FINALLY!!! A NATIONAL PLAN TO REFORM THE ELECTRAL COLLEGE

Setanta


It's the "winner-take-all" state laws that have perverted the Electoral College and made it undemocratic. If only the Supreme Court would declare the winner take all state laws unconstitutional, it would go a long way toward solving the problem. If the one person, one vote method would allocate votes to the electoral college, I wouldn't feel like my vote had been stolen.

BBB

Indeed it would, OE. The majority of Americans now live in urban and suburban areas in six states--California, Texas, Illinois, Pennsylvania, New York and Florida. With a direct election of the President, you could forget the other forty-four states. The interests of agricultural and mining states such as Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah--and several others--continue to get attention, and a good deal of it, because a candidate who cannot count on pulling four or more of the big six can still put together a win without them, and someone who can count of four or more of the big six needs at the least to assure those other states of the attention his or her administration would pay to their interests in order to neutralize the potential of such a coalition. That is how the system protects the lightly populated states.

I see what you and OE are getting at Aunt Bee. My answer to OE assumes the winner-take-all system of instructing electors, and my argument therefore takes no notice of that aspect of the College.

Electing loser president & slavery & the electoral c
Setanta, a lot of smart people believe slavery and the electoral college were linked. I will do some research to cite a scholarly work. In the meantime: ---BBB

Complete article

Daily Herald (IL)
Fix system before we elect 'loser president'
By Burt Constable
October 26, 2000
http://www.dailyherald.com/oped/col_constable.asp?intID=36825276

If most American voters cast ballots for George W. Bush, but Al Gore still manages to end up in the White House, folks would suspect the election was fixed.

But that scenario is possible unless we fix our flawed Electoral College system. By barely beating Bush in 11 key states, Gore could capture the 270 Electoral College votes needed to lock up the presidency, even if the overwhelming majority of our nation's voters select Bush.

The last "loser president" was elected in 1888 when Benjamin Harrison lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College.

Just because "the dreaded specter of a clear popular loser becoming the Electoral College winner hasn't happened in this century," doesn't mean we should wait to fix the system, notes Akhil Amar, a prominent constitutional law professor at Yale Law School.

"A car with a defective airbag might seem to run quite well until there's a collision ...," Amar said during his 1997 testimony before a House subcommittee studying the issue of Electoral College reform. "If 'we the people' would want to amend the Constitution after the 'loser president' materializes - and I tend to think we would - why are we now just waiting for the inevitable accident to happen?"

Despite decades of public criticism and the logic of Amar and other Electoral College opponents, nothing has changed. While we are careful - justifiably so - about rewriting the Constitution, the Electoral College system is not one of those Founding Fathers' notions worth protecting.

"The biggest reason it was set up was to protect slavery," Amar tells me Wednesday, noting that for 32 of our first 36 years as a nation, the Electoral College elected "a slave-owning Virginian" to be president.

Without the Electoral College, Northern states that let free blacks vote would have had more votes and more power, and a state wanting to elect a particular candidate could have doubled its clout instantly simply by extending voting rights to women, Amar says.

Justification for the Electoral College is rooted "in racism and sexism," Amar says, noting no other political bodies (whether foreign nations or our own states and cities) think enough of the Electoral College system to use it for their elections.

The 15th Amendment in 1870 gave black men the right to vote. A half-century later, the federal government decided women, too, could be trusted with the vote. But the Electoral College survives into the 21st century.

The winner-take-all system (except in Maine and Nebraska where electors can split the state's votes) is unfair to third-party candidates such as Ross Perot, whose 18.9 percent of the 1996 vote was rewarded with 0.0 percent of the Electoral College vote. This year, it will be unfair to Ralph Nader, whose backers will be invisible to the Electoral College unless they turn their back on their candidate and vote for Gore as the candidate closest to Nader on the issues.

That's why Amar favors the instant-runoff election concept I praised in Tuesday's column. Call The Center for Voting and Democracy at (301) 270-4616 or see www.fairvote.org for details.

"People say it's too complicated. It's not at all," Amar says, explaining how the instant-runoff concept is much easier to understand than the convoluted Electoral College.

With instant-runoff, a voter select the candidate he wants to win, his second choice and so on. The candidate with the fewest first-place votes is eliminated and second choices on those ballots are counted.

We use the concept "all the time," Amar says, providing an example. "My wife tells me to go to the grocery store and pick up brand X, but if they don't have that, then get brand Y."

That precaution saves us from bringing home a "loser" brand of frozen peas. Let's use it to protect ourselves from electing a "loser" president.

Okay. So, what about keeping the College and changing the system to a proportional system?

Or, what about keeping part of the College system (each state has a minimum of seats/votes) and having the rest elected proportionally?

