For sure. The NPR Politics podcast did a great story this year about how ridiculous it is that 50 old white people in a school gym in Iowa basically set the course for the entire race (and by extension, the entire structure of the federal government, since the president appoints the heads of everything). Ironic, since NPR themselves contribute to this problem, going on ad nauseum at how “important” the Iowa Caucuses are.
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California has more registered Republicans than any other state. Yet all those millions of voters are pretty much ignored during Presidential elections because it’s taken as a given that California will support the Democratic nominee. The electoral college screws over voters in both parties.
But hey, why waste time and effort trying to find out what scores of millions of Americans want and need when you can just pander to a handful of voters in swing states instead?
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Watch the arguments change when Puerto Rico and DC become states.
Or if California decided to break up into say 90 states each with the population of Wyoming.
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Why can’t all states just have the primaries on the same day?
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They could if they agreed to, but vested interests aren’t about to do that.
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I think even the senate is anti-democratic. I get that smaller states need safeguards so having vetoes on sensitive issues might be worth exploring. But right now the senate is ramming through a SC judge against the wishes of a large majority of the population. And last time round they did it with someone really quite obviously unfit for the position. Someone that the majority of the population had a legitimate eight to be very angry about.
This one seems a bit better at seeming… half normal.
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The best solution there I’ve seen proposed is to preserve the Senate but have the Senators vote with the House (perhaps giving their votes added weight). Congress as a whole still carries out the duties of the legislative branch without the current unbalanced situation.
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Sounds reasonable but I’m not the best placed to say. I do think the weird cult of personality surrounding the “Founders” is creepy and unhelpful. Ours are frequently a source of derision here, maybe unfairly sometimes, but I’d prefer that than a weird assumption that people centuries ago knew how to run stuff now.
I mean in both countries’ cases the founding people were often manifestly problematic from a contemporary perspective and didn’t seem to believe that human rights attached to women, queer people, the people they were taking land from and displacing, the people they were enslaving…
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The short answer is no, the Electoral College is no longer needed. Amend the constitution to both declare election of President and Vice President to be a direct ballot, and to set federal standards in ballots (must be readable without machine assistance, must follow standards as set by law in congress, and so on).
I would go even further and make the House of Representatives independent of state, so that congressional districts can be drawn across state lines. Instead, declare the body of the House of Representatives to be 400 members, in districts established every 10 years based on census. Maybe even change it so that each district is 5 members instead of just one, and the top five candidates are then sent to congress (to allow for more third parties).
And since senators represent the states, they are now no longer elected for 6 years, but are appointed by that state’s government and subject to recall. Give the states more flexibility in choosing who represents the state at the cost of direct election. Sure, that means corrupt governors have more influence in federal doings, but that’s the risk I think is worth the price.
Oh, and presidential appointments to office should be changed so that when the president appoints someone, the senate has 30 days to veto, no action is considered tacit assent. And set Supreme Court justices to a single term of no more than 20 years, and must be approved of not only by the senate, but must receive approval from a curia of all federal appellate justices.
Just some brainstorms, which obviously need work, but those are the sort of ideas that I have.
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It would be amazingly complex in the US. But you know what? People can handle complexity in the voting process and in the ramifications of it. In fact they enjoy it. They revel in it when, as in my constuency, we voted a lockout on right wing candidates because we the people understand how proportional representation by single transferrable vote works.
You would get alliances that are much more complex and representative of what is important to people rather than simply having to hold your nose and vote democrat if you are an anti racist of any stripe no matter how left. The British have been known to say that it’s too complicated but their voters in NI and Scotland seem to understand the them just fine (also European elections all over but…)
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…and yet we have Biden
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The fact that a constitutional amendment would be required to get rid of the electoral college makes the likelihood of success very, very low. Of more than 11,000 proposed amendments we have only 27 fully ratified amendments.
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just in time from the new yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/09/21/the-case-for-dumping-the-electoral-college
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You guys have all heard about the interstate compact solution that doesn’t require a constitutional amendment, right? I didn’t see it mentioned on this thread yet (maybe I missed it) but it’s far more achievable than an amendment that requires ratification from a number of smaller states. If just a few more key states sign on to this plan, we’re already there:
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There is always a constituency that wants to believe the mundane institutions and inequalities around them are ORDAINED BY GOD and thus absolutely and unquestionably legitimate—rather than being the detritus left over from a campaign of racist violence
So they tell each other in church that the Constitution was divinely inspired
Some of them even claim cops are a kind of priest
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Ordination in the Universal Life Church is faster and cheaper but getting a badge gives longer-lasting benefits and better immunity.
I had not seen the National Popular Vote site but makes sense that it’s going on.
My first thought was, will it achieve its objectives? I will read through the site and see if I can come to a conclusion on that.
Second thought was, would it survive the lawyers?
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I don’t think that anyone’s been able to put forward a reasonable legal theory that they can’t do it so far.
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The beauty of the National popular vote compact is it basically end-runs the Electoral College by pledging each state’s electors to the winner of the national popular vote. It all but makes obsolete the electoral college and achieves what a Constitutional Amendment would without the hassle of a national referendum
It also negates the disproportionate power that small, less populated states have over the electoral process by defying the will of the majority.
That’s one reason why small and unpopulated states that skew conservative use the electoral college as a cudgel to impose minority rule against the majority of the rest of the population.
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Under the national popular vote compact the states that have signed on pass state laws that award the states electoral college votes to the winner of the national popular vote - but the electoral college continues to be an institution under the constitution.
The national popular vote site posits that the small states actually do not have an influence under winner take all.
“The current state-by-state winner-take-all system actually shifts power from small and medium-sized states to an accidental handful of closely divided battleground states.”
There is an interesting table that shows which states are the battleground and which are not. Other tables support the thesis that the 13 battleground states, with 162 EC votes, get all the campaign visits and spending (pre and post election) while the states that reliably vote either democrat (196 EC votes) or republican (180 EC Votes) are largely ignored.
BTW, it looks like this compact would survive legal challenges since it’s within the purview of the states to award their EC votes how they decide to. There is already case law that says the current winner take all laws are not unconstitutional so the obverse would most probably be true also.
Of course these popular vote state laws can be repealed/replaced at any time by, for example, a new state government with a reason to do so. The “History of Winner Take All State Laws” section on the National Popular Vote site explains how this happened in the past, which gives us a view into the possible future.
Still, that’s no reason not to go forward with trying to make it happen. Maybe a few election cycles under national popular vote would garner enough support for an actual amendment to pass.
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