I’m in favor of the abolition of the electoral college, and had in the past supported the idea of National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, although I am doubtful that it will ever achieve 270 votes. My mind has done a 180 turn however when I realized what the precedent of such a compact could produce.
The theory behind the compact is that states can decide for themselves how they want to assign their electors and so if we can get 270 votes worth to agree to the noble idea of assigning their vote to the winner of the popular vote we bring true Democracy to the country.
But what if a certain party latched onto this idea with less than noble intentions. A party that viewed Democracy as a liability and say the sole purpose of election law to maintain their position in power. Suppose also that due to gerrymandering this party had gained the legislatures of several key battle ground states such as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida and Virginia. What is to stop them from creating a subcompact that would pool all of their electoral votes to whomever won the election in a set that includes themselves as well as every Red blooded American state that supported their party? New York and California need not apply.
While the path to 270 votes in a National compact is near non-existent, the path to 270 or at the very least a bright red fire-wall is not so inconceivable.
Can anyone explain how the constitutionality of the National state compact could be defended without leaving the country open to a undemocratic power grab?
Had a bit of trouble parsing this, but you mean if the Republican Party formed a subpact where all the red states, plus a few battleground states, all pledge their EVs to the ® candidate, regardless of the outcome of the national popular vote?
Basically yes, although, with the fig leaf that it is based on the combined popular vote of these red states so that it isn’t explicitly stating that no Democrat can win.
OK then, my non-Constitutional-scholar WAG is that this would go to the Supreme Court, who would strike it down saying that “the Constitution specifies a majority of electoral votes of all states nationwide, not just a select few.” Of course, such a ruling would also strike down the National Popular Vote pact and all other such pacts as well.
It seems that this Red State plan will need to have some blue-majority states come under the control of a minority legislature, or maybe I should say more than there are now, for this to be effective. Or at least as effective as the NPVIC. Or maybe I just don’t understand.
There are a good number of purple states that have Republicans in control of the state legislature. The infamous WI-MI-PA trio, of course, and Virginia too. Right now they all have Dem governors, but that would be all that stands in their way.
Unless you’re aware of any good outcomes of populism or power-grabs (of any kind) through history, I’d suggest that none of this makes sense.
“Ahah! The current President pulled the wool over the eyes of a bunch of rubes (80% of that half of the population) and beat out the more qualified, reasonable, and competent people who competed against him that only appealed to the minority, non-rubes in the world! Clearly, this demonstrates the solution to improving the situation in our country is to increase the power of common man!”
If that’s still where you are in your thought process, then all-red pacts or whatever else, are pretty well missing the forest for the trees. Your half also has that 80%.
Here is a description, from the Federalist papers, of the purpose of the Electoral College (with added emphasis by me):
The purpose of the Electoral College is:
Take time and effort to become informed and thoroughly investigate the presidential candidates.
Ensure that no one affiliated with any political group is a member.
Ensure that no political group is able to influence the outcome.
Is that the case today? Is there anything about how the electors are elected that might allow them to be influenced by a political group? Is there any selection criteria that might cause them to be anything other than non-partisan? Are there any laws on the books that might discourage an elector from performing his own investigation and voting freely, based on the results of his research?
Is the answer really democracy? As I also pointed out, in the above text, the aim is not democracy it’s “republican government” and while, yes, that’s unfortunate that those two words are tangled up with the names of the parties, there’s no actual connection. You can be a Democrat and be all happy joy joy for “republican government”.
So let’s also ask the Federalist why we don’t like democracy:
Basically, republics allow us to choose people who we trust to be wise and wholesome, to go and look at the big picture and make reasonable decisions.
Democracies just fall apart, due to partisan bickering and hatred.
But, as it notes, there is the risk of a republic - given that you’re choosing a small number of people - having that small number be targeted by partisan groups and be taken over by it, using illicit means.
However, the basic setup of the Federal government itself tells us a lot about some of the mechanisms that they viewed as being able to counter the ability for factions to take things over:
Basically, the solutions that Madison saw were:
Ensure that everyone is acting independently. No or very limited communication between one another. No or very limited dependencies on one another.
Break things into sub-units with explicit jobs that make them naturally hostile to one another, independent of whether they’re held by the same faction or not - so that they still end up having to compromise and work forward on the basis of reality.
