Posted on 10/25/2004 6:06:38 PM PDT by farmfriend
I love these people who think they know better than the founders how the constitution should be today. Leave it alone, it saved us from Gore and so it must be OK. General elections can be like the Jerry Springer show and people sometimes are as dumb as bricks, the Electoral college was instituted to save us from ourselves. This is a liberal ploy because they know their stick isn't selling as well anymore.
The reputable analysis (according to Dick Morris) is that one can not win the EV by any plausible scenario with a PV deficit of more thn 0.7%.
The House would object to a close state and change the vote. Also, electors would be forced to change their vote, potentially even before that.
it's www.realclearpolitics.com.
I do agree with removing the "human electors" portion and making the electoral vote automatic, but that's it.
Without the electoral college, Los Angeles, San Fransisco, NYC and other blue metropolises would decide the election for all.
Don't let ABC, AP, CBS, CNN, FOX, NBC
give the election to Kerry like they did Gore
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1255413/posts
There are too many problems with the voting systems for this to be feasible. The electoral college, while not ideal, localizes and isolates vote fraud while giving the states most similar to the country at large a larger say.
Bzzztt!! Wrong!!
Then gerrymandering congressional districts becomes even more important than it is. Then redistricting battles every ten years would make the current battles look like picnics.
Really, really bad idea.
You could write this article almost every election. The fact that it COULD have happened in 1896, 1916, 1948 and 1976 (and presumably 1960 and some other close elections) seems to indicate that this is a fairly common possibility.
I'm not sure I like all these articles that claim that every time the Electoral College is at odds with the popular vote, Democracy is imperiled. The United States is SUPPOSED to be a collection of sovereign governments. The Electoral College was DESIGNED to INFREQUENTLY choose the President. It was a compromise from a more parliamentarian way of choosing an executive.
One could just as easily argue that every time the President is not the same party as the Speaker Of The House that democracy is thwarted.
I recall that someone did this analysis for the 2000 election finding that the result of the electoral college was pretty close to the current system. Of course with the 2000 election you would have Bush v. Gore on a national scale as the candidates tried to pick up electoral votes district by district.
Then the Electoral College as a fraud containment device will have worked.
-PJ
Repeal the Seventeenth Amendment and I'd go along with assigning electors by district.
I think the good professor forgot that clinton also was opposed by a majority of the American citizens.
Legitimacy crisis? Sure hope Shyster Stuntz doesn't teach Constitutional Law.
I was discussing this subject with a Russian a few days ago and she said, "I really wish we had the electoral voting like the U.S. because all the elections are governed by the voters in Moscow. They do not know or care what we want in Kazakhstan or anywhere else..(paraphrased)"
Nothing. Although I'm a Bush partisan, should Kerry wins the EC but lose the "popular vote" (which is meaningless) by 3 or 4 (or 25!) million, I will say Congratulations President Kerry and may your four years be successful and prosperous ones.
Why, what would the author's reaction be?
But it can't be good for the country to have something America has never seen before: two consecutive Presidents who lost the popular vote. One of them by a lot.
I think it's perfectly fine for the country to abide by its Constitution. The possibility of having a President lose the "popular vote" only comes about because our two parties are so close and compete so fiercely for the marginal voter. This is what one would expect in a winner-take-all system that is functioning properly.
Electoral-college victories based on 60-40 or more "popular vote" splits wouldn't necessarily bode well for our country. It would mean something was wrong if one or the other party started racking up a 60-40 or more coalition.
Even in 1976, the art of opinion polling was sufficiently imprecise that neither campaign was likely to guess that Ohio and Mississippi would hold the keys to the kingdom. That ignorance was good for American democracy. It meant that candidates had to run national campaigns.
Hmm. I'm not so sure why that's so "good". Consider the current situation, candidates are able to identify a handful of states whose populations are close to 50-50. So they focus on those states' concerns. What's wrong with that? It seems to me that this provides incentives for people who live in one-party states to stop being so monolithic. No candidate will care about California or Texas so long as they vote monolithically. This suppresses the power of the single-minded blocs in those states. Isn't that a good thing?
We all understand this logic when it's applied to black voters, don't we? That blacks have suffered by voting such knee-jerk Democrat tickets every election? Well, same thing here. If states want to be power players they need to moderate and move away from extreme loyalty to one party or the other. Seems healthy to me.
That isn't good for American democracy. We've always known that the Electoral College allows minority presidents. But today, it virtually guarantees them. Over time, as polling and communication become more precise, candidates' electoral vote totals will correlate less and less with the nationwide popular vote. We could have a string of seemingly illegitimate presidencies.
Virtually no sentence written here is true. It's good for American "democracy" (I prefer "democratic republicanism"). The EC doesn't "virtually guarantee" minority presidents at all. The EV totals will not correlate "less and less" with popular vote (decorrelation has a limit). And no minority president is "illegitimate", and what does "seemingly" mean? Seemingly to whom? Not me.
First, get rid of the electors: human electors are a disaster waiting to happen, an invitation to bribery, fraud, or simple stupidity. Just give each candidate the number of electoral votes he earns on election day.
I'm ok with this.
Second, make each state do what Nebraska and Maine do: give one vote to the winning candidate in each congressional district, and two votes to the candidate who wins the state.
AFAIK any state may do this if they want. Few states want, for understandable power-politics reasons. To force them to, I guess, would require a Constitutional amendment. Sorry no.
It's not perfect, but it's a pretty good way to make sure that Presidents have broad, geographically diverse support without having the election turn on one or two states.
No, it's a good way to incentivize Presidents to focus all their energies on population centers. "New York, Chicago and LA areas" do not constitute a broad, geographically diverse support base.
It would work even better if the Supreme Court -- where are activist judges when you need them? -- would ban partisan gerrymandering, so we could have more close districts.
Gerrymandering is bad and all but that's a different issue.
America was lucky to escape Presidents Bryan, Hughes, and Dewey.
??? I don't get this part. What reason has the author to think those guys would have been all that bad compared to their opponents?
In the meantime, I'm rooting for a landslide.
Well ok we agree on something. :-)
"Without the electoral college, Los Angeles, San Fransisco, NYC and other blue metropolises would decide the election for all."
You betcha...that would be the end of this nation.
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