Posted on 08/28/2004 11:34:36 PM PDT by Former Military Chick
When Republican delegates nominate their presidential candidate this week, they will be doing it in a city where residents who support George Bush have, for all practical purposes, already been disenfranchised. Barring a tsunami of a sweep, heavily Democratic New York will send its electoral votes to John Kerry and both parties have already written New York off as a surefire blue state. The Electoral College makes Republicans in New York, and Democrats in Utah, superfluous. It also makes members of the majority party in those states feel less than crucial. It's hard to tell New York City children that every vote is equally important - it's winner take all here, and whether Senator Kerry beats the president by one New York vote or one million, he will still walk away with all 31 of the state's electoral votes.
The Electoral College got a brief spate of attention in 2000, when George Bush became president even though he lost the popular vote to Al Gore by more than 500,000 votes. Many people realized then for the first time that we have a system in which the president is chosen not by the voters themselves, but by 538 electors. It's a ridiculous setup, which thwarts the will of the majority, distorts presidential campaigning and has the potential to produce a true constitutional crisis. There should be a bipartisan movement for direct election of the president.
The main problem with the Electoral College is that it builds into every election the possibility, which has been a reality three times since the Civil War, that the president will be a candidate who lost the popular vote. This shocks people in other nations who have been taught to look upon the United States as the world's oldest democracy. The Electoral College also heavily favors small states. The fact that every one gets three automatic electors - one for each senator and a House member - means states that by population might be entitled to only one or two electoral votes wind up with three, four or five.
The majority does not rule and every vote is not equal - those are reasons enough for scrapping the system. But there are other consequences as well. This election has been making clear how the Electoral College distorts presidential campaigns. A few swing states take on oversized importance, leading the candidates to focus their attention, money and promises on a small slice of the electorate. We are hearing far more this year about the issue of storing hazardous waste at Yucca Mountain, an important one for Nevada's 2.2 million residents, than about securing ports against terrorism, a vital concern for 19.2 million New Yorkers. The political concerns of Cuban-Americans, who are concentrated in the swing state of Florida, are of enormous interest to the candidates. The interests of people from Puerto Rico scarcely come up at all, since they are mainly settled in areas already conceded as Kerry territory. The emphasis on swing states removes the incentive for a large part of the population to follow the campaign, or even to vote.
Those are the problems we have already experienced. The arcane rules governing the Electoral College have the potential to create havoc if things go wrong. Electors are not required to vote for the candidates they are pledged to, and if the vote is close in the Electoral College, a losing candidate might well be able to persuade a small number of electors to switch sides. Because there are an even number of electors - one for every senator and House member of the states, and three for the District of Columbia - the Electoral College vote can end in a tie. There are several plausible situations in which a 269-269 tie could occur this year. In the case of a tie, the election goes to the House of Representatives, where each state delegation gets one vote - one for Wyoming's 500,000 residents and one for California's 35.5 million.
The Electoral College's supporters argue that it plays an important role in balancing relations among the states, and protecting the interests of small states. A few years ago, this page was moved by these concerns to support the Electoral College. But we were wrong. The small states are already significantly overrepresented in the Senate, which more than looks out for their interests. And there is no interest higher than making every vote count.
Making Votes Count: Editorials in this series remain online at nytimes.com/makingvotescount.
"My thoughts? Open this area of the Constitution up for actual change, and it'll be a disaster. I don't want to have any sort of bipartisan discussion about the EC issue until the Democrats lose this next election by a wide margin and realize they have to clean house. In fact, I will resist discussion of changes to the EC even if Democrats have won with it. The EC is one of our Founding Fathers' most brilliant ideas, and I am wary of anyone who wants to tinker with it."
-- what about the merits of the idea?
I can and I'd live with it. I'd hope that it inspires more grass-roots attention to local politics.
If California were to be split up, it would have to be into several viable states -- it can't just be split up. So, how do we split California into smaller states that can still survive on their own?
How about:
1. South California: Coastal San Diego, Los Angeles, north up to, but not including Monterey. They get the naval base and the entertainment business. Capital: Los Angeles. Political leaning: mixed.
