Villainous Company

Why have Presidential elections at all?

Here's a notion: the Legislature could also "direct" that the electors be appointed under a pledge to award their votes to the Republican (or, alternatively, the Democratic) candidate, whoever he might be. Same logic, right?

One might say that this isn't that big a deviation from what the Founders intended. They intended Senators to be elected by the state legislature, after all: and the legislators are directly elected by the state's population.

There's no reason the President shouldn't be appointed in the same way; and, since the party that controls the legislature in a state is very likely to be the party that would win a statewide popular vote for President, it would probably not even change the outcomes of the Presidential contest to do things this way.

We could save a whole lot of money, and... what do you mean, you just like having elections?

Heh.

Actually, this could be very funny. The movement for the elimination of the electoral college is largely a Blue State thing. So, they could get these laws passed in California and New York, maybe a few other places. The Red States would carry on as they are.

If we'd run the 2004 election in that way, Bush would have won almost all the electoral votes: all those Blue States would have been obligated to vote for 'the national popular vote winner,' i.e., Bush. Kerry, however, if he'd won the popular vote would still have lost the election: the Red States wouldn't be obligated to vote for him, and the Blue States did anyway.

Well, I see on rereading that they've left themselves an escape hatch -- that they're not obligated to follow through on their principles unless they can win by doing so. How admirable. :)

Thank you.

This is what infuriates me Grim. Why have rules at all?

Why even bother with this annoying thing called a Constitution?

All of a sudden, the people of all fifty states plus the District of Columbia are empowered to elect their President the same way they elect their governors, mayors, senators, and congressmen.

I think I am going to be ill.

I chose to ignore this because it just reeks of being a moonbat attractant.

One of the arguments they advance is that large states that are percieved as "locked up" by one side or the other (largely blue states, I would note) get dissed by the candidates, as they don't need to campaign there, and so, the poor people, feeling left out, won't/don't vote.

All they're doing by this is putting the shoe on the other foot. You'd only need to concentrate on the 11 states in question, period. You could ignore that rest (which is good, because then us Red Staters would have no reason to vote, because we're meaningless anyway... which is what the Blue Staters want.)

I'm reminded of the movie "A Boy and His Dog" where the dog and boy are walking across the wastes of Kansas, the dog quizzing the boy on the Presidents, and the kid responds with Kennedy, Nixon, Ford, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy... obviously, in that world, the Electoral College had been eliminated.

8^)

I have seen this argument bandied about in several different forms, and the option that I actually prefer has the individual states splitting their electoral votes according to the % that the winner got. For example, if a state has 15 electoral votes and a candidate got 66% of the vote that state, he gets 10 electoral votes.
That way, each state is in play, and people like me, who live in NY aren't losing our votes because of the big cities like NYC.

I chose to ignore this because it just reeks of being a moonbat attractant.

Chicken...

Have you ever noticed, though, how all these "creative" moves to "reintroduce democracy" to American political life all involve circumventing the popular vote?

Every single darned one of them involves some kind of tricky manoever that only needs to be implemented because the idea under consideration would never make it if submitted to a general vote by the entire population.

I mean, we could just get rid of the electoral college altogether by amending the Constitution, but they're not sure that enough voters would go for that. So they have to resort to this little manoever to "get around" the rules, all in the name of "democracy". But if the same idea were submitted to a "democratic vote", it would go down in flames.

Who will rid us of this troublesome concept called representative government?

They all forget the reason the system exists, and was written into the law of the land: to make sure small states didn't get trampled wholesale by the large ones.

Back then it was Virginia, now it's CA, NY, FL, TX and all the reset.

As for your problem JontheMechanic, I don't know how you can fix it besides moving out of GFW territory. Come south!

JMarsh, I would move, but I love the weather and my national Guard unit would declare me AWOL.

Besides that, I also signed a 6 year, 15k bonus with them and I would rather not have to pay that back.

Weather? Geez, since I moved north to Atlanta, I've developed a stronger disposition against cold weather. I like it in February on the Bayou when its 60 degrees at 6am! I think it's feasible to transfer guard units, although I never tried it...

Just for the sake of discussion...

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That's exactly right. State legislatures have this power under the Constitution and indeed regularly used that power in the early years. The National Popular Vote proposal suggests that a state choose to use its power to reward the national popular vote winner, thereby making every vote equal.

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This proposal is constitutional. If people don't like it, they can defeat it in the states where it is being discussed (and let's hope that's all 50 states) or they can change the Constitution to prevent it.

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You misunderstand what advocates of a national popular vote argue. They don't focus on state size. It's a travesty for the small states and their people that almost every single one is completely ignored in presidential elections.

