I guess it depends on whether the frequency of recounting states makes up for the rarer, but possible need to recount the entire country.
Wolfman’s post is very insightful.
Here’s an oversimplification: in the beginning, the USA was like the EU is today. At the time of the Civil War, common usage changed - people said “The United States are doing X” before the war, and after they said “The United States is doing X”. Then, in Roosevelt’s response to the Depression, the practical impact of the Federal Government rose, so that people inside the USA think more in terms of what the government is doing and less in terms of what the country is doing.
I think the Electoral College is an anachronism that was based on the first of these three phases. I guess it should be modernized, but I worry that the deeper issue is that there is too much centralization of power. A more distant look back might, for example, describe a fourth phase that appeared most distinctly with the Bush administration, where the Federal Government becomes an instrument of the President. This would be a bad thing.
Direct democracy is dumb and I’m glad we don’t live in one. The founding fathers designed our government to protect us from the will of the majority. Otherwise being gay would be illegal, being Mexican would probably be illegal, Christianity would be the state religion, the list of crimes that carried the death penalty would be about 10 times as long . . . you get the picture.
Well, it may seem unlikely to you, especially since the congressional votes seem to split more along party lines than anything else these days. But it’s easy to imagine scenarios where the more populous states could “terrorize” the less-populous ones.
For example, let’s say that there was a proposed bill that would significantly benefit urban and suburban areas and be bad for rural areas. As you can see here, the most populous states also tend to have major cities and big suburban areas. Even though many of them, like New York and California, have huge rural areas, the bulk of the population is in the cities and 'burbs. So the big state/urban interests could easily overwhelm the small state/rural interests if representation was apportioned solely according to population.
I think several of the smaller states have also signed laws to do the same… but the laws don’t go into effect until states comprising a majority of the electoral college (that is: 270+ EVs worth of states) also pass such laws. Unfortunately, that seems pretty unlikely.
The further a state is from the center, the greater that state’s residents’ interest in moving to a proportional system – the candidates would both be forced to campaign there, and both parties would have to pay attention to major issues in the state. Unfortunately, the national parties like the current setup just fine; you can imagine the two big parties would be willing to break some knees and slit some throats to keep California and Texas from splitting their votes. If one (but not the other) split their votes it would represent a windfall of electoral votes for the party whose bedrock state didn’t move.
Not true. “Representative” is fairly common and it’s becoming more common.
To the OP: The founders did not want a perfectly representative system. The Congress and the presidency were set up intentionally to give more power to rural people, to landowners, and to the social and economic elite. Over time, we have successfully eroded some of these anti-democratic tendencies, but many still remain.
Moving thread from IMHO to Great Debates.
One thing that non-Americans often get confused about is that the states are not administrative districts organized by the national government, the way provinces are often set up in other countries. Instead, the states are sovereign entities with powers and rights that cannot be revoked by the central government. Each state has a right to be equally represented in the Senate and that right cannot be taken away (it’s explicitly exempted from amendment).
Comparison to the EU is apt. They are facing the same issues the United States did when forming: how to distribute representatives among small and large states. Their current method is ad hoc and is subject to fierce debate whenever it is opened. The issue of fair representation of the people must be balanced against the fair representation of the states. The US found a compromise that’s worked for us.
Maybe at some point in the future, Americans will reorganize our nation into a unitary state. But that day is a long way off.
There is no reason at all to suppose that the interests of Wyoming are aligned, or are opposed, with the interests of California because of the relative populations of those states. In fact I see no way at all to correlate the size of the population and the interests of geographical regions. I suppose one could argue that the only thing that matters is people, not places, but I doubt that argument would go very far.
Not exactly. The bills you’re referring to would give all of a state’s electoral vote to whomever wins the national popular vote. If enough states to comprise 270 electoral votes all got on board with it, the net effect would be the same as if we didn’t have the electoral college at all. From what I understand, the biggest obstacle to this plan is that all of the involved states have to use the exact same law for it to work, and every state introduces its own subtle changes to the wording.
I am a historian, and I fully understand the Connecticut Compromise. The process by which it was chosen does not justify it, however. The framers of the constitution were greatly limited, both by what they didn’t know and by the politics of the times. In the development of constitutions around the world, however, equal representation has a sterling record of success and does not lead to tyranny of the majority, while unequal representation has a poor record of protecting from tyrannies of the minority.
The Connecticut Compromise was supported out of necessity because the rural, agricultural southern states wanted to preserve slavery and refused ratification unless it was included. Slavery is a real result of unequal representation: The truly oppressed minorities only get treated worse, while the politically well-connected elite minorities gain in power. Slaveholders became dominant in the Senate while virtually impotent in the House of Representatives, and today special interests are far stronger in the Senate for the same reason.
