During the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton and Madison couldn't agree on what kind of president they wanted -- or how to choose one. So they turned it over to the states, giving the legislatures free rein to decide how to allot their electoral votes. After many twists and turns, we ended up with our present mongrel system: We take enormous pains to tally every vote but then allow most of them not to count.
The skunk in the garden party of democracy is the winner-take-all rule that 48 of the 50 states use (not Maine and Nebraska), although the Founders never envisaged it. For most of our history, it didn't systematically warp our politics, although it did allow minority candidates to win a fair number of presidential elections. But over the past several decades, as the country has settled into an evenly divided and fairly ideologically coherent two-party system, it has meant that, in running for re-election in 2004, George Bush didn't even bother to poll in 32 of the 50 states -- because he knew they were either lost to him or certain.
The cult of the battleground state, as intensified by the obsession with the swing voters who are assumed to deliver those states, relegates most of the country (and virtually all of the voters) to invisibility. Presidential candidates, campaigns, and first-term presidents, just don't care about most of us. In 2008, the presidential candidates, neither of them an incumbent, spent two-thirds of their time in just six states.
No Republican presidential campaign worries about voter registration or turnout in Texas. No Democrat sweats Massachusetts. A tiny handful of voters in Ohio, Florida, or even Nevada and Iowa, matter more than huge voting blocks of African-Americans in Mississippi and Alabama.
But because Madison and Hamilton couldn't agree and knew they were leaving a mess, they also left a solution. The states can -- and often do (Massachusetts almost a dozen times) -- change how they allocate their electors. The solution on the table today is the National Popular Vote. State legislatures are gradually joining a compact among themselves. Once states with more than half the electoral votes have joined, all of their electoral votes will go to the candidate who wins the popular vote. Every vote would count equally in every state in every election.
National Popular Vote doesn't abolish the Electoral College -- but it does perfect it by ensuring that we will never again elect a president who got fewer votes than his or her opponent did, and that both parties will have the incentive to campaign equally hard for every one of our votes. Thirty-one legislative chambers in 21 states have adopted NPV, and the reform is halfway to the magic number -- states representing 270 electoral votes.
It's one of the few political reforms around that seems to be garnering significant bipartisan support -- because leaders of both parties in the majority of the states that get ignored in the present system would like their voters to count.
Most of its serious detractors are on the right. Phyllis Schlafly and her Eagle Forum loathe it -- apparently, they are fixated on the fact that National Popular Vote would have sent Al Gore to the White House.
Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell also hates it, calling it "an absurd and dangerous idea," allegedly because in 1960 it would have a required a recount to see whether Nixon or Kennedy won the election. (In 1960, there was a recount in Hawaii. And, if Nixon had asked for one, there would have been one in Illinois, too. What's so dangerous?) But, really, McConnell hates it because it is faithful to the common, majoritarian ideals of both Hamilton and Madison.
What the Founders would find absurd and dangerous is the anti-popular form of politics over which McConnell currently presides. McConnell's vision of democracy (like that of today's House Republicans) builds on Newt Gingrich's subversive innovation, a system of parliamentary discipline in which Republican members of Congress owe their fealty to their party, not their electors. McConnell has added the distortion of the Senate's traditions of extended debate to create a permanent minority veto -- explicitly rejected by all of the Founders -- of all legislative action, combined with the use of that veto to blackmail the majority into accepting policy proposals that have neither public nor adequate Congressional support to pass on their own. George III never enjoyed the ability to thwart the popular will in his parliament that McConnell has in today's Senate -- and McConnell's vision is to translate that ability to the White House as well.
The next time we elect a minority president, there will be a massive public outcry to get rid of the Electoral College. National Popular Vote gives us a simple way to preserve state leverage over presidential elections without amending the Constitution but still protecting us against electing a minority president. If you really line up with either Madison or Hamilton, you ought to like it.
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When the bill is enacted by states possessing a majority of the electoral votes-- enough electoral votes to elect a President (270 of 538), all the electoral votes from the enacting states would be awarded to the presidential candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and DC.
The bill has passed 31 state legislative chambers, in 21 small, medium-small, medium, and large states. The bill has been enacted by 9 jurisdictions possessing 132 electoral votes -- 49% of the 270 necessary to bring the law into effect.
The National Popular Vote compact does not confer any advantage on states belonging to the compact as compared to non-compacting states. A vote cast in a compacting state would be, in every way, equal to a vote cast in a non-compacting state. The National Popular Vote compact certainly would not reduce the voice of voters in non-compacting states relative to the voice of voters in member states.
This movement is the kind of thing that will cause the break up of the United States - and probably Civil War II.
The Founding Fathers in the Constitution did not require states to allow their citizens to vote for president, much less award all their electoral votes based upon the vote of their citizens.
The presidential election system we have today is not in the Constitution. State-by-state winner-take-all laws to award Electoral College votes, were eventually enacted by states, using their exclusive power to do so, AFTER the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution.