You also really misunderstand what it takes to win when every vote counts equally. If you take whole groups of voters for granted and ignore them, they can vote against you. With a national vote every state would get attention.

Think about how President Bush won states like Ohio -- his campaign focused on everyone, including people in rural areas, small towns, the exurbs and his backers in cities. Everyone counts.

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The proposal of a national popular vote has super-majority support in the polls -- it has for decades. We'll see what happens in states, but if there were a national referendum (not that I'm suggesting it), it would win as big as term limits wins.

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Almost every small state doesn't matter these days. No one interested in the presidential race spends a dime on them, not a single voter in most small-state gets polled by a presidential campaign throughout the whole campaign period, etc.

I don't see any reason to think that the proposal isn't Constitutional. I personally think it's wise to have the states, rather than the people, elect the President, just as I think it's wise to have a Senate where the states are all equal and a House where they're not. I like the balances.

I do think you'll find that a movement to have eleven states force a change in how the other 39 states elect the President will generate a backlash. That is apt to go over like a lead balloon, and it will (not incidentally) strengthen the Republican party for structural rather than practical reasons.

The eleven states are the larger Blue States; you can imagine how popular having the Blue States change the game on the Red States will be among Red Staters. You're proposing a gambit that wouldn't likely change the outcomes in most Presidential contests if it succeeded, but will greatly improve Republican fundraising and Republican electoral chances in all 39 non-elite states.

If the point is to elect Democrats, it's not the wisest idea I ever heard. If the point is just to have the popular vote instead of the electoral vote rule -- I see no reason to prefer that, neither ethical nor practical.

As for Presidential candidates ignoring smaller states -- good. The less trouble we have out of meddling politicians, the better. I might well consider voting for a man who ran on the promise of, "If you vote for me, I swear it's the last you'll hear of me for at least three years."

Why don't we just abolish the states all together? We'll just carve up the country into 535 separate Congressional Districts (all Senators would be converted into Congresspersons) and vote direct for the president and your district's favorite son/daughter. Of course, we'd have to redistrict after each census, but we're already very good at making sure that "one man, one vote" is the law of the land. This is how we can ensure those "big states," like Iowa and New Hampshire, won't be able to control who becomes President.

Or better yet, why not just let the Supreme Court decide? Tha way we can go back to watching American Idol in peace.

And, yes, I'm passionate about it.

What the meddlers seem to be ignoring here is that the Founding Fathers did not see pure democracy as an unalloyed good. They saw it as a force that could easily lead to the tyranny of the majority over the minority: something, ironically, that the Democrat Party is always bitching and moaning about, and the influence of which both the Electoral College and the Senate were both designed to mediate.

Yet now that the population of the largely-urban Blue States is the "majority", the DNC is, ironically, all in favor of the tyranny of the majority. How special.

And I never claimed the proposal was unconstitutional; merely that it is an end-run, which it clearly is. The the article admits this by calling it a "finesse' because, in its own words they can't get 2/3 of Congress and 3/4 of the state legislatures to agree).

So this is very much like the filibuster deal, where 40% of the Senate wants to tell the other 60% what they are allowed to vote on even though the Constitution meant for every state to be equally represented in the Senate and theoretically therefore everything should be heard by all the states. But that's not good enough for some in Congress - they have to invent sneaky ways to exercise an outsized amount of power.

And perhaps someone can explain to me exactly how, in this era of mass communications and campaign spending bloat, requiring a candidate to personally visit all 50 states can possibly be a good thing?

This would vastly inflate the cost of a Presidential campaign, way beyond what it currently is now. What a victory for moderation in campaign spending and trying to get lobbying and corruption under control.

And we all know that the vast majority of voters turn out personally to see their candidate speak when he visits their state.... not. They see him or her on TV. Which makes it largely irrelevant whether he is there in person or not.

In an esoteric sense, it would be just dandy if all candidates had to get on a fricking bus and tour this great nation of ours shore to shore. Get out, shake a few hands, actually meet the people they were going to lead. Look out the window and see how Joe Sixpack in flyover land really lives instead of being sequestered in the Jefferson Suite at the Willard Hotel and forced to subsist on a diet of pate fois gras and chilled Laurent-Perrier.

But somehow I don't see that happening. Do you?

It is time for a series of inflammatory statements that will make nobody happy:

1. Notwithstanding my vast respect for the "founders" (or even "The Founders"), I am not sure that their opinions regarding the Electoral College should amount to a hill of beans. Why? Because the Electoral College is but one small element of the broader idea that states were the irreducible elemental unit of American government. This idea was true in 1787 and even 1860, but it was largely destroyed by the Union victory in the Civil War. It took a long time for people to realize this, and "states rights" still stir the hearts of some people, but there have been many changes in our Constitution and its interpretation thereof that have massively reduced the relevance of states in our system (see, e.g., the "incorporation" of the Bill of Rights to burden state legislation, and the federalization of the military). The Electoral College is, in that sense, vestigial. It is the appendix of American government.