I just don’t get this idea. It most definitely did not do its job. Slaveholding states clung to their power in the senate and fought tooth and nail against inclusion of new states. They supported protectionist tariffs that were strongly opposed in the north, and the two blocks of the senate - free and slaveholding states - became the basis for a cultural rift that resulted in the bloodiest war in American history - the Civil War. That’s not a success.
Obviously, it is far too reductionist to say that the reason for the Civil War was the structure of the Senate, and I don’t want to give that impression. But it was certainly a factor.
I don’t understand. How is that a result of equal representation in the legislature?
This argument assumes that there is something about rural groups that entitles them to special protection and less protection for urban populations. I don’t get why that is true. Right now, the rural areas constantly pass legislation that benefits them at the expense of urban areas. The massive amount of pork in the Highway Bill is the most striking example, and agricultural subsidies come to mind as well.
Is there really something about living in a rural area that means you should have additional rights? I’d add that the framers thought this was just as ridiculous:
The result of the structure of the senate is that the minorities which don’t need protection, lobby groups and special interests, gain disproportionate leverage, while minorities genuinely in need of protection lose ground because they lack the resources to compete with more well-connected minorities. You don’t see this in nations with equal representation to nearly the extent of the American political system. I’d hope we can agree that special interests are generally a problem for democracy.
*Much of my post is taken from my copy of Robert Dahl’s excellent book on this topic, How Democratic is the American Constitution? which I’d highly recommend to anyone interested.
And this happens all the time within states. I think the upstate areas of New York are often upset at the power of the more populous New York City - since I lived there, I just heard echoes. For a specific case, when money per school district was allocated in California, LA did very. Since the allocation, there has been population and demographic shifts, so some districts, like the one I live in, have gotten screwed, but there is no way to change it because of the dominance of LA in the state legislature.
A lot of state legislatures were set up on the model of Congress, and for similar reasons. And how could the Supreme Court hold the makeup of the Senate unconstitutional when it was specifically specified in the Constitution?
Many people are unaware that orignally Senators were chosen not by the voters directly but by state legislatures. Democracy in the 1780s was considered new and scary, so they hedged their bets.
What state are you from? If you really want that, just let it be known that your state will very quickly become irrelevant. 30% of something (on the low end) is better than 100% of nothing, and since that is a virtually automatic result even in the most biased of states you will cause your state to be completely ignored by the candidates.
Say you’re in Colorado, with 9 electoral votes. In a winner-take-all system both candidates hit the streets in Colorado for those electoral votes. In a proportional system they split approximately 5-4, and with a gain of a single electoral vote no candidate is going to go to the trouble and expense canvassing the state for votes.
You might think that’s a good thing, but a lot of people do not.
Other way around in New York, and federally. The return on tax dollars decreases almost directly with degree of urbanization. The more people you have, the less money you get back out of tax dollars. Upstate New York gets around $1.35 for every dollar it gives in taxes, while New York City gets closer to $0.65.
The Obama campaign sure seems to be going to a lot of trouble to canvas Omaha, Nebraska, certainly more than they would spend on Nebraska were it not for the state’s vote-splitting.
I’m happy for my state to be irrelevant. What I want is for my individual vote to be relevant, regardless of how my fellow in-staters vote.
What benefit is it to me that a candidate “hit the streets” or “canvasses” in my state?
Furthermore, if we were to reform the presidential election system by amendment to the Constitution, the only logical reform would be a pure popular vote. We can just ignore the damn states and base the election on the actual individual votes of the people.
But the compromise did give equal representation: of the people in the lower house and of the states in the upper house. Remember, the Constitution is an agreement among the states as much as among the people.
And it was an issue of large vs small states, not one of slave vs free. The votes for the compromise:
Connecticut, for, free, 5 representatives in the lower house,
New Jersey, for, free, 4,
Delaware, for, slave, 1,
Maryland, for, slave, 6,
North Carolina, for, slave, 5,
Pennsylvania, against, free, 8,
Virginia, against, slave, 10,
South Carolina, against, slave, 5,
Georgia, against, slave, 3,
Massachusetts, split, free, 8,
New York, not present, free, 6,
Rhode Island, not present, free, 1,
New Hampshire, not present, free, 3.
That’s not much of pattern for slave (3-3) vs free (2-1). But looks at the mean representation, 4.2-6.5, for to against.
In the next century, the slave states certainly used equal representation in the Senate to protect their slave holding, but that does not change how the compromise was originally forged.
Another problem is that there has never been a test of “faithless elector” laws.
No, so far as I know, that hasn’t been a problem in the four states that have adopted this to date. The bigger problem is that the EC confers a slight advantage upon Republicans, who are thus unwilling to support its effective abolition.