There might be a lot of good reasons why a straight popular vote is troublesome. However, in addressing such problems, one must never disturb the principle of “one man, one vote.” To me, that is an issue of fundamental right. Do what you want, but no matter what your reasoning is, it’s inexcusable to decide that people who live closer together (urban) should get proportionally fewer votes than people who live further apart (rural). It’s doubly inexcusable to deny some voters any votes at all based simply on their positioning relative to a randomly drawn line (state border).
There was a time when there were far more rural residents than urban residents. In those days, the rural people had more power, in proportion with their numbers. And that was appropriate. However, we now live in a world where there are more urban people. You know what? That’s democracy. You get some fundamental rights that the majority can’t screw with (as an aside, I believe that there should be more of these than we allow for today), but beyond that, if there are fewer of you, you get fewer votes and that’s that.
As I sit here and type more and more replys keep appearing. I guess I’ll just post what I have so far. Rest assured, I will keep plugging away.
Who were these Democratic chestpounders? I remember Hillary getting ridiculed for talking about a constitutional amendment in the aftermath of 2000 but that’s it. The only other elected official I know opposed to the EC is Republican Arlen Spector.
You mean like the divided presidential election of 1824 where the most popular of the four major candidates, Andrew Jackson, did get over 40% of the popular vote ( over 10% higher than his closest rival ) but only 38% of the electoral vote and was denied the presidency by the House of Representatives? I think we should consider actual events that have occured before speculating about hypothetical problems easily solved by a runoff election.
Not so. First off, the six biggest cities have nothing close to half of the total population. Perhaps if you include the entire metropolitan area that would change, I don’t know. But even if these six areas made up 75% of the electorate it wouldn’t make any sense for politicians to only campaign there because there is no guarantee of getting more than 67% of the vote there which is what you would need for the outcome elsewhere to be irrelevant. Democrats might get that much in the urban core but I’ve never seen it in the suburbs.
Look at how presidential hopefulls campaign now. They go to the battleground states because that’s where the votes that count are found. Under a popular vote ballots cast everywhere would count so why wouldn’t they go everywhere, or at least everywhere they had time to visit?
Actually, this turns out not to be the case. The Framers weren’t radical. The Constitution with its checks and balances was the epitome of conservative thought of the day. The radicals were those, like the country party here in Penna, who fought for unified governments. Why did the conservatives want to divide political power? In order to keep it out of the hands of the masses. The new antidemocratic constitution was created in order to strip the popular state governments of power.
Additionally, your argument is anachronistic. While direct election was mentioned in the federal convention it was never a serious possibility. Some, including Madison, did purport to support it but it was really just a stalking horse for their prefered method of electors. The choice was never between popular vote and electoral vote as the question is usually framed today. Instead the choice was between electors ( with a congressional default ) or direct selection by the Congress. The benefit of the former was that it allowed more distance between the legislature and the executive. If the legislature always chose the president and were responsible for his reelection it was feared he would just become their creature. A more accurate statement then would be that we have the system we have because the Framers favored seperation of powers but not term limits.
I have seen polls going back to 1950 and in every single one most of us favored abolition of the EC. The political will is lacking in our representatives but not in the American people.
The 2000 election was just like every other presidential election in that no one has an equal vote. Millions of votes over the years and never ever equality. Election 2000 is an anomoly only because its undemocratic nature was front and center for the whole world to see.
It’s a good thing then that we don’t need to amend the Constitution to move to a direct popular election. All we need do is convince enough states to assign their electors to the most popular candidate overall instead of just the most popular candidate within the state. If enough states do it ( and the eleven most populous states control a majority of the electors ) then no matter what the “small states” decide to do the popular vote winner will become president.
One of the arguments made above is that we need the electoral college because it protects rural voters. I’m expressing the opinion that the desire to protect rural voters should not trump the principle of one man, one vote.
In the current system, a majority of the people who vote are effectively disenfranchised because all the votes allocated to their states go to one candidate. I live in a state that will almost certainly go against my favored candidate. Therefore, I will get zero votes in the electoral college. That’s disenfranchisement.
But the votes are not proportional to their populations. (More importantly, the votes are not proportional to the actual votes cast.) Rhode Island has too many votes proportionately. It still violates the one man, one vote principle.
