It takes 3/4 of the States to ratify an Amendment to the Constitution: The Electoral College is safe

[SAYIT]

...and it takes a Constitutional amendment, not an interstate compact, to abolish the Electoral College.

The court challenge will quickly disenfranchise their constitutional end-around.

 

[Cecilie1200]

...and it takes a Constitutional amendment, not an interstate compact, to abolish the Electoral College.

Nobody is abolishing the electoral college. They are working within it to see that the majority is actually represented.

even if it's at the expense of the smaller states?

this really how we push a UNION of American citizens?

Are you OK with it being used to disenfranchise millions of voters in the larger states?

Larger state have more EC votes, they're not at all "disenfranchised"

Smaller states EC votes carry more weight. Larger states are indeed disenfranchised by the electoral college.

"Carry more weight" . . . in what?

 

[Cecilie1200]

...and it takes a Constitutional amendment, not an interstate compact, to abolish the Electoral College.

Nobody is abolishing the electoral college. They are working within it to see that the majority is actually represented.

In other words, they're just going to do an end-run around it to nullify it, rather than abolishing it through the proper channels, because leftists can't advance their agenda honestly.

The liberal scheme could easily fail. Remember that Hillary Clinton in 2016 did virtually no campaign appearances in California or New York. As a result, they didn't see Mrs.Clinton in those states, and voted for her in massive numbers.

Abolishing the electoral college would have moved Mrs. Clinton out of Flyover Country and into California where those folks would get a chance to see her. Clinton's popularity would sink like a rock, and she wouldn't get nearly the 4 million vote margin she did in the Golden Shower State.

That's as may be. Still not willing to let them permanently fuck up our system of government and elections on the basis of "Well, it wouldn't have helped them with THIS particular shit candidate, anyway."

 

[SAYIT]

...and it takes a Constitutional amendment, not an interstate compact, to abolish the Electoral College.

as i say over and over,WHY even bother having a PV when it does not even count that he EC is the only thing that matters in the end?

Article II

12th Amendment

 

[Cecilie1200]

...and it takes a Constitutional amendment, not an interstate compact, to abolish the Electoral College.

as i say over and over,WHY even bother having a PV when it does not even count that he EC is the only thing that matters in the end?

Um, we DON'T really have a popular vote. We just have a news media that likes to sweep all the state numbers together and jabber on about it as though it's meaningful.

 

[LeftofLeft]

The flyover states are worried that their dwindling brain-drained populations may lose some power in Washington but what they have done with their power is not a good case for keeping the EC. There's always the Senate where the rednecks have a decided advantage. Half of America is represented by a dozen or so senators and the hillbillies get the rest.

What is so brain-drained about flyover country compared to inner cities? In both rural areas and inner cities, there are instances of illiteracy and welfare. I think the difference is you people have got the inner cities bought up but are simply struggling to get the poor rural voters at scale; hence, the name-calling and arrogance. Plus, your side is losing voters who want to work which accounts for the push to eliminate the EC, enable non-citizens the right to vote, and lower the voting age.

 

[Pogo]

You are 100% correct. Every election would be decided by the States with the most people. All the smile states votes would count for nothing.

No, every election would be decided by the people of America. Each vote having equal value rather than the current system of a vote in Wyoming being worth 3 times the vote of a Californian. One person, one vote.

Seawytch you can achieve the same goal by having
all states agree to split their Electoral Votes proportionally according to how THEIR citizens voted,
not the rest of the nation.

If I recall last time I discussed this in depth with Pogo,
when we went back and split the State votes proportionally,
Clinton either won by a slight margin or it was tied and could have required either
a "run off" or a preferential vote to break the tie without a second run off needed.

IIRC Clinton still lost under that system. But at least millions of votes were not instantly tossed in the crapper by proxy, which is at least an improvement over the sham we call an "election" at present.

As for voting by popular vote, this would change campaigns
where candidates would only invest in lobbying the MOST POPULATED CITIES/AREAS OR STATES.