(Hey, I'm not getting at something. I'm European. I'm just puzzled.)

old europe


The winner take all system was devised and maintained by the political party dominate in the state. It is a way to maximize their political power on a national basis. It has only served to benefit the political party system, not the Common Good of the people.

I also believe that the winner take all state laws are unconstitutional as they violate the equal protection clause of the Constitution.

BBB

U.S. Constitution: Fourteenth Amendment
Fourteenth Amendment - Rights Guaranteed Privileges and Immunities of Citizenship, Due Process and Equal Protection

Section. 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section. 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

Section. 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Section. 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

Section. 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

BBB - You're making one very common mistake here, which is assuming that a democratic republic should operate like a democracy. The Supreme Court does not have it within their power to declare the electoral college unconstitutional because the Constitution does not require that the presidential election be held by popular vote. States are free to mandate how electors are chosen - by popular vote, winner-take-all, chosen by state legislatures, chosen by the state governors, etc. In Maine and Nebraska, they have an ingenious compromise that echos the make-up of the House and Senate. The popular-vote winner gets 2 electors (matching the # that go to the Senate) while the other elector votes are distributed according to the winner of each state congressional district.

That is not a mistake, it is a POV that a Democratic Republic should be more Democratic and less Republic.

True, but I missed it if BBB is proposing that.

Alice


I understand that states can enact such laws. My dream, however, is that some citizens, not states, would sue their states for violating their equal constitutional protection. If I were rich, I would have sought such a lawsuit years ago.

I've been bitching about the winner take all laws since I was old enough to vote.
BBB

As someone who resides in a small-population state, I certainly hope your efforts come to nothing.

There was a referendum to change the "winner-takes-all" system in Colorado, wasn't there?

Amar's remarks are of the character of someone who notices that everyone who dies has breathed prior to dying, and therefore comes to the conclusion that breathing is fatal and ought to be avoided.

The reason that "slave-owning Virginians" were elected so frequently is not to be attributed to a simple-minded statement about population and the Electoral Collge. Washington was elected twice, and could have died in office if he had not chosen to step down, simply because of his personal inegrity. At the time the constitution was ratified, those who supported its ratification called themselves Federalists, and left their opposition limping along, called "anti-Federalists" if they were known as anything at all. The lesson of political organization was not lost on Jefferson, though, who had opposed ratification of the constitution. He organized a political party, the Republicans, which, while not a political party in the modern sense (that would await Jackson forming the Democratic Party from the wreckage of the Republicans), it still had far more organization and local political clout than the Federalists. Washington was succeeded by Adams, who shot himself in the foot with the abuse of the Alien and Sedition Act. Jefferson's Republicans steamrollered the Federalists, and built up such a large and effective organization, that no one else was in a position to challenge the party. Madison and Monroe not only defeated all comers with ease, no one even ran against Monroe in his second term. It took John Quincy Adams to break the trend, and he did so by an appeal to monied interests (definitely elitism) at a time when the Republicans were fragmenting. Jackson had become governor of Tennessee by building his political organization from the ground up, and when he lost in 1824, he did the same thing, and successfully appealed to "the little guy" in 1828, at the beginning of what became known as the "Era of the Common Man." David Crockett was a prime example of the kind of successful political stumper who could appeal to that common man--he was no slave-owner, though a Southerner, and he was arguably one of the most useless people ever to be elected, and re-elected, to the House of Representatives. But successful campaigning and image-management have always trumped any reality in politics. Democratic sneers at William Henry Harrison lead smart Whig handlers to portray him as a back country Indian fighter, even though he was in fact the descendant of an aristocratic Virginia family. (His father, Benjamin Harrison, had signed the Declaration of Independence, and lived at the family estate on James River, which had done since the days when Richmond was a no-account village with a single mud rut for a main street, and the seat of government was at Williamsburg; William Henry Harrison's grandson, Benajamin Harrison, would exploit the same "man of the people" image as a veteran of the American Civil War when he ran successfully in 1888. That Benjamin Harrison was a wealthy and successful lawyer in Indiana who was defeated in the gubernatorial race in 1876, stigmatized as "Kid Gloves Harrison," and his Republican handlers learned the lesson--he championed the rights of veterans, homesteaders and Indians in the Senate before his Presidential bid, and the Republicans cultivated him with a "front porch" campaign in 1888.)

Your boy Amar is playing fast and loose with historical truth, and making silly and oversimplified statements about complex realities. He is pushing all the right buttons with remarks about racism, elitism and sexism--i don't doubt the rhetoric goes down well with those prepared in advance to believe it.

The Electoral College
The Electoral College

The United States is the oldest continuously functioning democracy in the world. Its constitution was ratified in 1788 and has been amended only 27 times since then. The first 10 of these amendments, called the Bill of Rights, were approved in 1790. Amending the constitution is (by design) an exceptionally difficult procedure, as described near the end of this page.