Overall, to be sure, we could get rid of the Electoral College, in favor of direct democracy, or we could continue to game the Electoral College so that it’s an ever-slimmer cutout for direct democracy.
But democracy sucks and is stupid and it’s never worked in all of history and all the things we’re complaining about today are exactly the sort of thing that we would expect to see because of continued advancement towards democracy. So if you don’t like things the way they are today, stop going that fucking direction. If you’ve stuck your hand in a pot of water and every time you turn the knob next to the fire clockwise, your hand hurts more than it did before, stop turning the stupid thing clockwise.
Just put the Electoral College back the way it was or was supposed to be (I say “supposed to” since the parties, via the state governments, almost immediately started screwing with it, to try and avoid its purpose).
Make it a deliberative body.
Ensure that they have no connection to any partisan organization.
Give them the power to investigate and choose, freely, independently, and secretly.
And, if you want to kick it up a notch:
Give them explicit jobs that will put their focus of the matter into competing visions, so that they’re naturally disinclined to cooperate, even with others that they might otherwise usually agree with.
And then just sit back and be happy. You’ll get a better friggin government. Stop fucking with the stupid thing for your partisan games. I promise you anything that you’re better with non-partisan, intelligently hired leaders than corrupt, partisan leaders who agree with you. So just do that. Create a system that you can trust and just trust the fucking system and leave it alone. It’s that easy.
How is this any different from what happened in 2016?
Republican states say: “Look, we all know that our votes are going to the Republican candidate, so let’s be sure our electoral votes go to the Republican candidate!”
That doesn’t change much.
If Florida or someone currently Republican is in danger of becoming a Democratic state, this is going to be a major draw for Democrats to become active.
The popular-vote mandate makes a clear moral argument, that even people who advocate for maintaining the electoral college can understand. Your proposal has no clear moral mandate; instead, it seeks to exacerbate the problems the EC presents.
I think I need to hear the details for this easy plan of hiring electors for the EC. I’d like to sit back and not worry about my knowledgeable representatives.
From what I understand of the OP, it is a major change/difference indeed. He’s positing a hypothetical scenario whereby the Republican candidate is essentially guaranteed Electoral College victory no matter what the Democrats do. That is miles different than 2016, in which all Hillary had to do was win another 100k votes in MI+WI+PA and she would have been president. In the OP posited scenario, no amount of states that the Democrats win can ever be enough.
Here’s one, but I could come up with dozens of choices. It’s not super hard.
Randomly select a body of people from the population about 2X or 3X the size of the total number of people you want to have serve as electors.
Give them a conference room.
Tell them to choose, from among their number, who they want to have be part of the Electoral College.
Tell them that this is what they should probably be looking for, though it’s up to them:
a) Not an elected official or politician
b) Will do the work of actually digging through the issues, learning about them, and talking to people.
c) Will similarly do the work of actually looking through information about the candidates.
d) You trust to make a reasonable and well-considered decision.
e) You can’t vote for yourself.
For conservatives, the moral mandate comes down to, “we want to win, and anything’s fair.” If they can get behind gerrymandering and voter suppression, then why not this?
Why is it even relevant that this be a compact? You could get the same effect by those Republican-controlled swing states just saying “We’ll have the legislature choose our electors, and since the legislature is Republican, of course they’re choosing Republican electors”. Each such state could independently decide to do that, without regard to whether anyone else is.
<looks at the current status of congress, senate, supreme court and white house><looks again> Well we sure wouldn’t want *that *to happen. Thank god y’alls have big picture, reasonable, non-partisan wiseguys in charge
If you go that far, might as well go the full Venice :
1. The ballottino, a boy chosen at random, draws thirty names by plucking balls out of an urn, thus setting the process in motion with a blind draw.
2. Those thirty are reduced to nine by a blind draw.
3. Those nine put forward forty names, each of which needs at least seven of the nine possible votes.
4. Those forty are reduced to twelve by a blind draw.
5. Those twelve put forward twenty-five names.
6. Those twenty-five are reduced to nine by a blind draw.
7. Those nine choose forty-five new names, each of which needs at least seven of the nine possible votes.
8. Those forty-five are reduced to eleven by a blind draw.
9. Those eleven choose forty-one, who must not have been included in any of the reduced groups that named candidates in earlier steps.