Does not follow. That's what they do now, focused on so-called "swing" states, which means their voters have only a 50-50 chance that their vote will be discarded rather than a 100% chance. As an inevitable consequence nobody bothers to campaign in Texas or New York or Massachusetts or Alabama, as both sides know those state votes are already predecided, so there's no point in either of them going there. And as a result of that, states like mine get a constant barrage of campaign events while those that the polls say are safely in a "red" or "blue" camp, get utterly ignored. Which also means no reason for the latter to consider anything except "what we've always done", because nobody gives them a reason to.

In practice, candidates reach FAR more potential voters through mass media than they ever could in a live appearance, so that's where the concentration would be. We could end up with no personal appearances at all saving those that will translate to useful video that can be edited to the next TV ad. You don't need to travel to reach a mass audience in the electronic age, and we are long past the point where we don't elect an executive but rather we buy a product, based on TV ads.

If you want a more representative split of Electoral Votes, again, that can be done by distributing these PROPORTIONALLY to reflect the POPULAR vote by STATE. So that still protects smaller and bigger states.

That's part of it, but also as regards proportionality probably the most egregious fault of the current WTA/EC system is that in my aforementioned state where the polls (that we have to depend on to find out if it's even worth getting out of bed on election day) say "too close to call", when all the dust settled, NOBODY won the state. No candidate could convince even 50% of the voters. That also happened in Pennsylvania, Florida, Virginia, Colorado, Wisconsin, Michigan, Utah, Arizona and I think a few others. Nevertheless the Electors in every one of those states awarded ALL (100%) of their EVs to whoever reached a plurality, which means more than half of the voters in all of those states got their votes immediately flushed down the toilet.

The Electoral College was never intended to work that way.

>> 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.

The primary reason was a major transformation in the methods that states use for appointing their Electoral College members. Before the 12th Amendment, most often a state’s legislature voted directly for Electoral College electors, which was consistent with the principle of majority rule. When states let citizens vote for the electors, they took steps to make sure that the chosen electors still represented the majority of the state’s voters, as well. For example, Massachusetts and New Hampshire experimented with different forms of runoffs in the event that an elector did not receive a majority of votes from the citizenry. Some states used districts to vote for presidential electors, rather than have all the voters of the state vote for all the state’s electors. This method permitted a regionally based minority party within the state to win at least some of the state’s electors, but presumably the majority party within the state overall would control a majority of the state’s Electoral College votes.

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.

... Ironically, William Jefferson Clinton’s election in 1992 was the most un-Jeffersonian of all. The only state in which he won a majority of the popular vote (setting aside the District of Columbia) was his home state of Arkansas.

..... 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. << --- The way we now elect presidents would horrify the authors of the U.S. electoral system. But the system can be fixed, and the power lies with the states (emphasis added)​

The author points out that the plurality-over-majority phenomenon occurs because of "third-party" candies siphoning off votes from the Duopoly candy, which leaves the 3P still far off the threshold but subtracts enough from the Duopoly so that neither of them can prevail in that state. That's what produced the Clinton result above (Ross Perot) as well as innumerable similar results from Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 to Jill Stein and Gary Johnson in 2016 (and in the case of Utah, Evan McMullin).

And two aspects are notable about that.

One, such third-party and/or "fringe" candidates receive a large boost of their support directly from voter dissatisfaction with the Duopoly system ------ which the WTA system protects and preserves, obviously, through the machinations stated above, and therefore makes a third party success impossible. A huge swath of the electorate (we can only guess how huge) doesn't like either the Democrat nor the Republican BUT feels they have to vote for the one to block the other, because it's a locked Duopoly system and one of them is getting the vote ----- while the two-sides-of-the-same-coin Duopoly Party knows that neither side needs to field a quality candidate, all they have to do is convince their voters that they're not as bad as the other side, so we inevitably get the choice of "Bad" vs. "Worse", because under that rigged system, we're getting either one or the other....

And Two, when such a third party campaign is undertaken, its strategy is not to win outright, but specifically to siphon off enough votes so as to deny either Duopoly party a majority in the Electoral College (which amazingly STILL requries a majority unlike the individual states), and thereby throw the election into the House of Representatives, where all bets are off and they can begin negotiating with either of the Duopoly for concessions. This illustrates how running outside the Duopoly is at once (a) a futile endeavor for reaching the office, and (b) invites, indeed requires, a strategy to in effect nullify the election altogether. That was directly and explicitly the strategy of Strom Thurmond (1948) and George Wallace (1968) who would have lobbied for racist concessions from whoever they could negotiate with.

