# The Danger of a Electoral college subcompact **URL:** \ **Category:** Politics & Elections\ **Created:** [June 10, 2019, 3:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-danger-of-a-electoral-college-subcompact/835303 "2019-06-10T15:32:01Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2019, 6:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-danger-of-a-electoral-college-subcompact/835303/21 "2019-06-11T18:16:18Z")
> [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > … > 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. 😕 Your post was TL;DR but what I gleaned from a quick skim was a defense of republicanism, as if the Electors were Wise Men that chose the Prez. That might be what the Founders intended, but _ **that is not the way the Electoral College works today.** _ Thus — sorry about that — your entire post is off-topic. > [@Chronos](#): > > 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. OP is trying to dress up the ploy into a subterfuge that might sound legit to the gullible. I’m not sure his specific proposal succeeds, but other versions might. Certainly the GOP is introducing a variety of obstacles to democracy, worded to make the gullible not realize the brazen partisanship. ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2019, 6:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-danger-of-a-electoral-college-subcompact/835303/22 "2019-06-11T18:28:09Z")
> [@Ravenman](#): > > Holy cow, where do you get this shit? I do believe that I have included a fair number of quotes in my first post, so that might give a bit of a clue. But if you want some quotes by Washington or others as well, they are easy to supply. But, for the sake argument, let’s say that I’m wrong about the history. Am I wrong about what would work better? ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2019, 6:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-danger-of-a-electoral-college-subcompact/835303/23 "2019-06-11T18:31:41Z")
> [@septimus](#): > > That might be what the Founders intended, but _ **that is not the way the Electoral College works today.** _ Thus — sorry about that — your entire post is off-topic. I was asked to say more about the difference between democracies and republics, based on a read-through of an earlier post where I explained the concept of the Electoral College and how it has become broken and how to fix it. So, yes, you are correct but your issue was addressed earlier. ---
**Author:** ![Buck\_Godot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/buck_godot/32/6573_2.png) [@Buck\_Godot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Buck_Godot)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2019, 6:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-danger-of-a-electoral-college-subcompact/835303/24 "2019-06-11T18:59:11Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > 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. That is certainly true. My scenario was designed to at least maintain the veneer of one man one vote. But even in your scenario the main point stands. If we step away from the current notion in which elections within a state determine where the electors for that state go, we open ourselves up to less scrupulous ways of assigning of electors. So we may be better off keeping Pandora’s box tightly closed. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2019, 9:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-danger-of-a-electoral-college-subcompact/835303/25 "2019-06-11T21:18:50Z")
The Founders certainly expected the people to vote based on trust instead of on the issues. In real life, of course, that’s extremely unrealistic. The fact that the Founders were so naive as to make such an unrealistic assumption is a large part of why our system is as screwed up as it is. ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2019, 10:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-danger-of-a-electoral-college-subcompact/835303/26 "2019-06-11T22:22:35Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > The Founders certainly expected the people to vote based on trust instead of on the issues. In real life, of course, that’s extremely unrealistic. The fact that the Founders were so naive as to make such an unrealistic assumption is a large part of why our system is as screwed up as it is. They did miss some things, to be certain. But it is good to understand the options, the arguments, what was tried, why things were changed, and so on. We are under no obligation to follow the Founders - neither as they proposed nor as we have come to believe they proposed. But they did do a pretty decent job and genuinely did think through a lot of the questions, and explained some amount of their reasoning. It’s useful to understand that and, more importantly, it’s useful to make proposals that look at the full history - just like they tried to do. We now have more history to look at. While the moves towards democracy were (probably) often enacted as political power-grabs, the _timing and focus_ would often have been due to the perception of an actual problem that needed to be addressed. Democracy was probably not the answer to those problems, but simply rolling back would probably return us to suffering those problems. Personally, I think that it is achievable to fill the government with people who are if not all entirely trustworthy, at least that they would mostly be so. But, practically speaking, you would need to compromise with the parties to get such changes put into effect. My proposal for electing people to the Electoral College might be impossible to pass, as stated. But you could do something like picking some people randomly, tell them to pick one person among their own number and the state congress will pick one person among their own number, and those two will take turns vetoing people in the electoral candidate pool until they get the desired number. In this option, the dominant