A dollar short and an hour late. There is a whole thread here that has discussed that. That idea is actually bogus. The large states still have domination of the electoral college just as they dominate the House. In practice today, the electoral college is dominated by a few "swing" states. Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania seem to *always* be key states.
-- Rick C
No one said anything about "big" states. For this plan to work only requires a majority of the electoral votes by *any* combination of states. It is not being pushed on anyone by the feds. They are signing up to it.
Besides, these states don't *pick* the president. They simply respond to the will of the populous. Then there is the fact that there is *no* protection of small states in the electoral college. I don't know why you can't understand that.
-- Rick C
The idea isn't bogus--take that away, and no candidate would bother ever going to New Hampshire, Delaware, Vermont, or any other number of states.
Sure, big states still have out-sized influence, but this way little states get some say too.
Cheers, James Arthur
Rick's started a reasonable discussion on a timely topic--where's the harm in teaching him?
Only one of us knows everything without studying(*), the rest of us have to learn &/or be taught.
(*) Bill Sloman :-)
Cheers, James Arthur
I find the varied and conflicting issues discussed to be interesting. Some say the electoral college to exist to prevent the larger states from having an unfair advantage in the presidential election. Here you are suggesting that if Senators are chosen by popular vote (which they are now days) the Senate has no purpose. Is it not clear that the Senate was the primary means of balancing power between the states?
The role of electors in balancing power between the states is minimal. In Congress each house must approve a bill for it to pass. This makes the Senate the great equalizer of state power. In the electoral college the elector count is determined by the sum of the Senators and Representatives for each state. This swamps out the balancing of the state's power in choosing a President. Worse, it is all usurped by the state's practice of assigning *all* their electoral votes to the popular winner in that state.
The electoral college is broken. It has resulted in choosing a president with a lower number of popular votes than the other candidate twice in the last five elections. I have always felt this is wrong from the time I first learned about it in school.
In addition, but a separate topic, is the way our candidates are chosen by the parties. Both parties use goofy ways to choose candidates. There needs to be reform of this as well.
-- Rick C
On Sat, 12 Nov 2016 09:08:27 -0800 (PST), snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com wrote: [snip]
Indeed! I figure I'll know I'm near/at death when I stop learning. ...Jim Thompson
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I'm not sure what your point is or how it relates to the electoral college. The "difference" *is* significant in that it selected a President who did not have the largest popular vote. I think you are saying the vote of many people doesn't matter so why does it matter if the election reflects that?
I don't follow that at all. This system is exactly one that allows any given candidate to be elected by focusing on a few select states. It focuses the result of the election of a relatively few votes. In 2000 the election was decided by 537 votes in Florida. A legal battle was fought for a month to determine the outcome. Clearly a little ballot stuffing would have changed the result of the 2000 Presidential election. It would be *much* less likely that the outcome of a nationwide popular vote would be decided by just 537 votes.
-- Rick C
You mean like very little attention is paid to Wyoming, Montana and Idaho now? Iowa and New Hampshire get attention by having early polls for the primaries. Otherwise they would be ignored with the current system. That's the point. The two extra electors mean diddly squat for the little states when bigger states have 55, 38 and 29 votes.
-- Rick C
True, the Senate also has the purpose of balancing power between states, but that's a much less important pupose. The states need representation. When it comes to something like unfunded mandates, the people won't take a stand against it, but state legislators who have to pay for it out of their budgets would.
That's actually a very good thing. It makes no difference if you get
51% or 99%. You get the same number of electors. A popular vote would enable an extremist to win with 90% of the people in a region, and some support elsewhere, but when 90% provides no advantage over 51% the candidate needs more than a little support in a variety of states. He needs broad appeal. That makes it harder for an extremist to get elected.Bill Clinton won with less than 50% both times, and the Perot vote was more conservative than liberal. Without Perot he probably would have lost. That's more significant, and potentially much more significant, because he won with much less than 50% the first time. You could fix that with a run-off election, but I don't think even that is a big problem. The very small discrepancy in popular vs. electoral votes is less significant considering how fickle a lot of people are, making a change of a few percent just signal noise.
