The Electoral College shouldnât even exist.
Awarding the electoral votes proportionally is far more fair than â.winner take allâ.
Would such a system have avoided donald? Bravo. What bout Bush v. Gore? â
One reason this should appeal to Republicans is that the demographics are going to shift dramatically in the future. A voter in TX for a National election Democrat - may as well not bother to go to the polls. Sad â Hopefully Beto OâRourke can change that. California Republicans complain that they arenât represented. This could resolve that. I like it even better than the National Popular Vote â which would have avoided donaldâŚ
Good luck with the lawsuit.
The Electoral College committed suicide on December 19, 2016, when it failed the only test for which it existed.
Time to bury its useless, rotting corpse.
It shouldnât, but âeverything is fairâ isnât in the Constitution, while the electoral college - including the stipulation that states can apportion their electors any way they want - is. In the early 1800s many states didnât even hold popular elections for president. This case has zero merit.
It isnât just the winner take all system. Wyoming has one electoral vote per 200,000 residents, California has one per 700,000.
This is why Bush v Gore had âLimitation to present circumstancesâ. There is a fundamental contradiction in the constitution between equal protection and one person one vote, and the electoral college. The best way to resolve this is to amend the constitution to eliminate the EC. If that doesnât happen and it ends up at SCOTUS, legal common sense says the more recent provision holds.This is still an anachronism, because when equal protection passed, it was not interpreted by the courts or male legislators as applying to women, although women immediately recognized this application.
But if the courts take Bush v Gore seriously, the EC is toast.
I think the proportional apportionment argument over winner take all has great merit. Winner take all is not mandated in the Constitution, and therefore greater weight ought to be placed on the method that gives âone-person one-voteâ the most effect. However, a practical barrier we have is the poor understanding of math concepts by the SCOTUS and the legal profession as a whole. This quote from the article sums up the matter:
Galvin also said that while there is a predictability to the winner-take-all method, there is less clarity in trying to dole out electoral votes based on the margin of each candidateâs vote total in each state.
âWhen you start talking about what percentage did you win Ohio by, then youâre raising questions,â he said. âThis is clearly a mathematical game.â
Ummm yes. It actually isnât very hard to calculate. If you win 45% of the vote in GA, you win 45% of GAâs electoral votes to the nearest one-thousandth of a decimal point. Add them all up and the person that gets a majority wins the election. (If there is no majority, my proposal would be an instant PV run off, but that would require legislation).
The SCOTUS is also terribly bad at math and economics. If you read John Robertsâ decision in the original ACA case, which preserved the ACA but made medicaid optional, youâll see how badly Roberts misunderstands the economic rationale for the ACA. He views the ACA as a type of welfare that government is entitled to implement if it has the votes, but canât recognize that that the ACA is actually a set of economic reforms of the private market for health insurance, which is why his stupid state rights argument on medicaid expansion should not have held sway.
To win these arguments in court, the plaintiffs have to put up powerpoint and excel sheets and run you tube like demos and present them as exhibits for the court clerks to study. The proportional method is also practiced in the Democratic Party for pledged delegates. It is pretty easy to calculate.
Additionally, the only way to justify keeping the electoral college is if members of the EC sue to overturn the 2016 election based on a common law theory of fraud. Knowing what they know now (and what they will know after Mueller indicts a bunch of folks), no EC member couldâve voted for Trump because there is absolutely no way he could ever fulfill the oath of office given his conspiracy with Russia and his financial and personal conflicts of interest. The EC is supposed to be a check designed precisely to protect the Republic from someone unfit. If the EC members couldnât take action in 2016 and canât find it within themselves to demand action now based on what we have learned, then there is no reason for its continued existence.
There are good reasons why no state awards their electors proportionally.
Although the whole-number proportional approach might initially seem to offer the possibility of making every voter in every state relevant in presidential elections, it would not do this in practice.
The National Popular Vote bill is the way to make every personâs vote equal and matter to their candidate because it guarantees the majority of Electoral College votes to the candidate who gets the most votes among all 50 states and DC.