Compare the electoral votes per person in California and Wyoming. People in Wyoming have a proportionally larger impact than Californians on the electoral vote and thus the presidency.
In addition, the votes of people who live in solidly democratic or solidly republican states are not as important as the votes of people in swing states. People living in Florida have a strong incentive to vote, since their state could be decided by just a few votes this year. People in Mississippi, however, do not. Their state is virtually guaranteed to go republican.
To give numerical examples, if Wyoming gets 3 votes, then:
-Rhode Island should get 6 votes
-Ohio should get 68 votes
-Florida should get 102 votes
-California should get 212 votes
I refered to this, but this thread has grown fast. Just to compare those numbers to reality, Rhode Island gets 4 votes, Ohio gets 20, Florida gets 27, and California gets 55.
NI: There are lots and lots of EC threads. Just do a search and you’ll find all the arguments for and against. From my perspective, I really don’t want to hash this over again. It’s been done to death.
But this is already the case even if we entirely scrap the electoral college and elect the president strictly based on the popular vote, because EC votes are handed out based exactly on the number of representatives in Congress. So we ditch that, and Congress is lopsided. So then we say, “This whole Senate thing is ridiculous, why does RI get the same number of senators as CA?” So we scrap the senate. Then we look at the house and say, “If Florida has one thousand more people than Ohio, why do they get the same number of representatives?” Because of course representation must be a step function since we can’t have half people.
Sounds like you have a problem with representative governments, not the way they’re elected.
Within any state, each vote means exactly as much as every other vote.
That is certainly one way of looking at it. Of course, I’m not sure how the popular vote addresses that, since any obvious majority will also give the same disincentive to the minority.
Ugh, when will people realize this one simple fact: THERE ARE NO ANSWERS, ONLY TRADEOFFS. The electoral college and the apportionment of votes (as well as our Senate/House/Executive system) is about TRADEOFFS and BALANCING them.
Our Founding Fathers were very aware of the “tyranny of the majority” and took great pains to make sure that minority views were not overrun by simple majorities.
Even the fact that we have two bodies of Legislature is a tribute to their genius. One body has every state equal, the other allows for an allotment based on population. One has a more “deliberative” aspect, the other more “immediate” representation of the People.
Same with the Electoral College. Sure, some right now are belly aching “Oh, we should just be a simple majority”. Sounds great until you’re not the majority.
I haven’t read the whole thread, but after a quick search it seems that this has not been properly addressed.
I found this site that gives the populations of the largest 50 cities as of 2000. I added them all together and got 44.62 million people. The population of the United States as of 2000 was 281,421,906. Those 50 largest cities control under 16% of the population. Needless to say, a presidential candidate who campaigned in only the five or six largest cities would lose soundly.
I would just like to remind everybody to cast their vote in the way they think would benefit the country the most. In swing states, the choice is clear-- you vote for either Kerry or Bush depending on who you want to sit in the White House. In other states, where either B or K is well ahead, the situation is more murky.
Many people in the “already decided” states (for example Mass. or Texas) feel that their vote is “wasted” or “doesn’t make a difference”. So they then decide to vote for a third party as a protest vote (protesting what, I’m not sure) or to not even vote at all. I would urge everyone in an “already decided” state to make sure they still vote, and cast that vote for the candidate they would like to see in the White House (among the ones that could actually be elected).
This is important because I believe the whole Electoral College thing needs to be be debated nation-wide. One way that could happen is if we have two consecutive elections where the popular vote winner is different from the electoral vote winner. It happened in 2000 and I, for one, hope it happens again.
I live in an state that already will go for Kerry. But I’m not going to get lazy and decline to vote, or vote for Nader or something as a meaningless protest vote. I am going to vote for John Kerry to help add to his popular vote count. I hope you will vote for Mister Kerry too-- no matter what state you live in–and failing that, at least make sure you vote. Because no matter what the Electoral College situaton in your state is, don’t be fooled, the popular vote DOES matter–a lot–even though it doesn’t elect a president.
Another split result like 2000 would, one way or the other, rivet a lot of Americans’ attention to our voting system. That attention, from a heretofore ambivalent poplualce, is way overdue.
