NO one should be able to vote in the election of our President if they don’t live in a state that is a member of the United States. That’s always been the case, even when we had lots of people living in non-state territory here on the mainland.
The question that needs to be asked in each and every case of an overseas territory of the United States is this:
Why are we continuing to keep territories that won’t ever become states? (Short version: why are we still in possession of an empire?)
If the people living in our overseas territories are happy to be part of the United States, despite not having the vote (or even citizenship in some cases!), then all is fine. If they are NOT happy with that, then we should be working to find a status that they would be happy with.
But voting for President is something that you do not because you’re a citizen of the United States, but rather because you’re the citizen of a state that has decided to give its citizens the right to determine who the electors are for that state. As others have noted here, if you’re wanting to change that basic relationship, you have to scrap the Electoral College and replace it with something else.
There should be no second-class Americans. People in DC, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, etc. should all have full representation in Congress and a vote for President.
I am an American living in the Cayman Islands and I get to vote for president. My voting precinct is determined by my last place of residence in the United States. Since my last US residence was in a deep red state my vote has comparatively little value. Maybe I should have established residency in North Carolina or Virginia before moving overseas!?
But if I had moved to Puerto Rico instead of Cayman I would have lost the ability to vote for an elector for president even though I would be living on American soil. It’s a f—ed up system IMHO.
The USVI does not have enough population to warrant it’s own district. Same for Guam and American Samoa. And even though the Pacific territories have some different interests than their Caribbean cousins the only practical way is to lump them all together.
Then what do we do about the CNMI? They are their own country, sort of. But yet they are a territory. If they want a presidential vote then I think they would need a significant change in their political structure first.
All territories can vote in primaries, but not in the election.
The reason being is the states elect the President, and USA territories are not states. This to me is fair.
If territories could vote, what would their electorial vote count be?
Only Puerto Rico would matter as they have a population of 3.6 million. This is about even with the state of Connecticut, who has 7 electoral votes. One major reason Puerto Rico is not a state is they are in massive debt.
But what would you do with the other rerrirotires with less population?
Guam is a USA territory with a population of about 100,000. Maybe they would get one electoral vote. That’s it.
On what do you base this assertion? Because you do understand that never in the entire 200+ year history of the country has this been true. Indeed, even today no one is guaranteed the right to vote on who should be President. I live in a state that as late as 1860 selected its electors without holding a general election in the fall. Tomorrow, your state might decide the same for 2020.
Are you, then, proposing that the Constitution should be re-written? I presume, then, you are one of those who believes in abolishing the Electoral College?
Is there strong evidence that the people of DC, American Samoa, Puerto Rico, Guam, Midway Island, USVI, and the Mariana Islands all have very similar political interests to each other? Unless the answer is yes, they should be separate districts.
The historical purpose of the electoral college to to make sure that geographically diverse places had a say in the presidency to suit their own needs. Nobody in their right mind would ever put Vermont and Wyoming in the same electoral district.
I agree 100% that all of these places should be included in the process. There should not be second class American citizens.
There’s nothing in the Constitution that says the Supreme Court is limited to nine justices. But Franklin Roosevelt found out tradition and public opinion opposed any attempts to change that. I think anyone who attempted to have a state legislature select presidential electors would face far greater opposition. It’s been a well-establish practice for over 150 years that electors are chosen by a general vote.
The territorial government doesn’t want it. IIRC they would rather have their own immigration restrictions, etc., that apply even to US citizens. If we’re all US citizens together, than any US citizen will have to be free to move to American Samoa, get a job in American Samoa, buy land in American Samoa, and so on.
I think I was wrong about their immigration system applying even to US citizens, but they do have their own immigration system, and they block people with less than 50% Samoan ancestry from owning certain lands (this does include US citizens).
I did answer your question (although you directed your question to Ravenman not me).
You are correct that there’s no explicit right to vote in the Constitution. There’s also no explicit prohibition against voting in the Constitution. For such a fundamental issue, the Constitution is surprisingly silent.
Absent any Constitutional direction, we have to look elsewhere. And pretty much every else we look we’ll find support for the idea that government legitimacy derives from voting. American politics has a consistent pattern of extending the vote. The counter-example you offered was abolished over 150 years ago. That abolition is more relevant than the fact that it had existed. The fact that we used to do something is less important than the fact that we stopped doing it.
Saying that we should have limited suffrage in 2017 because we had it two hundred years ago is like arguing we should allow dueling in 2017 because we allowed it two hundred years ago. And saying we should have dueling because the Constitution doesn’t prohibit us from having dueling is just silly.
I didn’t offer any counter-example. I simply pointed out that we do not have a system, nor have we ever had a system, that guarantees individuals the right to vote for who should be President. The assertion by Ravenman is that we SHOULD have such a guarantee, as I read it. My point is that, to do that we must upset the entire fundamental system under which we have chosen the President for over 200 years. If one is in favor of doing that, I assume that one is essentially in favor of blowing up the whole thing, eliminating the concept of states selecting the President, and turning that into some sort of popularity contest, involving all citizens of the US regardless of where they are resident. IF we are going to do that, there should be a clear argument as to why that should be done.
