Death to the electoral college

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I apoligize in advance for the following rant. I'm feeling a little cranky.

I'm getting sick and tired about all the talking heads talking about enrolling new voters and energizing the electorate. I wish these people truly understood the electoral college. I live in Massachusetts which is probably the most liberal state in the country. I do not believe a republican presidential canditate has ever won MA and gotten its electoral votes. This gets back to the red versus blue debate.

If you live in a state that is solidly red or blue, then your opposition vote is useless (my opinion). Kerry will probably carry MA with in excess of 70% of the vote. Now I know it is supposed to make everyone feel special that their vote is important, but the reality of the fact is that it isn't true. In reality it is the power of a few states that really determine what happens. To me if you don't live in a battleground state there really isn't even any point in going out to vote.

I was just at CNN looking at the results of the 2000 election. In almost every state (and I didn't look at all of them) the person who won the electoral votes, won them easily. There were only a few states where things were really close and getting the vote out would have mattered (Florida of course being the poster child).

Am I the only one that is bothered by this? Why do we even bother to vote if it will all come down to how Florida votes this time. I would think the DNC and RNC would have been better off convincing people to move to Florida and vote there, rather than campaigning in the rest of the country.

[ August 02, 2004, 20:48: Message edited by: The Great Snook ]

 

Not a disagreeable sentiment, Snook. I live in Texas of all places, and I think we all know who I'm NOT voting for. Of course I'm bothered by the fact that my vote won't count in any meaningful way. I'm still voting, regardless. Call it superstition, I guess - after last year, I'll never throw my vote away again. I will always vote my heart from now on, futility be damned.

I'd personally like this thread to turn into a discussion of whether or not the Electoral College is even a good idea anymore. I've been of the contention that it's outworn its welcome by about 100 years, and I'd like to see it gone. Also, I personally believe that's a big part of the reason why voter turnout has been in steady decline over the years. People feel less and less like their vote counts. Rational self-interest theory; it's simply not worth the effort to educate one's self on the issues only to cast an increasingly meaningless vote. That seems to be the trend, anyway.

If you'd like to go down that road (I hope so), perhaps change the title of the thread?

 

Naw if it comes down to florida 5 members of the supreme court will decide who wins again.
But urban areas are generally democratic, and the opposite for most mid western states, the democrats take the important states every time.

 

Yes, I live in R.I. and its always a landslide victory for the Democrats here. I vote anyway, but I do know that the vote doesn't really contribute to the guy I want in office.

I'm sadly quite short with the people raising money and "awareness" for Kerry's campaign. I told them I was with them on the vote, but what's the point of even wasting people's time when you know where our meager 4 electoral votes are going anyway?

I'll vote anyway, but just for the complaining rights.

 

@the bunny

Your wish is my command

Now you have me curious. Would the population vote more if everyone was convinced that every vote mattered? I know it would go a long way to informing everyone more. Here in MA (and I'm assuming you in Texas) we don't see any political ads. The candidates don't waste the money for it will not help them. I only expect to see Kerry in MA for fundraising (as we have a lot of cash up here in the northeast) and I don't expect to see Bush at all.

 

In NZ, we have a proportional representation system called Mixed Member Proportional. This means that the number of seats each party receives in parliament is pretty much directly related to the percentage of votes that it gets. So in our system, each vote has a direct bearing on your party's result.

 

I have always been perplexed by the electoral system and in an ancient thread where non-USAians were asked to explain what they disliked about the US it was on top of my list. An electorate college system is very undemocratic, it was instituted to appease the smaller states so they would not be overrun by the bigger ones completely, atleast that is how I understand it. Nowadays I think most Americans feel more like Americans than Idahoians or Georgians.

My main peeve though is that an electorate system makes it impossible for anyone not of the two parties to be considered. I dont know about you guys but a two party system is not all that much better than a one party system. Especially not when in all essential political questions the dems and reps are on teh same line.

The big blocs dont disapear with a different system but getting some dissenting voices into congress and the senate must be a good thing.

 

Yes, but, what's the alternative to state-by-state voting? A straight up-and-down, 50.1% take all? Sure, the US seems polarized now, but just imagine what it would be like if a politician only needed to appeal to the majority of the US as a whole. Consider:

- A 51% win in a state is no longer as valuable as a 60% win, or 70%. So candidates would have an incentive to focus on winning really, really big in the really, really big states. A candidate with huge victory margins in California and New York could swamp the rest of the country. Plus, political parties and interest groups would have more incentive to "pump" the results. What's a little marginal cheating to raise the votecount from 55% to 57%? It doesn't matter in a state-by-state vote, but it matters a whole lot if we're voting as one national pot.

- Right now a candidate has to appeal to the state as a whole - promising to bring jobs to Missouri, Florida, wherever. In a national poll, you could ignore those local particularities to favor your nationally-scattered interest groups.

