Brent Nyitray
Fairlington Blade
Let the mutherfuker burn!
jnc4p
Kevin S. Willis
Michigoose
lmsinca
markinaustin
Arcanaut
novahockey
quarterback
ScottC
yellojktWe’re two weeks away from the election, which looks like it’s going to be a nail biter. Most of you, though, needn’t bother to vote. Mark is free to make a statement with his vote, because Texas is deep red. For the time being. A California Republican is useful as an ATM, but not much more. As a resident of Virginia, my vote is being heavily courted.
The electoral college is the appendix of our constitution, prone to getting infected from time to time. As I love irony, I was hoping for Kerry to win Ohio in 2004 so that Bush would lose the presidency while winning the popular vote. Right now, Nate Silver has a 6% chance of Obama winning the election while getting fewer votes than Romney. There’s a 2% chance of the converse result. That puts the total odds at about one in twelve.
My modest suggestion would be to reform, but not eliminate, the electoral college. As every congressional district is electing a representative, one can also tally presidential votes by district. Winner of a state’s popular vote gets the bonus two electoral votes. Nebraska does it this way; I think one other state does as well. Maine, perhaps? DC gets a number of delegates that reflect its population, rounded up to an even number to eliminate the possibility of a tie. We keep the pomp and circumstance of the electoral college, but effectively it’s a popular vote.
The bonus being that certain states don’t get lavish attention. I’m not worried about all the political ads. With Virginia being a deciding state for president and senator, we get a truckload of them. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that Ohio has done very well in terms of federal contracts by being the swingiest of swing states.
As long as I’m proposing a significant change to elections, I would also suggest changing the terms of House members from 2 years to 4 years and having the entire House elected with the president. Or half and half if you’re into mid-terms. It’s interesting that the House has flipped only in mid-terms in my lifetime.
Well, I’m off to my bike. C’ya.
BB
Filed under: 2013 and beyond, democracy, states' rights | Tagged: vote |
All Things in Moderation 
We need to remember that the Electoral College is a feature, not a bug. In a pure popular vote election, nothing would prevent a demagogue from say the Deep South win a huge majority in the region which overwhelms a more divided electorate in the rest of the country.
I have long advocated the awarding of electoral votes by congressional district with the two bonus votes for carrying the state. But with as gerrymandered as congressional districts have become, I’m not sure it makes things more competitive, just better distributed.
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My issue with Electoral College by CD is state legislature gerrymandering. If we had bipartisan/nonpartisan commissions drawing up our CDs to be truly representative, then Electoral College by CD would be a fine idea.
Tampa has been inundated with TV and radio ads this year. I don’t mind the candidates’ ads so much, but the SuperPAC ads have just all been lies and annoying. Every time I hear/see a Crossroads or Priorities ad, I just want to vote for the other guy.
On the other hand, if I were inclined to stand in an adoring throng for BHO or Biden or WMR or Ryan, they’ve all come to the Tampa area a couple of times each. BHO is coming again on Thursday.
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I think BB, YJ, and Mike are in general agreement. However, i am not sure to what end.
1] Do we want the EV to square with the PV? YJ says no.
2] Do we want CA and TX to be worthy of campaign stops, and not just for donor drops?
The gerrymandering does make that seem a wasted effort, as I think both Mike and YJ agree.
3] If the CDs were not gerrymandered – say by reason of an amended VRA that applied to all the states – and the EV was changed to reflect CDs + 2, statistically the same result we get now would occur. However, Ft Worth, the biggest pop center in TX that is up for grabs, would get a campaign stop from both sides. This scenario of campaigning by CD would clearly lead to more expensive and longer campaigns, because there might be 100 CDs worth a stop compared with 9 states, now.
I doubt that any change short of abolition of the EV is worth a constitutional amendment. I think the EV is intended to give states power that they would not have otherwise, in the balancing act. Until I am ready to cede even more authority to the federal government than it now maintains, I would leave the EV alone.
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At this point, I’d just eliminate the electoral college for President and go with a straight majority of the popular vote. The Senate should be left as the anti-majoritarian institution.
The issues raised by yellowjkt are secondary to the problems associated with say the pandering to the Iowa and New Hampshire electorate during the primary process every four years.
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I doubt that any change short of abolition of the EV is worth a constitutional amendment.
Sure. I agree with that too. But Maine and Nebraska were able to change their electoral vote allocation method with state legislation. Again, I’m not in favor of the allocation by CD unless gerrymandering goes away.
there might be 100 CDs worth a stop compared with 9 states
If you look at the candidates’ schedules, they are making 2 – 4 stops a day. You can cover multiple CDs with one stop. The campaign already is 60+ days — that’s at least 100 CDs each candidate can visit.
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1 – I don’t think we’ll ever be rid of the electoral college, because it would require low population states would agree to give up their extra power in the electoral college. A ground war, CD by CD, would more closely reflect the popular vote while preserving the states’ interests.
