Political Theory

Re: what do you think about the electoral college?

gotlucky — Tue, 07 May 2013 06:15:40 GMT

Blasphemer, you who have not been baptized in the blood of immigrants, how dare you mock our ways!

Re: what do you think about the electoral college?

Malachi — Tue, 07 May 2013 03:20:35 GMT

lol, more evidence for nationalism as religion. its a ritual.

Re: what do you think about the electoral college?

Gavin23 — Tue, 07 May 2013 03:16:35 GMT

Thank you

Re: what do you think about the electoral college?

kohler — Mon, 06 May 2013 18:09:40 GMT

The Electoral College is now the set of 538 dedicated party activists who vote as rubberstamps for their party’s presidential candidate. That is not what the Founders intended. There have been 22,991 electoral votes cast since presidential elections became competitive (in 1796), and only 17 have been cast for someone other than the candidate nominated by the elector's own political party. 1796 remains the only instance when the elector might have thought, at the time he voted, that his vote might affect the national outcome. Since 1796, the Electoral College has had the form, but not the substance, of the deliberative body envisioned by the Founders. The electors now are dedicated party activists of the winning party 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).

During the course of campaigns, candidates are educated and campaign about the local, regional, and state issues most important to the handful of battleground states they need to win. They take this knowledge and prioritization with them once they are elected. Candidates need to be educated and care about all of our states.

The current state-by-state winner-take-all method of awarding electoral votes (not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but since enacted by 48 states), under which all of a state's electoral votes are awarded to the candidate who gets the most votes in each separate state, ensures that the candidates, after the conventions, in 2012 did not reach out to about 80% of the states and their voters. 10 of the original 13 states are ignored now. Candidates had no reason to poll, visit, advertise, organize, campaign, or care about the voter concerns in the dozens of states where they were safely ahead or hopelessly behind.

80% of the states and people were just spectators to the presidential election. That's more than 85 million voters, 200 million Americans.

Policies important to the citizens of non-battleground states are not as highly prioritized as policies important to ‘battleground’ states when it comes to governing.

Since World War II, a shift of a few thousand votes in one or two states would have elected the second-place candidate in 4 of the 15 presidential elections

The National Popular Vote bill would end the disproportionate attention and influence of the "mob" in the current handful of closely divided battleground states, such as Florida, while the "mobs" of the vast majority of states are ignored.

The National Popular Vote bill preserves the Electoral College and state control of elections. It changes the way electoral votes are awarded in the Electoral College.

Under National Popular Vote, every vote, everywhere, would be politically relevant and equal in every presidential election. Every vote would be included in the state counts and national count. The candidate with the most popular votes in all 50 states and DC would get the 270+ electoral votes from the enacting states. That majority of electoral votes guarantees the candidate with the most popular votes in all 50 states and DC wins the presidency.

States have the responsibility and power to make all of their voters relevant in every presidential election and beyond.

Unable to agree on any particular method, the Founding Fathers left the choice of method for selecting presidential electors exclusively to the states by adopting the language contained in section 1 of Article II of the U.S. Constitution-- "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors . . ." The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly characterized the authority of the state legislatures over the manner of awarding their electoral votes as "plenary" and "exclusive."

National Popular Vote has nothing to do with pure democracy. Pure democracy is a form of government in which people vote on policy initiatives directly. With National Popular Vote, the United States would still be a republic, in which citizens continue to elect the President by a majority of Electoral College votes by states, to represent us and conduct the business of government in the periods between elections.

With the current state winner-take-all system of awarding electoral votes, winning a bare plurality of the popular vote in the 11 most populous states, containing 56% of the population, could win the Presidency with a mere 23% of the nation's votes!

Re: what do you think about the electoral college?

ToxicAssets — Mon, 06 May 2013 14:58:17 GMT

Malachi:
no, not really. in a few states they divide them up according to district. but the entire point of the electoral college is that the electors are not bound to the will of the voters. the jeffersonian model was designed with a balance of powers, not pure democratic sentiment. electors are cannot be elected officeholders, they must be chosen from the population. originally u.s. senators were elected by state legislatures.

there has long been talk of individual states mandating that their electors cast ballots according to how they are assigned.

Thanks for clarifying that.

Well, I've read the wikipedia page about the Electoral College.

In practice, it seems very unlikely that faithless electors could change the result of an election, so the thing becomes basically a non-factor.

It is a theoretical possibility, pretty much like the event of your individual vote changing the result of the whole presidential election is also theoretical possibility, but it's not even a minor concern.

I believe that the main deficiency of the model is the disproportionate amount of attention that swing-states will receive in presidential runs, and not the far fetched scenario where a conspiracy of electors suddenly emerges to deceit everyone.

