Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I support the popular vote. I think the EC made sense when the Constitution was written since the states were more equal, but not now.
interesting, I support the EC for exactly the same reason...
as the states are not anywhere near equal in population now, I submit that the interests of more rural Americans are as important as those who live in more densly populated areas.... and the only way to ensure these more rural settings still get meaningful representation is through a system like the EC
This is precisely why I advocated allocating the vote by congressional district, while awarding the overall state vote to the two extra electors; so that, for example, California's 11.0009 million people who voted against the overall winner would have a voice.
Can you better explain this for me please?
I don't see how it makes a practical difference.
Take California with 53 districts and 55 EC votes. Under your proposal if the 53 districts vote 27/26 the 2 additional Senatorial EC votes go with the 27. And if the Senators are from different parties, that could cause no end of trouble.
Your proposal seems more symbolic than practical. Would some/all sates be required to have an uneven number of districts to prevent a tie that would render the two Senatorial votes superfluous, if they had to be split?
Looks like there are about 20 states with 254 EC votes that have an even number of districts.
As it stands now their 3 votes have comparatively no voice to California's 12.0001 million out of 24 million eligible voters giving 55 electoral votes . The question is what about the voice of the 11.0009 million?
What they, and I think the whole country needs, at least for Congressional voting, less so for Presidential, is Proportional Representation. There are several different forms of it to choose from. The political scientists recommend it, the party bosses run scared, because it gives more power to the voter.
Anyone who votes in a multi seat district for a state legislature already uses a primitive form of PR. Time to step up to the big leagues.
I think the electoral college is somewhat of a scam.
-The cynical part of me thinks that its in place because a true democracy (votes by the people) is too dangerous. The electoral college counterbalances any sort of uprising or mass popular dissent.
Look at Ross Perot in 1992. He got 18% of the popular vote, but none of the electoral college. Is the electoral college put into place to squash 3rd party candidates?
I think the legislative branch of government is also getting outdated. Two senators per state seems very outdated. Why not 4 or 5? 435 members of Congress seems far too small to get anything done (in a country of 300 million people??).
The electoral college (EC) is part of our system of checks and balances, and IMO, is brilliant.
I am commenting here only as between the EC and popular vote and not opining on any way that the EC might be tweaked to make it "better".
The United States of America is a Union of States... not a union of people. I love our Federalist system. A switch to a popular vote would be a big step away from true Federalism and a big step closer to a Nationalist system.
If the state lines are dissolved, that is when we can go to a straight popular vote because that is when it would be the United People and not the United States.
George Washington, in his farewell address, warned about changes in government, saying that we should "resist with care the spirit of innovation upon its principles, however specious [OR alluring] the pretexts." He went on to say, "In all the changes to which you may be invited, remember that time and habit are at least as necessary to fix the true character of governments, as of other human institutions; that experience is the surest standard..."
The same logic that governs our electoral system, [physicist Alan Natapoff] saw, also applies to many sports--which Americans do, intuitively, understand. In baseball’s World Series, for example, the team that scores the most runs overall is like a candidate who gets the most votes. But to become champion, that team must win the most games. In 1960, during a World Series as nail-bitingly close as that year’s presidential battle between Kennedy and Nixon, the New York Yankees, with the awesome slugging combination of Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, and Bill Moose Skowron, scored more than twice as many total runs as the Pittsburgh Pirates, 55 to 27. Yet the Yankees lost the series, four games to three. Even Natapoff, who grew up in the shadow of Yankee Stadium, conceded that Pittsburgh deserved to win. Nobody walked away saying it was unfair, he says.
Runs must be grouped in a way that wins games, just as popular votes must be grouped in a way that wins states. The Yankees won three blowouts (16-3, 10-0, 12-0), but they couldn’t come up with the runs they needed in the other four games, which were close. And that’s exactly how Cleveland lost the series of 1888, Natapoff continues. Grover Cleveland. He lost the five largest states by a close margin, though he carried Texas, which was a thinly populated state then, by a large margin. So he scored more runs, but he lost the five biggies. And that was fair, too. In sports, we accept that a true champion should be more consistent than the 1960 Yankees. A champion should be able to win at least some of the tough, close contests by every means available--bunting, stealing, brilliant pitching, dazzling plays in the field--and not just smack home runs against second-best pitchers. A presidential candidate worthy of office, by the same logic, should have broad appeal across the whole nation, and not just play strongly on a single issue to isolated blocs of voters.
