THEN YOU CAN’T FUCKING DO IT! PERIOD!
That’s the whole idea. Just because Freddy the Pig thinks that something is a good idea doesn’t make it so. You have to sell you idea to the general public, and if you can’t do this, YOU DON’T GET TO CHANGE THE RULES. This is the principle upon which our entire government is based. It’s not impossible, it’s been done 27 times. The system was purposefully designed so that it would be hard. The idea is that anything worth doing will overcome the difficulty of the process, and anything that can’t do that isn’t worth doing. Jesus fuck, the number of people willing to just toss out the Constitution on a whim always amazes me.
Yes, you can, because we can effect this particular reform without amending the Constitution, by taking advantage of the plenary power it grants to state legislatures to determine the mode of choosing electors.
Nobody is tossing out the Constitution. We’re talking about changing the mode of election of one particular officer of the federal government, and the Constitution allows the states latitude to change that process.
And with two exceptions (1804 and 1876, I think), it always has. The nationwide popular vote is not the one that counts.
Granted, the EC was designed in an era where states’ rights were stronger than federal rights, and the united states (lack of capitalization intentional) formed a nation. Since the Civil War, the United States is a nation of intermediate states. So an argument can be made (and often is) for revising the national election to reflect the current strong federal government and comparatively weak states’ rights.
But until the rules are changed, WeirdDave is stuck in the MDSSR. (Not MSFSR, it’s not a soviet federation as far as I know.) So go start the counter-revolution! Viva republik! Power to the masses! You who are about to die salute us! The white zone is for the immediate loading and unloading of passengers and baggage only!
There was a dust-up in 2000 that you may remember. Also, 1888. 1804 wasn’t one.
And I reject that argument. I’m a federalist. I almost always support the devolution of power to states, and to the citizenry in general.
Why, then, don’t I support the Electoral College? Because it’s an artifact of federalism. It preserves the shadow of federalism with none of its substance.
Changing the mode of election of the President won’t make the office more or less powerful, and it won’t effect the distribution of power between the state and federal governments. Those battles will be fought on other fronts.
The mode of election should be changed because it is unjust–because X+1 votes should defeat X votes, as they do for every other office in America.
Bullshit. You’re tossing the intent of the Constitution down the rat hole because you found a technical way around it. Half of the bitching that goes on on the boards about George W. Bush is because he’s doing just that, ignoring the intent of the laws and exploiting loopholes to get what he wants done done, but when the situation is reversed it all whine"But the letter of the law doesn’t say that we can’t backdoor the process". Hell, it’s not just the intent, if you know your history, the EC is the result of a long, hard fought, well thought out process that actually made the United States possible. And you wanna piss that away. Pathetic.
Ben-Don’t forget 2000.
Here’s the weird part. That pretty much reflects my thoughts as well. So here we have two people who basically agree with each other arguing. Ain’t life grand?
You’re correct about 2000; since Tilden v Hayes in 1876 had disputed EC votes, then the Bush v Gore 2000 vote also counts.
I was wrong about the other one – the first EC screwup was Jefferson v Adams in 1800.
After further research on Wikipedia (usual warnings, I know), I’ll include 1824 as another EC clusterfuck – but one that was properly played out by the rules, instead of subject to controversies like 1800, 1876, and 2000 were.
The problem is not that the “general public” doesn’t want it, it’s that individual states don’t want it.
States with low populations that get a disproportionate amount of power in elections and government in general don’t want to give up that power. They also have an incredibly disproportionate power in approving/rejecting amendments. Wyoming’s vote gets the same weight as California’s vote on the amendment even though they have 1/60th the population.
Anyway, this rule will only go into effect if states comprimising a majority of the electoral vote enact similar rules. Therefore, you’d have a majority of the states (population wise) being in favor of the rule.
I’d also like to point out that this rule is quite even handed and nice, because they COULD set the vote based on the vote totals in the sum of states that enacted the rule, instead of the whole country. That would sure get the red states quaking in their boots, wouldn’t it?
I’ve always thought this was an odd objection. People always say “well, if the small states didn’t have their out-of-proportion electoral power, they would always be overlooked and ignored”. This makes no sense. Imagine a US with no states at all, just one big heap of 300 million people. Would the people living in not-Rhode-Island be ignored? No, they would be exactly as important as the people living in not-California.
The real mystery is why Rhode Island is A State, whereas the San Francisco Bay Area, a region of at-least-equal size and economic importance, isn’t, and why everyone accepts that as a natural God-ordained and correct state of things.
Oh, and the OP’s use of the word “disenfranchised” is laughably spurious.
No, in point of fact, I think I’ve shown that it’s dead on. The only people who disagree are people who want to do away with the EC entirely, which is a completely different debate, but instituting this method for assigning Maryland’s EC votes effectively disenfranchises every voter in the state, within the confines of the EC system. If we had a different system in place it might not, but we do not. The process we have in place is the Electoral College, and within that framework I stand by my choice of words.
