Is the electionsystem the same as in 2004 when the candidate who got most wotes won all the “delegats” (seams to remember that one or two states i 2004 used the same system as the democrats use this election -> the winner gets most delegats, but not all).
Is there any changes from 2004 - or is it the winner takes it all in every states?
It’s electors, not delegates and the method will be the same. It would take a constitutional amendment to change it.
Maine and Nebraska remain the only two states who assign their Electors proportionally. Maine has four Electors and Nebraska has five.
In all other states, the Electors are chosen by the ticket that wins a plurality of the votes in the general election.
I don’t think it would take a constitutional amendment to change the winner-takes-all system. That can be changed by each state for its own group of electors.
To follow up on Giles’s response, here’s the relevant language (Article II, Section 1): Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.
There’s nothing in the constitution that says that electors must even be chosen by popular vote. They could be chosen by an interparty softball game for all the Constitution has to say about it.
In general, however, states are loath to make this change unilaterally because doing so would reduce their influence relative to the other states.
Consider California with 55 electors. It’s a very big prize. Who wins California is a very big deal.
But if California switched to awarding its electors on a proportional basis then most of the electors would cancel each other out. The Republicans would be guaranteed to win about 20 electors and the Democrats would be guaranteed to win about 20 electors. The battle would be over who got the remaining 15, reducing California’s influence to about the same as North Carolina.
As some of you may recall, there was a Republican-led ballot initiative effort last year that would have done precisely that. IIRC, some of the major backers of the initiative were associated with the Giuliani campaign.
The point is valid, but more applicable to the larger swing states like Ohio. In the case of California, it’s balanced by the fact that CA is often just figured as so securely Democrat that it’s not worth contesting. The Republicans simply write it off. Similarly, the Democrats write off Texas. CA has not gone Republican since 1988. The Reagan elections of the 80s, and the first Bush election were Republican landslides, and Reagan was a Californian. Likewise, Texas hasn’t gone Democrat since 1976, when Jimmy Carter carried the south completely.
One could observe that proportional splitting of states like CA, NY and TX might cause more attention to be paid to them as the non-dominant party would have a chance to get at least SOME electoral votes out of them.
I suspect that it’s not to increase the influence of their state, but is for purely partisan reasons. In most states, the legislature would be controlled by the same party as would win the presidential election in that state. So they would want to maximise the vote from their state to their party’s candidate.
Let’s call the parties Blue and Yellow. Suppose the state sends 5 electors to Washington, and that the Blue party controls the state legislature. Would those legislators prefer a system likely to send 5 Blue electors, or a system likely to send 3 or 4 Blue electors plus 1 or 2 Yellow electors? Of course, they prefer the first alternative, even if it means that the candidates ignore their state during the campaign.
Which I would call “increasing the influence of their state”.
If one party has a lock on a state they want to make sure all the votes go to their guy. So there’s no incentive to switch to proportional allocation.
If the state is up for grabs, winner-take-all makes it a bigger prize. So there’s no incentive to switch to proportional allocation in that case either.
No, it would not.
Each state gets to decide how it determines its electors. We started off the country without the majority of electors chosen by popular vote, and we could revert to that any time we wanted. Nebraska and one other state (somewhere in New England, IIRC; I’m too lazy to go look) choose them by congressional district, with two at large electors based on statewide vote.
There’s also the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact a proposed agreement (that is, legislation to be passed in the several states) whereby each state agrees that its electoral votes will go to the winner of the national popular vote, regardless of who wins that state–with the proviso that the compact only becomes operational when states representing 270 electoral votes have agreed to it. If that came to pass, the U.S. presidential election would be effectively transformed into a national direct democratic vote. Thus far, only a couple of states (Maryland and New Jersey) have actually signed on, but the proposal has gone to various stages of the legislative process in other states (including being defeated in some states, at least so far).