10. Those forty-one then choose the Doge.
Why those oddly specific numbers ? Because vaffanculo, that’s why !
Could you clarify what you mean when you say “democracy” and the democracies that failed?
IMO, parliamentary systems with proportional representation (preferably mixed-member proportional) are democracies that work very well. I consider the US a democracy, but a less democratic and less efficiently run one than Germany for example. I’d also say that institutional safeguards end up being detrimental because the safeguards themselves become co-opted by either the political parties or the groups that enable them. In a parliamentary systems with many parties, only a party that can both satisfy its base and make reasonable compromises can even participate in government, which naturally encourages reasonable compromise and discourages parties that either over-represent what they can accomplish to their voters, or who are completely unwilling to find common ground with other parties.
As to the electoral college, if you take it as a given that we have one, the one we have now is almost certainly worse than a simple majority vote for president. It offers none of the safeguards against mob rule, and just means that the mob can come from less populous states or swing states more easily.
Historically, like when the Constitution was being written, a democracy would generally have been seen to mean specifically what is today known as a direct democracy. This would be where everyone in the country or town or whatever it is votes, all votes are equal, and that’s that. In modern day, the examples of direct democracy would be things like California’s proposition votes or the Brexit vote.
The Founders mention a few historical cases among their writings but, I think, also probably had a fair amount of personal experience since most of them had been members of town meetings (some of which would have been “open” town meetings) during the Revolutionary War and they are uniformly sour on it in every known reference.
Principally, they reference Athens:
Though a number of other city states of the time also practiced Athenian or Athens-inspired democracy and, if we take the writings of Madison at face value, discussions of those are included if you read through the classical works. (I have not so I admit that they could have been BSing, for all I know.)
But, the structures and mechanisms of government are not a simple matter of fixed points gathered into a small set. You’re not either a direct democracy or a republic or a monarchy or whatever else. You can be 50% of one and 50% of another, or 40%/60%, or 30%/70%…
Democracy is not just direct democracy. It’s a scale on which you get to decide, through the specifics of the ruleset that you have chosen, how much weight you want to give to the overall opinions and demands of the population in accordance with simple majority rule.
If electors are apportioned in number according to the population of a state and simply mandated by law to obey the popular vote within his area, it is not quite direct democracy that chooses the leader of the nation, but it is quite close. If the electors aren’t apportioned in accordance with the population of the state but are instead - for example - simply a constant number regardless of population count, so far as the question of how much we are a direct democracy goes, that’s still just the same percentage as the previous case. If it’s 98% direct democracy when you apportion according to population count, it’s still 98% when you apportion at a constant value because in either case the elector has no function. Their choice is purely set by statute and their humanity is unnecessary.
The central distinction between republicanism and democracy is the question of whether people can be relied on to govern when it’s not their profession and they have no particular qualifications, no access to specialists, and will suffer no loss so long as they are always in the majority.
The argument that they can would be that the individuals will abstain from voting if they don’t know enough about a topic, but will be able to be heard (through their vote) when they do know something and will be affected.
But that argument completely avoids the discussion of whether people will vote to protect the rights of others, for one, other than the simple faith in humanity to be benevolent and caring of minorities. It doesn’t address the Dunning-Kruger effect and how to get around that. Nor does it answer the question of how your protect against people voting on topics when they shouldn’t, because they’ve been convinced that they should.
A classical era republic, to be fair, would not have had a hiring mechanism to ensure that the members of the government were qualified for the job or cared in any really way about what the people needed or wanted, beyond in a simplistic sense of keeping them happy enough that they don’t revolt and pay taxes. But, even in concept, the idea was always that you need a professional to do the job of governance. They need time to do research, the ability to hear from experts, and the freedom to consider and vote based on the merits.
The Founders believed that there are ways to ensure that you can get the rewards of a professional government, protect the rights of the minority, and still be answerable to the people.
To a large extent, that mechanism is trust.
Do you trust that Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump truly cares about you and simply has an innate desire to understand the needs and fears of every citizen in our land and try to find solutions and compromises to make sure that you’re able to live happily and safely? Or are that doing it more out of an ego trip and telling people whatever they think they want, so that they can gain power?
