Is the Electoral College Flawed and if So How do We Change It? (house of representatives, Congress)
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In the past nine months since the election we have hard that the electoral college is flawed. Two out of the last five elections saw a different popular vote than the electoral vote, that is simple to understand. But is it a symptom of the system and we should just leave it or should we fix the system? And if we chose to fix it, what do we do?
I say yes. It let's only 10% of the voting populous truly decide the president since they live in swing states. If you live outside of a swing state, what is the use in voting? My suggestion, tie electoral votes to the state's popular vote. So you win 60% of state's popular vote, you get 60% of the votes. For states with 5 votes, that would be 3 votes going to a given candidate.
As I understand it the electoral college was formed by our founding fathers and our country had a very small population. There has been talk to get rid of it for years but it doesn't happen.
It depends on whether the nation wants to change the fundamental nature of the United States, specifically, whether this is a union of semi-autonomous states as originally created or a single entity with mere organizational divisions.
It was created as a union of semi-autonomous states. As such, there are actually no "national" elections constitutionally. All elections are at state level or below.
In presidential elections, as defined by the constitution, state citizens vote for the person their state desires to be president.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, in that in most cases state residency creates more common interests than other kinds of associations.
The only reason "swing" states exist is because there is an ongoing conflict of interests within that state. IMO, that's an internal problem that should be resolved within the state, not by jury-rigging at the federal level. I don't think it's necessarily a good thing for one group in a state to effectively band with people outside the state to override the interests of others in that state.
IOW, I'd say, "Y'all folks in Florida need to work out your issues on your own."
States that are internally unified in their common interests should not be penalized for being so. Nor is there any injustice to political minorities in such states--that's how democracy is supposed to work.
Last edited by Ralph_Kirk; 08-07-2017 at 11:23 AM..
If you read about the discussions the framers of the constitution had on this subject you will come away with an understanding of just why it is the way it is. It took them over a month to come up with the electoral college system (it wasn't called the electoral college) and there was a lot of heated debates over this. The first suggestion was a purely democratic vote, that was shot down because it allowed the largest population centers to dictate to the rest of the country on matters that effected the Union as a whole. Then they toyed around with the idea of having congress pick the POTUS, but this could lead to collusion within congress and again the Union would suffer, so, in short, the electoral system was adopted.
The framers didn't like the idea of political parties choosing the POTUS and seeing how the States created the Union, the selection of the president would be left up to the states and the voters in the states. Each state would have equal representation because each state had 2 senators, and the people would have representation based on their states number of representatives. This worked very, until political parties got their fingers into the system.
Prior to the 17 amendment the only federal office that was elected by democratic vote was the House of Representatives, this was done for a reason because they represent the People, and were expected to make sure the central government worked for the people. Senators were appointed by the States, because they represent the State, and were expected to do the job of running the Union. One has to remember, we are a limited democracy and a Representative Constitutional Republic.
It depends on whether the nation wants to change the fundamental nature of the United States, specifically, whether this is a union of semi-autonomous states as originally created or a single entity with mere organizational divisions.
It was created as a union of semi-autonomous states. As such, there are actually no "national" elections constitutionally. All elections are at state level or below.
In presidential elections, as defined by the constitution, state citizens vote for the person their state desires to be president.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, in that in most cases state residency creates more common interests than other kinds of associations.
The only reason "swing" states exist is because there is an ongoing conflict of interests within that state--it's not clear to me that should not be considered an internal problem that should be resolved by measures at the federal level. I don't think it's necessarily a good thing for one group in a state to effectively band with people outside the state to override the interests of others in that state.
IOW, I'd say, "Y'all folks in Florida need to work out your issues on your own."
The problem with the idea that the states pick the president is if a state's system is flawed, it effects 49 other states. See Florida and the hanging Chad ballot from 2000. Hundreds if not thousands of votes were not counted due to chads. The difference between Bush and Gore in Florida was 0.0092%, that is in the thousands if not hundreds of votes that were cancelled. The state had issues and truly effected all 50 states. Tell me is that fair?