Experts, scholars, deep thinkers could make errors on electoral reform, Natapoff decided, but nine-year-olds could explain to a Martian why the Yankees lost in 1960, and why it was right. And both have the same underlying abstract principle.
If we used instead a pure democracy, we might end up with a candidate winning with a relatively small number of votes, even well under a simple majority. What if such a winner is disliked by an overwhelming majority of voters, but, because the field of candidates was so large, the winner simply was able to get the largest number of votes? The POTUS has to be able to govern the entire nation, and the US is a large nation with a very diverse population.
I think the legislative branch of government is also getting outdated. Two senators per state seems very outdated. Why not 4 or 5? 435 members of Congress seems far too small to get anything done.
I'm not so sure that adding bodies is a good way to increase efficiency...
to me, it would just add more chatter to the discourse.
The EC insures that all states have a vote in electing the President, if it were just up to majority vote then the POTUS could be elected before the western states had a chance to vote. Seeing's how 58% of the U.S. population lives east of the Mississippi River, hypothetically the POTUS could be elected without the vote of the western half of the country. This would be how democracy works, and the U.S. is not a democracy, we are a Constitutional Representative Republic.
There is enough corruption in the voting process in this country that a close election would be a nightmare. A real nightmare that would extend way beyond those two cases in the past. Note that close elections happen more than people realize.
I personally like the Congressional District vote. Both Washington, Arizona, and California have banned gerrymandering in how they set up the voting districts. Voters in other states just need to vote for people that will get rid of gerrymandering.
Democrats don't like the Congressional District vote since currently it does not favor them. However, all things change and in the future it probably will favor them. Political parties just morph and change into whatever they think will keep them in power.
Can you better explain this for me please?
I don't see how it makes a practical difference.
Take California with 53 districts and 55 EC votes. Under your proposal if the 53 districts vote 27/26 the 2 additional Senatorial EC votes go with the 27. And if the Senators are from different parties, that could cause no end of trouble.
Your proposal seems more symbolic than practical. Would some/all sates be required to have an uneven number of districts to prevent a tie that would render the two Senatorial votes superfluous, if they had to be split?
Looks like there are about 20 states with 254 EC votes that have an even number of districts.
Under the current scenario, congressional districts are irrelevant. If Candidate A gets 50.001 percent of the overall statewide vote in California, he wins all 55 electoral votes. And the 49.999 percent of the voters who voted for Candidate B get nothing.
Under my plan, the vote would be tallied by congressional district, though it could just as easily be determined the percentage of the overall vote for each candidate. If Candidate A won 27 districts, and also won the overall statewide vote, and Candidate B won 26 of them, then Candidate A would win 29 electoral votes (1 for each of the 27 districts, plus the 2 statewide electors for having won the overall statewide vote) and Candidate B would win 26 electoral votes.
It would not make any difference if there were an even number of districts. My own state of Maryland has 8 districts, 7 of which are represented by Democrats and 1 by a Republican. (We can thank gerrymandering for that lopsided result, but that's an argument for another thread.) Let's pretend that the voters cast their votes for president in exactly the same way as they did for their congressman. In this case, the Democrat would get 9 electoral votes (1 for each of the 7 districts he won, plus the 2 statewide votes) and the Republican would get 1. In real life, the voting is not so lopsided, and the Republican candidate could expect to earn 2 or even 3 electoral votes in Maryland.
Also, remember that the 2 statewide electoral votes are analogous to the fact that each state has 2 senators. Both of those votes would go to whoever won the overall statewide vote, regardless of the margin and regardless of how each district voted. The only way these two electors would be split is if there was an exact, to-the-last-man tie in the statewide vote.
As it stands now, Republicans basically concede California and New York and Democrats basically concede Texas. Just imagine if those states awarded their electoral votes proportionately; you would see the candidates compete throughout the nation, not just in a handful of battleground states. And the people's votes would count far more than they do now.
I'm not a fan of the lopsided leverage that certain swing states get (like Florida) but with total vote then you have the large urban centers calling most of the shots and that's a pitiful lack of diversity of input on the national stage.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
