The small states already have oversized influence on American politics, due to the composition of the U.S. Senate. More than half the people in the U.S. live in the 9 largest states, and they get 18 Senators. The minority that live in the other 41 states get 82 Senators.
Low population areas have influence in the EC only if they’re states. How much influence do sparsely populated areas of California, New York, or Texas have?
The reason why low population areas shouldn’t have much say in selecting a President is that not very many people live there.
Fewer people shouldn’t trump more people by some weird notion of what kind of geography should count more. A million people in a city should carry neither more nor less political weight than the million people in Montana.
Chronos and BigT have pointed out flaws in Natapoff’s work. Will you address them?
As a leftwinger I can tell you that I am decidedly not happy to be overwhelmed by the electoral power of the more moderate and conservative Americans. Should I have extra electoral power to make up for the fact that there are so many people who think my ideas are crackpot? Of course not. Does that mean that politicians for statewide office here in Pennsylvania don’t try to reach out to me to gain my vote? Of course not. They appeal to me, just as they appeal to people in Philly and people in the rural T of the state. Because we all have a vote that can help them win office.
I hardly think I’m ignorant. I’m familiar with The Federalist. I’ve read over a hundred books on colonial and revolutionary America including a couple dozen specifically on the creation of the Constitution. Allow me to recommend one: Gordon Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic. It provides a fine overview of the intellectual background of the day. Jemmy Madison was a bright guy but he was a man of his time. The premoderns believed that there was one single true public interest. In this simplistic view whenever people banded together to support private or regional issues this was not a legitimate political exercise but a dangerous faction. This is why political parties were held in such scorn and also why it was commonly believed that only small homogeneous republics could survive for any length of time without devolving into tyranny. In the famous Federalist #10 Madison is arguing against this latter idea by claiming that in an enlarged republic the greater public interest will overcome local factions. This is a historically significant document in that it provided an ideological reason to support the Constitution in the face of the common wisdom of the day but because it is so anachronistic it’s not useful as political science today. What Madison (and everyone else back then) failed to understand is that local factions could and would combine into national political parties. Ironically Madison was a major founder of one of the first political parties.
But in any case all of this misses the point. Certainly people do bring up the tyranny of the majority but never in an appropriate way. Yes a majority can be tyrannical just as any individual or group can be tyrannical but someone must have the power to elect representatives. Trading a potential tyranny of the majority for a potential tyranny of this minority or that minority is no improvement.
Certainly if there were a direct election presidential candidates would attempt to appeal to people in Louisiana. They would be foolish not to. How can you not understand that politicians need votes and they will seek them wherever they can find votes that will help them win? The problem with the EC is that because of the enduring political realities caused by the 2 party system the only votes that matter are in a handful of states. Go and look at the map Lord Feldon posted. Candidates have no interest in appealing to the majority of Americans. How can you possibly believe this is a good thing?
So what? This is not 1787. You don’t need to travel around to appeal to people. The important thing is not where a candidate is physically but where he or she is politically. I live in electoral central. The television stations here in Pittsburgh reach not just western Penna but also into eastern Ohio and northern West Virginia. We get bombarded with television ads and robocalls. Candidates come through all of the time. I’ve never seen one. None has ever come to my town. So what? Should I care that they have never come up to me to shake my hand? No. I care about what’s important: what they will do in Washington DC if they are elected.
You say you are getting old and forgetful. Do you remember just after midnite when you said that California, Illinois, and New York were being ignored?
It could happen in a popular vote, but it’s vastly less likely. This was in fact mathematically proven by the very folks you’re citing. That’s the central tenet of their argument: They claim that the Electoral College is superior precisely because it makes situations like that so much more likely. And if you start from the premise that such situations are a good thing, then their conclusion is correct, but you really need to seriously question that premise.
How do you get that it’s “decidedly rural”? The state is nearly three quarters metropolitan (73.5%, by my calculation, not even counting the Springfield metropolitan area). Sure, there are a lot of acres of farmland, but acres don’t vote, people do.
The problem I have with this argument is that while opportunities to tip a few states (and their EVs) with such shenanigans are pretty common, people would have to take fraud to a much higher level to win a national popular vote that way.
Our closest election in modern times (maybe ever; haven’t checked) with respect to popular vote was Kennedy’s 113,000-vote victory over Nixon. It would take a lot of doing to have 113,000 dead people vote. But in that election, five states were decided by less than 3,300 votes, and another five by less than 10,000. Create 24,000 votes in the right places, and Nixon wins in 1960 - and indeed, Nixon’s partisans fought quite a battle to reverse the outcome in some of those states, giving up only in early January of 1961.
And of course, we all know about 2000. Regardless of what we think of it, it certainly accentuates the fact that it would be easier to screw with the outcome of a close election by screwing with one close state, than by finding enough votes to reverse the popular vote outcome.
Our current system is much more vulnerable to corruption than a direct popular vote would be. It’s not even close.
The sparsely populated areas of California bolster the power of the more liberal parts of California and I like that.
It is true that there are more electors per voter in Wyoming then in California, but Wyoming is 3 votes, California is 55.