I've ranted a lot about how bad the primary system is. Both parties reject their best every time because the people are so completely ignorant they don't know who they're voting for or against. Convention delegates might vote only for establishment candidates but so do the people almost all the time. At least the delegates wouldn't make the really stupid choices like Bill Clinton or Trump, and they wouldn't outright reject Gephardt (first to drop out in 1988), Biden (same in
2008), Giuliani, Kemp, Walker (same in 2016), Webb (same in 2016).
I'm still not following what you are saying. The Senate *is* chosen by popular vote and even the President is not chosen by state legislatures. Where is this "representation" of the state legislatures in the Federal government?
You don't make sense. You say the electoral college requires "broad" support when in fact it puts the election in the hands of only a few states and clearly does elect Presidents who had more people vote for another candidate.
If an extremist candidate can't muster 51% in a few regions to get enough electoral votes how could that extreme candidate ever get the largest number of popular votes?
So you feel it is not important to elect the Presidential candidate with the largest popular support? Maybe we should invalidate all elections where the popular vote is closer than say, 2% and have them draw straws?
You have identified the real problem with elections. People are not well informed enough to properly select representatives. This is clear from the simple fact that the biggest tool a candidate has is commercials which typically contain very little information and are nearly always very biased. Then there is the fact that a nation selected a new President because he said he is going to "Make America Great Again".
-- Rick C
What should they have done?
whereas you want to only trash it as far as the first ammendment?
-- This email has not been checked by half-arsed antivirus software
Popular vote, as the name implies, is about people, not about states.
If the states in the "popular vote cartel"* wanted to subvert will of the other states, they would ignore the popular vote from those states.
All of this is still within the rules of the constitution.
The only reasonable way (that I can see) to protect against this hypothetical abuse is to retire the electroal college and go with a popular election instead.
(*) I just invented this term to mean those states subscribing to "National Popullar Vote". If it has some other incompatible meaning please ignore that.
huh?
By using popular vote it makes votes harder to buy, as the president is elected by the whole nation, not merely by the swing states.
-- This email has not been checked by half-arsed antivirus software
I just got an idea. If the Democrats can convert the small states to Democratic and the large states to Republican, the problem is solved and the Dems win in the EC and will quit bitching.
.
You don't know Democrats very well.
No subsequent constitution has copied that particular feature, so it looks more like a bug. It's there because America puts it's president in charge of the executive, and leaves him (so far) there for fours years unless he does something impeachable.
This is another feature that also looks like a bug. In every other advanced industrial country, the guy with executive power answers to the house of representatives ( or it's equivalent) and can be thrown out at any time if a "vote of confidence" is lost.
Everybody else over-represents the smaller states in the Senate, and uses that to keep the smaller states happy. It works.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
New York still has rent-controlled apartments. It's odd.
Sydney has "strata title" and we own the flat we live in. The Netherlands has a different system, but we own the flat we live in when we go back.
The electoral college isn't the only primitive part of the US legal system.
Dream on.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
A more fundamental question would be about hanging onto an antiquated constitution when there are whole lot of field-tested improved versions out there to be adopted.
You may keep a horse and buggy for sentimental reasons, but you'd still drive a car (or take a train) to get anywhere - both options that have become available since the US constitution was first put together.
The founding tax evaders over-restricted the right to vote - which was a mistake, and you have corrected that. There were other errors that are equally in need of correction.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
Jamie doesn't know what he's talking about, as usual.
Jamie's idea of logical argument is a painfully pitiful approximation to the real thing - which he finds "incoherent" because he can't follow it.
Knowing how to spell "existence" would be one way that Jamie could make a very small step along what - for him - would be a very long road to that state.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
How about we just go with the popular vote and no one has *any* cause to complain? Well, I guess there will always be some who want to complain.
-- Rick C
Is it those rational liberals rioting in the streets? Did you notice all the problems we had with conservatives when Obama was elected, twice. Nope, no property damage, no traffic disrupted, it's just the whiny liberals that disrupted civil society.
Mikek
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