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So you hold a group of small states should be able to ruin the country because they are small. Explain that. Only rational is that they vote RW. Other than that they are takers of little import.
My own NV, a relative small state, went to Clinton and threw the Republicans out of both houses of the State Legislature. And we run relatively low on taxes and remain with our Libertarian under tone. But we were smart enough not to buy into Trump.
And we and CA both raise and stock fish in quantity.
At the same time you are trying to make it so that "a group of large states should be able to ruin the country because they are big". By the way I think ruin might have been a typo and it meant to be run. Either way it fits.
Interesting. I see that retired military and those on Social Security are no longer welcome at the ballot box.
And by the way, the US Fish & Wildlife Service jointly runs programs with many states to stock fisheries and protect animal habitat.
Where do you keep coming up with these wild azz comments? You need a time out. You probably are one that continuously complains about fake new sites, while posting fake information at the same time.
1% of the population or 1% of those who voted? Were there more than 200 million votes casted this time around?
No. There were a total of about 136,000,000 votes case in this presidential election. So far, according to Cookpolitical.com 64,900.000 were cast for Clinton. Approximately 62,300,000 were cast for Donald Trump. The rest of the votes were cast for third party candidates. Clinton's popular vote margin over Trump is more than 2.5 million votes. It appears to be just under 2% of the total votes cast. In 2000, when Al Gore gained more popular votes than George W. Bush it was closer. Gore's popular vote margin over Bush was 1/2 million popular votes.
This election was a farce that clearly demonstrates why the USA should have abandoned a 227 year old system that makes it possible for a candidate with fewer votes than his/her opponent to win the race.
Trump claims he has a "mandate". I wonder how far he thinks this mandate extends? What he is is the legal victor in an election due to an arcane process that long ago outlived its usefulness.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cruzincat
If it ever got close to that happening, someone within one of the states will bring a lawsuit, saying that the agreement is circumventing the vote within their state for the presidential election, and you know what will happen then? It will be found unconstitutional.
Please cite the provision of the Constitution that you believe such a law would violate.
Unless one is living in pre-Civil War days its not a good argument. There is about as much chance today of a state seceding is there is that we will send a manned space mission to Pluto. This is the kind of argument that is on par with the notion that people need "the right to keep and bear arms" to protect themselves from the federal government. Its a lame argument. I won't use more descriptive adjectives because I don't wish to offender our moderators.
Seriously, you make a good argument why we shouldn't have elections at all. Let's just have a dictator like Francisco Franco or Mussolini. I submit that if the candidate supported by most of the people does not win--or does not at least make it into a run off election--there is no point in having elections at all. The irony here is Americans love to preach to the rest of the world about the importance of elections and democracy. Than, we have an election where the candidate with fewer popular votes than his opponent wins. Seriously, if I were a foreigner and I heard our rhetoric, I think I would laugh.
How about a hypothetical change in history. Assume for a minute that Russia, instead of taking over the countries that became the USSR, offered to begin the USSR with everything being run by popular vote? I can only assume that the population back then was such hat Russia would pretty much have total control, much like they did end up with. Do you think the other "states" would signed up, knowing they would be lorded over by Russia in everything they do?
This is an interesting comment. No one here has talked about elections in India at all. We have no way of knowing whether a fair process is followed or not. We also don't know how the whole ID situation is handled in India. Perhaps, they make a point of coming to slums and making ID for voters on the spot? I don't know. The only kind of ID law I could support is one where the government comes to the people and makes the ID for them. No thanks. I've stood in too many lines in social security offices and my local DMV to have confidence that such a system will result in every citizen who wants ID getting ID. I lost my daughter's original social security card and literally spent hours trying to replace it. Finally, ID is not required to get public assistance. If you want to talk about that I will.
The courts continue to hold most voter ID laws unconstitutional. I prefer the court's reasoning to yours.
So would I if every judge adhered to the constitution.
Unfortunately judge shopping works.
1. No. On one end, I'm not so sure it matters at this points as political parties sort of blew it, but the Electoral College exists to prevent direct democracy, which the founding fathers had a profound fear of. At one point, this even applied to the Senate, where the state's senate would select who their Senator in DC would be, but this was scrapped in favor of a popular vote. The President is currently more or less voted for by states rather than majorities, where a single popular opinion (James Madison called them "factions") would basically rule over everyone. As I said, political parties sort of muddied this, but I do think the Electoral College is a better option. I also think we need to amend it a bit and have electoral votes awarded proportionally rather than be a winner take all method.
2. No, I do not think more people would vote. As is, popular vote more or less decides how the electoral votes will look. The myth that your vote doesn't count needs to be dispelled. I also do not think the POTUS needs to receive more than 50%. The POTUS is elected if they have the most electoral votes overall.
3. Maybe, though perhaps people in rural American, who are overwhelmingly conservative, would outnumber the liberal massive cities. Again, the electoral college is meant to prevent this sort of thing. As I already said, political parties sort of messed that up, but I still feel what we have is better than what those who are dissatisfied with the results of the 2016 election are calling for.
If you are a Democrat living in a deep red state, or a Republican living in a deep blue state, you would understand that voting for president right now is almost a total waste of time. If there are other candidates or issues on the ballot that you feel strong about then it is not a waste of time. I fall into that living in Maryland, but I voted anyway, even though there were no local votes that I considered important this time around. I keep holding out hope that enough other Republicans will figure out that they should vote anyway and who knows? Someday we might figure out that if we all voted we might actually find out our numbers are not all that small.
