Cecilie1200
Diamond Member
If people don't want to vote enough to do it on their own, the nation is better off without them voting at all.
Elizabeth Warren: 'End Electoral College'
- Thread starter Lakhota
- Start date
If people don't want to vote enough to do it on their own, the nation is better off without them voting at all.
Markle
Diamond Member
Of course, there is "left" or "right". Democrats/Liberals/Progressives think they know what is best for everyone and that they should be in control, regardless of what is best for the country.
The Electoral College is not going away, just as President Donald Trump is not going away. Relax and enjoy the good times!
That's not making a point. That's just whining behind your own fantasies by making shit up.
--- and that's not addressing the issue in any way whatsoever. Skeered.
Idiot, I said it was legal either way. What I said was it was wrong to disenfranchise voters by not allowing their votes to count when she could have counted them. I also said I believe she would have allowed them to be filed late had it been Bush, the brother of the man who appointed her as Secretary of State, who was behind in the count.Again, it wasn’t the state’s legislature — it was Katherine Harris, Florida’s Secretary of State at the time. And it was up to her discretion whether or not to accept late returns...
The 2000 Florida Statutes
102.112 Deadline for submission of county returns to the Department
(1) The county canvassing board or a majority thereof shall file the county returns for the election of a federal or state officer with the Department of State immediately after certification of the election results. Returns must be filed by 5 p.m. on the 7th day following the first primary and general election and by 3 p.m. on the 3rd day following the second primary. If the returns are not received by the department by the time specified, such returns may be ignored and the results on file at that time may be certified by the department.
Apparently, disenfranchising the electorate was more important than determining who was the rightful winner.
Apparently, you're not accepting that "may" can be used either way and still be legal. You could say there was "disenfranchising the electorate" if instead of "may" there was "shall not".
Shitstain, you did say "may", and still continued your post blaming her just as she broke the law.
She didn't, she acted within the law, regardless of who appointed her and whether you like it or not.
bripat9643
Diamond Member
- Apr 1, 2011
- 170,170
- 47,419
- 2,180
The EC isn't going away. Get used to it.
>> But here is an argument for Electoral College reform that might actually appeal to conservatives: Simply put, the way we currently elect presidents would horrify the early American authors of the U.S. electoral system, as defined in the 12th Amendment.
The drafters of that amendment, above all, wanted presidents to be elected according to the principle of majority rule. By the early 1800s, America had experimented four times with presidential elections, and had seen how the Founders’ original electoral system gave undue power to the minority party. In response, members of Congress devised a system—still federalist in nature—in which the winner of an Electoral College majority was supposed to have won majority support in the states.
The problem? In the decades since, states have abandoned their commitment to majority rule. Candidates today can win all of a state’s Electoral College votes with simply a plurality of votes in that state—and that state, either alone or along with others where the same thing happens, can swing entire elections. In 2016, Donald Trump won all the electoral votes, totaling 101, in six states where he received less than 50 percent of the popular vote: Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. (Hillary Clinton won seven states this way.) [poster note: actually the author forgot Utah where Rump got six more EVs with just 44% of its PV, Clinton actually "won" six states this way, not seven, those being Colorado, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hamster, New Mexico and Virginia) Those 101 [107] votes were [more than] one-third of the 304 Trump won overall—they were essential to his reaching an Electoral College majority of 270 and becoming president.
How did America’s presidential elections go so far astray from the goals of the 12th Amendment? And can we go back?
Understanding this deviation requires first going back to the origins of our current Electoral College system and examining what it was designed to accomplish. This history can also offer models for how states might change their rules in order to restore America’s commitment to majority rule. Principled constitutional originalists should be leading the call for this kind of reform—a reform that requires not a constitutional amendment but only changes in state law. In reality, the current system works to the detriment of both Republicans and Democrats.
.... The Electoral College system governing us today, as delineated in the 12th Amendment, is primarily the result of congressional deliberations in 1803, which revised the original system adopted at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. To the Founders, the goal of the first electoral system was to elect presidents who were consensus choices, rising above the fray of squabbling political factions. Each elector was required to cast two votes for president, each for a different candidate and the two candidates coming from different states. The assumption was that nationally acceptable second-choice candidates often would prevail over disparate “favorite son” candidates from each state.
