The state must represent their constituency. They can proportionality distribute their college votes by the populace within their state or they can give them all to the winner of the popular vote WITHIN THEIR STATE, but they can not give their votes away due to voting in other states.. This violates FEC rules..
And if i was a voter in one of those states they would find themselves in court defending that disenfranchisement of my right to vote.
ABSOLUTELY RIGHT. If Trump wins 60% of the popular vote in state XYZ, that state cannot say that Hillary won the national popular vote (which is a meaningless, non-binding statistic only with no legal value), by 2%, so they are giving Trump's 60% state win over to Hillary. That violates every election law in the books.
For the Dems to even suggest such a thing is the hare-brained fascist power-grab to end all hare-brained fascist power grabs and will be challenged and defeated in the Supreme Court.
The states involved would be changing their laws regarding how they seat electors. In that case, what law would be violated, specifically?
Well, if it contradicts the results in the state, it would amount to disenfranchising their voters. I'm gonna say any number of people could make a convincing case that that's illegal.
As I read it, if a state is going to go through the charade of a popular vote purportedly to select Electors, then every state that apportions
any of its electors contrary to a significant portion of those votes --- as they
all do with the WTA system --- is in so doing disenfranchising that portion of its voters. And as already noted, that's already been going on longer than any of us have been alive. If a case can be made that that is in fact illegal, then I wish somebody would make it, yesterday. James Madison would agree, and already did.
It is not a "charade", nor is it "disenfranchising", that every election has a winner and a loser. That is nonsensical on the face of it. How in the hell would you make it illegal for elections to produce one winner, even assuming you wanted such an asinine and impossible thing?
Beats the shit outta me. Perhaps if I had suggested such a canard I'd have a basis to explain it, but since I didn't, it would appear you're attempting to morph what I did say into something I didn't for lack of any response to the former.
It is indeed a 'charade' in that it's (the election) trotted out as if it matters, as if it's a genuine vote, as if going to the ballot box means something, when in fact not only is it not at all required, but once it's counted, the state's Electors are not obliged to follow it at all, and in fact DO NOT by virtue of the "unanimous" song and dance, let alone the occasional so-called "faithless elector".
My state for instance did not vote 100% for Rump at the ballot box, but rather 50.5%. Yet our sterling Elector Set gave him all fifteen of our state's votes, one hundred percent. I'm pretty sure that 100% is not the same thing as 50.5%.
As just noted immediately above, they can do that, it's within their job description. But what they can't do is sit there and tell me (or Congress) that their vote of 100% "represents" the state vote of 50.5, because clearly it cannot. No math exists that makes that equation. Ergo charade, ergo disenfranchisement. Now if they had allotted 8 votes to Rump and 7 to Clinton they could claim that EV represented the state vote. But they didn't. Nor did anybody else, nor do they ever.
And leave us not omit that this is one of the glaring sore points of the WTA, that since the sentient among us already know there's a 50% chance our vote will be shit-canned in a so-called "battleground" state, and a 100% chance it will be shit-canned in a so-called "red" or "blue" state, a yuge chunk of us just don't bother to vote at all, resulting in an internationally embarrassing 55% turnout for a freaking national election --- because what's the point if your vote is going to be ignored?
I don't recall James Madison EVER suggesting that we should somehow invent elections with no winners.
Nor do I. That's probably why I made no such claim. Once again, trying to shift my point to some other point I didn't make merely because if I
had made it you could have handled it. But here's a flesh-out of the point I actually laid down that you're trying to avoid:
>> In 1823, Madison wrote a
remarkable letter to George Hay explaining his views of the Electoral College, his
strong opposition to states voting as winner-take-all blocs and his view of the origins of the winner-take-all rule. In addition to
disenfranchising districts that voted against the preference of the state, Madison worried that statewide voting
would increase sectionalism and the strength of geographic parties. <<
It would appear he was exactly right. Witless the proliferation of wags whining about "coastal domination" and the aforementioned bullshit of "red states" vs. "blue states", exactly as Madison predicted. Scarcely a distinction between that and "Confederate states" vs. "Union states", the only practical difference being convenience of geography.
>> He wrote that his views were widely shared by others at the Constitutional Convention, and that the winner-take-all approach had been forced on many states due to its adoption in other states << ---
Link here to "kindergarten"
-- and there you have the origin of WTA ....
state-level Groupthink.