2. On the other hand, there is nothing really wrong with the Electoral College, either. While it can occasionally result in the victory of a candidate who has not won the national popular vote, so what? What, a priori, is so sacrosanct about the national popular vote? So while I think that the Electoral College has largely lost its objective value, I don't really see what harm it does.

3. Obviously, the Electoral College looms large as a tactical consideration in any given presidential election cycle. So? For those of us who love the arcania of politics at least as much as the outcome, that just makes it fun. One year Florida is on the bubble, another year Ohio. We should all be relieved that it is never New York, California or, for that matter, Texas.

4. Even if you have a "one man, one vote" fetish, there are far bigger problems with American democracy than the Electoral College. The Senate is a disaster from that perspective, but the one provision of the Constitution that cannot be amended by its terms is the requirement that each state have two, and only two, Senators. More troublingly, the intersection of computers and household census data have perverted the drawing of district lines, so now House races are virtually uncompetitive. If people think the Electoral College is "undemocratic," they should be positively apoplectic over our system for drawing Congressional District lines. Finally, the expansion of powers of the federal courts that began in the "Lochner" era 90 years ago and accelerated dramatically after World War II has meant that a huge proportion of the laws that shape our society are determined by a tiny number of people who are beyond the reach of the voters.

5. There is nothing really wrong with using negotiated settlements to reallocate the power that is granted under the Constitution, as is proposed in the quoted text. On the other hand, they rarely work. For example (as I have written here before), the presidential veto is one of the little mysteries of American constitutional development. Why didn't the Congress decide 200 years ago that it would make an internal compact to override any veto? That simple decision at any point in our history would have significantly shifted the balance of power from the executive to the legislature, and pushed us toward a parliamentary model. It is interesting that it never happened. A different example that has haunted American government at least since the Adams administration is the allocation of war powers. It has never been clear from the text of the Constitution precisely how those powers should be allocated. Instead, it has been the product of an extended negotiation between the president and the Congress that persists to this day.

It is time for a series of inflammatory statements that will make nobody happy...

You see? This is exactly the kind of thing restarts the Cycle of Violence. You bait me with irresponsible G-spot posts (which I high-mindedly resist the temptation to snark at) and I respond with sober, civic-minded expositions on the Electoral College.

*sigh*

Candidly, we are all just biding time until spd rdr wakes up, gets his first cup of coffee, and sees where the discussion has gone since he last checked in.

T-Hawk is right that the Constitution does give quite a bit of room for finesse of this sort. Actually, the more I think about it, the more I really like the idea of having the President elected by the state legislators (and the Senators, too, though that requires repealing th 17th Amendment). There's really a lot to be said for it; and it's just as Constitutional. No more hideous campaigns, and the public -- which by and large cares little about these matters of state -- can just concentrate on only their state and local elections, rather than having to try to understand things they don't care about anyway. If you get those local elections right, the big ones will be settled by the good people you got in at your local level.

Meanwhile, Cassandra said: "Look out the window and see how Joe Sixpack in flyover land really lives instead of being sequestered in the Jefferson Suite at the Willard Hotel and forced to subsist on a diet of pate fois gras and chilled Laurent-Perrier. But somehow I don't see that happening. Do you?"

As a matter of fact, I do remember when that happened. That's why we won't see much more of it.

I like the electoral college, I think it provides a nice little safeguard. Like say for example that it comes to light after an election that the winner has 666 tattooed one his dome. The electoral college could just say "nah, you go to hell".

This system could also be useful in awarding the Heisman trophy. If the Heisman electoral college didn't convene until after the bowl game, then Vince Young would have won and the world wouldn't have to live with the sick feeling that comes with the knowledge that Tommie Frazier came in second in 1995.

Libs would love to get rid of it so blue California & blue NY can call the shots...

That's the funny thing -- it wouldn't even work. Who won the popular vote in 2004? For all the argument about this-or-that district in Ohio, if it'd been a popular vote contest, Bush's win was well above the level of argument.

The population center of the country is moving south and west every day. You should see the housing developments that have been going in around Atlanta, for almost thirty years now.

Even if this was a workable plan, which I doubt, it wouldn't change the direction of things.

I agree with spd.

As if you guys didn't have enough to think about, I had that fourteenth cup of coffee, the result being an parallel assault on the Seventeenth Amendment by the Heigh-ho shock troop.
Sorry, Cass. It's all Grim's fault.

Some day you are going to post a link that works the first time around.