This worked with George Washington in 1789 and 1792. But in the next two elections, after Washington retired, head-to-head competition developed between two opposing political parties—the Federalists, led by John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, and the Jeffersonians*, led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. It soon became clear that two-party politics was incompatible with the two-presidential-votes-per-elector rule.
In the election of 1800, Jefferson outpaced Adams in the Electoral College tally—73 to 65—but tied his running mate, Aaron Burr, since the Jeffersonian electors each cast their two votes for their party’s presidential and vice-presidential candidates. The Constitution’s mechanism for breaking this tie was a vote in the outgoing House of Representatives (by a special procedure in which each state’s delegation had one vote), which meant that the party controlling the outcome in the House (the Federalists) was opposed to the party whose candidates had tied for the presidency (the Jeffersonians). Not only had the Electoral College not yielded a clear winner, but tie-breaking process made matters tenser; the governors of Virginia and Pennsylvania were even prepared to use their state militias to defend Jefferson’s claim to the presidency.
Eventually, the Federalists backed down, in large part because Hamilton convinced his fellow partisans that, while Jefferson’s principles were abhorrent, at least he had principles, whereas Burr did not. (All who have seen the phenom musical Hamilton will remember this point.) Still, it was clear to the Jeffersonians that they had to do something to prevent such circumstances in the future.
Not only that, but the Jeffersonians wanted the Electoral College to yield winners who were more reflective of the prevailing sentiment among the American people. This was strategic: Ahead of the election of 1804, Jefferson had just completed the Louisiana Purchase, which Federalists opposed but the rest of the country enthusiastically applauded. The Jeffersonians also held two-thirds majorities in both houses of Congress in 1803; they did not need Federalist support to send a constitutional amendment to the states, where they were dominant as well.
So, when Congress met that year, the Jeffersonians introduced a draft of what would become the 12th Amendment, and lawmakers went to work debating it. In fact, Congress in 1803 gave much more thought to the nature of presidential elections than the 1787 convention delegates had given.
The Federalists—with Senator Uriah Tracy of Connecticut most conspicuously leading the way—defended the 1787 Electoral College system, clinging to the idea that it allowed a minority party to block a majority party’s presidential candidate. If the minority electors found the majority candidate objectionable, all they had to do was cast their two votes for their own presidential candidate and the vice-presidential candidate of the majority party, and the majority party’s vice-presidential candidate would almost certainly end up with more votes than the majority party’s presidential candidate. The Federalists contended that this minority veto was more consistent with the consensus-seeking goal of the 1787 Electoral College.
The Jeffersonians, however, argued strenuously that, according to fundamental principles of republican government, the chief executive must be the choice of the majority party. Senator John Taylor, a constitutional scholar from Virginia, asserted that it “never” is appropriate that “a minor faction should acquire a power capable of defeating the majority in the election of President.” Instead, Taylor proclaimed on the Senate floor, “the election of a President should be determined by a fair expression of the public will by a majority.” The 12th Amendment that he and the Jeffersonians proposed—in which electors each cast a single vote for president and then a separate vote for vice president—was designed to entrust power to the majority vote, which the Jeffersonians saw as representative of the popular sentiment.
.... The Jeffersonians did not conceive of this majority rule as a national popular vote. Sufficiently committed to federalism, they wanted a candidate to achieve a majority of Electoral College votes by securing majority support within the states providing those electoral votes. A duly elected president under the 12th Amendment, in other words, would attain a federally appropriate, compound majority-of-majorities.
Eventually, the Jeffersonians got their way in 1803. The next year, the 12th Amendment was ratified, making clear the young republic’s commitment to the will of the majority.
At first, the system devised in 1803 produced results generally consistent with the 12th Amendment’s original intent. But over time, the amendment began to lose its majoritarian moorings.
