“Concept”? The EC isn’t a concept. Do you mean people do not understanding the reasoning behind voting for Electors, rather than voting directly for President? Hell, professional political scientists argue about the justification and results of this method.
And what are people to “make an informed decision” about? An individual can make no decision effecting the law by which the President is elected, unless the law is on the ballot.
I think that reforming the Electoral College so that all members must vote according to the popular vote will minimize pandering to certain sub-cultures, but dramatically increasing campaign spending. It would be interesting to watch how campaign strategies shifted.
My greatest concern is that reformation would completely side-line smaller parties.
I would like Elector votes to have to be cast proportionally to the popular vote. Frankly, I don’t get why states still have control over voter rights at all.
I’m another guy from New York. Meaning no personal disrespect, but I always want to barf when I hear this intrinsically absurd argument. When you write that less populated states get “a bit more say,” what you’re really saying is that they get “a bit more say than they deserve.”
What exactly do think that highly populated states are populated with? They are filled with people. If state **A **has 15 times more people than state B, then state Ashould have 15 times more voice than state B. Not because state A is selfish. Not because it is a bully. Not because it is smarter, or richer, or better – but because it has more PEOPLE, and people are what matter in a democracy.
I can never understand how small staters yell and scream that a direct democracy is somehow more unfair than one that violates a principle as elementally fair as the one-person-one-vote standard.
And even if you were to argue that neither way is completely “fair,” at least the strict one-person-one-vote method is a lot closer to being fair than the thumb-on-the-scale-for-the-small-states system we have now.
And those people collectively have different interests than people from other states. When you’re talking about states big enough that their population is larger than most, without the balance that the Electoral College or a body like the Senate provides those people always get what they want. Is that what you want? The majority is great as long as you’re in it. When you’re not you get ignored. Well, you can ignore states at your own peril with the EC. 271-265 in 2000? That’s Rhode Island and Washington, DC.
It is indeed giving states with less more of a say, but that is a perfectly legitimate check on the tyranny of the majority.
People in small states can make any case they like based on the threat that – as you say – the large states ignore them at their peril. But they have no right to insist that, person-for-person, their voices deserve to be more weighty than the voices of those who lives in large states.
There are plenty of laws that protect minority voices from tyrany. Democracy, however, is not tyrany; it is giving each person an equal say. What you want is to give some people more of a say than others. That sounds a lot more like to tyrany than my version.
It all goes back to what I said before. Populous states are populous because they are filled with PEOPLE, not some giant heartless collective mob of unworthy robots that has it in for the good people of little Wyoming or North Dakota.
I’m voting for McCain. But if Obama wins the EC and loses the popular vote, he’s the president, fair and square. I’m a fan of the EC, being a “states’ rights, don’t give the Feds all your power” kind of guy. I have no problem with such a scenario, not even a little bit.
My take has always been that, if the major parties ignored the small states or rural areas, one of the parties (or perhaps a large third party) would start focusing on those areas because they would be free for the taking. That would get both/all three parties competing over them again and they’d be back in the fold.
It always annoys me to hear the broad overgeneralization that the Electoral College is a good thing if you live in a less-populous state and a bad thing if you live in a more-populous state. I’m in Montana and I think the Electoral College is an abomination.
A straight popular vote would ignore statehood entirely and make campaigning by state pointless. Candidates (and elected officials) would pander to the population centers and ignore rural areas.
A straight vote by states (every state has one vote) would ignore population density entirely and give people in tiny or sparsely-populated states a disproportionately high level of control.
The current system gives us the worst of both worlds. Some states have all-or-nothing ballots, some have proportional splits. Candidates can be completely eliminated by as few as two states. The vast majority of candidates drop out before most votes are even cast. The EC system basically locks out third parties, which we desperately need right now: when a third-party candidate can pull 19% of the popular vote without getting one single elector (Ross Perot 1992), it strongly encourages people to just give up and vote for one of the two major parties.
The electoral college is just plain flat-out broken.
You might think so, but California’s population alone is that of Wyoming, Vermont, North Dakota, Alaska, South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Maine, Idaho, Nebraska, West Virginia, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Kansas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Iowa, and Connecticut combined. Texas, New York, and Florida exhibit similar dominance.
Nobody bitched about that. They bitched because the GOP stole the electoral vote.
ETAm, if Obama wind the electoral vote, I expect to hear whining and crying like we’ve never seen before. I predict we’d hear talk of secession in some states. If they try, I hope that Obama takes the Sherman approach.
I encourage people who feel this way to go to your local library and do some reading. Suggested keywords: Virginia Plan, Constitutional Convention, Connecticut Compromise, James Madison, US Constitution. There are very good reasons that the United States is not a democracy.
Do you have the same concern over the fact that every state, regardless of size, gets two senators, every one of them with an exactly equal vote? I don’t, but I already tipped my hand. If I’m Iowa, it’s the only way I’ll play.
Well that’s balanced more or less with the House of Representatives. The Senate can’t pass legislation without pushing it through the house where I am pretty fairly represented.
We have the House because people from populous states DID take issue with their votes being unequal just as I’m doing. Are you in favor disbanding the House?
I say again. Why is someone from North Dakota’s vote president better then mine? I thought all men were created equal. Iowa can go screw it’s self if it thinks it’s better then me.
Maybe we should take a play from Congress and start having election do-overs till the popular vote and electoral vote match.
I haven’t heard one argument in favor of the Electoral College that makes any sense to me. However, there’s going to be ferocious opposition to getting rid of it, and it hasn’t made a difference that often. My view, if it stays, it stays, and anyone who seeks the Presidency needs to understand it (and Obama absolutely does).
All the evidence pointed toward Al Gore legitimately winning Florida. That, and the fact that the Supreme Court stopped the manual recount means that the popular vote isn’t even an issue. Personally, I’m not at all convinced that Gore would’ve been a vastly better president than Dubya, but fair is fair.
If Obama wins the election without a majority of the popular vote? Well, that would mean that he followed the right strategy. I’m actually interested to see just how this would play out. The Republicans would be absolutely apoplectic, Obama supporters would have a little soul searching to do, and Michael Moore is going to have a doozy working out his commentary (he’d do it…he always delivers…it’s just going to take some effort). Ultimately, Obama is going to have to prove that he deserves the job, as it has been for everyone who’s come before him. I want him to win this (he’s the first Democrat in my life I’ve ever been 100% behind), so I’m not particularly nitpicky about how he does it.
Seriously, what the heck do you want? To scream “Hypocrite!” at Democrats? That’s going to get old pretty fast, and your voice is just going to get lost in the angry mob anyway.
I hate to admit it, but I’ve got to agree with this. It would make the petty side of me ecstatic. That ecstacy would probably last just a couple of months, though, as we had to deal with years of bitching (I still hear bitching about 2000) that the black guy stole the vote. And my wallet