No, it is not. The EC is a method of choosing our president. This method does assign weights to states but this is not a requirement. Instead we could choose our president by allowing every citizen an equal vote. Or we might use a completely different method.
Unfortunately that’s not all, or even most, of the concern about the EC. In addition to other perversions of our electoral system the EC makes Americans unequal in three ways. That all of a state’s electoral power goes to the leading candidate leaving those who voted against this candidate unrepresented in the college is merely the first. Between states people are unequal because there are fewer people per elector in the “smaller” states. And outside of the states there is no vote at all. Americans living in the insular territories are governed by a man they have no power to elect. So there are plenty of other problems.
And the unit rule certainly is an artifact of the Electoral College. The term refers to not just the electors and the constitutional rules that surround them but also the federal and state laws and political practices that go along with it. But even if that weren’t true we should remember that while the constitutional provisions don’t prevent states from moving away from winner-take-all elections they do discourage them from doing so. The EC leaves the choice to the state legislatures and that is the best strategy for state officials to maximize their clout. It’s no coincidence that nearly all states do it the same way. And it’s no coincidence that opponents in Colorado have chosen referendum rather than trying to push a bill through the regular state legislature.
This assumes that the current 2 Party System remains intact which is a difficult pill to swallow given that the commonly accepted reason it’s still around is because of the plurality elections this proposes we do away with. Why should we assume that once you remove the winner-take-all penalty people won’t support smaller parties that better represent their beliefs? Even as things stand now the winning candidate often gets less than half the votes. If we had used a proportional system with the same popular votes in the last several elections the House would have decided the outcome in 1960, 1968, 1992, and 1996. The 2000 election might also fall into this category depending on how the fractions were rounded. Moving to a proportional system doesn’t make sense unless we find a better contingency than we have now for the probability of a lack of majority in the college.
So what? Why should someone in a safe state take comfort in the fact that someday, somehow, their state might become a swing state? It doesn’t make the current election any more palatable.
No it doesn’t always compartimentalize problems and Florida is the prime example. Had every ballot cast by every eligible voter been counted as intended Gore would have won. There were many factors biasing the vote in that state in 2000, some intentional, some not. The result was that Gore fell a few hundred votes short of the lead and the state went to Bush. Did the EC compartimentalize that error? No. As we know the error turned the entire election. Now had that same problem occured in a popular vote it wouldn’t have changed the outcome of the election because Gore still had a half a million vote lead nationwide.
So your argument here is that it might help or it might hurt?
Why? The federal government might just let the states run the election within national standards. You know, just like it works now.
Yes, lets remember Florida. 10,000 votes either way would have changed the outcome there and thus turned the whole election. But if we didn’t have the EC those 10,000 votes wouldn’t have been able to. So in an extremely close national race 10,000 altered votes might turn a direct election. the same goes for the Electoral College. The difference is that with the EC those altered votes in the right places might change the outcome even if the national tally isn’t all that close. I’m no statistician but from what I understand the greater the tally the higher the confidence that error hasn’t changed the outcome. So lets recount them all. It’s safer.
As I have already said, the Electoral College isn’t something only perverts democracy a couple times a century. The problems with the EC are endemic and have effected every single vote ever cast.
And I have just explained why their objections are unconvincing if you care to argue the point.
As I have just explained to erislover towards the beginning of this post, the proportional system isn’t much of a solution at all, unless the contingency plan is improved. Again, feel free to dispute my argument if you are unconvinced.
I can particularly see this happening if this year Bush wins the popular vote, and Kerry wins the EC. Then both sides will feel they were once burned by the current system, and worry who will get burned the next time.
I’ve already explained that there is no reason to expect any potential voter to be disregarded by candidates just because of where they live. If we had a popular vote that is, that certainly does happen now. So why should we compromise?
As This Year’s Model has pointed out, Nebraska and Maine do not use a proportional system of any kind. As I have pointed out, moving to proportional election of electors would encourage the growth of minor parties which makes it less likely for any candidate to get a majority of electors. Do you have any better contingency plan that what we have now?