There have been hundreds of unsuccessful proposed amendments to modify or abolish the Electoral College - more than any other subject of Constitutional reform.
To abolish the Electoral College would need a constitutional amendment, and could be stopped by states with as little as 3% of the U.S. population.
Instead, state legislation, The National Popular Vote bill is 61% of the way to guaranteeing the majority of Electoral College votes and the presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in the country, by changing state winner-take-all laws (not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but later enacted by 48 states), without changing anything in the Constitution, using the built-in method that the Constitution provides for states to make changes.
All voters would be valued equally in presidential elections, no matter where they live.
Electors are people. They cannot be rounded to the nearest one-thousandth of a decimal point.
The whole number proportional system sharply increases the odds of no candidate getting the majority of electoral votes needed, leading to the selection of the president by the U.S. House of Representatives, regardless of the popular vote anywhere.
It would not accurately reflect the nationwide popular vote;
It would reduce the influence of any state, if not all states adopted.
It would not improve upon the current situation in which four out of five states and four out of five voters in the United States are ignored by presidential campaigns, but instead, would create a very small set of states in which only one electoral vote is in play (while making most states politically irrelevant),
It would not make every vote equal.
It would not guarantee the Presidency to the candidate with the most popular votes in the country.
Now 48 states have winner-take-all state laws for awarding electoral votes.
2 award one electoral vote to the winner of each congressional district, and two electoral votes statewide.
Neither method is mentioned in the U.S. Constitution.
The electors are and will be dedicated party activist supporters of the winning partyâs candidate who meet briefly in mid-December to cast their totally predictable rubberstamped votes in accordance with their pre-announced pledges.
The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld state laws guaranteeing faithful voting by presidential electors (because the states have plenary power over presidential electors).
Good points @otto.
By proportional representation, I can see that there could be an electoral college tie. Perhaps DC or Puerto Rico statehood could change that tie problem by generating an uneven number of states.
Iâve heard that the GOP is gunning for a Constitutional Convention â and that would be a horror for our country IMO.
Heaven knows what they would come up with â fetal personhood, forced religion, who could say how they could corrupt it.
I donât trust anyone to ârewriteâ the constitution and even a Constitutional Convention with the intention to eradicate the Electoral College would be risking other things getting in there IMO.
Call me simple-minded, but the thing I donât like about the National Popular vote â although it would be better than what is going on now (Bush v. Gore and Trump v. Clinton) â I like that old fashioned direct line from the vote to the election - (which is one reason I dislike the EC) â National popular vote could take a red state like TX and make it blue (which would have happened in the last election - and it just doesnât sit as well with me as dividing the EC votes. The same would happen in CA or NY if they suddenly were turned red. IMOâŚ
Electoral Votes arenât people. The number of electoral votes isnât determined by the actual number of human electors. It is determined by the sum of the number of Senators + the number of Representatives in the House for each state. In the Proportional Vote allocation model of the electoral vote, if you win 45% of the PV in a state, you get 45% of the EV.
One of the points of the original law suit is to declare the winner take all model unconstitutional because it violates one person one vote and it is not ordained in the Constitution. So if the law suit were to succeed, no state could do WTA. All would have to do a proportional vote model if the EC is to remain in effect.
It is correct, however, that the proportional vote model does increase the likelihood that no candidate will reach 270 EVs, a majority of EVs, in close elections. And that makes sense mathematically because in our closest elections (2000, 2016, 1968) no one got to 50% of the vote.
The closest popular vote elections weâve had in modern history are 1960: Kennedy + 108k; 2000; 1968: Nixon +511,944; 1976: Carter +683,247, 2000; Bush - 547,398; and 2016: Trump -2,868,518.