... All of this began to change with the rise of the plurality winner-take-all system, in which all of a state’s electors are awarded to the candidate who receives the highest number of votes in the state—even if that candidate receives only a plurality of the popular vote. Winner-take-all became the dominant method of appointing electors among the states after Andrew Jackson felt robbed of the presidency in 1824 and helped to persuade state legislatures to change their rules to permit plurality victories. [Jackson had easily won the popular vote by over eight points but lost the decision to Quincy Adams]
Today, 48 states rely on the plurality winner-take-all system to select their presidential electors. It has long been the norm. But it is also a system the Jeffersonians would find entirely objectionable insofar as it empowers a party and a candidate that lack a majority of votes. The Jeffersonians would find it even more objectionable if such a candidate achieved an Electoral College victory only as a result of these minority-vote wins in enough states. Yet this is exactly what has happened in several recent elections.
... It is the states that have the power to restore the Electoral College to its original intent—and to ensure that it better represents the will of the American people. To do so, they must commit themselves to this majority-rule principle: No candidate receives all of a state’s electoral votes unless the candidate gets a majority of the state’s popular votes.
There are many methods states can use to comply with this principle. They could have a regular runoff between the top-two candidates, held in late November, if no candidate received a majority in the initial popular vote. Alternatively, states could hold a preliminary vote—perhaps on the Tuesday after Labor Day—to clear the field of third-party and independent candidates, so that only the top two finalists appear on the November ballot. (This option would function similarly to the “top two” system that California and Washington state currently use for nonpresidential elections.) Or, states could adopt the kind of “instant runoff voting” procedure that Maine recently employed successfully for its congressional elections: Voters can rank their preferences among multiple candidates, so that a computer can tally which of the top two finalists receives a majority once all lower-ranked candidates are eliminated.
[ OldLady ] see above
Another idea: A state could award all of its electoral votes to a candidate who receives a majority of the state’s popular vote, but if no candidate does, then the state would apportion its electoral votes among the candidates. For example, in the instance of a 38-37-25 percent split among three candidates in a state’s popular vote, a state with 10 electoral votes might split them 4-4-2.
... This commitment to majority rule, moreover, is actually fairer to third-party and independent candidates than the current system, because it gives them a chance to break through without risk of affecting the outcome if they don’t. When voters don’t have to worry about how a third-party candidate might skew the election, they might feel more emboldened to vote for that candidate, and the candidate has a better opportunity to make his or her case. << ---- Edward B. Foley, Professor of Law at Ohio State University (Politico Magazine)
Bolds are mine.
The drafters of that amendment, above all, wanted presidents to be elected according to the principle of majority rule. By the early 1800s, America had experimented four times with presidential elections, and had seen how the Founders’ original electoral system gave undue power to the minority party. In response, members of Congress devised a system—still federalist in nature—in which the winner of an Electoral College majority was supposed to have won majority support in the states.
The problem? In the decades since, states have abandoned their commitment to majority rule. Candidates today can win all of a state’s Electoral College votes with simply a plurality of votes in that state—and that state, either alone or along with others where the same thing happens, can swing entire elections. In 2016, Donald Trump won all the electoral votes, totaling 101, in six states where he received less than 50 percent of the popular vote: Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. (Hillary Clinton won seven states this way.) [poster note: actually the author forgot Utah where Rump got six more EVs with just 44% of its PV, Clinton actually "won" six states this way, not seven, those being Colorado, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hamster, New Mexico and Virginia) Those 101 [107] votes were [more than] one-third of the 304 Trump won overall—they were essential to his reaching an Electoral College majority of 270 and becoming president.
How did America’s presidential elections go so far astray from the goals of the 12th Amendment? And can we go back?
Understanding this deviation requires first going back to the origins of our current Electoral College system and examining what it was designed to accomplish. This history can also offer models for how states might change their rules in order to restore America’s commitment to majority rule. Principled constitutional originalists should be leading the call for this kind of reform—a reform that requires not a constitutional amendment but only changes in state law. In reality, the current system works to the detriment of both Republicans and Democrats.
.... The Electoral College system governing us today, as delineated in the 12th Amendment, is primarily the result of congressional deliberations in 1803, which revised the original system adopted at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. To the Founders, the goal of the first electoral system was to elect presidents who were consensus choices, rising above the fray of squabbling political factions. Each elector was required to cast two votes for president, each for a different candidate and the two candidates coming from different states. The assumption was that nationally acceptable second-choice candidates often would prevail over disparate “favorite son” candidates from each state.
