The purpose of the electoral college is to protect the interest of slave states. 230 years later, it’s still working like a champ.
I’m familiar with that. Not sure what your point is, though. (Sincerely, not snarkily. Well, sincerely, anyway.)
If even one state did it, then campaigning in that state would focus on the electors, not the public, and the electoral votes for that state would be very unlikely to go to someone like Trump. It wouldn’t have made a difference in this election, but we all know there are close elections where every electoral vote counts. And it could easily turn a formally safe state into a wildcard. Who knows what a slate of electors appointed by nonpartisan commission would do.
It’s NOT the ostensible reason now, and in fact many states have laws prohibiting or discouraging it from happening. And the individual states, not the Founding Fathers or the Constitution get to decide who the electors from that state represent and how they are chosen. Again, a state could have them chosen by the governor, by the legislature, by a commission, or by lottery. They’ve ll chosen to have them selected by a popular vote between party slates, but they don’t have to.
It’s not by happenstance that all states went the same way. The tragedy of the commons occurs when you have competition between multiple entities and shortcuts are the easiest way to get ahead. Like, sure we could continue to ramp up robotics, so that we can manufacture widgets at double the rate and half the cost. But that will cost billions in investments and a decade of R&D. OR, we could just move our manufacturing to China and accomplish the same improvement of scale and cost, using manual labor, for a few 10s of millions over the course of three years. Any business which doesn’t go with the China option will lose out, because they’ll lose the price war in 3 years and not be competitive until 7 years later, all while having a much larger debt to pay off.
The states don’t want the best candidate for the country. They want the candidate who offers them the most goodies. A state which abdicates that bargaining power will lose the competition with the other states for Federal money and preferential legislation. And so, they take advantage of their latitude and choose an option which negatively impacts the long-term health of the country.
Only if it was a swing state for that election.
But it would probably be really bad for just one state to behave this way, when the others didn’t, as they would be more likely to vote for a McMullin or a Johnson - someone who seems better than the big candidates. And then, if the state is large enough, it could cause a failure for any candidate to win the majority and everything goes to the House, which will upset everyone across the country.
Entirely true, but only relevant if it’s practical. No single state is going to accept the loss when everyone else is still getting the benefit of tactical voting.
Sage Rat, I’m not saying it’s a good idea. But if someone wants the electoral college to act as anything other than a rubber stamp for the state popular vote, that is how you would do it. It’s not a constitutional issue, and it doesn’t matter what the founders intended. The founders left it up to the states, and the states made it what it is.
The President doesn’t have much influence on pork barrel spending. Do you have a cite that the move to a popular vote for the president was a race for federal money? Why wouldn’t they stick with legislative votes for electors, which would give the states far more bargaining power (for what little it’s worth). My understanding is that it was part of a large cultural shift towards popularism and small-d democracy in this country.
Nonsense. If California went to the system I facetiously proposed, you can bet your ass the Republican machine would get to work pumping money into California state legislative seats and lobbying the legislature, the bipartisan legislative committee for choosing the nonpartisan commission, the members of the nonpartisan commission for choosing the electors, and (as soon as they were chosen) the electors themselves. And they could do so for far less money than it takes to turn a swing state.
You think you’re smart enough to see this, but the electors chosen by the commission wouldn’t? By the time the electors met, they’d be deciding between Clinton and Trump and throwing their vote away.
No cite, but it happened before Federal money became a thing, so it would have been more for national influence in general, at the time. Nowadays, it would be for Federal money as well.
The electors wouldn’t be elected until November so it would just be one month that the parties would have to try and influence them, and it would be fairly easy to have the rule be that the electors set the schedule and decide the format, so that it’s more like a congressional hearing than a small audience to be advertised to.
I’d hope that they’d have a sense of professionalism sufficient to send it to the House if they were issued with two true duds. In the case of this election, Hillary might have passed muster, but I wouldn’t put it past a mini-EC deciding to support the most qualified candidate, on the basis that the House should - like them - try to hire the most qualified person, rather than the candidates that the parties desired.
But ultimately, I’m not really seeing what we’re arguing over? Yes, a state could decide to leave the path of evil. Unless you want to argue that this is less of a pipe dream than an amendment, I’m not seeing why your point needs to be argued against mine? I feel like you should be presenting it as an addendum, as an alternate pathway, rather than a competing variant since you haven’t really seemed to give any reason not to go for either or both.
I think it’s more likely that an amendment can be passed, since we can point to the words of the founders advocating this style of election, and even show an amendment that they started to prepare for consideration. And, no one state has to be the one to sacrifice itself, to start the move. The impact would happen to all, equally.
This is one of those constitutional traditions that is simply not violated. Sure, the electors have the power to do so, but they are not supposed to exercise that power anymore than the Queen of England is supposed to refuse to give consent to a bill passed by Parliament, or the United States Supreme Court should strike down a particular law because it disagrees with the law.
You’re right that it’s not a matter of error, but I think that has more to do with giving states lots of flexibility in how votes are allocated. We’re very used to popular vote (by state) dictating how electors vote, but the electoral college would permit a state to let you vote for President by party rather than by candidate. Appoint enough Republican electors and they’ll pick a Republican candidate; you’ll find out who later. There’s also no reason the electoral college couldn’t work more like a modern political party’s nominating convention - you have to vote for the voters’ candidate in the first round, but then work out deals if further rounds of voting are required. No state has adopted that option, but it wouldn’t be an option if the Constituted used a simple numerical tally of some sort.
