This reminds me of the argument that States legalizing pot wouldn’t be effective because the Feds would just send armies of DEA agents into the offending States, and the neighboring States would set up search roadblocks at the borders, and… Turned out nobody really cared that much.
You can argue against any proposed State law being ineffective, if you assume that the Federal government is going to do everything in its power to defeat the purpose of that law. But you need some plausible reason why the Feds would be so deeply invested in sabotaging this particular law. It’s not like there are some massive entrenched interests that specifically depend on the Electoral College to maintain their power.
That seems a bit hyperbolic, considering that the popular vote winner only loses the EC a couple times per century on average. And I don’t think you could plausibly suggest that those losers (Gore, Hillary, the 19th century dudes) were more dangerously demagogic than average Presidential candidates.
Except that in this case, it’s not the Federal government that is threatening to weaken it - in fact, it’s the lack of Federal government action that would do it; it is one or more of the states that are not members of the compact that would pass state laws concerning what results from that state would be released.
The Federal government is pretty much powerless to do anything about it, based on my interpretation of the second clause of Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution (“Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors…”)
Oh, I see what you’re saying. I assume those States’ results would just be ignored by the NPVC States, and I don’t see any problem with that. It would be analogous to a State today refusing to report any election results whatsoever; they could do it, but the rest of the country wouldn’t just shrug and say “well, guess we’ll never know who the President is”. At some point, they’d move on without input from the people who inexplicably decided to not participate in the process.
The thing that concerns me about the state compact idea is that if you start leaving the door open for states to base their elector choices on the results of other states, Republicans could form a compact that includes all bright red states and a selection of swing states with Republican legislatures, so as to make those swing states irrevocably Red, and this would be much easier to get made than the nation-wide one required to fix the electoral college.
Of course if Republicans did this Democrats would form their own blue compact, and so all that would matter is which compact could get enough state leglislatures to sign on to put them over 274, which means we are right back in the situation where legislatures decide the electors rather than popular vote.
Even if it’s a given that a larger House and district-based elections would solve the problem in some durable way, how exactly is this easier than a constitutional amendment? It requires more states to be on board than are needed for an amendment, and the 2/3 supermajority requirement in Congress would be a non-issue if you had that much of a political consensus.
Also, in an economy that was mostly agrarian with the population spread more or less evenly around the colonies, the founders could never have imagined how wildly the populations of the states would vary, and how political parties would tend to sort themselves geographically. I think they wanted to avoid parties taking on an important role, but this might have been too idealistic, so maybe we can blame them for that. It’s human nature to seek allies when you have a common goal, hence political parties are almost inevitable. Moreover, the British Parliament had had Tories and Whigs for decades.
Mainly because it helps the Republicans, and they want to keep it.
Why can’t we change the Constitution? Because the process for doing so also heavily favors low-population states which are usually Republican/conservative dominated. Proposed amendments are voted on by a two-thirds majority of the states regardless of their populations, and ratification requires a 3/4 majority of the states, also regardless of population. California gets one vote, and Wyoming gets one vote. I’m sure I don’t need to spell out what that means.
I believe this is why there have been no politically progressive amendments in more than 50 years. There have been some amendments of a housekeeping nature, but nothing that protects or extends voting rights, or offers protection for the disadvantaged. I think the tide turned when Phyllis Schlafly mobilized conservative women against the ERA, torpedoing its ratification.
You’ll notice, also, that the ones who are crying for an Article V convention are mostly conservatives, because it would be a disaster for liberals and progressives.
The States can be brought on board one at a time, through grassroots efforts or peer pressure. It’s a longer term plan than an overnight Amendment, but more achievable. In my opinion.
Also, there are two problems here. The EC problem is the one where there aren’t enough Electors to distribute evenly among the population, so different states have different voting power. A massively increased House would solve that problem.
The States’ “winner take all” policies are a separate issue, and would still be a problem without the Electoral College, assuming we keep 50 separate State elections rather than one National election (which would be just as difficult as abolishing the EC, if not harder.)
Looking at those low-population states, most of the ones which went for Biden are small states in the Mid-Atlantic and New England (plus D.C. and Hawaii), which aren’t necessarily rural, but they are historically liberal.
Most of the ones which went for Trump are larger (in land area), predominantly rural states, nearly all in the West.
I’ve long been arguing for exactly this. If a few million liberal Democrats would just move from California and New York into Wyoming/South Dakota/Montana/Idaho/North Dakota/etc, they’d totally flood in and take over those states politically. It would give Democrats a massive +10 boost in the Senate and dozens of extra Electoral College votes. It would deliver dominance to the D’s. And California and New York would still remain solidly blue.
Now you just have to convince a few million Californians to move to Wyoming. Note that most years, less than a million people move out of California at all.
Expanding the size of the House can be done by ordinary federal legislation without requiring permission from any state (except insofar as each state’s voters exercise their usual influence over their representatives and senators). Assigning electoral votes by district would require state action, but since it’s a bad idea in any case (it would amplify the effect of gerrymandering and thus increase the motivation to engage in it) it can be consigned to the circular file.
I’m not following. The House is set at 435 by a federal statute.
If instead the federal statute said that the distribution quotient was based on the population of the smallest state (currently Wyoming) compared to the national population, that would change the size of the House and make each state’s representation closer to the population ratios of each state to the national population.
That would increase the House by about a hundred, last time I looked at it, but wouldn’t need the consent of the states.
“The founding fathers gave us the electoral college, and the founding fathers can do no wrong, except for slavery thing,” is one take.
Jamelle Bouie provides some interesting historical context. The electoral college is a kludge, the output of a committee on “Postponed parts”. Before that, proposals for the selection of the President were all over the map. They included, yes, a popular vote, legislature gets to decide, but also:
selection by the governors of the states or by state legislatures; election by a committee of 15 legislators chosen by lot (and obliged to act as soon as they were chosen, to avoid intrigue); a popular election in which each voter cast ballots for two or three candidates, only one of whom could be from his own state: nomination of one candidate by the people of each state, with the winner to then be chosen by the national legislature.
So basically it was a typical ATMB discussion. The electoral college itself lasted in its original form for all of 2 Presidencies: by 1804 factionalism had taken over the process and the EC was no longer deliberating.
Gifted article
My takeaway is that lots of democracies survive without an electoral college and the farm lobby is fairly powerful worldwide. So I’m skeptical about whether EC stays around is an existential issue for rural states, though it isn’t a trivial one.
As I said upthread, and extra one hundred congress members would help a bit, but not really make a significant change in terms of the inequality. In order to really fix it you would need to expand the house by factor of 2 to 4.