The procedure for electing a president is spelled out in Article II. Each state is entitled to a number of electors equal to that state's representation in Congress (Senate + House). Since each state has two senators and at least one Representative, every state has at least three electors. Currently California has the largest number of electors: 55. The electors meet in their respective state capitals in December of each election year to cast their votes for president and vice president. These electors, who together form the electoral college, are the ones who actually elect the president. If no candidate gets a majority of the electoral vote, the House of Representatives elects the president, with each state having one vote. This happened in 1800 and again in 1824.

Each state is free to choose its electors as it wishes. In the 18th Century, America was largely rural and most people were farmers who knew little about politics. In this climate, a direct election of the president would probably have been difficult in any case. In the early days of the nation, electors were chosen due to their wisdom and knowledge of politics, not due to their preference for any particular candidate. Even in the modern world, direct election of a distant president is not always so easy. For example, the European Union does not have a direct election for its president. Instead, a complex system exists in which countries, not citizens, are the key players, exactly like the role of the states in the U.S.

Each state determines how its electors are chosen by state law and the process varies from state to state. In states with primary elections, each presidential candidate usually designates a slate of electors who then appear on the November ballot. The voters are then actually voting for a slate of electors pledged to one candidate or another. In caucus states, the electors may be chosen at the state caucus. Electors are actual human beings, with houses, children, jobs, and very occasionally, their own opinions. In most states, the slate of electors that gets the most votes wins and gets to travel to the state capital in December to vote for president and vice president. In the bitterly contested election in Florida in 2000, George Bush carried the state by 537 votes out of over six million cast, and thus got all 25 of Florida's electoral votes. Since it is the electoral vote, not the popular vote, that actually elects the president, keeping track of it is crucial for people who want to know how the campaign is going. This website is designed to make it easy to track the electoral vote.

Many criticisms have been leveled at this 18th Century system. First, why have electoral votes at all? Why not just elect the president by popular vote? The reason this system has never changed is simple: politics. States with many buffalo and few people, like Wyoming, benefit from it and are not keen on changing it. Since every state gets at least three electors, low-population states have proportionally far more political power than they would have in a direct election system. The number of voters per elector is about four times smaller in the three-elector states than in the most-populous states, as shown in this table. The fact that nearly all the low-population states are heavily Republican adds to the difficulties of changing the system. Direct election of the president would eliminate the current bias in favor of the Republicans.

Getting rid of the electoral college would require a constitutional amendment. Amending the constitution is (by design) an exceptionally difficult process requiring not only 2/3 majorities of both houses of Congress, but also by the legislatures of 3/4 of the states. Even in 1788, the Founding Fathers knew that politicians often made outrageous promises. They wanted to make sure the constitution, which most Americans regard as sacred, could only be changed when there was a massive consensus in favor of the change. To give a modern example, president George W. Bush has called for a constitutional amendment stating that a marriage shall be a union between exactly one man and one woman. The Founding Fathers well understood that political slogans like this should not find their way into the constitution too easily, so they made the process very difficult. Changing the electoral college system will not be easy.

A second criticism of the electoral college is its winner-take-all character. If Florida's 25 electoral votes had been split 13 for George Bush and 12 for Al Gore, then Al Gore would now be president. There is nothing in the constitution mandating winner-take-all. The manner for choosing electors is regulated by state law. In fact, two states, Maine and Nebraska, do not use winner-take-all. In those states, the winner of each congressional district gets one elector and the winner of the state as a whole gets an additional two. Any state that wanted to adopt this system need only pass a state law to do so. No constitutional amendment is required.

In his book Fixing Elections: The Failure of America's Winner-Take-All Politics Steven Hill argues for Instant Runoff Voting. In this system, each voter would designate a first choice, a second choice, etc. After all the votes have been cast, everyone's first choice is counted. If some candidate has a majority, he or she is elected. If not, the candidate with the fewest number of votes is disqualified and his or her votes redistributed to the voter's second choice candidate. This process is repeated until some candidate has a majority. In 2000 under this system, voters could have designated Ralph Nader as their first choice and Al Gore as their second choice. When the first choice votes were counted and it was discovered, for example, that Nader came in last (not really, since there were even more minor candidates), his votes would then have been given to the second choice candidate. In effect, a voter could have said: "I want Ralph Nader but if I can't have him, I'll settle for Al Gore." With instant runoff voting, this is possible. This system is used in some municipal elections. Again, any state that chose to adopt it need only pass a state law to do so. No constitutional amendment is required.