party in Congress would simply send someone to veto everyone in the opposite party in the candidate pool. That’s not ideal, but it still gives us, at least, an elector who is empowered to serve his mission. There is a quantitative difference between a partisan who is a corrupt idiot and a partisan who is qualified and trustworthy. In terms of turning things around, you have a better chance down the line if you can at least start getting the latter in there. Elections act like an evolutionary pressure. Based on the rules, they select for a particular type of candidate. But, at some point, a method might be discovered to circumvent the intent of the rules, like that you can offer people government jobs if you’re hired. And sometimes things will break because the world changed. Quite likely a large savior of government in previous times was the fact that there was no TV nor radio. Smarter people look better in print to your average person. On TV, tall people look better to your average person. Obviously, we had no way to predict the TV. But, so, in previous times, the smarter person had an innate advantage and that may have made the popular vote produce a result that’s not too terrible. Now that the world has changed, a different sort of person is selected for and it breaks the system. No actual rule change was made. It’s likely that we could come up with a system that seems impenetrable to everything and resolves all of the problems of the past sufficiently. 200 years from now, likely the people looking back would think that we were a bunch of dumb-asses who clearly were missing the obvious. That’s unavoidable. But I think it’s like what I have said about libertarianism and anarchism: The place we are at now is the end result of liberty and individual ability to negotiate and compromise. We were free and self-empowered. We discovered that there were limits to how well that works in practice, so we built systems to allow us to deal with our personal conflicts better. If we toss those all away, then we’re just starting from scratch and will have to re-learn all of the lessons that our ancestors learned that got us to this place. Or, in science, people will say that Newtonian physics was wrong and invalidated by Relativity. But that’s not true. Newtonian physics were simply an improvement on previous understanding and Relativity was an improvement on that. Newtonian physics might not be as accurate but, if we somehow forgot Relativity, we’d still rather have Newtonian to fall back on then go all the way back to zilch and have to start from scratch. To advance you need to accept that it’s an iterative process. Trashing the learnings of our ancestors isn’t wise. It’s not how you make things better. You don’t know more or better than them. You know things that they didn’t know, but they knew things that you don’t know. Failing to learn from them and assuming that they had no lesson to teach isn’t the right answer. Studiously obeying their every word isn’t the right answer. Understand their thoughts, track through where that got off track. Understand the thoughts of later generations and track where their ideas got off track. Between all of that, try to come up with something that might work. Personally, I think that the Founders were closer to a solution - largely because Madison was a scholar and put in the work to understand the subject. Later changes were developed as a response to crisis or as power-grabs by the states and by the parties. They weren’t as well thought out nor as well-intentioned. But the Founders did not 100% have a solution, nor would their solution have stayed permanently perfect, given the simple truth that things change. But we can iterate on what they did, and it is time for that. But it’s not time to throw it away. Or, at least, I haven’t seen anyone make any populist proposal that seemed like it would be a genuine step up. ---
**Author:** ![Ravenman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ravenman/32/2929_2.png) [@Ravenman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ravenman)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2019, 10:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-danger-of-a-electoral-college-subcompact/835303/27 "2019-06-11T22:50:40Z")
> [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > Am I wrong about what would work better? Having a system of what is essentially jury duty to choose electors to choose the President is a system that would institutionalize the marginalization of minorities and likely emphasize the racist and sexist power structures in America, which have only really been challenged in recent years by popular action. ---
**Author:** ![str8cashhomie](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/7cd45c/32.png) [@str8cashhomie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/str8cashhomie)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2019, 2:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-danger-of-a-electoral-college-subcompact/835303/28 "2019-06-12T02:45:37Z")
> [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > 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. I think there are a few problems with this analysis 1 - It ignores the fact that there are many modern democratic countries that have systems very similar to this description that work better than the US does now. 2 - (As has been discussed) electors are already instructed by the winning party to vote party line, and chosen for being party loyalists. Replacing our current system with a popular vote for president doesn’t prevent the EC from being an antipopulist safeguard, because it doesn’t actually act as one in the first place. 