Unable to agree on any particular method for selecting presidential electors, the Founding Fathers left the choice of method exclusively to the states in section 1 of Article II of the U.S. Constitution-- "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors . . ." The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly characterized the authority of the state legislatures over the manner of awarding their electoral votes as "plenary" and "exclusive."
The constitution does not prohibit any of the methods that were debated and rejected.
Neither of the two most important features of the current system of electing the President (namely, universal suffrage, and the winner-take-all method) are in the U.S. Constitution. Neither was the choice of the Founders when they went back to their states to organize the nation's first presidential election.
In the nation's first election, the people had no vote for President in most states, only men who owned a substantial amount of property could vote, and only three states used the state-by-state winner-take-all method to award electoral votes.
The current 48 state-by-state winner-take-all method (i.e., awarding all of a state's electoral votes to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in a particular state) is not entitled to any special deference based on history or the historical meaning of the words in the U.S. Constitution. It is not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, the debates of the Constitutional Convention, or the Federalist Papers. The actions taken by the Founding Fathers make it clear that they never gave their imprimatur to the winner-take-all method.
The constitutional wording does not encourage, discourage, require, or prohibit the use of any particular method for awarding the state's electoral votes.
Conservatives were the torries who supported the britsh aristocracy..some things never really change.
The biggest compromise is in the senate, where-by Alaska with 1/30th the population of Callifornia gets the same representation.. This is true for many red states... such that forever, they get to extort FED money before anything can get passed and why red states on avg get back 50% more than they pay in, they are our welfare states.
regards
regards
has a Strong Rural Bias.
None of the 10 most rural states (VT, ME, WV, MS, SD, AR, MT, ND, AL, and KY) is a battleground state.
The current state-by-state winner-take-all method of awarding electoral votes does not enhance the influence of rural states, because the most rural states are not battleground states.
No, the next time the outcome of a presidential election is in doubt, the Supreme Court will step in and award the office to the Republican.
The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC). All the 270+ electoral votes from all the states that have enacted the bill would be awarded, as a bloc, to the presidential candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The bill would thus guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes.
If you go for 'popular vote' then New York, California and several other big states with large cities have way more power than they deserve. They already have more electoral votes than most smaller states combined. Do the small cities and rural areas get a say at all? Madness.
To support this you'd have to be a Democrat and live in a large city. It won't happen. :p
Why are Republicans so scared of this idea? As a "liberal", I'd have to actually let those millions of unapplied Republican votes be counted toward the national total, while they currently get none of them. I'm completely OK with that.
http://lexrex.com/enlightened/AmericanIdeal/aspects/demrep.html
What about Progressives leads to anarchy and 300 million candidates? (many under the age of 18 or 25 or 35, I might add)
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I'll just address the process. 2008 was a mess due to the closeness of the vote in Florida.
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If you think that was messy, imagine a really close election based on a pure popular vote.
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Bottom line -- there is no perfect system.
This it's-good-enough attitude is part of what's turning the country into a has-been nation.
Why sail across the Atlantic, 15th Century explorer? Europe has been working for us for thousands of years. Why go to the Moon? We've been stuck here on Earth for millions of years. It's been working for us.
It seems to me that we could make the world a much better place if they stopped throwing up roadblocks and diversions. Their mindset frustrates me.
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If anything the opposite is true. Economic conservatives want to encourage risk while economic Lefties want to encourage security regardless of risk.
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In fact, among democracies, direct presidential election is pretty much restricted to France and Latin America. Neither make great examples, as France only started 50 years ago with the Fifth Republic, and Latin American nations have only recently started holding truly democratic elections.
The nations of Canada, Great Britain, Germany, Spain, Japan, Israel, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, etc. all rely on some sort of indirect method to choose their president (or prime minister for those that still have monarchs as head of state). Yet none of them seem to be any less representative or democratic as a result.
We all remember the mess of the 2000 Presidential election. The butterfly ballots and hanging chads of Florida are etched in historical memory. But what if we switch to a popular vote, and the national vote comes out that close? We let each local jurisdiction set rules for polling, registration, ballot design, etc. Rather than the dozen or so lawsuits that Bush vs. Gore sparked, you'd end up with hundreds.
This proposal seems more likely to create problems rather than fix them.
While a popular vote may seem attractive, one must consider that there may be unintended consequences before calling for a change.
(I think one of the major achievements, maybe the biggest, by Obama is that he has done so much in such a great effort to change this feeling and thinking from the Arab Muslim world. And President Barack Obama has almost succeeded as of now. Four more years will be adding to more such improvement and finally leading to much if not full approval of Arabs and Muslims. I want myself to be the one of such humans helping this great man accomplish this.)
The population of the top five cities (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Philadelphia) is only 6% of the population of the United States and the population of the top 50 cities (going as far down as Arlington, TX) is only 19% of the population of the United States. Suburbs and exurbs often vote Republican.
If big cities controlled the outcome of elections, the governors and U.S. Senators would be Democratic in virtually every state with a significant city.