If the proportional vote model had been applied to Clinton, she leads the EV 255-247, but doesnât get a majority. In 2000, neither Bush nor Gore would get a majority: 259.14 to 258.42 (Bush). I havenât had time to apply it to the other elections, but I suspect Kennedy-Nixon and Nixon-Humphrey also have a result where no one gets a majority but the distribution of EVs is more aligned with the PV. The same may well be true of Clinton-Bush-Perot.
It is much more reflective of the PV than our current WTA EV model. But it is not perfect and it would require (as I suggested above) a run off PV election where no one gets 50% of the national vote. Essentially, if you want someone to get a majority, you need to make it a pure binary choice: with 2 candidates, not 3 or more. We would move, effectively, closer to a French style system.
In terms of incentives, it would drive parties to run up the score in their strong states and strong areas and battle to a draw in battleground states. So you might get a situation where people ignore a state like Florida where the parties basically split it down the middle in most elections and instead a Democratic candidate tries to run up the score to get to 65% of the vote in places like NY/CA and all of the big urban counties across the country.
If Texas enacted the National Popular Vote, and the national popular vote winner was a Democrat, Texas would not be âmade blueâ if the winner in Texas was not the Democrat. The electoral votes of Texas would be cast for the Democrat. But everyone would know who won the Texas statewide election.
In Gallup polls since 1944 until before this election, only about 20% of the public has supported the current system of awarding all of a stateâs electoral votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most votes in each separate state (with about 70% opposed and about 10% undecided).
Support for a national popular vote has been strong among Republicans, Democrats, and Independent voters, as well as every demographic group in every state surveyed. In the 41 now shown on divisive maps as red, blue, and purple states surveyed, overall support has been in the 67-81% range - in rural states, in small states, in Southern and border states, in big states, and in other states polled.
In state polls of voters each with a second question that specifically emphasized that their stateâs electoral votes would be awarded to the winner of the national popular vote in all 50 states, not necessarily their stateâs winner, there was only a 4-8% decrease of support.
Question 1: âHow do you think we should elect the President: Should it be the candidate who gets the most votes in all 50 states, or the current Electoral College system?â
Question 2: âDo you think it more important that a stateâs electoral votes be cast for the presidential candidate who receives the most popular votes in that state, or is it more important to guarantee that the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states becomes president?â
Your points are strong, nevertheless, Iâm going to respectfully disagree with you.
If I live in California and I vote Republican and all the EC votes go to the Democratic candidate, I will feel that âmy vote didnât countâ. The reason for that is that the EC votes are based upon the accumulation of the individual votes. Reciprocally, if I live in Texas and vote for the Democratic candidate and the state goes Republican then my vote is âwastedâ.
If the situation that occured in the 2016 election occurred, under the National Popular Vote, then the EC votes for TX would have gone to Hillary. If the EC votes are derived from the individual votes, this not only makes the TX votes âwastedâ or makes the votes seem to individuals that âmy vote didnât countâ â it would make people who voted for one candidate feel that their votes were switched to the other candidate. (In effect).
I donât know any rabid Democratic partisans - most are more reasonable, but I do know a lot of rabid Republican partisans - to a degree you wouldnât believeâŚunless you have spent time talking to some of them. Although the universe of people I know is tiny and very anecdotal, Republican voters are not ruled by reason and facts.
As much as I hope to see the EC dissolved/discontinued, there is something about the feeling of switching votes that makes it unsavory, IMO.
Again IMO - the more direct the line to the elected official in the simplest terms the better the solution. We are in agreement however, that the solution needs to be at a state level. In all likelihood it wouldnât be rabid red states that would ever endorse NPV, so it is all a moot point. For my view, I find it problematic as a solution.
Electors, who vote, ARE people, who meet in early December, in their states, and vote.
The electors are and will be dedicated party activist supporters of the winning partyâs candidate who meet briefly in mid-December to cast their totally predictable rubberstamped votes in accordance with their pre-announced pledges.
