The one HUGE flaw in your proposal is letting the incumbent stay in office when he didn’t get a third of the vote either. That effectively turns non-votes into votes for the incumbent. This idea is actually much worse than the present system.
The “pick two alternatives and rank them” is actually used in some elections (legislative, maybe, I’m not sure) in some countries. It hasn’t been adopted for popular votes in this country largely because the pool of voters is so huge, it would be incredibly difficult to count it up, except maybe on a county level (or in, say, Delaware).
spoofe, good point. Since it wasn’t meant to pass onto electing any other official, just the president, I suppose the only way out of that is to have a seperate registration for voting for the president.
seawalk, yes, if 100% of Americans registered and 2/3 + (margin of error) stayed at home then yep, no candidate is selected. Remember, only the people who registered are counted as votes.
Really, the pres of the US is only considered by some to be “the leader of the free world.” I can’t believe that trying to make sure more people get ogether to vote for this person is a bad thing.
fg, letting an incumbent stay in office is a flaw? You mean we should just play “shuffle the president” when the public can’t decide on which of the candidates would be better than the existing president? Perhaps I’m not understanding you. Knowing that GWB will stay in office if people don’t get together will cause two things: more voters (if GWB is an ass all 4 years) and politicians trying harder to match the people’s desires.
Why Keep the electoral College
I forget who asked me this, but I didn’t want to slight it. IMO the electoral college compensates majoritarianism. For example, if California housed 1/3 of the population, and two or three other states tacked on another 1/3, then suddenly we’ve got about 10% of the states determining who is going to be president of all of them. Yuck! Keep the House as having members proportionate (somewhat) with population, everyone gets an equal say in senators, and there is some compensation in determining the pres. Really, I think its a novel set-up, with the slight problem that not voting because you find all the presidential candidates to be assholes doesn’t accomplish anything. Its either vote for some guy you hate less, or let the chips fall as they may. Hence, this thread.
Say… what happens if you’re not apathetic, you think the incumbent is a total jackass and should be dragged out into the street and shot, but you don’t like either of your other choices any better? (In practice, I’d suggest you emigrate if you hate American politics so much, but…)
I think maybe what fg is concerned with is that voting for neither of the other candidates is tacitly an endorsement of the incumbent rather than an expression of disgust with the other choices. In that case, under your scheme, I suppose a person would just not register to vote for president.
Thanks!
Let me play devil’s advocate here (I don’t think we should get rid of the EC either). Without the EC, we run the risk of only a few states determining who the president is [a risk that I should think would be obviated by dividing the electors from each state according to the division of the popular vote in that state, which is why I asked the question in the first place]. On the other hand, what matters is the people, not the states, so if 55% of the people want someone to be president but he loses the electoral vote, hasn’t the will of the people been thwarted?
Furthermore, since a state gets a number of electors equal to its total number of Congressmen, doesn’t that mean that effectively the vote from someone in Rhode Island is more meaningful than the vote from someone in California? (I.e. the ratio of electoral votes :: popular votes is bigger in small states.) Wouldn’t this be exacerbated by splitting the electoral votes according to popular vote by state? After all, if CA gives you 20 or 30 times more electoral votes than RI does and it’s a winner take all, you’ll care more about the CA vote simply because the rewards are so much larger, whereas if it’s not a winner take all, you might be advised to go after the votes in small states more agressively, thus giving even more disproportionate importance to them.
That’s probably not clear, so I’ll give an example. Say you win 55% of CA’s electoral votes, and we’re at some point where it conveniently has 100 of them, so you get 55. You also win 55% or RI’s electoral votes. Suppose it has 3. Logically, you’d get 2 of the 3, or 67%. Getting that extra 1 little vote from a lot of small states could add up to a large vote that wasn’t really due to you. In other words, it’s fairly easy to divide electoral votes in a way representative of the popular vote if you have a lot of them, but if you don’t have a lot of them, it’s hard to do so and the roundoff error could come into play.