This worked with George Washington in 1789 and 1792. But in the next two elections, after Washington retired, head-to-head competition developed between two opposing political parties—the Federalists, led by John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, and the Jeffersonians*, led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. It soon became clear that two-party politics was incompatible with the two-presidential-votes-per-elector rule.
[*"Jeffersonians" = "Democratic-Republican Party"]
In the election of 1800, Jefferson outpaced Adams in the Electoral College tally—73 to 65—but tied his running mate, Aaron Burr, since the Jeffersonian electors each cast their two votes for their party’s presidential and vice-presidential candidates. The Constitution’s mechanism for breaking this tie was a vote in the outgoing House of Representatives (by a special procedure in which each state’s delegation had one vote), which meant that the party controlling the outcome in the House (the Federalists) was opposed to the party whose candidates had tied for the presidency (the Jeffersonians). Not only had the Electoral College not yielded a clear winner, but tie-breaking process made matters tenser; the governors of Virginia and Pennsylvania were even prepared to use their state militias to defend Jefferson’s claim to the presidency.
Eventually, the Federalists backed down, in large part because Hamilton convinced his fellow partisans that, while Jefferson’s principles were abhorrent, at least he had principles, whereas Burr did not. (All who have seen the phenom musical Hamilton will remember this point.) Still, it was clear to the Jeffersonians that they had to do something to prevent such circumstances in the future.
Not only that, but the Jeffersonians wanted the Electoral College to yield winners who were more reflective of the prevailing sentiment among the American people. This was strategic: Ahead of the election of 1804, Jefferson had just completed the Louisiana Purchase, which Federalists opposed but the rest of the country enthusiastically applauded. The Jeffersonians also held two-thirds majorities in both houses of Congress in 1803; they did not need Federalist support to send a constitutional amendment to the states, where they were dominant as well.
So, when Congress met that year, the Jeffersonians introduced a draft of what would become the 12th Amendment, and lawmakers went to work debating it. In fact, Congress in 1803 gave much more thought to the nature of presidential elections than the 1787 convention delegates had given.
The Federalists—with Senator Uriah Tracy of Connecticut most conspicuously leading the way—defended the 1787 Electoral College system, clinging to the idea that it allowed a minority party to block a majority party’s presidential candidate. If the minority electors found the majority candidate objectionable, all they had to do was cast their two votes for their own presidential candidate and the vice-presidential candidate of the majority party, and the majority party’s vice-presidential candidate would almost certainly end up with more votes than the majority party’s presidential candidate. The Federalists contended that this minority veto was more consistent with the consensus-seeking goal of the 1787 Electoral College.
The Jeffersonians, however, argued strenuously that, according to fundamental principles of republican government, the chief executive must be the choice of the majority party. Senator John Taylor, a constitutional scholar from Virginia, asserted that it “never” is appropriate that “a minor faction should acquire a power capable of defeating the majority in the election of President.” Instead, Taylor proclaimed on the Senate floor, “the election of a President should be determined by a fair expression of the public will by a majority.” The 12th Amendment that he and the Jeffersonians proposed—in which electors each cast a single vote for president and then a separate vote for vice president—was designed to entrust power to the majority vote, which the Jeffersonians saw as representative of the popular sentiment.
.... The Jeffersonians did not conceive of this majority rule as a national popular vote. Sufficiently committed to federalism, they wanted a candidate to achieve a majority of Electoral College votes by securing majority support within the states providing those electoral votes. A duly elected president under the 12th Amendment, in other words, would attain a federally appropriate, compound majority-of-majorities.
Eventually, the Jeffersonians got their way in 1803. The next year, the 12th Amendment was ratified, making clear the young republic’s commitment to the will of the majority.
At first, the system devised in 1803 produced results generally consistent with the 12th Amendment’s original intent. But over time, the amendment began to lose its majoritarian moorings.