And that was never supposed to be how it works either.

Continuing the article:

>> 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. <<

​

So yes, put the proportionality back into the EC so that umpteen million votes don't get summarily tossed in the trash can before election day even occurs, but also make it impossible for somebody to whisk away 100% of a state's EVs just because they got 17% of that state's vote where none of the other 7 candidates could muster more than 16. And for those continually crying the blues about the small states, it would protect them too. ALL states would be sure about who they were voting for, and their EVs would be actually representative of that state, for the first time in centuries.

 

[basquebromance]

The math does not add up for Democrats to win the Senate or the Presidency without rural America.

 

[Seawytch]

You are 100% correct. Every election would be decided by the States with the most people. All the smile states votes would count for nothing.

No, every election would be decided by the people of America. Each vote having equal value rather than the current system of a vote in Wyoming being worth 3 times the vote of a Californian. One person, one vote.

Not planning to remake the country on the basis of your faulty math equations.

Nothing wrong with my math your bitchiness.

Voters In Wyoming Have 3.6 Times The Voting Power That I Have. It's Time To End The Electoral College. | HuffPost

 

[anynameyouwish]

...and it takes a Constitutional amendment, not an interstate compact, to abolish the Electoral College.

I see conservatives like stacking the deck when it is in their favor.

 

[anynameyouwish]

The math does not add up for Democrats to win the Senate or the Presidency without rural America.

if red states didn't get EXTRA VOTES Democrats could easily win the presidency.

 

[Cecilie1200]

You are 100% correct. Every election would be decided by the States with the most people. All the smile states votes would count for nothing.

No, every election would be decided by the people of America. Each vote having equal value rather than the current system of a vote in Wyoming being worth 3 times the vote of a Californian. One person, one vote.

Not planning to remake the country on the basis of your faulty math equations.

Nothing wrong with my math your bitchiness.

Voters In Wyoming Have 3.6 Times The Voting Power That I Have. It's Time To End The Electoral College. | HuffPost

There's one thing very wrong with your math, Your Foolishness (aside from the fact that you let Hufflepuff Post do your thinking for you): It's based on a false and illogical premise. You ASSume that numbers of individual people voting is supposed to matter on a national scale.

 

[Bootney Lee Farnsworth]

Incorrect. If enough states (the magic 270) agree to the popular vote compact, it's done.

Wrong.

That is an unconstitutional interstate compact that becomes federal law if congress consents, thereby bypassing the amendment process and working contrary tot the 12th.

.

 

[Seawytch]

You are 100% correct. Every election would be decided by the States with the most people. All the smile states votes would count for nothing.

No, every election would be decided by the people of America. Each vote having equal value rather than the current system of a vote in Wyoming being worth 3 times the vote of a Californian. One person, one vote.

Not planning to remake the country on the basis of your faulty math equations.

Nothing wrong with my math your bitchiness.

Voters In Wyoming Have 3.6 Times The Voting Power That I Have. It's Time To End The Electoral College. | HuffPost

There's one thing very wrong with your math, Your Foolishness (aside from the fact that you let Hufflepuff Post do your thinking for you): It's based on a false and illogical premise. You ASSume that numbers of individual people voting is supposed to matter on a national scale.

It should matter in a small d democracy. I noticed you can’t actually counter the math with anything but bitchiness and pathetic attacking of the source.

Whose votes count the least in the Electoral College?

 

[Seawytch]

Incorrect. If enough states (the magic 270) agree to the popular vote compact, it's done.

Wrong.

That is an unconstitutional interstate compact that becomes federal law if congress consents, thereby bypassing the amendment process and working contrary tot the 12th.

.

They are almost there...we’ll maybe get to see...

 

[Pogo]

Incorrect. If enough states (the magic 270) agree to the popular vote compact, it's done.

Wrong.