I should also note another potential problem with a proportional system. Since the current contingency plan is the House, and since the House wouldn’t be elected proportionally it wouldn’t have minor party representation, the best electoral strategy for the minor parties would be to try to win electors and then bargain before the electors cast their ballots. That is, they are likely to try to win enough electors to hold the balance of power in the college and then cut a deal with one major party or the other. Now I have no problem with empowering minor parties ( being Green and all ) but find the side effects troubling. Electors would be voting for candidates they weren’t pledged to during the election. This would play havok with the faithless elector laws and, I’m afraid, loosen the connection between the popular votes and the electoral votes. Electors would no longer be mere cogs in the wheel. They would sometimes be determining the outcome of the election in favor of someone they weren’t pledged to vote for in the general election. That, despite several faithless electors over the centuries, has never happened.
Not necessarily. The feds could just set up stricter guidelines and some seed money and let the states keep running the elections.
Why do you think there are no national standards? Haven’t you heard of the Help America Vote Act or the Motor Voter Law? The feds already do have oversight of federal elections. They just don’t do a very good job because they traditionally defer to the states.
I think that’s a false assumption. That the central government hasn’t shown much interest in modernizing the electoral infrastructure under the current state run system doesn’t make it likely the same thing would happen if we moved to national elections. If it were a truly national election then I would expect the demise of the hands off tradition in the national government.
If we moved to direct election then the margin of victory in every state would concern everyone. This is a further indication that the national government would take responsibility for national elections.
Cost I will grant you. A national recount would cost more. But it wouldn’t take any more time since the precincts wouldn’t be counted one at a time. “General weariness”? Were Americans bored during the recount? Not according to Professor Patterson of Harvard’s Vanishing Voter Project. According to him we were never so interested during the election as we were after voting ended. Recounts with the outcome hanging in the balance, unlike the long tedious campaign, provided drama and a definitive climax.
Like I said, Florida 2000 demonstrates that deviations in other states certainly can change the overall outcome. If you don’t trust the states then you should favor more oversight. Nationalizing the election would naturally lead to more national oversight.
I don’t. It solves none of the problems of the unit system and while it is harmless enough in states with small and relatively homogenous populations like Maine and Nebraska it would be a different story in larger states where gerrymandering is the norm. As a for instance, I live in the battleground state of Pennsylvania but I, like nearly all Pennamites, live in a district biased in favor one major party or the other. Under a district system we would be in safe districts and our swing state would be worth a mere 2 electoral votes.
Um… Colorado was a safe state. It made little sense to campaign there since it was reliably Republican. Thus it had no major candidate visits in 2000 but has earned some attention this year because of the referendum. There seems to be a disconnect here but not on the part of those favoring the change.
Are they really learning more about it? I’ve only seen one person in the media point out that Colorado was a safe state. All the other pieces were too busy bemoaning the loss of immediate electoral importance Colorado didn’t have to start with.
I have to object to this. It’s just a freaking slippery-slope argument.
I have no problem with representative governments.
I think our bicameral legislature is ingenious.
I have no problem with proportional representation in Congress, I think it’s quite logical.
Where I don’t like it is in the popular vote for President. That’s the only situation that conflicts with “one man, one vote” as far as I can see.
I’ve always been anti-electoral college as it stands now but I’ve got to say that AHunter3’s argument makes a lot of sense, even more than a straight popular vote. It would be fair to the people who live in states that always go one way (even Texas would have a few Kerry electors), give the smaller states a boost, and force candidates to campaign in more than the six or seven swing states. Are there any other states besides Colorado that are considering a switch to proportional electoral voting? I’d definitely be in favor of something like that for Pennsylvania. (Though not until next election. Chances are that Kerry is going to clean up on this state. That will make up for all the Texas Kerry voters whose votes won’t count.)
We have the Electoral Colleg because 200 years ago it was an excellent compromise.
Now, i am sure that most of the people would vote it out- but you need 2/3rd of the States to vote it out- and that not going to happen.
All this debate on whether it’s fair or whether getting rid of it would disenfranchise more or less voters than the current system are moot. We cannot get a 2/3rd majority. MAYBE a bare majority and that’s it. Sorry, we are stuck with it until a Constitutional Convention, which I hope doesn’t happen in my lifetime.