US electoral system

[darthdavid]

See above poll

[darthdavid]

Can a mod add the option i don't live in the us and say no please?

[Joe]

Nope, I say leave it alone, for a number of reasons. It maintains the federal character of our Republic, allows vote fraud to be confined to "swing states" rather than spread evenly throughout the nation, prevents candidates with extremely limited appeal from using that singular appeal to win an election, and discourages third party/independent candidates from running, allowing the winning candidate to claim a more reasonable mandate.

[American asshole mode on]

And another virtue of the Electoral College system, one that we mustn't gloss over, is that Europeans dislike it. Something would definitely be wrong if Europeans didn't approve of at least some of our ways of doing things.

[American asshole mode off]

[Sea Skimmer]

Its perfectly fine in my opinion.

[Joe]

"approve" should be "disapprove."

[RedImperator]

It's perfectly fine. Without it, small states would have essentially zero voice in electing the president, which is unacceptable in a Federal system, even if it can allow for a candidate to lose the popular vote by a statistically insignificant margin and still win the election.

[Joe]

The better term to describe the statistically insignificant margin by which algore won the 2000 popular vote is probably "nonexistent." With all the fraud that is inevitable in primarily democratic urban enclaves, I would be willing to bet the Bush really won the popular vote.

[darthdavid]

People aren't really represented by the current system. The electoral college was designed because the founding father's thought that there were too many stupid americans to properly elect a president. Now there are still many stupid people in this country but the porportion of dumb to smart has shifted a little twoards smart since then and the population has grown to the point where there are enough intelligent people to conduct a proper election.

[HemlockGrey]

I think we should keep it, but change it so that the electoral votes are distributed based on percentages, i.e. if you win 20% of Florida you get 20% of Florida's vote.

[Joe]

People aren't really represented by the current system. The electoral college was designed because the founding father's thought that there were too many stupid americans to properly elect a president.

I'm not so sure they were wrong. Also, the primary reason the election of the President was originally not very democratic was because the Presidency wasn't meant to be the Maximum Leader position it is today. But even with the current Presidency, the safeguards of the electoral college remain.

I think we should keep it, but change it so that the electoral votes are distributed based on percentages, i.e. if you win 20% of Florida you get 20% of Florida's vote.

What the hell is the point of that? That essentially just makes the election of the President basically direct with a homage to federalism as little more than a formality.

[kojikun]

i wouldnt care about direct election so much if it werent that stupid people can run. if people were required to pass qualification tests proving they, oh i dont know, KNOW THE FUCKING CONSTITUTION AND THE BILL OF RIGHTS then MAYBE just maybe this country would actually be a good democracy.

as it stands the system of government needs major reworking.

[RedImperator]

I think we should keep it, but change it so that the electoral votes are distributed based on percentages, i.e. if you win 20% of Florida you get 20% of Florida's vote.

The states are free to distribute electoral votes however they wish. New Hampshire, IIRC, can split its electoral votes. I wouldn't mind if electoral votes were parceled out by Congressional district (with the statewide winner carrying the two senatorial electoral votes)--it would prevent situations like the one that exists in Pennsylvania currently, where high voter turnout in Philadelphia (80% Democratic and a rat's nest of voter fraud) can swing all of the state's electoral votes to the Democrat.

[Alyeska]

It's perfectly fine. Without it, small states would have essentially zero voice in electing the president, which is unacceptable in a Federal system, even if it can allow for a candidate to lose the popular vote by a statistically insignificant margin and still win the election.

Ahem? With the electoral system all loosing votes in small states are pointless. With a non electoral system ALL votes count which mean even small states have an important voice.

[weemadando]

Hell no. I like laughing at you guys too much.

[Howedar]

It's perfectly fine. Without it, small states would have essentially zero voice in electing the president, which is unacceptable in a Federal system, even if it can allow for a candidate to lose the popular vote by a statistically insignificant margin and still win the election.

Ahem? With the electoral system all loosing votes in small states are pointless. With a non electoral system ALL votes count which mean even small states have an important voice.

Say what?

[RedImperator]

It's perfectly fine. Without it, small states would have essentially zero voice in electing the president, which is unacceptable in a Federal system, even if it can allow for a candidate to lose the popular vote by a statistically insignificant margin and still win the election.

Ahem? With the electoral system all loosing votes in small states are pointless. With a non electoral system ALL votes count which mean even small states have an important voice.

Um, a few numbers. According to the 2000 census, California has almost 34 million people--33,871,648, to be exact. Pretending for a minute they're all registered voters, to win a majority in California a candidate must capture 16,935,825 votes. That is more than the combined total populations of Nevada, New Mexico, West Virginia, Nebraska, Idaho, Maine, New Hampshire, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, North Dakota, Alaska, Vermont, the District of Columbia, and Wyoming. Are you starting to see the problem for residents of small states if there's no electoral college?

Now, these numbers don't matter worth a damn if states are just administrative regions and you're treating their populations only as the general population of the United States, but they're not--they're coequal partners in a Federal union, and an electoral system that weights seventeen states less than a 1-vote majority in the single largest state can't work in that situation. The Electoral College actually gives more weight to the votes of individuals in the smallest states, but so does the United States Senate (your vote counts for more if you're electing a senator from Wyoming, which has less than half a million people, than it does a senator from California, with 34 million people, but your senator and the Californian's senator's votes count the same in Congress). The only election in which each voter's choice is weighted the same no matter where they live is in elections for Congress, since under the Constitution and several Supreme Court rulings, every Congressional district in the country should be as close to the same size as every other one as mathmatically possible. This was a deliberate choice on the part of the Framers, one of the mechanisms to protect the minority from a tyranny of the majority.

