Posted on 02/29/2008 4:38:12 PM PST by LurkedLongEnough
[You will find Democrats support it. Large cities with millions of people will control all presidential races if there is no electoral college]
Absolutely, and therefore most of the small red states would not even bother to votes as the states with the largest cities would determine the outcome of elections.
Nah. Eliminating the EC would place way too much emphasis on the densely populated large cities which are heavily liberal.
Here we go again.
Proof of the superiority of the Electoral College.
That's their nature ~ can't be changed.
If Connecticut wants to disenfranchise itself by abdicating their rights in the Electoral College, so be it. I seriously doubt that other small states will go along with it.
Ditto. Leave the electoral college alone.
GREAT article. Here’s the money part of it:
...To figure out these probabilities, Natapoff devised his own model of a national electorate—a more realistic model, he thought, than the ones the quoted experts were always using. Almost always, he found, individual voting power is higher when funneled through districts—such as states—than when pooled in one large, direct election. It is more likely, in other words, that your one vote will determine the outcome in your state and your state will then turn the outcome of the electoral college, than that your vote will turn the outcome of a direct national election. A voter therefore, Natapoff found, has more power under the current electoral system.
Why worry how easily one vote can turn an election, so long as each voter has equal power? One person, one vote—that’s all the math anyone needs to know in a simple, direct election. Natapoff agrees that voters should have equal power. “The idea,” he says, “is to give every voter the largest equal share of national voting power possible.” Here’s a classic example of equal voting power: under a tyranny, everyone’s power is equal to zero. Clearly, equality alone is not enough. In a democracy, individuals become less vulnerable to tyranny as their voting power increases.
what they’re saying is, had popular vote counted, W would have never been up for re-election in ‘04 as he would have lost in ‘00..
this is all well and good UNTIL a Republican wins the popular vote, but the Dem would have won the electoral college..THEN we’ll see a scream to go back to the way it was..
The Connecticut guy doesn’t know that his statement is completely false. If it was popular vote only then the candidates would only campaign in New York, California, Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania and Ohio. The rest would be ignored. The Electoral College is what gets states like Connecticut any attention from the campaigns what so ever. It doesn’t matter what the people or even an indvidual state says the only way to get rid of the Electoral College is to pass an Amendment to the Constitution of the United States which requires 2/3 of each house of the Congress and then a majority vote of the legislatures of 3/4 of the States.
Ravenstar
There would be only one way I would ever support this. Purple dye on the finger.
ALL voter rolls get purged and everyone has to re-register to vote.
Voter fraud then becomes a crime punishable by life in prison.
Or even better. Vote by county. You win the county you get 1 vote. Whoever has the most, wins.
I wanted to attend the Electoral College, but I can’t afford the tuition.
But we would probably have had very different candidates nominated too and a much different campaign strategy. Does anyone really think Al Gore would have been the VP nominee in 1992 if not for the fact that the DemocRATS needed a ticket that could pick off a few states in their weakest region, so they ran a ticket with two southerners. Al Gore still hoped to pick off a few southern states in 2000 as the presidential candidate, but two terms as VP where showed his true colors helped kill off support in the south. If Gore had merely won his home state, he would have won the election.
The whole process of nominating presidential candidates is centered around trying to attract votes from as many states as possible not by racking up huge majorities in just a few states. Using a sports example, college football teams don't get ranked in the BCS based on the number of points they rack up against inferior teams. So what if Nebraska could put up 80+ points against Akron. That doesn't tell you whether they could beat USC.
You would have to get a constitutional amendment through in order to get rid of the electoral college. It will never happen-thankfully.
Because they are idiots. You can’t take something static and throw in a dynamic without recalculating the outcome. If we would have had a popular vote system instead of the EC, the candidates would have campaigned differently and states that went deep blue might not have bee so blue. The result would have been completely different.
Take some of the most liberals states where many republicans don’t bother to vote because they know that their state will go to the ‘Rats and what difference does it make if it is 65-35 or 66-34? Instead if we had a popular vote, people might be encouraged to get out and vote knowing that their vote went to the national total.
Also, the candidates would campaign in more in the most populous states and pay little attention to smaller states. However, every vote would count from every state.
Liberals make the mistake of thinking in static terms. They thought that when they passed the Luxury Tax, money would come pouring into the coffers. Instead it destroyed the luxury boat building industry in the US and generated very little revenue. They also cannot see how LOWERING taxes increases revenue even though they have seen it time after time. Well, maybe they CAN see that lowering taxes increases revenue. They just can’t stand it when someone makes money they they don’t get.
Just like they couldn’t see that giving people money to make ethanol would drive up the price of corn, which caused farmers to plant more corn, taking other less profitable grains out of production (and causing THEM in turn to rise as supply falls), and causing feed grain to rise and ultimately affects your wallet at the grocery store.
Idiots.
Not only is her statement incorrect as to 2004 but she is counting on changing the rules after the 2000 election. If everyone knew before the election that it would be by popular vote they would have voted differently.
That’s like saying after the world series is over the team with the fewest runs should have been the winner if the rules were different. If the rules were different the game would have been played differently too.
Typical lefty.
Yeah that’s right, let’s have just the popular vote and have California an New York elect our presidents. The heck with the rest of the country and think how much it would save on campaigns since you don’t have to travel there and you can ignore everybody in flyover country.
Actually, what some of these idiots are thinking of is having a bunch of like-minded liberal dominated states cooperatively pass similar or identical laws to apportion their electoral votes in a way that will favor the liberal presidential candidate. They won’t need a Constitutional amendment to take this route.
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