3 - The assumption seems to be that anything that either makes the US more democratic inevitably makes it worse because it’s a slippery slope to mob rule. I don’t think this holds - I could imagine an extreme where essentially everything is a ballot referendum that would be markedly worse than we have now, but if there is a democratic happy medium and we’re on the antidemocratic side of it (as opposed to the democratic side of it) we should more closer to the happy medium. I don’t think it’s even possible to imagine every possible government system on a scale from more democratic to less democratic, and it’s more valuable to just look at whether an individual change is overall better for creating a government that looks out for it’s people’s interests rather than trying to figure out if it moves you closer or farther to ideal amount of democracy. > [@](#): > > 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. In my personal view, the US policy of detaining child migrants who attempt to cross the border from Mexico is inhumane and against my core values. I don’t want to participate in a government that does this. If we instituted your electoral vision, and I totally bought in and simply used my political influence to elect an extremely wise president whose only campaign promise was to hire experts to run each department, and to compromise with congress - if all that happens and the resulting government continues to detain child migrants at the border, I’m throwing out my trust in this new republic and using whatever levers I have to prevent the policy of detaining children from continuing. That’s why we have the system we have today. The founders designed a system that institutionalized both their vision for a republic run by wise men, and also their core values. The majority of them supported slavery, and used things like the 3/5 compromise that allowed states with a high proportion of slaves to inflate their own power in the house and electoral college. Even when the early party systems started to take shape, only white male property owners (the only class that had the ability to own slaves in the first place) could vote. It took gradual democratization to the point that at least white men who didn’t own land could vote, and then it took popular will among that group to oppose slavery. Then it took popular will to oppose (sometimes by force) the plan for the entrenched political party (the Democratic-Republicans) to maintain stability by ensuring that enough new slave states were formed. It then took the Republican party to galvanize this populist, abolitionist movement. If people only voted for the wise leaders who would decide policy for them, they wouldn’t have supported a newly formed political party that made no attempt to disguise it’s contempt for slavery and it’s willingness to use democracy as a tool to politically isolate slaveowners until they lost their influence. Instead, voters would have continued to support experienced politicians from the more entrenched party that continued to allow the richest people in the country to maintain the institution of slavery for a profit. ---
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [August 22, 2019, 2:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-danger-of-a-electoral-college-subcompact/835303/29 "2019-08-22T14:07:10Z")
Previous thread on the NPVIC: [https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=846106](https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=846106) ---
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [August 22, 2019, 2:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-danger-of-a-electoral-college-subcompact/835303/30 "2019-08-22T14:32:30Z")
You bumped a thread that’s been dormant for two months just to link to _another_ dormant thread. Do I have that right? Just checking. ---
**Author:** ![Northern\_Piper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/northern_piper/32/5304_2.png) [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2019, 12:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-danger-of-a-electoral-college-subcompact/835303/31 "2019-08-23T00:51:46Z")
If the recent decision about faithless electors stands, the interstate compact is dead. It only works if the states can direct their electors to vote in a certain way. The 10th Circuit has ruled that electors are not subject to state direction. Once picked, they are exercising a power directly under the Constitution and the states can’t tell them how to vote, or disqualify their vote once cast. [https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/faithless-elector-a-court-ruling-just-changed-how-we-pick-our-president/ar-AAG8tdZ](https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/faithless-elector-a-court-ruling-just-changed-how-we-pick-our-president/ar-AAG8tdZ) ---
**Author:** ![Velocity](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/velocity/32/18006_2.png) [@Velocity](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Velocity)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2019, 1:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-danger-of-a-electoral-college-subcompact/835303/32 "2019-08-23T01:21:14Z")
So now it all comes down to which side - D’s or R’s - vets their electors better. It will most likely all still be diehard blues or reds who stand little chance of disappointing their supervisors. ---
**Author:** ![CarnalK](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnalk/32/486_2.png) [@CarnalK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CarnalK)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2019, 1:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-danger-of-a-electoral-college-subcompact/835303/33 "2019-08-23T01:53:17Z")
> [@Northern\_Piper](#): > > If the recent decision about faithless electors stands, the interstate compact is dead. It only works if the states can direct their electors to vote in a certain way. > ] It would be exactly the same situation as now. The state would be sending people who promise to vote in the expected way. They can assure that by appointing party loyalists of the party they’re supposed to vote for. ---