I would say the proportional electoral vote I suggest is a best of all worlds. Swing states are demphasozed and states like Texas, Arizona, California and New York might be visited by other parties to get out the vote rather than skipping them for battlegrounds.
No it wouldn't. Each man gets one vote. And all those individual votes add up to a majority of votes nationwide.
I 100% agree. I also think that the party system should be abolished and "individuals" with individual ideas should run. The party system divides the nation and then the electoral college seems to divide it even more. Just tally up the votes nationwide and whoever has the most wins.
Location: New Jersey, originally from America's Dairyland
23 posts, read 17,865 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mkpunk
I say yes. It let's only 10% of the voting populous truly decide the president since they live in swing states. If you live outside of a swing state, what is the use in voting? My suggestion, tie electoral votes to the state's popular vote. So you win 60% of state's popular vote, you get 60% of the votes. For states with 5 votes, that would be 3 votes going to a given candidate.
I've often thought a system like this may be a good idea, but states decide how to allocate their electoral votes and there is very little incentive for a state to adopt such a system.
A solid red or blue state will almost always have the state government controlled by the dominant party*, so they would not want to adopt a system that would allow the opposing party a portion of the state's electoral votes. For example, if California, which is generally a Blue state at the presidential level and where the Democrats control the Governor's office and both houses of the state legislature, awarded their votes proportionally, the Republican presidential candidate could end up with a good 20 of the state's 55 electoral votes.
Swing states also have little incentive to switch to such a system**, since it would make only a few of their electoral votes competitive instead of all of them. For example, I am originally from Wisconsin, which is very much a swing state and has 10 electoral votes. If Wisconsin used a proportional system, the split would almost always be 5-5 or maybe 6-4 in a few cases. A swing state would be unlikely to do this because it would reduce their national influence and remove the incentive for parties and presidential candidates to pander to them (consider how much of recent presidential campaigns has focused on issues most pertinent to places like Ohio and Pennsylvania).***
So there isn't much incentive for a state, whether Red, Blue, or Swing, to switch to such a system. For something like you are proposing, there would probably have to be an amendment to the U.S. Constitution
*One exception to this is that until recently there were some red states, such as West Virginia and much of the south, where the Democrats are often or usually in power at the state level, so they may have had an incentive to switch to such a system. However these Democrats were and are generally more conservative than the nationwide party, so they may have supported Republicans at the presidential level. Those days are pretty much over anyway, most of those Democrats have either been voted out of office or switched parties and the South and West Virginia are more solidly "red" now.
**An exception to this was before the 2012 election, some Republicans in Pennsylvania (which is a swing state but where the Republicans at that time held the Governorship and both houses of the State Legislature), proposed switching to a system that would award two electoral votes to the statewide winner, and one to the winner in each Congressional District. This is the System Maine and Nebraska use. At that point, the Democratic candidate had won Pennsylvania in the last 5 presidential elections, usually by very small margins, so such a scheme would have given Romney a significant share of the states electoral votes. Actually, because the Republicans had total control of the state government after the 2010 Census, they were able to gerrymander the congressional districts in their favor so Romney would have won most of the states electoral votes.
***In my opinion, this is one of the biggest problems with the electoral college: the fact that it gives outsize influence to a few states, and generally gives rural areas outsize influence.
I say keep it because it represents the original intents of the founders of the nation. It's interesting to see people musing over what they would replace it with, but nobody who matters cares what we think. If our current system is replaced any time soon it will be replaced by a system designed by lobbyists and crony capitalists and would be an even bigger disaster than what some people think we have currently.
I don't want to see any constitutional conventions, constitutional amendments or radical changes to our system happening right now. I don't trust the current corrupt ruling class to come up with anything better. Maybe in 50 or 100 years we'll have a more mature and principled set of leaders that we can trust to mold our future in a way that would benefit the people instead of the establishment.
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