Proposal to Update the Electoral College 922
A Stanford Professor has put down an idea (and also co-wrote a 620-page book for those who are that interested) on how to update the often criticized Electoral College system for presidential elections. Under the proposed system participating states would form a compact to throw all Electoral College votes behind the winner of the national popular vote regardless of which candidate won in any individual state. This proposed system would also make it much easier to bring the system up to date since it would not require a constitutional amendment to change or disband the Electoral College.
Re:it's more complicated than this... (Score:2, Informative)
State law can. Federal law cannot. course INAL.
Re:Sorry. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Outdated System (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, you're quite wrong. The answer to the problem is in the name of our nation: "The United States of America"
Under the original constitution, each state was a separate entity with its own laws that banded together for common defense under a singular Federal entity. Federal powers were always intended to be weak so as to allow for the diversity present in each state governing itself.
The electoral college was setup because the states were concerned that they would not be fairly represented. The concern was that since New York had the largest population, all the elections would follow their desires without the opinions and diversity of the rest of the nation coming into play. As a result, the EC was developed to allow even the smallest state to have a bit of weight in their vote.
In case the implications of that aren't clear, let me spell it out: The electoral college is designed to NOT reflect the popular vote.
Sometimes the popular vote reflects the college vote (especially in the case of a landslide), but in many close races the two will differ. (e.g. Bush vs. Gore '00)
What's interesting is that the people demanding a change in the method used to count the vote is almost always the folks from heavily populated areas. i.e. The exact people the electoral college was setup to protect against. The concern is that these people have little understanding of other areas, and would do insurmountable damage to the rest of the nation. Considering that our food production as well as many forms of research and manufacturing are handled in rural areas, failing to represent them could be disasterous.
Re:It's an interesting thought, but... (Score:5, Informative)
The one thing that keeps them under control and from getting out of hand is that all state compacts must not only be approved by all state legislatures involved, but also by the U.S. Congress.... keeping the U.S. Consitutional issues in hand.
These compacts are usually done for rather mundane tasks like highway construction projects that cross state lines, school districts that take in kids from just across the state line, or other issues that would involve multiple states. Some good compacts I've seen allowed "in-state" tuition at a group of universities in a specific region. Minnesota in particular established seperate compacts to do just that with all of the neighboring states.
Even more bizzare was a compact between Minnesota and Mantoba, where an airport on the U.S./Canadian border was more cheaply extended across the international border by 1000 feet. It wasn't a huge airport, but the need was there to build the extra length of runway and make a joint state/province authority over the expanded airport. The state and provincial governments ran the airport, but it also needed federal authority from both national governments in order to get this to work.
Once states enter into a compact like this, it becomes enforceable almost like the U.S. Consitution, and states simply can't back out of it shy of fully repealing the compact by agreement with all of the people participating in that compact. Indeed, something like this ultimately has even more authority in fact than the U.S. Constitution as trying to get the whole thing renegotiated all over again after the compact is in legal force would be something next to impossible to accomplish. All told, I think a constitutional ammendment would be easier to negotiate because of this problem. SCOTUS doesn't let states get away with the same garbage that would be routine for the World Court.
Re:No (Score:3, Informative)
There's STILL no declared presidential winner there, and the losing idiot is still calling for marches, making unsubstantiated accusations, and not giving the legitimate government there a chance to function and do its job. He claims "the will of the people will be heard," forgetting the fact that almost 2/3 of the population were intelligent enough to vote *against* him.
(This is an election that was declared clean by European observes, lest anyone accuse the USA of interefence.)
Hell, I'm from a crappy, wrong colored state that I want to be the other color. As a constant loser, I wish we had a Maine type system. Were I a constant winner, I'd probably be more than happy. It's easy to criticize when you're the loser. The easy, most fair, non-partisan answer is to keep everything local or as local as you can. Hence states can do whatever the hell they want to, and even though I'm not happy with how my state does it while I'm losing, it beats a centralized system.
Re:No (Score:5, Informative)
Isn't it interesting that each example cited above is an example of groups that vote strongly Democratic.
You didn't include lists like "gun enthusiasts, stock traders, CEOs, and religious fundamentalists". This shows where your bias comes from.