In any event, I don’t think it was ever the intent to let delegates second-guess or safeguard the people’s vote as you describe.
Please explain exactly how a state that appointed its electors by either a vote of the legislature or of an independent would lose federal money. Also explain how a state in the 1800s that moved from a legislative to a popular vote would gain influence. I seriously don’t get it.
Ok. And?
Ok…
Are you under the impression that I’ve actually proposed something? I’m beginning to think you’ve missed the point of everything I’ve posted. Or I’ve missed the point of yours.
My proposal is idiotic. Or at least it should be since I typed it out without giving a single thought to the merit or feasibility of the plan. It was merely intended to gently mock the OP and respond to the idea that the EC is “supposed” to be a bulwark against people like Trump. My points were that it ISN’T supposed to be that, regardless of how the founders envisioned it; that the founders deliberately avoided giving it ANY particular purpose or mandate but left that up to the individual states; and that what it became (a slightly unreliable system of counting up the weighted outcomes of the popular votes in each state) is neither the fault of the founders nor the accidents of history, but of a deliberate political choice in each state (and subject to revision at any time) to make it exactly that.
I think the EC is archaic, undemocratic, open to accident or exploitation, and should be done away with, but not “the path of evil.” I generally think that having it respond to the will of the electorate is a very good thing, though I suppose a case could be made for the sort of technocratic, nonpartisan system I facetiously proposed. But I certainly wasn’t trying to make it, and I’m not about to.
My initial post was in response to the OP, not your post that preceded it. You’ve criticized it (so I perceived) on points not exactly germane to my purpose, but I will say that I believed and continue to believe that a state (and especially the members of its legislature) would have something to gain in terms of power and very little to lose if it were to give back to itself or its organs the power of assigning its votes in the EC–except for fidelity to the principles of democracy and the goodwill of its people, who I’m sure would resist giving up their vote.
The underlying problem is that low-information voters would freak out, and that “low-information voter” in this context means “never read and understood the Federalist Papers”.
On the Virginia ballot it said “Electors for Hilary Clinton and Tim Kaine”.
If there were significant information revealed about Trump between Nov 8 and Dec 19, the electors as a group would have a better case for not voting as expected. They can vote any way they want. There are state laws in some cases that bind them but those have never been tested in court. Nothing short of him admitting that he really did rape a teenager will change the expected electoral college vote.
Even in this case, I expect that the majority of electors will say “The people told us how to vote. If they want this guy out, they can tell Congress to impeach him.”
I agree. I think we made a serious mistake when we elected Trump. But I’m not ready to abandon democracy because of it.
Except that the settled law is that the Electors can, in fact, vote for whoever they want. This is the constitutional system we ratified back in 1787.
If we want a different system, there’s a pretty simple way to change that. A constitutional amendment for direct popular election of the President and Vice President.
As of today, Republicans are very much in favor of the Electoral College, because twice in the last 16 years they’ve gotten an Republican president elected despite losing the popular vote. Faithless electors screwing over the Republicans has some implications for next time…it means the Republicans would decide that we’ve got to do away with the Electoral College. It doesn’t just screw the Democrats, sometimes it screws the Republicans too.
If you want to argue that the Electoral College is a good system because it preserves or magnifies the importance of small states, or whatever, then fine.
But if part of your argument is that the Electoral College can use their wisdom to prevent the obviously unsuitable darling of the masses, well, if you’re not going to use that power in the case of Donald Trump it’s time to put that argument away for all time.
Shodan, the electoral college IS removing the right of the American electorate to pick who we want. The American electorate voted for Clinton. It’s the electoral college’s foolishness that’s going to invalidate that choice.
You may think that’s a good thing, but don’t lose sight of who the American people chose.
The American people chose to select a President under a certain system. If we want to change that system so that the President is elected by a simple majority, we could. If we wanted to implement a system where the election was like quidditch, and whoever wins the majority gets 150 electoral votes automatically, we could do that too.
We could even have a system where the electoral college overrules what the people decide no matter how that decision was made, but we don’t.
The rules of the EC were set up, everyone agreed to operate under those rules, and everyone agreed to abide by the outcome as it arose under those rules. The OP is talking about overruling that outcome because Trump is a bozo. He is a bozo. But he won under the rules agreed to. Saying after the fact that Clinton got a majority misses the point - we did not, and Clinton did not, and Trump did not, agree that whoever got a majority would win. We agreed that whoever got a majority in the EC would win.
We can certainly change the rules now, and perhaps we should. But not retroactively.
Regards,
Shodan
If I understand it correctly, electors in the EC would not be violating the Constitution or any federal law or statute if they change their vote. I think this would violate the spirit of our election process, but I don’t believe it would violate the letter of the law (although certain states punish faithless electors).
It would cause a whole heap of trouble, and possibly violence, and would probably lead to the elimination of the EC.
Well, Trump didn’t. He was going to “keep us guessing.” Until he won - then he was totally cool with the outcome.
And Clinton supporters were totally cool with the EC until they saw the outcome. And Gore supporters were fine with the butterfly ballots in Florida in October 2000. So it goes.
Regards,
Shodan
I don’t think you can say this with any degree of confidence at all. Clinton won the popular vote under the current system. But you cannot simply say that if we had changed the system to a pure popular vote for this election, the popular vote counts would have remained largely the same and therefore Clinton would have won. If you change the system, you change the campaigning strategies of the candidates. You alter people’s decisions as to whether to vote third-party or not. You change voters’ tendencies regarding whether or not to bother voting at all. And so on.