The main reason being that such a conspiracy would be ridiculously obvious to detect. Say Ron Paul wins with a landslide, but then all of the sudden, every elector decided to vote for the other guy just like that. They go all like "Fuck you Paul". How on earth they're gonna get away after pulling something like that?

I mean, it's easier to rig a close-call state ballot-counting process for that effect, Karl Rove style.

edit:

Wikipedia's "Faithless elector" article:

As of the 2012 presidential election, there has been only one occasion when faithless electors prevented an expected winner from winning the electoral college vote: in December 1836, twenty-three faithless electors prevented Richard Mentor Johnson, the expected candidate, from winning the Vice Presidency. However, Johnson was promptly elected Vice President by the U.S. Senate in February 1837; therefore, faithless electors have never changed the expected final outcome of the entireelection process.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_elector

Re: what do you think about the electoral college?

Malachi — Sun, 05 May 2013 19:20:03 GMT

no, not really. in a few states they divide them up according to district. but the entire point of the electoral college is that the electors are not bound to the will of the voters. the jeffersonian model was designed with a balance of powers, not pure democratic sentiment. electors are cannot be elected officeholders, they must be chosen from the population. originally u.s. senators were elected by state legislatures.

there has long been talk of individual states mandating that their electors cast ballots according to how they are assigned.

Re: what do you think about the electoral college?

ToxicAssets — Sun, 05 May 2013 19:03:35 GMT

Also what if someone like Ron paul got the nomination and the majority of the national vote but then the establishment got enough electors to vote against him thus denying him the presidency. Only under the electoral college could this very likely situation happen.

Aren't all the electors of a state supposed to vote for the guy who got the majority of popular vote in that state?

Re: what do you think about the electoral college?

Malachi — Sat, 04 May 2013 22:06:48 GMT

those are two excellent points.

Re: what do you think about the electoral college?

Gavin23 — Sat, 04 May 2013 15:23:15 GMT

It doesnt help smaller states only the states that happen to be highly contested. Ohio Florida etc. It encourages disporportionate amounts of money to be sent to hese few states while all others regardless of size are ignored.

Also what if someone like Ron paul got the nomination and the majority of the national vote but then the establishment got enough electors to vote against him thus denying him the presidency. Only under the electoral college could this very likely situation happen.

Re: what do you think about the electoral college?

Samarami — Sat, 04 May 2013 14:48:44 GMT

I'll weigh in with gotlucky: "If they can keep you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers." -- Thomas Pynchon http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/235.Thomas_Pynchon Sam

Re: what do you think about the electoral college?

ToxicAssets — Sat, 04 May 2013 11:55:46 GMT

The electoral college ends up by putting much more weight on the votes of people living in swing states, which does not seem very democratic.

Re: what do you think about the electoral college?

Monroe — Fri, 03 May 2013 22:47:34 GMT

Neodoxy^ I share your lack of care.

BUT yeah people who wish to abolish the electoral college generally wish to replace it with popular vote, as if to say America is a direct democracy - which, Constitutionally, we are not. To reiterate what gotlucky said, a popular vote would allow for high population coastal states to decide for other smaller populated states with very little support of anyone else. The electoral college is just an ineffective method of state's rights preservation.

Re: what do you think about the electoral college?

vive la insurrection — Fri, 03 May 2013 22:40:30 GMT

When I was young I used to LOVE looking at maps and charts and graphs related to them: the electoral college really filled that fetish, esp when a 3rd or 4th party did good.

The election of 1892 was my favorite to look at

1912 was kind of cool (4 people on a graph and 3 on a map) - though the fact that Roosevelt and Taft did a split, it really ruined the aesthetics of 3rd party graphs and maps.

and of course 1860 was always a really fun one (mostly because of the constitutional union party)

Re: what do you think about the electoral college?

Neodoxy — Fri, 03 May 2013 22:24:55 GMT

Honestly my care level is 0. If anything I like the electoral college because it's another example to point to with statist democrats (in the broad sense of the term) that the state and democracy both fail, because they can't even rectify their systematic anti-democratic failures.

Re: what do you think about the electoral college?

gotlucky — Fri, 03 May 2013 21:46:59 GMT

The state is anti-libertarian. What you are asking is whether statist method of decision making A is more or less anti-libertarian than statist method of decision making B, but both are equally anti-libertarian. Libertarians prefer decentralization to centralization, but democracy is not necessarily any more decentralized than a dictatorship in terms of state power. The matter of decentralization has to do with how large the unit of a particular government is, not the method of decision making. King George had no business running the government in the American colonies, and New Yorkers have no business voting on what the government should do in Alaska or American Samoa. Changing the decision making from a few rulers to many citizens doesn't necessarily scale back state power.

If the electoral college did the deciding, then most people would know that the state is a sham. If you have everyone's vote direct the electoral college, then most people delude themselves into thinking that the government is accountable to them.