Yeah. That one would have been easy. How about Bill Clinton? If it went to the House who would have been picked?
Maybe a parliamentary system would be better than direct election.
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The House can pick from the top 3 electoral vote getters.
h/t to @j_from_texas for correction
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The solution, of course, can be found in the not so distant past. Convince the Party to nominate a candidate that inspires overwhelming excitement of the base (versus playing right into the cynical belief of far too many citizens that “All Politicians Are The Same”), thus dragging along to the polls a significant number of marginal and non-voters. See 2008…
And how did that work out last time. They didn’t check squat.
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I prefer ranked choice, but would happily accept either over the EC.
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Then why do we have them at all? Yes, I can see nightmare scenarios, but the point is they have twice enabled the worse choice to be installed in the white house. The basic electorate have twice chosen the better candidate only to be overruled by the idiotic EC. Yes, it’ll take a constitutional amendment to change it, but it really needs to be done.
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I do not know, but the losing side could petition for an en banc decision by the entire panel of active judges on the Circuit. There’s danger in that–if the larger panel agreed with the original decision that might have some weight with the Supremes, but it might also mean that the matter does not have to be reviewed at the highest level.
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Setting the stage for
Swing Vote ( a 2008 movie)
This is a little like the superdelegate thing in party conventions. In theory, it’s supposed to add another, more thoughtful deliberative layer, but in practice it’s garbage that will only have power when creating disaster.
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The conservative rendering of the Constitution has failed. A handful of people, not surprisingly, people who embrace corruption and crime, are getting into office, stopping our processes, and deciding everybody else is wrong.
It’s time to fully realize the liberal Constitution of the founders. Corporations are not people. Money is not speech. Trump cannot do anything he wants, and Moscow Mitch is not god.
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I don’t think so:
" If no candidate receives a majority of Electoral votes, the House of Representatives elects the President from the 3 Presidential candidates who received the most Electoral votes. … The Senate would elect the Vice President from the 2 Vice Presidential candidates with the most Electoral votes.
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Yes, I was wrong, you are correct. Thanks!
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Just because they didn’t exercise judgment in a way we agree with doesn’t mean they don’t have the latitude to exercise it.
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OFFS. If they didn’t exercise it this time with so obvious a problem, when would they?
It’s as vestigial as an appendix.
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Yup. It’s completely vestigial. That doesn’t mean the Tenth Circuit is wrong on the law.
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I didn’t say they were wrong on the law. I said the law didn’t work as intended.
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The law worked exactly as intended. The Electors didn’t.
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Ah…Don’t hate the law, hate the lawyer who abuses it?
Laws that don’t work… don’t work…and need to be revised.
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Nope. Not saying that at all. The Electoral college stems from a fundamental mistrust of direct democracy on the part of the uneducated masses. It was also designed with an intended lack of political parties, in an age where the population was low enough that the electors could all be known representatives of the voters, men of standing and judgment that the people could know well enough to trust, and who could, in turn, know the candidates well enough to render an informed, considered judgment. And it was a time where the speed of communications and the lack of real mass media made it difficult for candidates to really connect on any level with the masses themselves, so having local representatives made more sense. A product of its time, and its authors’ skepticism about the rationality of people.
It’s also completely outdated and counterproductive, just like the entire ‘we’ll hold primaries on different days because candidates need time to travel from one city to the next by horse, let alone one state to the next’ system is.
Outdated laws need to be changed. Laws that don’t serve the general interest with an understanding of how the modern landscape intersects with human nature need to be changed. That doesn’t mean ‘This Court Case Could Bring Chaos To The Electoral College’. Any chaos that would result from Electoral discretion is already there. The Tenth is right, Smith is wrong, and it’ll take a Constitutional Amendment to change that.
Even in a case like the popular vote initiative, where the Electors are assigned proportionately as soon as enough states sign on to trigger it… doesn’t change that. The states can assign however they like… and come December, the Electors can flip those laws the bird, because the Constitution says they can.
That doesn’t make it right, and it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be changed. But then, I never said it was right, and I never said it shouldn’t changed.
All I said was that the Tenth is right, and Smith’s wrong, about what the law is right now.
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My original comment didn’t say the court was wrong either. I said it didn’t work as intended.
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