That’s scary. And sad.
For that matter, it’s sad that high school graduates couldn’t explain how to determine how many EC votes are assigned to a given state. It’s not that hard.
Pardon, but wasn’t the ‘intent’ of the Constitution that each state would appoint electors, who would be Wise Men who would get together, deliberate, and decide who our next President would be?
That’s what I remember learning in school, anyway. And if so, the intent of the EC has long since been tossed down the rathole, and all we have left is an archaic means of scoring elections that in itself existed, in part, so that slaves of African descent could increase the weight of their masters’ political preferences to the tune of 3/5 of their number.
Anyhow, what the states of the compact are doing is perfectly Constitutional. They are welcome to pick their electors however they want to. They’re just doing it in a way you don’t like.
What this law does, is enfranchise the voters of Maryland in a different way.
In 2004, a close election that went GOP, Maryland was a 56-43 slamdunk for Kerry. Wouldn’t have mattered if Kerry had won 51-48 or 61-38: the size of the majority (and the minority) didn’t matter. Every Republican in the state was disenfranchised - and to a certain extent, Dems were too, because the excess Dem votes might as well not have existed. Under this plan, that would no longer be the case.
Why should a Dem candidate go to Alabama? Under the current system, no reason at all; it’s not going to go Dem unless the election’s a landslide. But if the election is decided by popular vote, then if you’re John Edwards or Barack Obama, having won the Dem nomination, you think, “maybe I can get 45% of the Alabama vote in 2008, rather than the 37% that Kerry got in 2004, and that would really help me.” Similarly, a Republican candidate has a reason to campaign in New York, California, Illinois. Votes are votes, no matter where you can get them, if the election’s decided by popular vote. That’s enfranchisement.
In that case, you’re absolutely right, because you’ve defined it that way. So what’s the debate?
ETA: Thought we were in GD. Just realized we were in the Pit. Nevermind.
Maryland (and the interstate initiative consortium in which they are participating with this measure) are going at it wrong. What they should do is have the state law establish that as soon as >50% of the EC’s worth of the states have adopted similar laws, they will allocate their states’ electors in proportion to the popular vote in that state instead of winner-take-all.
• Preserves states’ rights
• No infringement on the sense that it’s the voters in that state whose votes determine how the states’s electors will vote
• Like the original proposition, it ceases to disenfranchise voters in states where their individual vote is not the majority opinion within that state. At least to the level of “graininess” dictated by the population of the state.
• Like the original proposition, it takes the national election out of the hands of a few “swing states” and makes pretty much every state an important one to be concerned with / campaign in.
Except that (a) the law as proposed only goes into effect if all/enough states ratify it, which effectively does away with the EC entirely, so your hypothetical situation couldn’t really come into play, and (b) “disenfranchise” is a pretty meaningless word to toss around with respect to the EC. A vastly worse kind of disenfranchising already happens to, say, all republican voters living in California, whose votes NEVER matter at all ever. Compare that to the people in Maryland, each of whose individual votes, under the proposed system, always matters exactly as much as each other individual voter in the US. They are MORE franchised by the new law, if anything.
I have far more problems with that. That scheme would have thrown both 1992 and 1996 - and, arguably, 2000 - to the House of Representatives.
Welcome to Western Canada, Dave.
No, you’ve got it wrong. AFAICT, Weirddave has defined disenfranchisement, for purposes of this discussion, to mean:
You’re enfranchised if and only if your individual vote, along with the others in your state and your state alone, determine the choice of electors for your state, as long as the EC exists, whether or not if it’s effectively superseded.
(Have I described your position correctly, Weirddave? If not, consider this post moot, and we’ll move forward from there.)
So he’s right, by definition.
Doesn’t really make for a debate, but then (as I was slow to observe) this isn’t GD.
And that gets us right back to the big state - small state problem, since if an election is decided in the House, each state delegation gets one vote, with a majority needed to win.
Yea, you pretty much got it RTF. Thx for the clarification.
Now Max, if you want to change the system for electing the president, that’s fine. RTF listed upthread some things that were in the original Constitution that were later changed. There is a mechanism in place for doing this. Use that mechanism. It is designed to be hard. That is it’s intent. People saying that it’s too hard to amend the Constitution are missing the entire point. It is precisely because it is so hard to change that the Constitution is such a stable base for our entire system of government. Doing things using shady (but legal-nowhere here have I said that what the legislature did was illegal or unconstitutional) backdoor methods to work around the Constitution has the cumulative effect of weakening the foundation upon which our whole system of government is based, and should be strongly opposed whenever they rear their head.
Even if I favored getting rid of the EC I would be strongly against this bill on principle, and would oppose it just as strongly.