[weemadando]

Are you starting to see the problem for residents of small states if there's no electoral college?

Tyranny of the majority occurs in any democratic system regardless of implementation and intention.

Also, the Electoral College is not the only solution, its for a system that lacked the modern conveniences of real-time communication. If you were to modernise the system you could remove the Electoral College while still maintaining proportional representation. The Electoral College is not the last bastion against tyranny.

[RedImperator]

Are you starting to see the problem for residents of small states if there's no electoral college?

Tyranny of the majority occurs in any democratic system regardless of implementation and intention.

Also, the Electoral College is not the only solution, its for a system that lacked the modern conveniences of real-time communication. If you were to modernise the system you could remove the Electoral College while still maintaining proportional representation. The Electoral College is not the last bastion against tyranny.

Perhaps not, but it's better than a one-man, one-vote sytem, which is what most alternatives to the electoral college turn out to be. I argued earlier that you could keep the electoral college system but parcel the votes by congressional district, and you wouldn't even need a Constitutional amendment to do so (states can decide how their electoral votes are parceled out, up to and including letting the electors disregard the popular vote entirely). So in other words, if Al Gore won more votes than George Bush in New Jersey, he'd get the two Senate electoral votes plus one vote for every Congressional district he carried, up to 13 (if he won every district). This would eliminate situations where large metropolitan areas can swing entire states to one candidate (such as in Pennsylvania, where half a million voters in Philadelphia, a city entirely dominated by one party, can swing 23 electoral votes). It would also make it extremely unlikely a candidate could win the popular vote but lose the electoral vote (it's already very unlikely that a candidate could win the popular vote by a statistically significant margin and still lose the election).

[FettKyle]

Do you even understand when he says ever vote counted states wouldn't have any unfair advantage You just count up all the fucking votes for example (hypothetical) 18,000,000 Californians voted for Gore you add that up with all the other states votes for Gore as a popular vote really all that matters is that every vote is counted there is no unfair advantage except in an electoral college which then allows for a president to win even though the popular vote said other wise. All you do is count ever vote that went to the person in the Country and the person with the most votes win. I still don't see how this would give a state a unfair advatage.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Upshot is, its harder than hell to ammend the constitution, and there's no real push for it.

So bring on the electors!

[phongn]

Do you even understand when he says ever vote counted states wouldn't have any unfair advantage You just count up all the fucking votes for example (hypothetical) 18,000,000 Californians voted for Gore you add that up with all the other states votes for Gore as a popular vote really all that matters is that every vote is counted there is no unfair advantage except in an electoral college which then allows for a president to win even though the popular vote said other wise. All you do is count ever vote that went to the person in the Country and the person with the most votes win. I still don't see how this would give a state a unfair advatage.

I've never seen such run-on sentances!

The problem is that you're considering each state merely an administrative district of the US, when they're really equal partners of a union. If in a popular system certain high-population states can swamp low-population states, the partners become unequal in the election of POTUS. The politics of those high-population states thus become ascendant over those of the low-population states.

[EmperorSolo51]

I think we should keep it, but change it so that the electoral votes are distributed based on percentages, i.e. if you win 20% of Florida you get 20% of Florida's vote.

The states are free to distribute electoral votes however they wish. New Hampshire, IIRC, can split its electoral votes. I wouldn't mind if electoral votes were parceled out by Congressional district (with the statewide winner carrying the two senatorial electoral votes)--it would prevent situations like the one that exists in Pennsylvania currently, where high voter turnout in Philadelphia (80% Democratic and a rat's nest of voter fraud) can swing all of the state's electoral votes to the Democrat.

No, I live in NH and we do not do that. Our Electoral votes go to whatever candidate has won the popular vote in our state. You are confusing NH with Maine, which does split up it's electoral votes per district.

[RedImperator]

No, I live in NH and we do not do that. Our Electoral votes go to whatever candidate has won the popular vote in our state. You are confusing NH with Maine, which does split up it's electoral votes per district.

D'oh! It seems I did not, in fact, recall correctly.

[Tsyroc]

I think we should keep it, but change it so that the electoral votes are distributed based on percentages, i.e. if you win 20% of Florida you get 20% of Florida's vote.

I like that idea better than the winner take all most states currently have.

I do think we should keep the electoral system as a way to somewhat protect the less populous states but I think a proportional electoral system within each state would better represent people.

[Tsyroc]

Ahem? With the electoral system all loosing votes in small states are pointless. With a non electoral system ALL votes count which mean even small states have an important voice.

Every person's vote is more equal in a direct election but I think that keeping some sort of electoral system helps make the less populous states feel that they aren't getting trampled on by states with huge populations that supposedly all think alike. Actually, I think that's a good argument for each state having two senators but it might be interesting to see how voting would go if we had a true popular vote. It's possible more people would turn out because they wouldn't feel their vote is wasted because they live in a state dominated by one party.