and 40 percent vote Republican, give the Democratic candidate 33 EC votes, and the Republic candidate 22 EC votes. And if 60 percent of Wyomingites (??) vote Republican and the rest vote Democrat, give the Republican two EC votes, and the Democrat one.
Yeah, your explanation makes no sense to me at all. ISTM that having non-proportional representative bodies like the EC and the Senate permits more “tyranny of the bureaucracy” than a pure one-person-one-vote system, not less.
The fact that it’s a representative democracy rather than a direct democracy doesn’t matter. If the representatives are controlled by the popular will, as under a pure one-person-one-vote system they would be, then the state is not tyrannizing over the populace. The majority bloc of the populace may well by tyrannizing over minority blocs, but that’s not the same thing.
This doesn’t mean that I’m necessarily in favor of a pure one-person-one-vote electoral system; I’m just arguing that it’s not at all the same thing as a centralized dictatorship where the government is controlling the populace rather than the other way around.
BTW, what did he do to/for/in Baltimore?
Oy, wouldn’t you know, the one time I don’t quote the poster I’m responding to, another post sneaks in between. My previous post was directed to Weirddave.
This isn’t (at least not mostly) about Dubya; the thing is, four elections for president have gone to a guy who didn’t win the popular vote, and several others in this century alone (Kennedy/Nixon) have had margins of victory in swing states smaller than the national difference (in other words, IL and TX could have voted for Nixon by a few thousand votes and Kennedy still would’ve had the popular majority).
It’s not about “we hate the guy who was elected in a mess in 2000”. It’s “this system makes it so that many people are effectively disenfranchised when voting for President based on their location”.
The problem is, what if you live in a state that’s comfortably between divisions there? For instance, what if you live in a state with 4 electoral votes, and Republicans have no chance of getting over 75% of the vote? That would mean that neither party has a realistic chance of gaining or losing votes from that state, and thus would ignore it.
The primary problem I see with this is that population changes and reapportionment of electors could make things really bad. Let’s take as an example the red state/blue state divide from '00 to '04. 2004’s red states were the same as 2000’s, except for New Hampshire, which went red in '00 and blue in '04. Due to population shifts, Bush could still carry the '04 electoral vote (which kinda sucked, but that’s a subject for a different Pit thread or a thousand) without New Hampshire, despite his margin in '00 having been less than New Hampshire’s electoral vote.
Now, suppose that this law was adopted by 2004’s red states (unfortunately a majority of the electoral college). But then, everyone decides that they want to be where they were in 2000 after all, and move back, and electors get assigned back to the 2000 figures. Now, we have a situation where a minority of the electoral college is pledged to support the popular vote winner, and things can get bizarre.
I have no problem with the basic idea, however. This whole electoral college thing is pretty stupid, and not particularly democratic. Under Maryland’s plan, every voter in the country has just as much say as any other, which sounds nothing like disenfranchisement to me.
Um, electoral votes can’t be reassigned before a census, but if the minority of the EC is pledged to the National Popular vote (through relative growth in states without the plan, for example), the interstate compact simply is no longer operative – at least until there are enough states with it again.
The question of allocation is a problem in small states, and we’d need to decide on a way to do it.
But plenty of states get ignored in the current system, where a relative handful of swing states get all the attention. I’d be willing to bet that fewer states would get ignored if EC votes were allocated proportionally.
If we assigned electoral votes as decimals to more than three places, that solves that problem (three places would still have given 2000 to Bush, and the idea here is to get a system that most accurately reflects the will of the people – at least in my opinion, and in that of many others).
A person with X+1 votes has a better claim to be President of the United States than a person with X votes, regardless of where those votes come from. All Americans should be equal in voting for President of the United States.
This reform is perfectly constitutional, it’s long overdue, it’s supported by 70% of the American public, and it would be gathering serious momentum by now if Arnold hadn’t vetoed it in California.