2. North California: Coastal Monterey, San Francisco Bay Area, Napa, north to Redding and the Oregon Border. They get liberal fantasyland. Capital: Berkeley. Political leaning: Hard Left Democrat.
3. Sierra: Eastern mountainous region that runs up the entire eastern border of California. They get water, tourism, Yosemite, Tahoe, winter skiing. Capital: Sacramento. Political leaning: Conservative Republican.
-PJ
These are exciting ideas, fellow FReeper!
-PJ
Totally agree. California, taken alone, would be the fifth largest economy in the world. I do not think the founders of this country intended for a single state to have this much power over the rest of the nation. Splitting it into three states makes perfect sense. Of course, Texas and New York would need to be split in two to keep it consistent. Florida is getting close to needing to be split in two.
The Electoral College is great. Otherwise, candidates would be forced to campaign only in big cities, totally ignoring rural areas and sparsely populated states.
Yes, they would care less about the people who hold onto traditional values. But that's what the perfumed princes and the Boston brahmin want.
So who's going to violate a state's sovereignty and split the state in two? Only the state itself could decide that. But even that wouldn't work: it would encourage EVERY state to infinitely divide and increase their Senate representation.
<< The Electoral College makes Republicans in New York, and Democrats in Utah, superfluous. >>
Bull$hit!
The Electoral College ensures that the voters of every one of the fifty sovereign states that own operate and comprise these united STATES, gets his say in who will occupy the chief executive's office -- be, as it were, chairman of the federal board.
<< .... in 2000, when George Bush became president even though he lost the popular vote to Al Gore by more than 500,000 votes .... >>
More bull$hit!
The total number of votes cast for Gore by criminal aliens and other ineligible miscreants by far exceeded 500,000 -- and President Bush won where it counts -- and by 38 states to 12 and, geographically, in 81% of the country, populated by 143 million Americans, to Gore's 19% and 129 million.
The Electoral College is one of the Founding Fathers' very best ideas!
See post #81: Alexander Hamilton's treatise on the Electoral College...
However one may think about the EC - it is definitely more important to get the voting procedure clean! It´s unbearable for the United States that still dead people votes count or that the list of people who are uneligible to vote (like criminals) is hidden from the public in many states. We don´t have these problems in Europe and therefore consider your voting procedure as inferior. You have too many posssibilities to manipulate elections (and I blame the blue and red side for that). I know you will dismiss it, but being registered from birth till death by the city you live in, and bearing a national ID with your address on it has advantages. We receive a notification a few weeks before our election by mail, then we can send it back and ask for a mail vote or we go to the ballots, show our ID or passport, our names on the voter list is marked and we get our vote. When the ballots close, the number of marked names is counted and must be identical with the number of votes. Then the helping hands in the office count the votes - and we take care that at least one of the two big parties is present. With that easy procedure, we never had any claims that there could be a fraud. Oh, and the right to vote can be taken away by a courts decision, but it must be said in the sentence, and for max. 5 years. This (our) system is different to the US -and ... that´s a point why many many people put the finger on you.
The Times' editorital does not answer the one critical question: why should American citizerns entrust the Presidency to the voters of the most populous states?
That would be the consequence of electing the President
by popular vote.
I would vote for keeping the Electoral Collage as it is - and as the founding fathers wished it to be. It is the last vestige of the concept of the united States of America as opposed to the United states of America. It was bad enough when our Senators were changed from representing the States to become nothing more than another House of Representatives.
The election of the President of the united States is too important to leave entirely up to the mob.
California is insane, that monster needs to be split into three states.
Without the EC, candidates would just focus on NY, CA, TX, FL and a handful of coastal mega states.
At least it would have spared us clinton, who won with 42 percent of the popular vote.
Hello .30Carbine! We agree on something: the EC is a superb institution, and Hamilton does indeed explain it well, quoting Alexander Pope: "For forms of government let fools contest -- That which is best administered is best."
Hamilton was also a proponent of the right for individual citizens to keep and bear military-grade weapons.
He was also a defender of the state's neutrality with respect to religious beliefs writing in Federalist 51, " In a free government the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity of sects."
Then explain to the children that the electoral college makes every vote equally importatnt.
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