And I am going to drop dead from shock... :)

Someday never comes, Cass.

I see Crckt's gone off the medication again.

It's all just part of that irascible charm that makes you so devastatingly irresistible to the gentle sex.

And would you be nice before I smack you? The sentiment behind your snarkily-expressed opinion was not incompatible with the one which led me to post this in the first place. So I guess Crckt and I can comfort each other in the looney bin.

Well, there are good reasons why we have a REPUBLIC, not a direct democracy.

And there's a good reason why the Electoral College, as well as our elected representatives, form a deliberative, and deliberate, buffer protecting the electorate from acting on passions that may be temporary, inflamed, and myopic.

A direct democracy, wherein public policy or elections are determined by the masses based on emotions or opinions that are temporary, inflamed, and myopic, would most likely lead to confusion, chaos, and anarchy.

Thus, there is absolutely no surprise in my mind why Democrats and other liberals are working behind the scenes to accomplish this.

Their goal is to create enough controversy, crap, confusion, chaos, and anarchy - through their strategy of using propaganda, lies, half-truths, and misconceptions - to undermine public trust in our existing system(s) so that people turn to them and their worldview of a global, one world government controlled by the UN can be regarded as the only legitimate authority to provide stability, security, justice, environmental protection, and other basic needs.

We can delude ourselves into thinking that this is too broad a "conspiracy", and that things are simply moving in this direction due to naturally-occurring events with no basis in an underlying ideology.

Then, one day, when it's too late, we'll realize that this goal has been achieved, and we'll ask ourselves what we could have done to stop it.

> Almost every small state doesn't matter these days. No one interested in the presidential race spends a dime on them,

Really? Fascinating idea. I guess that's why no one pays any attention to those vast electoral powerhouses, the Iowa Caucus and the New Hampshire primary...

Oh, wait... they can make or break candidacies.

I guess there is something wrong with your reasoning.

I've said this elsewhere, so I'll simply repeat myself:
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One of the chief problems of State is how to manage succession. The US system has certainly been effective, maintaining what is clearly the oldest major government on the face of the planet (excluding some random ancient autonomous city-state like "Lichtensteinistan" or "San Andorra" or whatever).

Yes, we are a "young" nation but our government is actually the *oldest* one around. All other major governments have gone through a major restructuring at best (UK from Pure Monarchy to a Parliamentary one with a Figurehead being the mildest), usually by the force of armed revolution. Sometimes (France, China, Russia, anywhere in SouthAm or Africa) more than once.

And the fact of its effectiveness is in the 2000 elections -- a defacto Constitutional Crisis occurred, with the successor signal being swamped by the noise on the line. Despite this, instead of resorting to arms we resorted to legal maneuvers to resolve the problem, because the parties in question, among other things, knew the people would not accept a succession-by-force.

I say this because I think that Democracy, for all its flaws, does represent an incredibly stable system -- since it gives the people a vested interest in the leaders (perceived-only or real, it is there), it puts a strong pressure on the succession to be by rule of law rather than via force of arms.

There is no reason why anyone would pay any attention, without the Electoral College, to ANY of the bottom 20-odd states (population-wise). It would be utterly stupid for them to pass a law such as that proposed. If the upper ones do it (I don't think they will) then let 'em. The situation is similar to one of monopoly -- the ones who cheat (i.e., don't pass the law, or repeal it after the fact) will be the winners.

THEY will cast the deciding votes in close elections. Then, of course, the whining idiots who stupidly straightjacketed themselves will kvetch and moan about how unfair the election was (most especially if it goes to a red-state candidate over the blue one) .

My heart... it will bleeeeeeeed. Sob. Sob. Boo-hoo. Yeah.

It funny that those in favor of getting rid of the electoral college argue that it reduces the disparity between large and small states when that was exactly what the Senate and House (and by extension the EC) was designed to do. The senate (all states equal) gave too much weight to the small states, the House gave too much weight to the large states. Thus, "The Great Compromise".

If you think Wyoming is already underrepresented by it's 3 Electors compared to New Yorks 31 (a 10% relative worth) just think how little anyone will care about it when it's relative worth is only 2.6% (500k vs 19.2m).

As a candidate, who's issues will I get further with? The issues that effect a primarily urban population (NY) or the issues that effect a primarily rural population (WY)? If these were the only 2 states, I'd only need to convince 52% of New Yorkers to turn Wyoming into New Yorks landfill. Don't want Nuclear Reactors in your backyard, it only takes 52% of New Yorkers to put them all in Wyoming. Don't want Jails in your backyard, it only takes 52% of New Yorkers to put them all in Wyoming. Don't want X in your back yard...

The EC helps to balance that equation.