**Author:** ![Northern\_Piper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/northern_piper/32/5304_2.png) [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2019, 2:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-danger-of-a-electoral-college-subcompact/835303/34 "2019-08-23T02:22:31Z")
> [@CarnalK](#): > > It would be exactly the same situation as now. The state would be sending people who promise to vote in the expected way. They can assure that by appointing party loyalists of the party they’re supposed to vote for. No, prior to the ruling, several states have “faithless elector” statutes which allowed the state to disallow a vote by a faithless elector and compel a vote along pledged lines. That type of state compulsion to vote a certain way will be gone if the ruling stands. ---
**Author:** ![CarnalK](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnalk/32/486_2.png) [@CarnalK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CarnalK)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2019, 5:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-danger-of-a-electoral-college-subcompact/835303/35 "2019-08-23T05:17:46Z")
> [@Northern\_Piper](#): > > No, prior to the ruling, several states have “faithless elector” statutes which allowed the state to disallow a vote by a faithless elector and compel a vote along pledged lines. That type of state compulsion to vote a certain way will be gone if the ruling stands. Has a faithless elector ever had his vote invalidated(before this court case)? Not to my knowledge. So striking down any laws about this maintains the status quo. ---
**Author:** ![CarnalK](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnalk/32/486_2.png) [@CarnalK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CarnalK)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2019, 5:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-danger-of-a-electoral-college-subcompact/835303/36 "2019-08-23T05:29:46Z")
> [@RTFirefly](#): > > You bumped a thread that’s been dormant for two months just to link to _another_ dormant thread. > > Do I have that right? Just checking. She once bumped an AOC thread that was 2-3 weeks dormant to let everyone know some guy was selling buttons with AOC’s face on them. She makes bad bumps. ---
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2019, 9:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-danger-of-a-electoral-college-subcompact/835303/37 "2019-08-23T09:37:19Z")
> [@Northern\_Piper](#): > > No, prior to the ruling, several states have “faithless elector” statutes which allowed the state to disallow a vote by a faithless elector and compel a vote along pledged lines. That type of state compulsion to vote a certain way will be gone if the ruling stands. I don’t know how the NPVIC laws are written, but ISTM that they could be written (if they aren’t already) to work essentially the same as now, only it would be the national rather than the state popular vote that would determine which party’s slate of electors got chosen. Such a NPVIC majority would be no more or less vulnerable to faithless electors than a traditional electoral majority. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2019, 9:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-danger-of-a-electoral-college-subcompact/835303/38 "2019-08-23T21:14:27Z")
I’m reasonably certain that **Elendil’s Heir** is a he, not a she. ---
**Author:** ![AlsoNamedBort](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alsonamedbort/32/3213_2.png) [@AlsoNamedBort](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AlsoNamedBort)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2019, 9:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-danger-of-a-electoral-college-subcompact/835303/39 "2019-08-23T21:26:46Z")
> [@Northern\_Piper](#): > > No, prior to the ruling, several states have “faithless elector” statutes which allowed the state to disallow a vote by a faithless elector and compel a vote along pledged lines. That type of state compulsion to vote a certain way will be gone if the ruling stands. The election is to select electors, not to tell the electors what to do. So currently, if Florida goes Republican, they would choose the 29 electors selected by the Republican party. Florida’s not saying to them “go vote for the Republican candidate.” They already wanted to do that before the election. But if Florida signed on to the NPVIC, and the Democrat won the national vote, Florida is then choosing the 29 electors selected by the Democratic party. Again, these are 29 people who already wanted to vote for the Democratic candidate. ---
**Author:** ![ElvisL1ves](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/5daacb/32.png) [@ElvisL1ves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElvisL1ves)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2019, 10:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-danger-of-a-electoral-college-subcompact/835303/40 "2019-08-23T22:53:14Z")
> [@RTFirefly](#): > > I don’t know how the NPVIC laws are written [Here](http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/sites/default/files/eve-4th-ed-ch6-web-v1.pdf). PDF. > [@](#): > > they could be written (if they aren’t already) to work essentially the same as now, only it would be the national rather than the state popular vote that would determine which party’s slate of electors got chosen. That’s the gist of it, though. > [@](#): > > Such a NPVIC majority would be no more or less vulnerable to faithless electors than a traditional electoral majority. Yep. Faithlessness is the specific problem (antidemocracy being the general one), and laws preventing faithlessness from having an effect are the solution. This ruling is not consistent with any part of our legal system or history, however. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-danger-of-a-electoral-college-subcompact/835303.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-danger-of-a-electoral-college-subcompact/835303.md?page=3)