... All of this began to change with the rise of the plurality winner-take-all system, in which all of a state’s electors are awarded to the candidate who receives the highest number of votes in the state—even if that candidate receives only a plurality of the popular vote. Winner-take-all became the dominant method of appointing electors among the states after Andrew Jackson felt robbed of the presidency in 1824 and helped to persuade state legislatures to change their rules to permit plurality victories. [Jackson had easily won the popular vote by over eight points but lost the decision to Quincy Adams]
Today, 48 states rely on the plurality winner-take-all system to select their presidential electors. It has long been the norm. But it is also a system the Jeffersonians would find entirely objectionable insofar as it empowers a party and a candidate that lack a majority of votes. The Jeffersonians would find it even more objectionable if such a candidate achieved an Electoral College victory only as a result of these minority-vote wins in enough states. Yet this is exactly what has happened in several recent elections.
... It is the states that have the power to restore the Electoral College to its original intent—and to ensure that it better represents the will of the American people. To do so, they must commit themselves to this majority-rule principle: No candidate receives all of a state’s electoral votes unless the candidate gets a majority of the state’s popular votes.
There are many methods states can use to comply with this principle. They could have a regular runoff between the top-two candidates, held in late November, if no candidate received a majority in the initial popular vote. Alternatively, states could hold a preliminary vote—perhaps on the Tuesday after Labor Day—to clear the field of third-party and independent candidates, so that only the top two finalists appear on the November ballot. (This option would function similarly to the “top two” system that California and Washington state currently use for nonpresidential elections.) Or, states could adopt the kind of “instant runoff voting” procedure that Maine recently employed successfully for its congressional elections: Voters can rank their preferences among multiple candidates, so that a computer can tally which of the top two finalists receives a majority once all lower-ranked candidates are eliminated.
[ OldLady ] see above
Another idea: A state could award all of its electoral votes to a candidate who receives a majority of the state’s popular vote, but if no candidate does, then the state would apportion its electoral votes among the candidates. For example, in the instance of a 38-37-25 percent split among three candidates in a state’s popular vote, a state with 10 electoral votes might split them 4-4-2.
... This commitment to majority rule, moreover, is actually fairer to third-party and independent candidates than the current system, because it gives them a chance to break through without risk of affecting the outcome if they don’t. When voters don’t have to worry about how a third-party candidate might skew the election, they might feel more emboldened to vote for that candidate, and the candidate has a better opportunity to make his or her case. << ---- Edward B. Foley, Professor of Law at Ohio State University (Politico Magazine)
Bolds are mine.
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--- and that too is not addressing the issue in any way whatsoever. Thinking is hard, so why bother.
The Fingerboy Solution: throw up your hands, give up, cave in, wimp out, bend over, lie back and think of England. That's how we git thangs dun in Fingerfuck's Merka.
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That's one of the problems with voting not being compulsory, as is in Belgium or Australia. I wish it is, so we see the real outcome of the elections, plus give another reason to Democrats to whine how poor people are not able to get to polling places.
Exactly.
The Constitution’s focus is to limit power and impose checks and balances, in order to avoid tyranny of any kind, and especially tyranny of the majority (see the Bill of Rights). The Constitution values not just bodies, it also values states (2 senators even though VA in 1790 was eleven times the pop. of RI).
basquebromance
Diamond Member
- Nov 26, 2015
- 109,396
- 27,171
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- #1,550
let's lower the voting age to newborns. that way Democrats don't kill them!
That's exactly what the problem is with Democrats. They don't care about legality if they can push for it any other way, or go around it. Even when you point it to them, as you and many of us did, they still ignore it, and pushing their narrative.
It's simple. If you don't like something in the constitution, you know how to change it, follow the process.
Today's left are not liberals. They wants us to call them liberals because it associate them with founding fathers, although they're nowhere near them. Today left are progressives, which is closest to Marxist Bolsheviks.
Cecilie1200
Diamond Member
I think they've probably also had some other sore losers kvetching over the years, too.
Now I remember why I had you on Ignore so long. Thought maybe you'd learned something down there.
Too bad so sad.
The Left has never been "Liberals". Don't blame somebody else because you don't know what words mean.
Speaking of which "Progressives" exited the scene 100 years ago.
Two. The other way is convention of states.
Markle
Diamond Member
Wait, majority vote is not required. But popular vote is???
Hey, I ain't the one whining "will never work" with zero ruminations on the subject. Go buy a mirror. The fact that you waddle in here emptyhanded is nobody's fault but urine.
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