A successful nationwide presidential campaign of polling, organizing, ad spending, and visits, with every voter equal, would be run the way presidential candidates campaign to win the electoral votes of closely divided battleground states, such as Ohio and Florida, under the state-by-state winner-take-all methods. In the 4 states that accounted for over two-thirds of all general-election activity in the 2012 presidential election, rural areas, suburbs, exurbs, and cities all received attentionâroughly in proportion to their population.
The itineraries of presidential candidates in battleground states (and their allocation of other campaign resources in battleground states, including polling, organizing, and ad spending) reflect the political reality that every gubernatorial or senatorial candidate knows. When and where every voter is equal, a campaign must be run everywhere.
Under National Popular Vote, every voter, everywhere, for every candidate, would be politically relevant and equal in every presidential election.
Every vote would matter equally in the state counts and national count.
The bill would take effect when enacted by states possessing a majority of the electoral votesâ270 of 538.
All of the presidential electors from the enacting states will be supporters of the presidential candidate receiving the most popular votes among all 50 states (and DC)âthereby guaranteeing that candidate with an Electoral College majority.
The bill would give a voice to the minority party voters for president in each state. Now they donât matter to their candidate.
In 2012, 56,256,178 (44%) of the 128,954,498 voters had their vote diverted by the winner-take-all rule to a candidate they opposed (namely, their stateâs first-place candidate).
And now votes, beyond the one needed to get the most votes in the state, for winning in a state, are wasted and donât matter to presidential candidates.
Utah (5 electoral votes) alone generated a margin of 385,000 âwastedâ votes for Bush in 2004.
Oklahoma (7 electoral votes) alone generated a margin of 455,000 âwastedâ votes for Bush in 2004 â larger than the margin generated by the 9th and 10th largest states, namely New Jersey and North Carolina (each with 15 electoral votes).
8 small western states, with less than a third of Californiaâs population, provided Bush with a bigger margin (1,283,076) than California provided Kerry (1,235,659).
Support for a national popular vote for President has been strong among Republicans, Democrats, and Independent voters, as well as every demographic group in every state surveyed
Newt Gingrich summarized his support for the National Popular Vote bill by saying: âNo one should become president of the United States without speaking to the needs and hopes of Americans in all 50 states. ⌠America would be better served with a presidential election process that treated citizens across the country equally. The National Popular Vote bill accomplishes this in a manner consistent with the Constitution and with our fundamental democratic principles.â
Eight former national chairs of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have endorsed the bill
The bill was approved in 2016 by a unanimous bipartisan House committee vote in both Georgia (16 electoral votes) and Missouri (10).
In 2016 the Arizona House of Representatives passed the bill 40-16-4.
Two-thirds of the Republicans and two-thirds of the Democrats in the Arizona House of Representatives sponsored the bill.
In January 2016, two-thirds of the Arizona Senate sponsored the bill.
In 2014, the Oklahoma Senate passed the bill by a 28â18 margin.
Each stateâs electors are listed on each stateâs Certificate of Ascertainment, on the NARA website.
https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/2012/certificates-of-ascertainment.html
for example
Texas ELECTORS FOR REPUBLICAN PARTY
- Keith Rothra 14. David Stone 27. Betty Stiles
- Butch Davis 15. Sandra Cararas 28. Texas Moore
- Tim McCord 16. Mary Holmsley 29. Richard Bernhard
- Clinton Evetts 17. Matthew Johnson 30. Thom Wikins
- Benny Gordon 18. Nelda Eppes 31. Bill Fairbrother
- Steve Jessup 19. Ruth Schiermeyer 32. Mary Ann Collins
- Paul Bettencourt 20. Johnny Lovejoy, II 33. Loren Byers
- Walter Wilkinson, Jr. 21. Patti Johnson 34. Samuel Owens
- Bonnie Lugo 22 . Tim Turner 35. Billie Zimmerman
- Terri Flow 23 . Jennifer Weaver 36. Daniel Whitton
- Georgia Scott 24. Royal Smith 37. Steve Munisteri
- Kaye Moreno 25. Linda Rogers 38. Carolyn Hodges
- Jane Juett 26. Jean Mciver