What about Neil DeGrasse Tyson? Would you trust that if you pointed at him and said, “I trust you to care about me and everyone else in the country, truly and deeply. And I trust you to actually sit down, talk to people, and do the work to really understand the issues and the options available to us. And I trust that whatever decision you come to, was made in good faith and was a solid and reasonable choice that I would respect if I had the freedom to have done that same work.” That he would then go and live up to that?
The idea of the founders is that. Election is not intended to be a vote on the issues. When we elect our representatives, we are pointing out people who we trust to have our back and who we trust to have the diligence and wisdom to sit down and faithfully do the work. Nothing more and nothing less.
The concept that the people are to vote on policy is, in essence, voter fraud.
Voter fraud is anything where you are giving a person money to vote some way, threatening them with harm if they don’t vote the right way, etc. But it would also be, I would contend, voter fraud if you lied to people about what they’re supposed to be voting on. We’re not supposed to be voting on policy. We are strictly and simply meant to be voting based on trustworthiness. Is this a good person? Is this a fair and reasonable person?
We have had 200 years of voter fraud and part of that lie has been that we are and were meant to be a democracy and that any move which empowers the simple majority of the general populace to have their way is “good” and not just good but a fundamental pillar of our nation and an ultimate goal to strive for, like “all men are created equal” where we didn’t used to live up to it but gradually we are getting better.
And that is 100% factually and provably bullshit. That is the product of 200 years of corrupt influence of party heads taking advantage of the populist tendencies of humanity to try and get their policy enacted and to maintain power. It’s a con that plays on the lie that the only way to make sure that your voice is heard is through democratic systems, ensuring that your elector and representatives can’t act outside of your direct command.
And it may seem like that would make no sense. How would a person who is seeking to corruptly gain power come out ahead if he is actively trying to give the power to me, the voter?
But that comes down to the saying that in theory there’s no difference between practice and theory. But in practice, there is.
The average person is easily mislead. They aren’t professionals. They haven’t spoken to the experts. They often aren’t inclined to think in a high-minded way that is friendly to the minorities. If you tell them that these are the only options, then they’ll trust that you’re telling it to them straight. So far as ever are concerned, you’re the expert and they are simply backing the expert. Practically speaking, how are they to know better? It’s like expecting people to vote against a doctor on how to go about a surgery. They’re not going to do it.
Democracy, in theory, empowers the people and ensures that their needs and fears are being addressed - since it is the people themselves making that choice. But, in practice, the people are prey to the dishonest and they don’t abstain from voting on things that they shouldn’t vote on. If they tried, the dishonest would simply convince them that they need to.
A republic is better. We were never supposed to be a democracy and, while greater enfranchisement of the populace has been good, there is no advantage in changing the systems of government to be more democratic - hostage to the popular vote. A professional government is better, protects the needful better, ensures the rights of the oppressed better, and promotes reason and compromise.
The Founders didn’t set it up quite right. They missed a few steps and that has allowed the system to become perverted and taken over by factions. But the answer is to correct those mistakes not to continue advancing in the direction that the factions are leaving the trail of candy.
It is plausible that some and maybe even many of our representatives are honest in their march towards democratic systems. They may be well intentioned, in majority, when they recommend things like the simple popular vote. But that does follow on 200 years of lies and being told that this way is good and expected. But, just the fact that they propose it now, when they fall out of power, tells you however honest their intentions might be on a theoretic level, this is a pure attempt at a power grab. It is factional struggle that leads then to employ the promise of democracy and populism to achieve their political aims.
This is an attempt to use you and, high-minded intentions be as they may, good people can still lie to themselves and then spread that lie to you.
But it is short sighted. The solution is not democracy. It’s to sit down and do some research and put in the work to set up a good system that builds on what we have learned and can see through history.
As said, my suggestion was to undo what has been done since we have been losing the benefits of the systems as they were originally.
It was better. The move to democratic systems have reduced how high-minded and big picture our representatives are. And my recommendation should make it even better than it was before.
What is totally amazing about your lengthy diatribes on the nature of our government is how woefully out of touch it is with historical facts. The rise of party machines was not something that was the product of populism; populism was the response to the concentration of political power among the elites. See the 17th Amendment, for example.