What IS a charade is to say, "No matter who wins in this state, we're going to give our Electoral votes to the winner of all the other states!" THAT is disenfranchising every voter who isn't a resident of California, New York, or Texas, basically.
That it may be,. but it's not unConstitutional.
The fact that there are people who are honestly bewildered about what our system does, how it does it, and why just goes to show how utterly ignorant our population has become.
Fully agreed. We've both made this point.
"Winner take all" states are not my preference, but are still far more inclusive of all citizens voting and participating than any pretense that a "national popular vote" could make at it.
Nnnnnope. 49.5% of my state's voters didn't get included at all, and the same applies to every other state with only the percentage varying. But every one of them shit-canned a shitload of votes.
Seems to me if this fantasy that imagines "the people don't vote, the states do" is to hold, then there's no point in the people ever going to the polls at all --- and we're back to "charade". Indeed many a state has sent many an elector with no popular election at all, and it was entirely Constitutional. So why do we bother?
I won't say you're definitely wrong about how out-of-touch people have become, but I do think this is going to be egregious enough to wake a lot of idiots up, when push comes to shove. And I think it will be idiots on BOTH sides of the aisle.
Oh, it's an end-run around the Constitution, and the fact that the left is screaming, "TECHNICALLY, it's okay! We can get away with it!" doesn't change the fact that this is a deliberate, malicious attempt to twist and pervert the letter of the law in order to attack the intent of the law.
Again, perfectly Constitutional. That document does not prescribe HOW the states are to select their Electors. That includes whether it's based on an internal vote, an external vote, or no vote at all. That's simply the fact. It may not be, and in fact isn't, the preferred solution but it
does fall within the Constitutional framework, which means they
can do it if they want to. IF the end result fits the framework AND the end result is undesirable, THEN the framework is the faulty factor.
And yes, I know that the US Constitution doesn't specify a vote of the people, but I don't think that's because the Founding Fathers considered the votes of individuals in regards to the President to be irrelevant or unimportant; I think they just believed that the question would be addressed at the state level, which is where they thought the will of the individual people would be strongest and most valued. I don't think they expected us to become so spoiled and apathetic and divorced from the concept of sovereign states that we would allow things to come to this pass.
It's actually because a direct popular vote, as Madison preferred in principle, would have resulted in biased power in states that had more broad enfranchisement than others. This does not apply now but at the time of the Constitution different states had different voter enfranchisement laws. Pennsylvania had relatively expansive suffrage rights, for example, and Massachusetts did not, so that would have put the latter at a disadvantage --- hence the proxy system. In fact as late as 1860 at least one state (SC) was still using its state legislature to select Presidential Electors with no popular ballot at all.
But again, that was the layout of the late eighteenth century, and since we've federally enfranchised citizens universally regardless of state, this basis
no longer applies.
From the above link:
>> The College's primary purpose was not to give small states greater representation, as is often claimed by its defenders today. Instead, the Electoral College was created to reflect the political realities associated with accommodating the institution of slavery into our electoral system. Under a direct election system, the southern states would be at a significant disadvantage because their slaves could not vote. Through the Electoral College and the Three-Fifths Compromise, however, partially counting the slaves when determining the number of presidential electors allowed southern states to rival the electoral power of their northern brethren.
(Indeed as already pointed out, four of the first five POTUSes (32 of the first 36 Administration years) were slaveholders from the South, and specifically from Virginia, the dominant Electoral College pool).
... Madison expressed his preference for a national popular vote for president in a speech at the Convention, however, arguing that "
the people at large was...the fittest " to choose an executive. Although he recognized that such a system would put southern states, including his native Virginia, at a major electoral disadvantage, Madison believed that "
local considerations must give way to the general interest," and he was "willing to make the sacrifice" of his state's political power for the good of the American democracy. His fellow Southerners had no interest in such political martyrdom, though, and Madison was forced to support the Electoral College as a compromise. <<
So that's how we got here---- ultimately a byproduct of
Slave Power -- a political dynamic which, interestingly, was singled out and vehemently denounced by an upstart organization called the Republican Party. I find that particularly interesting considering the OP wants to imagine it's the
Democratic Party here making the same challenge. As you and I seem to agree here, 'those who ignore their own history...."