Given all that, why would we simultaneously keep an EC and allocate the electoral votes from each state according to the ratios in the popular vote?
(My unthought-out compromise: winner takes all votes corresponding to the state senators, the rest of the votes are divided according to the division in the popular vote.)
Well, the key word there is “better.” If you don’t like anyone better then there’s not much to do. I admit that such is a bad case, and I live with it every four years. Such is life in politics, I suppose.
Don’t have to hate the politics, just the politicians!
Well, as it stands there is no way to express that either. At least, here, active support is required to get a new president in. We have to want it, and that pres has to be a good boy to win all those votes.
I admit that the changeover to my plan exhibits a fatal flaw, but once in place we can be more assured that the president in office pleases more people (until we get to your point below).
But it isn’t just “the people” that matter. Its the people in certain locations.
The fundamental issue here is that there are 50 states with specific interests, needs, and desires. Since population will not be distributed equally throughout these states, the population of California will be dictating what happens to states that don’t share its interests. So, some sort of trade-off is necessary. We want to represent the interests of people in different geographical and social locations without slighting population density itself. I honestly can’t think of a better system than one we have now which would accomplish this.
No. Percentages don’t care about population. And just because California is a bigger state with more people doesn’t mean it is actually more important than any other state. IRL it is a bit more important than say, Rhode Island, to both the economic health and prosperity of the country, and of course we do make sure that California does have more votes. It just can’t have them all because its interests aren’t necessarily the interests of the entire Union.
Well, that’s a matter of perspective. Most states aren’t “landslide” states in the election results I’ve looked at. Its only the winner-takes-all systm which exacerbates this. It is still possible, of course, to nip away some electoral votes over popular votes, but it will be more difficult under this system to do so.
To both allow popular vote to matter and to not slight states based strictly on population.
Can you detail what sort of actions you are thinking of? Offhand I could only think of declaring a national emergency. Do you feel that is likely to occur, and if so, what stops a president from doing that now?
First, the electoral college is stupid. That’s my opinion and I can back it up if you want me to, but that’s not what this thread is ultimately about so I won’t right now.
Second, when you register, you don’t unregister for the next election. You stay registered. Unless you’re planning on changing that in your hypothetical, this is a big flaw in your plan. Those that refuse to vote, or do not want to vote, or are too lazy to vote, etc. are now automatically voting for the incumbent because they registered 10 years ago.
Third, like foolsguinea said and I repeated above, refusing to vote means voting for the incumbent. This gives a HUGE advantage to the incumbent. It’s already an uphill battle for the challenger.
Fourth, from a purely mathematical perspective, the incumbent wants as many opponents as possible. Think about it. The more opponents, the less likely anyone gets 1/3 of the vote and the more likely the guy stays in office another year. The only way to combat this is to eliminate every party but two.
Fifth, since the only way to re-elect a two term president to a third term is to not show up for voting (because his name isn’t on the ballot), how can you tell who’s not voting to support the president and who’s not voting because of apathy? How do you solve the problem when you don’t know what the problem is?
It appears you guys are trying to reinvent the wheel. Voting systems have been examined with mathematical rigor, and by some of the most brilliant minds of the ages. I particularly recommend the “Condorcet Method.”
Reinventing the wheel, and then you offer me a reinvented wheel. Thanks, chas. It is a small-- if interesting-- read. I’d have to read more into the reasoning behind it, but on the surface its all right. You’ll not the incorporation of choice-voting to a small degree above.
Ender, thanks for your analysis of the electoral college. It was breathtaking. I really am interested to hear your opinions, so I’ve taken the liberty of opening a new thread where you can explain why it is , as you say, stupid. Here ya go.
Yep. That’s the point. Why remove the existing president if we can’t find a better one?
Your party analysis would interest me more if there were significant third party candidates. In the end, though, I find partisan politics to be sorta dumb anyway, because when one candidate makes a good point that everyone likes the other candidate just "me too"s it and nothing was really accomplished. I’d get rid of parties, too, if I felt that it were possible.