The third objection to the electoral college is the so-called faithless elector problem. As mentioned above, electors are actual human beings, with all the properties that go along with that. In particular, when they meet in December in their respective state capitals, they sometimes do not vote for the candidate they are officially pledged to. In 1948, for example, Truman elector Preston Parks of Tennessee, voted for Strom Thurmond who was running on the pro-segregation Dixiecrat ticket. In 1960, Nixon elector Henry D. Irwin of Oklahoma voted for Virginia Senator Harry F. Byrd, then an ardent segregationist. In 2000, one of Gore's D.C.'s electors, Barbara Lett-Simmons, cast a blank ballot in protest of the District's lack of congressional representation. None of these faithless electors changed the outcome of their respective elections, but in a close election in the future, it might be possible for a candidate to bribe enough electors to swing the election. At the very least, state law could make voting the wrong way a felony with life in prison as the punishment.

If Congress wanted to keep the electoral college but make it fairer, there is a simple (but unlikely) solution: increase the size of the House of Representatives. There is nothing in the constitution mandating a particular size except that each member must represent at least 30,000 people (which puts an upper limit on the House of about 10,000 members). In fact, the House has been expanded repeatedly in the past as the nation grew. The most recent expansion was in 1911, when the U.S. population was about 93 million, so a representative had 212,000 constituents. With the current population of 293 million, a representative has 674,000 constituents. To bring this number back to its 1911 value, the House should be expanded to 1370 members. Since a state's electoral vote is equal to its congressional representation, with 1370 House members, the effect of the 100 senators would be much smaller and the electoral votes would be almost proportional to population. To increase the size of the House, Congress would merely have to pass a law; the states would not be involved at all.

Even without any changes, the system does offer some flexibility. In New York State, for example, there is a Liberal Party and a Conservative Party, and both are on the ballot at every election. The Liberal Party usually nominates the same person as the Democrats and the Conservative Party usually nominates the same person as the Republicans. As long as each party gets enough votes, it retains its status as a recognized party and gets on the ballot automatically at the next election. It has been suggested that if Ralph Nader were to choose the Kerry electors as his electors in each state he gets on the ballot, then people could express their support for him, and provide impetus to his movement, but a vote for Nader would (literally) be a vote for Kerry. This would no doubt encourage many people to vote for him knowing that such a vote would not help George Bush.

It is worth noting that Senators were appointed, not elected, originally, but that before the constitution was ammended, the several states had already begun to pass their own laws to open the Senate seats to popular election. Perhaps the same could happen with the allocation of electors, or the instruction of electors, in the Presidential elections--but it would require a good deal more interest on the part of the electorate. As Aunt Bee points out, the "winner take all" system helps to enshrine and protect the "two-party" system, so they aren't going to tinker with it without a very substantial and real electoral threat.

The electoral college is crucial. This country is called the United States of America for a reason, although many people have completely forgotten that it is. People not only have interests, but areas have interests, and states have interests. The founders were very smart and infinitely wise in terms of many of the checks and balances included in the constitution. If we were to eliminate the electoral college, the next logical question would be - why have 2 senators from each state regardless of size? Similar argument here. Why elect representatives from areas within states, or from states? We are a representative republic, not a pure democracy to be ruled roughshod by the overall majority. Individual people have rights. States have rights. That fact is built into the judicial and legislative branches, and in their wisdom the founders intended the same factor to have some influence in choosing the head of the executive branch of the United States. Anyone in favor of eliminating the electoral college is simply uninformed and ignorant in terms of how and why the country was framed the way it was. I credit some of this ignorance to the lousy job of educating young people in American history and government.

Precisely - well said, Okie. Total democracy = mob rule. We need those checks and balances.

The electoral college has only swung the election a very limited number of times versus the popular vote, but what it has accomplished in more unnoticed ways aside from deciding the vote is perhap more important. It has drawn attention to the issues unique to small states, that are important not only to the small states, but to the country even though the masses of people often do not realize it. Issues like energy, agriculture, mining, and the timber industry, are just a few examples. Politicians therefore become more informed on these issues because they desire just a few electoral votes from a small state that may be crucial in swinging the election toward them. So even when the electoral college does not affect the outcome most of the time, it still affects the manner in which the president elect views the country and ends up governing the country. It goes without saying that there are many effects here too numerous to mention that come into play if one simply considered it all in a more informed and wiser manner.

Yes. It failed.

This is an unwarranted statement. Fourteen United States Presidents have been minority Presidents--meaning that they took less than 50% of the popular vote. In fact, John Quincy Adams was the first minority President in 1824, and in an election in which Andrew Jackson took the greatest percentage of the popular vote. This has happened repeatedly--the Lincoln election in 1860 arguably being the most crucial--right down to our contemporary times, when George Bush won the 2000 election, not only as a minority President, and not only when the opponent Mr. Gore took the greatest percentage of the popular vote, but when in fact, Mr. Gore took an absolute majority of the popular vote, more than 50%. It is very misleading to claim that the votes of electors in the College have "swung" the election a "limited number of times." The President has been a minority President in about 30% of the elections.