The voters in Orange county and the Central valley would not be blue.
My state Washington is only a blue state by a little amount, we have 12 votes and if it was not winner take all that one half of the state would contribute as many votes and Alaska and Wyoming do.
It is popular to say Wyoming and Alaska have too much power, but they only have 6 votes out of 538 so no one really pays them much attention and they don’t have nearly the power you think they do.
I personally think that the states have a right to be represented and that the idea that a pure Democratic is more “fair” is completely unfounded. Those 6 votes, that represent 20% of the entire countries landmass only matter in the rarest of rare elections.
Sorry but the math in this is bad. Sure this method gives an increase in power to individual votes, but it does so at a loss of accuracy. If you really wanted to maximize the voting power of the individual you would have a lottery among all the people who voted and the winner picks the president. There would be a small but real chance chance of ending up with President Palin, but at least your vote had the most chance to swing the election.
But even if we decide that our goal is to have every vote have a high probability of swinging the election, and avoiding having a minority constituency ignored, the electoral system as it stands now is just about the worst you could do. As it stands now, your vote only counts if you are in a swing state. If you live in Utah, or Massachusetts, there is no chance that your vote will change the election, in these two states one candidate or the other is pretty much guaranteed to getting the 50% they need, and in the off chance that they don’t it represents a landslide election for the other candidate. As a result there is no point on either side in courting anyone in those states.
But under a straight vote system, bringing out the base in a safe state, or forming a significant line of opposition in a lost state can still assist your goals, so every vote has to be treated as equally important.
I would like to see states divide up the votes proportionally so if you get 5% of the vote you get 5% of the EV for that state. Some adjustments would have to be made but I think its a good start, especially for the most populous states.
The current state-by-state winner-take-all system of awarding electoral votes maximizes the incentive and opportunity for fraud. A very few people can change the national outcome by changing a small number of votes in one closely divided battleground state. With the current system all of a state’s electoral votes are awarded to the candidate who receives a bare plurality of the votes in each state. The sheer magnitude of the national popular vote number, compared to individual state vote totals, is much more robust against manipulation.
National Popular Vote would limit the benefits to be gained by fraud. One fraudulent vote would only win one vote in the return. In the current electoral system, one fraudulent vote could mean 55 electoral votes, or just enough electoral votes to win the presidency without having the most popular votes in the country.
Hendrik Hertzberg wrote: "To steal the closest popular-vote election in American history, you’d have to steal more than a hundred thousand votes . . .To steal the closest electoral-vote election in American history, you’d have to steal around 500 votes, all in one state. . . .
For a national popular vote election to be as easy to switch as 2000, it would have to be two hundred times closer than the 1960 election–and, in popular-vote terms, forty times closer than 2000 itself.
Which, I ask you, is an easier mark for vote-stealers, the status quo or N.P.V.[National Popular Vote]? Which offers thieves a better shot at success for a smaller effort?"
Any state that enacts the proportional approach on its own would reduce its own influence. This was the most telling argument that caused Colorado voters to agree with Republican Governor Owens and to reject this proposal in November 2004 by a two-to-one margin.
If the proportional approach were implemented by a state, on its own, it would have to allocate its electoral votes in whole numbers. If a current battleground state were to change its winner-take-all statute to a proportional method for awarding electoral votes, presidential candidates would pay less attention to that state because only one electoral vote would probably be at stake in the state.
The proportional method also could result in third party candidates winning electoral votes that would deny either major party candidate the necessary majority vote of electors and throw the process into Congress to decide.
If the whole-number proportional approach had been in use throughout the country in the nation’s closest recent presidential election (2000), it would not have awarded the most electoral votes to the candidate receiving the most popular votes nationwide. Instead, the result would have been a tie of 269–269 in the electoral vote, even though Al Gore led by 537,179 popular votes across the nation. The presidential election would have been thrown into Congress to decide and resulted in the election of the second-place candidate in terms of the national popular vote.
A system in which electoral votes are divided proportionally by state would not accurately reflect the nationwide popular vote and would not make every vote equal.
It would penalize states, such as Montana, that have only one U.S. Representative even though it has almost three times more population than other small states with one congressman. It would penalize fast-growing states that do not receive any increase in their number of electoral votes until after the next federal census. It would penalize states with high voter turnout (e.g., Utah, Oregon).
Moreover, the fractional proportional allocation approach does not assure election of the winner of the nationwide popular vote. In 2000, for example, it would have resulted in the election of the second-place candidate.
A national popular vote is the way to make every person’s vote equal and matter to their candidate because it guarantees that the candidate who gets the most votes in all 50 states and DC becomes President.
How does proportional vs winner-take-all disenfranchise the state government
And didnt they disenfranchise themselves by leaving it up to the voters?
I think each states should decide for themselves how to divide up the vote but for the larger states, a proportional representation would work. How can we have an equitable system when someone can walk off with over 20 EV by getting 48% vs 46% of the vote? A smaller state that wants to monoplize the EV could have a transferable voting system.