2 – I don’t think Yello’s first argument stands up, that a radical could win the presidency by piling up big margins in one part of the country. The reason being that the the coasts would loathe the demagogue from the south (and the south and center a radical from the northeast). Information spreads too fast nowadays. That Gallup poll with Romney up 6 or 7 points was largely due to a big lead in the south, but he’s tacked to the center in the general election.
3 – Good points, however, on gerrymandering. California’s new districting law makes that a more interesting place. This is already a possibility. As I recall, a Pennsylvania legislator tried to pull this off. That gives us an even worse prospect, that some state representatives will use gerrymandered districts to give their presidential candidate an edge. Republicans in a few reliably blue states–WIsconsin and Pennsylvania come to mind–pull that switch. That gives one party an inherent advantage. I can’t think of any reliably red states on the presidential level that are currently controlled by Democrats, but it works both ways.
To make this work, one would have to take on gerrymandering. Perhaps that’s a necessary precursor to such a reform. Electoral commissions work quite well
To date, four presidents have won in the electoral college while gaining fewer votes than an opponent. That’s roughly one in fourteen elections, three of which were in the 19th century. Nate Silver has the prospects at a bit under 8%, about the same. I don’t like those odds.
BB
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Thinking about this a little further, I’d propose some mechanism to declare a statistical tie. You can go back and count the votes thousands of times and get different numbers each time, so that isn’t a method for accuracy. Instead, we can acknowledge the difficulty and just say that if the difference in vote totals between the candidates is less than 0.001% (or some such number) in both the count and recount, then the election is declared a tie and each candidate is awarded half the electoral votes.
That doesn’t solve the problem of having to recount local elections, but at least you wouldn’t have Bush v. Gore II.
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Me too! Didn’t think of the bonus for carrying the state, but that sounds good. And the gerrymandering is less of an issue for rewarding electoral votes, as it’s unlikely any variations on the gerrymandering would significantly impact the overall distribution of electoral votes come election time. It would make our individual votes count more, that’s for sure.
My mind is pretty much made up. Tennessee will inevitably go to Romney, which is fine with me. I like Obama, and if there were just nobody else to vote for, I might actually vote for Obama (grading on a personal curve that helps Obama and hurts Romney, which isn’t fair, but my thinking really isn’t important: it’s the collective mind that makes democratic politics the best way to govern more than any one person’s ideological opinions). So, I’m voting for Gary Johnson. Yay, protest vote!
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it’s unlikely any variations on the gerrymandering would significantly impact the overall distribution of electoral votes come election time.
That’s not necessarily true. In FL, voter registration is split about 40/35/20/5 between D/R/I/minor. Giving the Rs all the non-D votes (and assuming all registered voters vote), we should have a 15/10 R/D Congressional delegation. But right now our delegation is split 19/6 R/D. Even in 2008, when BHO won the state 51/49, the split was 15/10 R/D. IMO, that has more to do with gerrymandering than anything else. And I doubt that FL is alone in this regard.
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I have lived in two of the most gerrymandered districts ever (as I recount in this blog post). I was in Alcee Hastings district in Florida and I now live in one in Maryland that pretty much stretches the entire height of the state. It makes no sense to make my representative so geographically divided.
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MD has a couple weird looking CDs. Other interesting gerrymandered districts (off the top of my head) are CA-38, IL-17, PA-6, PA-12, PA-18 (? Patrick Murphy’s CD), Eastern NC (NC-03?). My favorite is IL-04, Gutierrez’s district — looks like a C clamp.
FLs districts have now changed with the 2010 Fair Districts Amendment redrawing. Corrine Brown’s new FL-05 is still a snaky thing in the middle of N FL and Alcee Hasting’s new FL-20 kind of wraps around Ted Deutsch’s new FL-21.
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4 days ago: I actually debated this topic a while ago at a debate tournament, so I know a little about the subject. The system was originally put in place to prevent the more populated states from taking advantage of the small ones. That electoral college did a wonderful job at it. It seems like the aspect of the electoral college that bothers you is the winner-take-all system that the states use to distribute its electoral votes. I see the reasoning though. It is based on the hope that people will collaborate and pick a candidate that appeals to a lot of people. If they divided up the electoral votes based on percentages in a state, it could easily be split in multiple ways. (There could be 4 people who all get about 25% of the states electoral votes.) This could lead to a much worse situation where the president can have more electoral votes than the other candidates but still have relatively little of the popular vote. I see the logic and think that it is pretty solid. A good example of the vote getting split is when Teddy Roosevelt ran under the Bull-Moose party and split the conservative vote. Woodrow Wilson won the election with about 40% of the popular vote. The winner take all system discourages people from trying to run if they dont have a shot of winning. If we didnt have the winner take all system, this splitting of the vote would probably happen more often. So, I guess it is a “lesser of two evils” situation where the founding fathers though this system was better. One thing that is very outdated about the EC is the fact that we stopped adding representatives. This means people in smaller states have votes that “count more” towards the general election. If I remember correctly, a person in a less populated state has about 4 times the influence as a Californian on electoral votes because we stopped adding representatives.
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