There’s another factor involved. The voting issues that the amendment is intending to fix are WORSE in the amendment approval process than they are in the presidential election process.
You’re talking about fixing disproportionate voting power by having a vote. A vote where a small percentage of the population can prevent it from going through, and that population will have their voting power reduced the most.
Which is exactly the problem. An accident of history has given a group of people disproportionate power and now they, and everyone vested in seeing those people retain their power, are fighting tooth and nail to keep that power. A problem hardly unique to this case (see War on Drugs for another example).
True. But one of them (the quick end of the EC as a deliberative body) was changed without changing the Constitution, and the other - ending slavery - wasn’t done with any intent with respect to the EC.
Not to mention, we had to exclude most of the slave states in order to pass the 13th through 15th Amendments.
No, I don’t think we are. The problem isn’t that a Constitutional amendment can be blocked by 1/4 of the states - it’s that it can be blocked by states whose population is only 4.4% of the U.S. population.
To get 2/3 of Congress, and 3/4 of the states, OK. But due to the fact that the opposition will come from the smallest states, this amendment would require not a 75% mandate, but a 96% mandate.
So there’s a way around it, that is completely Constitutional, and only tramples on the ultranarrow definition of ‘enfranchisement’ that you’ve concocted here. Nobody’s ‘rights’ will be trampled on, except the ‘right’ of those in small states to have their votes count more than those of the rest of us.
And if there’s such a thing as “states’ rights,” the right to have something can be countered by exercising one’s right to relinquish it. Maryland has chosen to give back to the nation as a whole, under specified circumstances, the right to choose its own electors. It can do that. Giving stuff away is against no law.
Not necessarily. States like Vermont, Montana, Idaho, and Utah might appreciate somebody actually caring about what they think, since it now matters how much the Democrat and Republican win instead of just whether they win (each state went for one candidate by at least 20% in 2004). The only small swing state is New Hampshire; twelve of the thirteen smallest states (by population, of course) are not contested every four years. Nobody gives a crap what California, New York, or Texas think either; CA and NY will vote for whatever Democrat is running, and TX won’t, no matter what issues and people are involved.
Assuming we get all the states to implement such a system, that’s effectively just the popular vote with 50 rounding errors. Why would that be preferable to simply using the popular vote?
And the chances of getting one big state to implement it unilaterally are small. There’s no way the majority party will vote to give the opposing party a bunch of electoral votes that they’d otherwise control.
ETA: I’m in favor of a system like Maryland is considering, since it would mean that national politics actually involve issues that affect California more than the ones that affect Iowa.
It wouldn’t necessarily. But converting to a full popular vote would require a constitutional amendment; the system i described would not. I was offering a sort of pragmatic middle ground.
Also, proportional allocation of votes might get more people to the polls. If, for example, you live in a solid Democratic state (in Presidential elections) like California and are a Republican, it makes little difference to you whether the Democrats win 51% of the Presidential vote in your states, or 99%. The result is the same—all the EC votes for the Democratic candidate.
But if the number of EC votes each party got was proportional, and if 45% for the Republican candidate would mean 2 or 3 more EC votes than 40%, you might be more likely to get out and vote, in the knowledge that you vote could change things.
Of course, a national popular vote would also have this effect.
Well, i never offered the idea under the assumption that self-interested majority parties would support it. I think, in general, it’s safe to say that very few politicians have the integrity to support a system—no matter how good—that might result in them losing power and influence.
I don’t mind the Maryland system, as long as it’s universally adopted. I don’t really like the idea that only some states would do it, while others would continue with the old system.
I would prefer winner-take-all per district. So, the candidate that gets the popular vote in a district gets one EC vote. Give the last two to the majority winner for the state.
Yeah, some of you might have to work for a living …
That’s how Maine and Nebraska do it. To the best of my knowledge, and I could be wrong, their votes have never been split.
Why? That would give legislatures even more motivation to gerrymander–as if they didn’t have enough already. The campaign would be fought in a handful of swing districts instead of a handful of swing states.
Why change anything if you don’t solve the underlying problem–that a candidate with fewer votes can defeat a candidate with more votes?
Martin O’Malley, that is. Baltimore’s former mayor, Maryland’s new governor. What exactly is your problem with him, WeirdDave? Please be thorough, specific, and (since this is the Pit) pungent.
What Freddy the Pig said.
For instance, in a state evenly divided between supporters of Parties A and B, with 5 Congressional districts, Party A controlling the legislature could pack one district so it had a 90-10 split favoring Party B, and arrange the other four districts so that they all had a 60-40 Party A majority.