The comment about staying registered is important. One would definitely have to reregister for the presidential vote.
There are plenty of third party candidates. There were 9 presidential candidates on my ballot when I voted in November. Short of Reform, the other 6 probably got .000001% of the vote combined.
But that’s the point. Under your system, the presiding president would encourage alternate candidates. Not openly, of course. But the more people he can throw on that ballot and the more coverage he can give to the lesser candidates, the tougher it is to get 33% of the vote for one person. And when that happens, he stays in office.
I think campaigning for the other person might be an easier way to stay in office than campaigning for yourself. Besides, it would certainly be more fun.
Well, the keyord there was “significant.” Technically, since there are write-ins, there are as many parties as there are people willing to vote for themselves.
The idea here is that politicians themselves will have to become more in tune with the rest of the nation in order to get elected. Yes, it is an uphill battle. Aand rightly so… the guy is only gonna be president, after all. Perhaps I consider the job more important than it is.
It would be interesting to see the president lobbying for third parties, but I don’t find it likely. I mean, if Clinton were to rally for the greens all it would do is make more people eager to oust Clinton, wouldn’t you say?
Oh, no candidate would openly support another. But there’s enough backdoor dealing in D.C. to make it happen. And believe me, under your system it will happen.
Because when a two term president realizes that the only way he’s going to stay in office is to ensure the other candidates don’t get 1/3 of the vote, he will start sabotaging them any way he can. This is a very good way. All in the name of democracy too!
Well, one would presume that the people who aren’t voting out of apathy are the ones who failed to register to vote in this presidential election, right? And this could be easily solved anyway by something simple like adding a “none of the above” to the ballot. If there’s no vote at all, one assumes apathy; if the vote is for none of the above, then it’s what erl would have called a “no” vote.
And as an aside, why is it necessarily wrong to have a three term president? It certainly wasn’t a problem 60 years ago (or at least, not to the people who voted for FDR). But if you people are really worried about that, why couldn’t erl’s suggestions be modified to include a hard limit on the number of years a president could serve in addition to the limit of 2 terms in which he could appear on the ballot and campaign for election? And not that this would dissuade a really determined incumbent, but tampering with the election would naturally be a crime.
Note also that an inclusion in some way of a choice mechanism reduces the advantage to the incumbent somewhat.
Well, so long as our government is representative there will be corruption. In fact, i think even in a completely non-representative democracy there’d still be corruption. 'Tis the way things are with humans when some people have more power han others. I can’t elimnate that with avoting scheme, and I certainly wouldn’t try to.
Well, I’m not sure I can see how a president and his cabinet can sabotage another candidate. If that were the case, you see, once we had a partisan federal government-- by your reasoning-- it would always be in power through such underhanded tactics. As history has demonstrated the opposite, I see no real concern here.
Precisely. This is the beauty of it: not liking the candidates actually means something!
The point of this system in general, now that I’ve thought about it more, is to keep electing better presidents. If we can’t find a better president, why replace him? Answer: we shouldn’t. Yes, the odds are slightly in favor of the current president in any election. We don’t want to pull a good president out without due cause; like, oh, a better one comes along.
Of cours the problem remains that one may not even like the existing president just as much as one doesn’t like the candidates. I am unaware of how to address this situation in any voting scheme. But this system addresses all other cases of preference: it sets up the vote to be an opinion poll on whether the candidates are better or worse than the existing president. If they are worse then no one should replace the existing one, even if he is a bit of a schmuck (this is truly not much different from the lesser-of-two-evils that we have now). If they are better then the support should show that (after all, they only need to have a relative majority, which is already required here, and not piss off greater than 66.7% of the rest of us).
Should elections every two years prove to be a bit much, I suppose we could just leave it as is: elections every four years period. I’m not very keen on that idea, though, because it becomes much closer to the benevolent dictator.
As a compromise I might suggest that the restrictions on winning may become looser over time so that it is harder for the existing president to stay that way; but, as it stands, I don’t see that as necessary.