Note that you didn't hear an outcry about the electoral college when Clinton took the White House with 43% of the popular vote in 1992
That's because he got more popular votes than any other candidate:
Clinton 43%
Bush Sr. 38%
Perot 19%
See? The guy with the most votes won. Even without the electoral college, Clinton was the winner. Interesting concept. Nobody said the winner had to have the majority of the votes, just more than any other candidate. Clinton got 5 million more votes than the next highest candidate. The will of the people was served. Hence, no uproar.
In 2000, the will of the people... as a whole... was that Al Gore be President. He got 500,000 more votes than any other candidate. That fact is incontrovertible.
Your hatred of Clinton notwithstanding, more Americans wanted him to be president than any other candidate... both times.
You're trying to confuse the issue. Kennedy got more POPULAR vote than Nixon in 1960 by the way... by 100,000.
Abolition of the Electoral college would have STILL meant JFK won in 1960 and WJC won in 1992 and 1996. Actually, abolition of the Electoral College would have meant that every election in the past century would have gone EXACTLY as it went... with the exception of 2000.
Any time there is a viable third candidate, no candidate will get 50%. That's a mathematical fact. It doesn't detract from the basic fairness that says "the guy with the most wins".
No amount of spinning will change the fact that America, by a narrow margin, rejected Bush in 2000. If a vote were somehow held today, Bush would make McGovern in 1972 look like a landslide winner.
Re:interesting theory (Score:4, Informative)
They already do.
This will do nothing to encourage voter turnout though. Voter apathy is a much more complex issue.
Historically, one of the most effective ways to increase voter turnout is to force people to live under dictatorial rule for an extended period of time.
Me? I keep voting in order to AVOID that. Usually it works.
Re:interesting theory (Score:5, Informative)
You do know that your employer is required by law to give you time off to vote, don't you?
No?
*sigh*
Re:No (Score:3, Informative)
History HAS been rewritten by the winners (as they always do). The war was about taxation. at the time there was no federal income tax. The fed got its money through tariffs on imported goods. The South was an agrarian society, and thus exported most of its production. They typically recieved finished goods in payment, which when imported was subject to tariffs.
This book traces the taxation issue. [mises.org]
Before the civil war the tariff was around 20%. In the book above, the author looks at federal revenue leading up to the civil war. The sourthern states paid roughly 85-90% of TOTAL federal receipts, while most federal spending was in the northern states (70%+).
The Republican party was started as a regional (north eastern states) party. One of its primary planks was an increase of tariff rates. Shortly after they republicans took office they increased the tariff on imported goods to 50%.
Thus you have a southern economy already paying the lions share of taxes and getting little benefit, and the northern economy paying few taxes and increasing taxes on the rest. Before the new congress came into office the south saw the handwriting on the wall....
The book mentioned above goes into this in detail, including reproductions of political cartoons of the time. My favorite shows pres buchanan as a poor widow, while a southerner holding a bag of money taken from the federal "safe" is walking out of the house.
Re:They had a HUGE disparity then as well. (Score:3, Informative)
Irrelevant; "Tennessee" as a distinct political entity did not exist in 1770 (and in any case the United States did not yet exist).
The actual ratio between largest and smallest states at the beginning of the Republic was 12.6:1 (1790 population of Virginia: 747610; 1790 population of Delaware: 59096), which is almost an order of magnitude smaller than the corresponding ratio today.
Re:interesting theory (Score:4, Informative)
Not true in all cases - though it looks like roughly 3/5ths of the states do *something* about it:
http://www.timetovote.net/voter_leave_laws.html [timetovote.net]
Outrageous! (Score:2, Informative)
It's about a close to sedition as you can get. Maybe it IS sedition.
States' rights are under constant attack, and Article 10 is being dismantled in courts at every level in our country.
No surprise that large states are good candidates for this compact, nor that they may have come up with the idea. They see the proportionality as a problem for them. Damned right. They don't get to dictate so much, and that's as it should be. We are indeed the United STATES of America.
Nonetheless, I suspect every single state will get attention in the 2008 Presidential election. Some day you might need New Hampshire's two votes to get elected.
