One Person, One Vote for President

[jaxx]

Published: June 21, 2010

Nearly 10 years after George W. Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore and became president anyway, the New York State Legislature has a chance to withdraw from the archaic and unfair way this country picks its chief executives.

...The Electoral College was established by the nation’s founders in part to appease slave-owning states. It is based indirectly on population, and slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person. Each state now gets as many electoral votes as it has representatives in Congress. New York, for example, has 31 electoral votes, and whoever wins the most votes in New York gets all 31.

The result can be what we all saw in 2000, where the votes of one state, Florida, decided the election despite the fact that Mr. Gore was the nation’s choice by more than a half-million votes. Since then, an organization called the National Popular Vote came up with the end run around the Electoral College that is now before the New York Legislature.

Since it takes 270 electoral votes to win the presidency, the National Popular Vote laws would go into effect only if states accounting for 270 or more electoral votes agree to the new system. So far, five states, with a total of 61 electoral votes, have done that. New York should become the sixth.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/opinion/22tue4.html?th&emc=th

I am not a fan of the electoral college.

[zipplewrath]

1. The EC is fine

Basically, it ensures some level of cohesiveness in the only truly "national" election we have. I'm not saying we couldn't do a little tweaking, but a purely popular vote is almost assuredly a bad idea. Some crazy amount of the population is in two long strips up and down both coasts. Last time I tried to calculate it, the population between Boston and DC is something like 25% of the country. If you take both coasts, which includes basically all of Florida and Frisco, LA, and San Diego, you have some crazy percentage of the whole country approaching 70%.

As it is now, much of the country is considered "flyover country" politically. Candidates don't spend alot of time in Wyoming and Alaska. But none the less they do have to spend some time in the more moderate population areas. If one went to a purely popular election, the candidates would focus almost entirely on the two coasts, and really only within the higher population concentrations. Shifts in results there can cause vote counts that match whole states. And with TV, the populations in smaller states would still be "influenced" by the activity in the high population densities.


The problem isn't the EC. With any level of decent election laws in Florida, Gore would have won. If there is a problem right now, it is that the content of the senate is vastly disproportional to the population. 35% of the population represents 8% of the votes in the senate. 23% of the population controls over 50% of the votes. These are crazy numbers, and combined with the rules of thes senate, leave a country run by its fringe.

[jaxx]

2. I agree about the senate being disproportionate.

But what do you do? The house is where the numbers mean reps. The small population states are the ones who mostly fight it out to remain blue...if they are. But blue isn't always so blue in them, as we have seen.

I like the idea of one vote at a time for president. No matter which state you come from, you count.

[zipplewrath]

3. Senate rules need to change

The senate was created, and much of the basic theme of their rules, in a time when the largest state was Virginia and the smallest was Rhode Island. Now you have Rhode Island, Wyhoming, and a few others and you have California, Florida and New York, not to mention 50 states instead of 13. The rules of the senate need to be changed such that small minorities can't permanently stop governing. I've proposed several things in the past. You could require filibusters to have at least one state from each federal district participating. There could be an escalating burden on the minority over time. And there are other proposals, such as having at least one vote from the majority or something.

[Sparkly]

4. I think the EC should be done away with, too.

It was intended as a way to measure the popular vote anyway, and it doesn't work.

The argument is, "Look at all those little tiny states that'd have lots of power just because there are a lot of people there!" Well yes, it's people who vote, not land. Unless or until we pay a lower tax rate than others, we shouldn't have lower representation than others. It's not right to me that people living in less densely populated states have greater power with their vote than people in the states that, by the way, generate a lot of the country's wealth.

Make everybody's vote count equally. That makes sense to me.