It’s widely known that Al Gore won the 2000 popular vote but lost the electoral college vote. This is the 4th time that’s happened in America’s history. But what struck me after 2000 was a remarkable LACK of calls to abolish the electoral college in favor of a pure popular vote. So many people were so angry about that election, yet I never heard even one mainstream politican or mainstream TV personality seriously propose scrapping the electoral college. Why not?
Now I know there are reasons against scrapping the college – I’m not asking whether this would be a good plan or not. Please don’t bother listing the advantages of the electoral college, cause I already know them. But good idea or not, it seems like a thing that many people would want to change. Why didn’t the proposal get more traction than it did? You’d think there would be at least one Ralph Nader type longshot candidate who would make it the centerpiece of his campaign.
Personally, I’m completely in favor of the electoral college and would never want to see it abolished. I won’t bother you with it’s advantages and disadvantages as per your request, but I’d not support a platform that called for its abolition.
I see no way to get rid of the electoral college. The evil part of the system is the disproportionate power it gives the small states. Look at Wyoming, with 3 electoral votes and 509,000 people. It has one electoral vote for every 170,000 people.
California, with 55 electoral votes, and 36,100,000 people has one electoral vote for every 657,000 people. To have the same presidential representation as Wyoming, California would have to have 212 electoral votes.
OK, I took the largest state and the smallest state to accent the unfairness, but even Wisconsin, the 20th most populous state in the union gets 1.2 electoral votes for every 1.0 that California gets, based on population.
It would require a constitutional amendment to change the system, and you only need 17 states to reject it to block the amendment. The smaller states are not going to give up the political pull their uneven distribution of electoral votes gives them.
I’m as against the electoral college as anyone, but it doesn’t take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
I see one way to get rid of the electoral college, or other disproportional representation…
You’re a rich guy. You build a city or two and pay a few hundred thousand left-leaning people who agree with your plans to move to Wyoming and vote. Wyoming becomes a blue state. Move operations to the next under-populated state and repeat. Sit back and watch what happens.
I distinctly remember a lot of outrage in 2000 as well. I also distinctly remember most of those people being put to task because of the enormous disadvantages of a pure popular vote. Even if that weren’t the case, as was pointed out, I think most people realize fighting it is a lost cause, and gave up fighting because of that.
I’m also quite certain it would be on the boundary of political suicide to attempt to change it. In this case, it favored the Republicans who controlled both houses and now the presidency, so what’s their incentive to change it? Likewise, it hurt the Democrats, who had NO chance of getting it passed and who already have a bit of a stigma of being “sore losers” and any kind of movement like that would only perpetuate that image.
What I’m curious about is why anyone is still concerned about this seven years after the fact with much larger issues intervening since.
Some states are doing what they can to minimize it, like, IIRC Maine already splits up its electoral votes, and Colorado had a resolution (it failed, right?) to split their votes based on the intra-state popular vote. Of course, I think that’s even sillier, because it’s even more arbitrary. Unless a candidate has a large enough majority in a state with an even number of electoral votes to prevent an even split (which doesn’t seem common, since many states also run close), then the presidential elections would be mostly decided by states with an odd number of electoral votes. Then again, if a lot of states did that, maybe a call for a change to popular vote might actually gain some momentum.
The question is not, “Why do we maintain the electoral college?”
The question is, “Why, given that we have always had an electoral college, do the news media persist in providing the sum total national vote, as though it’s something important to the system?”
The lack of lasting outrage is explained like this: Most voters in 2000 voted for Al Gore. The majority of those who did so held their noses while they pulled the lever. That’s why we didn’t have riots in the streets when the Supreme Court “resolved” the issue some weeks later.
Krokodil, why would you assume Gore voters were “holding their nose”? The majority of voters supported the man in 2000 as the better candidate and not just the lesser of two evils. And it’s not like the last eight years have given anyone who voted against Bush cause to second guess themselves.
To be fair, Little Nemo, a lot of people who voted for Bush were also holding their noses. According to wikipedia Bush got 50,460,110 votes while Gore got 51,003,926 votes. So when you say a majority decided that Gore was the better candidate it’s not like it was a significant majority.
As for the “unfair edge it gives small states,” California (and New York, Texas, and Florida as well) have only themselves to blame for not taking the following into account:
The House of Representatives has been capped at 435 members for 95 years now, with one brief 18-month variant in 1959-60. The reason behind this has little to do with that being a magic number of some sort; it’s the maximum number of desks that can be fitted into the current House chamber without some sort of redesign. There is no major reason why 500, 700, or even 1000 Congressmen would not be acceptable, and some sound reasons in terms of effective representation why the number should be increased.
The number of Presidential Electors is legally defined as being the total number of Senators and Representatives from your state. No reason why it has to be this way; it simply ensures that the smaller states are not overwhelmed by the big states.
The name of the country is the United States of America, not the United People of America. That might clue you into the idea that the states do have some residual sovereignty and the right to influence federal activity, to the extent they can retain and wield it.
Just because you happen to belong to a majority or plurality does not give you authority or influence to disenfranchise a minority. California may have 20% of 25% of the U.S. population at present; that does not mean that it, or its Congressmen, get to tell Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Nevada, Utah, and Oregon how they should run themselves.
Well, I was one of them, and so were most of my friends and relatives. We were all pretty disappointed with the choices offered. That’s why we didn’t storm the Suprme Court building with torches and nooses. Can you account for your inactions that week? I don’t recall any other Frankensteinian mobs out there either.
It’s always tempting to wonder wistfully about how much better things would have been under a different president. Strangely, no one is all that wistful about how Gore would have handled events in the wake of 9-11. He had my grudging vote, but not my confidence.
There is actually a sneaky, backdoor way to effectively eliminate the electoral college. It depends on the fact that the individual States are allowed to assign their EC votes via any process they wish (as long as it isn’t discriminatory)
States change their process to align their EC votes with the national popular vote, as long as there are enough states using this process to swing an election. Once that last swing state signs in, winning the popular vote will get you enough EC votes to win the election.
Under the Electoral College the popular vote is meaningless. In MA, where I live, there was almost no reason to vote as the results were clear. So various parts of the electorate weren’t represented. Under that system, looking at a skewed popular vote doesn’t mean anything.
And that’s the heart of the matter. The issue isn’t the Electoral College but the ‘Winner Take All’ method that most states use in apportioning which candidate gets the state’s electoral votes.
So the issue is convincing states to redefine how they perform that process. It’s already well-established that they can do so as Maine has been doing it differently for a while. But convincing some of the others, particularly large states, will be a significant challenge.