- More importantly, candidates have to appeal to local politicians - the governors, state assemblies, state party machines, etc. Without that buffer, campaigns would be even more nationally populist.

- Statistically, each vote would matter even LESS. One vote in 100 million is a drop in the ocean. Even in a 50.1%-49.9% election, that amounts to at least 200,000 votes. Gore beat Bush by more than a half-million votes in 2000. That's a wider margin than a Kerry blowout in Rhode Island or Massachusetts.

- It would increase the power of political parties, since so much would turn on get-out-the-vote politics everywhere in the US, not just in selected counties.

Well, those are just idle speculations...maybe we should take this one step further and ask if we should appoint our legislators in a massive national poll (a la Harbourboy's NZ system). Is it legitimate for states to retain this peculiar pollitical peculiarity?

 

The NZ electoral system changed in about 1990 from a 'first past the post' system to the current proportional system after a national referendum (i.e. a poll) which determined that the voters wanted an updated system. So it was us, the voters, who decided how we wanted our elections to be run. Any democratic nation should be able to change its system if that's what the voters want.

 

@Grey

You do bring up some very valid points. If it was straight popular vote contest whoever won the coasts would automatically win the election. That would then marginalize the people who live in the middle of the country.

 

That is simply not true Grey and Snook. Electoral votes are appointed on the basis of population. New York and California count for significantly more votes than say...anywhere else (excluding Texas maybe).

Fire The Liar in '04

 

Would someone mind telling to a non-american what "electoral votes" are and how they differ from regular, two-round elections?

In Finland, people vote for candidates, and the ones who get the most votes get to the parlament. The parlament presents the president candidates, of which two are chosen to the last round to compete.

Just curious.

 

This topic makes me wonder. Are many people aware that MANY US presidents have been "minority" presidents? By "minority," I mean that they received less than 50% of the popular vote, and only won through the electorate. I would name some, but I have my list of those presidents on another computer that's currently fried. The one that most people probably know is Abraham Lincoln, who was renowned for freeing the slaves.

Yes, that's a bit , but I've wondered about it for a few months...

 

I love the electoral college. As I already stated in the previous threads about the same issue. I love it.

Joacqion wrote.

The problem is, that most Europeans live in monolithic states and not in confedercies. The electoral system is brilliant for federal states and confederacies of course.

And that's why I think that whatever the US-problem is, it is not with the electoral college. We use pretty much the same system and it's one of the pillars of the Swiss mulit-party-system. Strange, isn't it.

The problem is, that the states corrupted it on the states leve. It was the states that deciced that all votes should go to one party, voiding the votes of millions of others. Every state could change that any time.

And the excuse that this change of the electoral college, that all votes go for one party in the end, is there to secure the voting-rights of the small member-states is pure humbug and completely misleading. As most states get ignored because of this change and only the "battle-states" count. The system as it was meant to be secures the small states and their opinions more then enough and surely better than a "winner-takes-all-systems".

Someone spoiled the system in nearly all states, why don't you change it back to the way it was meant to be ?

 

Oh no, Joacqin, my friend. The two party system may not be very good, but the alternative of one party is an absolute despotic state. The Founders were convinced that the balance of the political machine would be maintained by the parties opposing each other. They understood that the danger of one party would be the "death of liberty."

But the power is supposed to reside with the congress. That is why they gave congress so many checks to executive power. The Republicans are whining because the dems have blocked some of their attempts to completely seize the reins of government. But the system is SUPPOSED to work that way. No one party is supposed to have all the controls of government. Otherwise, the machine will break. The Founders understood this and it was a large part of the Constitutional debate in 1787-88.

Nevertheless, the executive branch has only increased in power, while the current congress seems nothing more than a den of lackeys and yes men who obey the party leader(prez). But true representative power was always supposed to be with the legislature. And they have the ability to act aloof from the executive branch. I mention all this becuase as DMC correctly pointed out, it is only the executive that is elected by the college, and it is somewhat anti-democratic in nature. But the president was never supposed to have this much power anyway.

 

Here's something else to think about that no one has even mentioned yet. The electoral college does NOT have to vote with the popular vote of the state. It almost always goes that way, though. I don't remember the exact election, but I remember from a US History class, there was one election where a small state's popular vote was for one candidate, but the electoral college from that state cast their votes for the other candidate.
If that happened on a regular basis, what good would the system be then?

 

This is a graph detailing the electoral vote split up for 2004:

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0781447.html

Here's one (I didn't check to see how up to date it is) that shows the votes across the map. Decent short explanation of how the system works here too.

http://www.worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/namerica/usstates/electorl.htm

Looking at it on the US map, it makes me wonder why they don't decide the president over a game of RISK.

Elios brings up an interesting point, in the US we don't vote directly for a candidate, we vote for an electoral representative who promises to give his vote to a particular party.

 

I thought that, after the disaster of the 2000 election, the college system was going to be scrapped. Were any changes carried out?