Just saying I'm a fan of the electoral college

[ebartley]

Romney's ahead in the popular vote totals, and has been for a while. I don't know if the west coast is finished coming in yet, but I'm just while he is that I want the election decided on the basis of the electoral college, not the popular vote

Comments

[wldrose]

I will need to think about this.

[ebartley]

Under a popular vote system, something like Sandy could make a huge impact on the election results. As it is, it had no direct impact on the Presidential election and there was never any prospect it could. (Even had it hit a swing state it would tend to depress votes in general rather than a directly partisan effect, though at least prior to 2008 Republicans were more likely to turn out in bad weather

[lhn]

Once again I'm with you. I'm not sure I have a problem with faithless electors, since I'd guess that in a situation in which it could actually flip the results, there'd at least be a plausible justification. (E.g., a major scandal uncovered between Election Day and the meeting of the electors.) Historically, at least, faithless electors have been limited to purely symbolic defections-- and if a party really did such a poor vetting job that they managed to lose the Presidency due to elector betrayal, it's arguable that's prima facie evidence that they're not prepared to actually govern.

(Though I'm certainly rooting for Romney to win the popular vote this time around, if only for the entertainment value of watching dozens of pols and pundits on both sides argue the exact opposite of what they were saying in 2000.)

[agrumer]

I was watching on Fox News, and they announced right around the time you were posting this that Obama had taken the popular-vote lead, but it had been apparent for a while before that that Romney's lead was evaporating. I think it dropped from 100,000 to 20,000 over a commercial break, and that was with most of California still uncounted.

My plan for altering presidential elections, if I wielded the Rod of Rulership and could dictate my will, runs as follows:

• Do away with the Senatorial bonus - each state now gets as many electoral votes as it has Representatives in the House. (Small states would hate this, so it would never happen in real life.)
• Do away with state-level bundling. Each congressional district casts an electoral vote distinct from the others in its state. (Large states would hate this, so it would never happen in real life.)
• Do away with electors. Electoral votes would be allotted to the appropriate candidate automatically, rather than having to go through a special person. (The political parties would hate this, so it

[ebartley]

People were for some time, however, speculating that Romney needed a +1% advantage in the popular vote to win the electoral college, so it was a realistic possibility that he'd have higher margins in the red states than Obama would in the blue states.

I'd like to do away with electors, and I'm not sure why the political parties would kick - net/net the potential for faithless electors hurts them.

I don't want to break down electors into congressional districts or really anything smaller than the states. States can't be gerrymandered. Congressional districts routinely are.

Doing away with the Senatorial bonus ... eh. I'm not in favor, because I think the large states are already too dominant. I'd like to move towards federalism, not towards California / New York / Texas running the nation.

Increasing the number of seats in the House strikes me as a good plan

[agrumer]

As I understand it (and I might be misremembering), being an elector is a goodie the parties hand out as a reward for hard-working, loyal members. That means the people doing the hard work in the parties, and having lots of social connections to power brokers, would be the ones most likely to kick up a fuss over doing away with electors

[kent_allard_jr]

Hark, it's the Redistricting Signal!

There's no formal definition of gerrymandering, although there are some agreed-upon standards for "good" districts: They should be contiguous, compact, "cognizable," close to equal in population, and keep communities of shared interest intact. (The art comes in deciding which values to maximize.) What one can do, at least, is give responsibility to people who don't have a material stake in the outcome. That means some kind of independent commission.

Note that gerrymandering is more of a problem at the state house level than it is for Congressional districts. The latter have to be just about equal in population; state assembly and senate districts can be up to 10% apart. Plus, Congresscriters don't directly draw their own districts the way state legislators do, so there's a slightly greater chance of independent judgment.

[crash_mccormick]

One of the (Evil Liberal ie Middle of the Road) NPR shows I watched in the run up was an remarkably unbiased documentary about the electoral college system. It mentioned an active movement by a group to moot the electoral college system in fact by passing laws in various state legislatures that:

1) take effect when 270 lectros worth of states have passed the same law
2) allocates all the states electrocal votes to the winner of the popular vote

[ebartley]

I really hope we never open that can of worms.

Constitution:

Article 1 Section 10 second paragraph

No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.

Article 2 Section 1 second paragraph

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.

So ... are those laws an agreement with another state? They're set not to go off until other states act, but not specific other states. And if they are an agreement, which takes precedence, the legislature directing the appointment of electors or the

[lhn]

I'm also concerned about the constitutionality of the implementation. Electors are federal officials, so states (probably) can't impose binding voting requirements on them, any more than they can require that all representatives from the state vote with the party that controls the legislature

[agrumer]

I suspect it only becomes a problem if one of the signatory states decides to default.

Congress can't prohibit a bunch of states from all deciding to change their laws in the same way; that's how the Uniform Commercial Code works. But treating that group decision as a contract, enforceable in court, now that probably takes the agreement of Congress, like founding the Port Authority did.