Living in a state like Maryland, though, allows me to see in microcosm, how it would be in the US if the large metropolitan areas ruled over the rest of the country by virtue of the popular vote. I would not prefer doing away with the Electoral College for that reason.
If you want to pretend that Trump would have won even if this were a popular vote contest, you have my permission to do so. It is extremely unlikely given the fact that Trump's greatest support was outside the cities and suburban areas of this country. Claiming that he would have won doesn't even pass the giggle test.
What about all the Republican non voters in the deep red states that didn't bother to vote because their state was going to go to the Democrat anyway?
You will probably counter that there were probably a similar number of Democrats that stayed home because they live in deep red states, and you could be right.
The problem is no one know for sure who would vote if the presidential election was determined by popular vote. All we can say for sure is that it would change. Or might not change. We do know that the campaigns would change.
However, there's a well established precedent of granting them their citizenship. So these views are going to remain purely theoretical.
Also taking away their citizenship would be unfair and in the grand scheme of things a very wrong thing to do (which I think would still be constitutionally impossible).
What they could do is to change the Constitution to stop granting automatic citizenship to future anchor babies. (Btw there's a booming "anchor baby" tourism industry in China, except the people using it are not poor).
Changing it would require the approval of 34 state legislatures (as well as 2/3rd of Congress and Senate). This is a very long shot, but doable under the right circumstances.
Any precedent set before the action presents itself as a problem, should be reconsidered once it does become a problem. Otherwise, we might still have some states with slavery.
There is no justice in equating land ownership with the federal policy of voting. With the electoral college the results are skewed. Why did Trump win with two million less votes?
The electoral college was a policy to help the 1800's southern states account for the lack of qualified voters. It helped the south take into account population as a whole (Pre 1860's, so yeah you get the picture) so that policies would not take on a geographic preference.
The country is now very diverse, and federal policy is not subject to geographic preference but a population preference.
I say lets do a population preference, because the way it is right now has no benefits. (Think of the next election)
You really do not think that one person living on 100 acres that belongs to him/her is in danger of having less influence on policy than two people living on 1 acre? Really?
I only used that example to show that the one person has as much right to have a say in the government as the two, and having a system that allows the one to be ignored can be detrimental to all three.
I only used that example to show that the one person has as much right to have a say in the government as the two, and having a system that allows the one to be ignored can be detrimental to all three.
The problem is that it is more detrimental to ignore the two than it is the one. This is why elections are based on the principle that the person who gets the most votes wins.
Here we have it folks. Xenophobia and what I regard as downright hatred of immigrants. There's a reason why we have about eleven million illegal immigrants in this country. Its the fact that Americans love cheap labor. We love it as long as it gets our crops picked at cheap prices and gets us cheap service in places like restaurants. Than we just want the immigrants out of sight and out of mind. This is the same country--remember--that has gone probably twenty years without increasing the minimum wage.
Even if we wanted to deport all eleven million illegal immigrants the practicalities involved in doing so are completely unrealistic. All of these people would have to be given at least a minimum amount of due process to insure that a mistake wasn't being made and that someone who truly was a citizen wasn't being deported. Even I agree we need a stronger border with Mexico. However, we can't just round up everyone that is claimed to be an illegal alien and deport them from this country without even a hearing. There are only so many immigration judges and so many facilities to hold them.
Undocumented immigration is a complicated problem. However, it wouldn't exist if there were plenty of people in this country benefiting from cheap, unskilled labor. If it ever were "ended". You can bet you'd see the price of fresh vegetables and fruits going through the roof.
If there were no immigrants or anyone else to take the menial jobs, there would be greater incentive to create machines to do the work. necessity is the mother of invention. Somehow it would get done or the people will just pay more for the products. Or do without. Or grow your own. It tends to balance out. We survived much more hardships in the past.
Sports analogies have nothing at all to do with the electoral college. I find it interesting that multiple people have raised these analogies. Better arguments would be based on history and an understanding of the balance between state power, federal power, and individual rights that is created by the Constitution. The fact that so many choose to fall back on sports analogies tells me that their understanding of history is rather wanting.
Or is it the fact that there are obviously a lot of people that won't make the effort to understand the history that we have to resort to sports analogies to make them understand. The father speaking baby talk to their child is not a baby, is he?
More importantly though, the topic here is not about the outcome of this presidential election. That appears to be a given. The topic is about whether the Electoral College is a good or bad method of selecting our President and whether that method should be changed in the future.
I totally agree. I think a popular vote for President would energize people all around this country. I think instead of having voter turnouts of 50% to 60% of registered voters, we could get that up to perhaps 80%. Increasing electoral participation by Americans is a worthy goal. This argues strongly in favor of going to a direct popular vote for President.
I question whether Trump really understood the implications of the electoral vote. He spent very little time campaigning in Michigan and Wisconsin. On the other hand, everyone knew that Pennsylvania was a swing state.
Your comment about Trump not spending all his time complaining about George Bush is interesting. Instead, he spent most of his time complaining about Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Wait and see over next four or eight years. Obama promised to not stay silent like GWB did for him. I can't see Trump allowing that to go on without comment.
Trump's weakness was in urban areas and suburbs--where large chunks of the population live. The only way I could see him winning in such areas would have been to have run a remarkably different campaign. It would have focused on bringing more federal dollars into the cities. Such a campaign would have been anathema to conservative voters.
Actually, Trump did reach out to the minorities and other low income whites in those areas. "What do you have to lose" was his mantra there.
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