To those people who say this is a good idea, but we should adopt it by amending the Constitution, we all know that will be impossible. A constitutional amendment can be blocked by one-third-plus-one of either house of Congress, or by one house within the legislatures of 13 small states. The difficulty of amending the Constitution sometimes ossifies out-of-date ideas, and the Electoral College is one of them.
Colorado voters turned down such a proposal by 65%-35% in 2004.
As far as I know, no states do this. Maine and Nebraska each assign two votes to the state-wide winner, and one vote to the winner of each congressional district, which is vaguely similar.
It merely requires that there be a broad consensus that the system is broken. Such a consensus does not exist for the electoral college.
Why? People don’t vote for President of the United States…states do. If the states decide to pick their electors by who wins the popular vote in the state, that’s great, and I think they should, but it’s ultimately up to them. (and, likewise, if they want to do what Maryland just did, and pick their electors based on who wins the national popular vote, that’s up to them too, although I think it’s bizarre.)
Right, you’re correct that no states actually use the system i would like to see. Maine and Nebraska go part of the way there.
As for whether there’s a consensus about the system being broken, i’m not sure. If people don’t think the EC is problematic as it currently stands, i think that in many cases that might simply be due to ignorance of how it works.
I teach American history to college undergrads, and in one of my courses, on American Intellectual History, we spend time discussing the debates over the Constitution (federalists and anti-federalists; Madison, Hamilton, Brutus, Henry, etc.). I’ve been teaching at one of the nation’s better art colleges, a place where tuition is very expensive and where a high proportion of kids come from private high schools, are at least very good public schools. These are kids who received good schooling, and who generally come from the politically-conscious middle and upper-middle class.
Each year, before we discuss the Constitution, i ask them if anyone can explain roughly how the Electoral College system works. And, quite frequently, not a single person in a class of 20-25 students can give even a rough outline of how the votes for President are allocated, or how the number of EC votes for each state is determined. Hell, a couple of years ago, not one person in the class could tell me how many US Senators represented each state.
I realize that this is merely anecdote, but i wouldn’t be surprised if a pretty high proportion of the American people are as ignorant as those students.
Anyway, as i said earlier, i’m not especially opposed to the EC system; i’m just not convinced by those who argue that changing it to a popular vote would be a tyrannical or unjust measure.
Nitpick:
This phrasing is acceptable in casual usage. Keep in mind that the formal styling is Marylandistan Soviet Socialist Republic (MDSSR).
Back on topic: The popular vote hasn’t been “upset” all that often, so why do people suddenly have this raging “need” to change the EC system? Especially since I concur with WeirdDave, Maryland’s new (and on-hold) system changes from “We’ll pick our electors based on the statewide first past the post preference” to “Wel’ll pick our electors based on the nationwide FPP preference, never mind what the Maryland vote results say” seems to me to effectively disenfranchise the Free State.
But that’s more a GD concept, and this is the Pit. So let me go dig out my camp chair.
The simplest way to fix the Electoral College, requiring only a change in federal law, is to increase the size of the House of Representatives to some large number, say 1000 seats. (I’d say 2000, but that’s getting somewhat impractical. 
) Increasing the number of seats smooths out the lumpiness in the EC.
It also has the side effect of improving representation by reducing the number of constituents per district.
One upset is one too many. X+1 votes should defeat X votes.
Is this a “raging need”? No. Can we survive for another 200 years with the present system? Probably. That doesn’t mean that change is a bad idea. We can do better than an outmoded system that allows a candidate with fewer votes to defeat a candidate with more votes, and we should.
No. Maryland will contribute to the nationwide popular election just like every other state, and the winner will become President. Nobody will care how any more how a particular state’s electoral votes are cast.
I think M.S.F.S.R. would actually be the most appropriate usage for this issue.
Well, you’re half right. No, one quarter. The Senate is a good idea; the EC was a so-so idea that is now bad.