Interestingly, the 2000 election would have gone to the House had every state done that. Ralph Nader would have gotten around 3 electoral votes (from California and I think New York; the threshold for getting a vote would be pretty low in the biggest states).
I know that!
My point was that a proportional system may work for some states but not other. The context of my statement was that each states should decide for itself what would give the fairest division of EVs assuming a winner take all is unfair. For example, a state with 3 EV may decide that if no third party gets more than 10% of the vote, 2 votes go to the winner and 1 to 2nd place.
Several have expressed this sentiment. I’m not trying to argue with you, specifically, yours is just the post I quoted.
The problem I have is: Congressional representatives and state legislatures are the ones who care about this. The President is not there to pander to Californians. What power does the president specifically have to offer any state? How does the President “ignore” a state? Talk to your governor about the issues that affect your state. Talk to your state and federal congressmen. What exactly is the President going to do?
This isn’t a rhetorical question, by the way. I’ve never thought about the President doing things for states. If you’re being ignored, I really want to understand how. (Question open to anyone, obviously.)
Presidential candidates concentrate their attention on only a handful of closely divided “battleground” states and their voters. There is no incentive for them to bother to care about the majority of states where they are hopelessly behind or safely ahead to win. 9 of the original 13 states are considered “fly-over” now. In the 2012 election, pundits and campaign operatives agree already, that, at most, only 12 states and their voters will matter. They will decide the election. None of the 10 most rural states will matter, as usual. About 76% of the country will be ignored --including 19 of the 22 lowest population and medium-small states, and 17 medium and big states like CA, GA, NY, and TX. This will be more obscene than the 2008 campaign, when candidates concentrated over 2/3rds of their campaign events and ad money in just 6 states, and 98% in just 15 states (CO, FL, IN, IA, MI, MN, MO, NV, NH, NM, NC, OH, PA, VA, and WI). Over half (57%) of the events were in just 4 states (OH, FL, PA, and VA). In 2004, candidates concentrated over 2/3rds of their money and campaign visits in 5 states; over 80% in 9 states; and over 99% of their money in 16 states.
More than 2/3rds of the states and people have been merely spectators to presidential elections. They have no influence. That’s more than 85 million voters ignored. When and where voters are ignored, then so are the issues they care about most.
For example, Rhode Island gets absolutely no attention from Presidential nominees because of its reliable allegiance to the Democratic Party. In fact, believe it or not, the last Presidential nominee to visit the state was Richard M. Nixon in 1960. The only reason Nixon visited the states was because of his campaign promise to visit all 50 states.
Policies important to the citizens of ‘flyover’ states are not as highly prioritized as policies important to ‘battleground’ states when it comes to governing.
Disproportionate attention and priority is given to the needs of the Cuban-American community in South Florida and the grain farmer in Indiana, while Long Island fisherman, the Texas rancher, and the chicken farmer in Delaware are constituencies ignored by Presidential nominees.
Florida seems to get faster reaction and attention after hurricanes and oil spills than Louisiana.
Ethanol subsidies and corn growers receive great attention due to the role of Iowa in both primary and general presidential elections, but wheat growers in Nebraska get ignored.
Freemarketer, George W. Bush supported steel tariffs during his presidency as a way to appeal to Pennsylvania voters.
The number and population of battleground states is shrinking as the U.S. population grows.
As of March 10th, some pundits think there will be only Six States That Will Likely Decide The 2012 Election
The REAL reason for having the electoral college and winner-take-all system is because it makes election night so much FUN to watch. It’s neat to see them call states individually, and tally up the votes.
If it were proportional or disctrict-based, it might still be kind of fun, if not a lot more chaotic. We’d have to wait longer to get the real results, probably.
What would CNN do with their big magic board and their fancy software that John King uses to talk about which states candidates need to win, how many EC votes they have, etc if we went to direct proportional representation.
We only get presidential elections once every 4 years, so they need to be as entertaining as possible.
If you guys want to get into weird arguments about what would be fair/unfair for candidates visiting a state, just petition your state’s legislature to pass a law that says something like, “the electoral votes of this state shall go to the candidate who wins the most popular votes and has visited the state 10 times or more. In the case where no candidate has visited the state 10 times or more, the electoral college voters of this state are required to vote for Mickey Mouse.” or something like that.
The issue that jumps to mind are President Bush and steel tariffs. He imposed some in 2002 despite the fact that they were obviously going to run afoul of our trade agreements. Sure enough he was forced to withdraw them under pressure from the WTO but during those 20 months the price of steel was driven up. This was done for political reasons. It was good for the economy here in Pennsylvania and West Virginia but bad for manufacturers of steel products. Unfortunately for those manufacturers they weren’t clumped in swing states so their interests were ignored. The most adversely effected state was Michigan but it just wasn’t the electoral prize that PA and WV were.
Quote:
Originally Posted by cobruell
Interesting article recently posted about this topic…
What did you find interesting about the article?
[quote=“2sense, post:50, topic:436486”]
What did you find interesting about the article?
I thought it nicely layed out what the Constitutional issue will be. It was very clear in going over the history of the Compact Clause, which is where most of the action will be if there’s every litigation over this.