Then Party A wins the state EVs either 4-3 or 6-1, depending on whether it gets the statewide majority. Sweet for Party A, but not so sweet for democracy.
It’s bad enough that this can be done with Congressional districts to begin with. But there’s no need to open electoral votes to additional gaming of the system. We’d like to move in the direction of a system less susceptible to gaming, not more.
States rights are good and well and all (inasmuch as they provide “laboratories” to try out different sets of laws that other states can choose to emulate/disavow) but I see no reason that they should supercede peoples rights.
And for the past 200 years, a person’s effective ability to influence the government via Presidential Elections and Senate Elections has basically been a haphazard crapshoot based upon accident of geography.
Presidential Candidates avoid going to states that are solid “Red” or solid “Blue” because it is a COMPLETE waste of their time to campaign there. Instead, only the privileged residents of “swing states” get any attention at all.
Maryland will certainly get less attention. Why should candidates bother to advertise or visit there if the popular vote winner gets the EC votes anyway?
They are better served following a national strategy and picking up the Maryland EC votes as a garnish.
Here are my problems with proportional allocation of EVs:
As has been said plenty of times, the composition of the Senate should more than suffice to preserve the disproportionate clout of small states, and protect whatever interests of their need protecting from the bad ol’ Big States that would otherwise…what? Beat them up and take their lunch money?
Take a state with 8 EVs, for instance. Each EV would represent 12.5% of its vote, so a 50-50 vote split would yield a 4-4 EV split, a 62.5% - 37.5% split would yield a 5-3 EV split, etc.
So somewhere in between - around a 56.25 - 43.75 vote split - would be the breakpoint between a 4-4 and a 5-3 EV split. The breakpoint between 5-3 and 6-2 EVs would be at about 68.75% of the vote.
If that state was normally 50-50, or normally broke about 60-40 for one party, then candidates would ignore that state because it would involve changing a lot of votes to get one more EV. But if it was normally about 55-45 or 57-43, then it would get a lot of attention.
Similarly, a state with 7 EVs that was split 50-50 would get a lot of attention, but it if was split 57-43, it would get none.
Pretty flukey, huh?
But when i spoke of proportional allocation, i was speaking of using the Maryland votes to allocate Maryland’s EC votes, but doing it proportionally instead of on a winner-takes-all basis. I was not, in that case, speaking of the current proposed system whereby the state allocates its EC votes according to national popular vote.
As i’ve said before, i think a full national popular vote for President is the best solution; i was just offering the proportional allocation thing as a middle ground that wouldn’t require constitutional amendment.
Proportional allocation (even with rounding error), implemented in all 51 jurisdictions, would greatly diminish (although not completely eliminate) the risk that the popular-vote loser will win the election.
However, you can’t get there from here. You would need an interstate compact agreed to by all 51 jurisdictions, not by jurisdictions representing 270+ electoral votes as for the popular-vote compact.
The reason is that any single state opting out of proprtional allocation would gain an instant advantage, either in terms of candidate attention or for the party of its choice. For example, if Ohio opted out, you would have 49 states in which candidates could swing only a vote or two by affecting their margin of victory, and one state in which candidates could swing 20 votes by winning the state by a single percentage point. Guess which state would get showered with candidate attention and dollars?
Conversely if a “safe” red or blue state like Texas or New York opted out, it would confer an overwhelming advantage on its party, as 49 states would have their votes split proportionally and one would go all to one party.
Ergo, proportional only works if agreed to by all 51 jurisdictions. The chance of all 50 states (plus Congress, acting for DC) agreeing on anything is so remote as to be not worth discussing.
If he won with a platform like that then the voters of Maryland deserve what they got coming to them.
The EC has a real and legitimate purpose - to maintain the rights of all the states, even the smaller ones. Without the EC, nationalpoliticians would only pay attention to the larger more populous states, and the small states would be marginalized.
But Maryland’s position is absurd. I would much rather Maryland and all other states cast their electorial votes in proportion to the popular vote within their own state. If electorial votes could be cast as fractions, so much the better. This would eliminate the amplification of noise in the voting system, and make vote counting fraud much more difficult.
Every legislator in Maryland who voted for this nonsense should be innundated with public outrage, and then be voted out of office. Are recalls or impeachment possible?
[QUOTE=Blalron]
States rights are good and well and all (inasmuch as they provide “laboratories” to try out different sets of laws that other states can choose to emulate/disavow) but I see no reason that they should supercede peoples rights.
[QUOTE]
Possibly because we are the Unites States of America and not the United People of America?