That is an unconstitutional interstate compact that becomes federal law if congress consents, thereby bypassing the amendment process and working contrary tot the 12th.

Bull SHIT.

An interstate compact is by definition a cooperative agreement between the interested states. For example when states share traffic violation info (not all do, as I found out going to Tennesee traffic court).

It has zero to do with "federal laws", and the states don't make federal laws anyway --- Congress does that. NOR does it "bypass the amendment process" because nothing would be changed in how the Electoral College works.

Read that again ---- NOTHING would be changed in how the EC works. No Thing.

As for "unconstitutional" --- here's what the Constitution already says and continues to say:

>> 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.

The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons, of whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves. And they shall make a List of all the Persons voted for, and of the Number of Votes for each; which List they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the Seat of the Government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate. << (Article II, sec. 2)​

That's what they've already been doing, and that's what they would continue to do.

As for what manner the several states may direct, that's up to them and they already have changed it over and over through the years, right back to the daze when there wasn't a popular vote at all, because nothing in the Constitution requires one. So this would simply be one more Manner the State may direct. Because a State may direct whatever Manner it wants.

As for the Electoral College ---- NOTHING changes. No Thing. No Change. Electoral College goes on as usual, exactly as the Constitution prescribes.

 

[Hutch Starskey]

...and it takes a Constitutional amendment, not an interstate compact, to abolish the Electoral College.

Abolishing the Electoral College would be to disenfranchise the smaller states...

How so?

 

[Rustic]

...and it takes a Constitutional amendment, not an interstate compact, to abolish the Electoral College.

Abolishing the Electoral College would be to disenfranchise the smaller states...

How so?

It’s obvious, Rural America does not have the numbers to matter in a pure popular vote... End of story

 

[Cecilie1200]

You are 100% correct. Every election would be decided by the States with the most people. All the smile states votes would count for nothing.

No, every election would be decided by the people of America. Each vote having equal value rather than the current system of a vote in Wyoming being worth 3 times the vote of a Californian. One person, one vote.

Not planning to remake the country on the basis of your faulty math equations.

Nothing wrong with my math your bitchiness.

Voters In Wyoming Have 3.6 Times The Voting Power That I Have. It's Time To End The Electoral College. | HuffPost

There's one thing very wrong with your math, Your Foolishness (aside from the fact that you let Hufflepuff Post do your thinking for you): It's based on a false and illogical premise. You ASSume that numbers of individual people voting is supposed to matter on a national scale.

It should matter in a small d democracy. I noticed you can’t actually counter the math with anything but bitchiness and pathetic attacking of the source.

Whose votes count the least in the Electoral College?

"I notice that you didn't do something you actually did, but which I'm choosing to pretend wasn't there."

And we don't happen to BE a democracy, dear. We happen to be a republic. In this case, that is an important distinction.

State representation in federal government has NEVER been intended to directly represent population on an exactly proportional scale. This is not a design flaw, or a breakdown of the system. It's quite intentional.

 

[Pogo]

No, every election would be decided by the people of America. Each vote having equal value rather than the current system of a vote in Wyoming being worth 3 times the vote of a Californian. One person, one vote.

Not planning to remake the country on the basis of your faulty math equations.

Nothing wrong with my math your bitchiness.

Voters In Wyoming Have 3.6 Times The Voting Power That I Have. It's Time To End The Electoral College. | HuffPost

There's one thing very wrong with your math, Your Foolishness (aside from the fact that you let Hufflepuff Post do your thinking for you): It's based on a false and illogical premise. You ASSume that numbers of individual people voting is supposed to matter on a national scale.

It should matter in a small d democracy. I noticed you can’t actually counter the math with anything but bitchiness and pathetic attacking of the source.

Whose votes count the least in the Electoral College?

"I notice that you didn't do something you actually did, but which I'm choosing to pretend wasn't there."

And we don't happen to BE a democracy, dear. We happen to be a republic. In this case, that is an important distinction.

State representation in federal government has NEVER been intended to directly represent population on an exactly proportional scale. This is not a design flaw, or a breakdown of the system. It's quite intentional.

That makes the allocation of House seats kind of hard to explain, doesn't it.