It's outrageous. Almost as bad as pure, receiptless electronic voting. Almost.
rick
Re:Electoral equal != Legislation centralisation (Score:3, Informative)
This is incorrect. Since the United States is not a parliamentary system, politicians would pander to the largest mass of voters: white, middle class, suburban, Christian. They would have little to gain from reaching out minorities, if in doing so they ran the chance of alienating the majority. In a parliamentary system in which there are numerous parties sharing power in coalition governments, small parties can wield power by appealing to niche interest groups and minorities. Not so in a presidential system.
The paradox present is that by introducing intermediary institutions, voting is both distorted and therefore more responsive to minorities. Under PR, we would see:
Within the smaller groupings of states, groups that are minorities on a national scale can exercise decisive weight as swing votes within the state. Thus regionally grouped minorities (Polish in Chicago, elderly in Florida) can gain a voice they might not have had otherwise. In a nation-wide PR system, the presidential candidates will all go for the big homogeneous bloc of white, middle class, Christian, suburban voters than make up 60-70% of the United States, ignoring the minorities making up the other 30-40%.
Finally, by further undermining the importance of states, a PR system would weaken the federal system that the States established in order to maintain a proper division of powers. The importance and influence of states were undermined when the 17th amendment was passed, removing from the state legislatures the right to appoint Senators. As a result, even more power was centralized in Washington DC. Moving to PR, and erasing the importance of states would be one more step in that direction.
Everyone on Slashdot understands why centralizing power is a bad thing in the computer science / tech industry / operating system market. Why don't they understand why further centralizing power in national politics is just as dangerous?
Re:interesting theory (Score:3, Informative)
Wouldn't hurt to read up on how other countries actually handle it before making comparisons. Countries with a majority system and therefore multiple parties usually work like this:
Ca. 50% of the popular vote are needed for an absolute majority in the parliament. With this, you can create normal laws. Usually you don't have these 50%, so you need to enter a coalition with another party(ies).
Now, to change the constituion, you need more than 50% of seats, ususally 75%. That means that in addition to your coalition partner (together with whom you generally have somewhere between 52% and 65%), you need to convince yet another party (from the opposition, no less) that the change is a good idea.
Pretty high hurdle if you ask me, and you can make it more than 75% just to be sure.
Re:That explains it (Score:3, Informative)
That being said, I don't necessarily disagree. Our founding fathers had a SEVERE distrust the of the American Populace. The reason we have electors was because the "common-folk" weren't smart enough to vote for president -- you were supposed to vote for the smartest (guy -- at the time) you knew, and then the electors would pick the pres. And back then, guy #2 was the VP. Or have we forgotten that? We've strayed so far from the system our founding fathers set up originally -- remember all the warnings AGAINST two party systems?
At the end of the day, there are persuasive arguments on BOTH sides of the debate -- but yours is not one of them.
"republicans" in new york and "republicans" in north dakota have little in common. nation wide parties are a load of crap.
Re:Two words (Score:3, Informative)
Isreal is one of the few nations that practice this and it tends to help with new political parties come in and not stagnate with with a two party system.
Re:interesting theory (Score:3, Informative)
Brazil doesn't have Diebold as a viable political force, and at a national level supports open source software. Don't even begin to think that can happen in a country owned by it's corporations.
Where the power lies (Score:3, Informative)
How many times have you seen presidential candidates fighting over, say, North Dakota? How about Massachusetts? California? Texas? Oklahoma? I'm guessing none. North Dakota is too small to be bothered with, while the other four are so locked in to one party or another that the candidates don't have to worry about swaying voters in that state.
Now look at Ohio and Florida. They're swing states, where every vote counts because the race will invariably be close. They're also very populous, so winning or loosing one can easily tip the entire national election. Candidates bend over backwards to appeal to these populous swing states.
Voters in the small states are effectively disenfranchised because winning or loosing a 3 electoral vote state is insignificant. Minority voters in states that are heavily Democrat or Republican are disenfranchised because their votes will not change the outcome of the election. The people whose really have significant power are in the large swing states.
Re:interesting theory (Score:2, Informative)
Last time I looked, the Constitution said "Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors..." According to Wikipedia, in the 1789 election [wikipedia.org], 6 states used some form of popular vote and 4 used other means to choose electors (New York failed to choose electors, and two other states were not eligible because they hadn't ratified the Constitution). History does not support your statement.