(no subject)

[sophiaserpentia]

A Stanford University computer science professor has come up with an idea to circumvent the more than 200-year-old Electoral College system and institute a national popular vote to elect the president of the United States.

The proposal by John Koza, who also invented the scratch-off lottery ticket, is receiving serious consideration by lawmakers in several states. Legislators in California, New York, Colorado, Illinois and Missouri have sponsored bills to enact such a plan.

Koza's scheme calls for an interstate compact that would require states to throw all of their electoral votes behind the winner of the national popular vote, regardless of which candidate wins in each state. The plan doesn't require all 50 states to join, but a combination of states that represent a majority (at least 270) of the electoral votes. If the largest states join in the agreement, only 11 would be needed.

... Assemblyman Mike Villines, R-Clovis (Fresno County), however, argues that a national popular vote is a bad idea that would force presidential campaigns to focus only on large urban areas such as Los Angeles, New York and Miami.

... Koza, a registered Democrat who served as an elector in 1992 and 2000, claims the current system also has resulted in presidential campaigns largely ignoring states that heavily favor a particular party or candidate. California, which has strongly supported Democratic candidates in recent presidential elections, has become a state that candidates only visit to conduct fundraisers, he said.

"The main thing wrong with the current system is that two-thirds of the states are left out from the whole system ... because a (presidential) candidate has no reason to campaign in those states where they are way ahead or way behind," said Koza, 63, who lives in Los Altos Hills. "It's not just whose baby gets kissed in which campaign, it means that, for example, California issues such as Pacific Rim issues, high tech, California's agriculture don't get addressed."

... "In terms of the likelihood of this actually happening, I think it's pretty slim, considering many of the states have vastly different political leanings," said Nancy Martorano, an assistant political science professor at the University of Dayton in Ohio. "I just don't think states like Texas and California will ever enter into any sort of interstate compact."

Perhaps an easier fix would be to change the states' winner-take-all system to awarding electoral votes in proportion to the popular vote, Martorano said.

from Stanford professor stumps for electoral alternative (thanks to metaphorge for the link)

The Electoral College has already in my lifetime made the United States an international embarassment. It makes the job of selling representative democracy around the world more difficult when the main exporter and proponent of this system uses an antiquated electoral system which can sometimes give the election to the candidate who lost the popular vote.

The Electoral College is based on the idea that the masses are too dumb, uneducated, and gullible to trust with the solemn duty of selecting a President. Therefore every four years the states were to select a group of its elite elder statesmen, scholars, and captains of industry to make the choice for us. These were to be people free of "any sinister bias," but given that the agenda of the aristocracy has always "gone without saying," anyone who has examined the way cronyism works can see that the elites wanted to lock in the central executive power of our government for themselves. The President was to be the advocate of the aristocracy's agenda in the federal government.

And we cannot rid ourselves of this system, despite dozens of attempts over the last 200 years to do so. Perhaps the above proposal, while not exactly ideal, will accustom Americans to selection of the President by popular vote. If this movement succeeds, after a couple of generations perhaps it will be much easier to shed this antiquated, elitist relic from our system of government.

Comments

[ulbh.livejournal.com]

It's very ironic that the election of the President by the States, as specified in the Constitution, was enacted to avoid the problems cited in your post. The idea of a popular election was opposed by the less populous states, as they correctly saw that under a straight popular vote, New York and Massachusetts would elect the President and it wouldn't matter a damn what anyone in Rhode Island thought.

That's still true today, because they screwed up and compromised, giving the larger states a larger say anyway through the allocation of electors by representation in Congress, which is proportional to population.

The real problem is that the Federal Government now exercises vast unconstitutional powers, so that there is a very good reason for a citizen of Rhode Island or West Virginia to even care who the President is, whereas from 1789 to about the 1830s, they didn't really have to, unless perhaps they were up in arms over the Federal whiskey tax.

The other major change not clearly forseen by the Founding Aristocrats (for, indeed, that charge is quite true) is the influence of political parties (referred to at the time as "factions" and warned against, to no avail, in The Federalist Papers). It is almost inevitable that a system of direct voting will devolve into rule by two indistinguishable parties, who form a guild to lock out minor parties and thereby impoverish the political system. Various systems of preference voting have been proposed that avoid this effect to some degree, but of course the Demopublican Guild will not allow them to be enacted, because some of their math guys are as smart as our math guys, so they know those ideas for the threat they are.

That's the real embarrassment, and we won't have a representative Republic again (being charitable and assuming that we did have something close to t hat until 1832) until it's fixed.

[starwatcher]

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As one who has tried to "vote the bastards out of offfice" for the past twenty years, I'd like to see either system take effect. But I think that making the electoral votes proportional to each state is more likely to be accepted by the voters. If Candidate A gets 60% of the popular vote in my state, he deserves only 3 out of 5 of the electoral votes. Enough '3's could outweigh a '12', and candidates would need to address more states.

But we also need to change how the party candidate is chosen; very often a potential candidate that I want to throw my vote behind is shot down before he even gets to the selection convention. I'd like to see a pool of four per party. The party with the most votes produces the president, and the candidate with the most votes within that party is the winner.

Since the possibility of either in the foreseeable future is miniscule, may as well dream big, right?
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[arcanum-dogma.livejournal.com]

i like the idea of percentages, however each state would need to accept 3rd parties without petitioning for this to begin to represent the population. also, the primaries would need to be reconfigured - i'm fed up with having to register as a democrat just to delude myself into thinking that i actually have a voice in my state government. one of the few (er, very few) things that i admire of my wife's country-of-origin is the mandatory vote. the rest of the system is far more corrupt than ours (a signaporean's compulistory vote isn't a meaningful vote when the ruling party declares the other candidates ineligble to run) but they did take a step in the right direction some forty years back...

as an aside, the last two years of supreme court appointees, coupled with the likely-to-pass bill criminalizing the interstate transportation of female minors for the purposes of abortion, has me thinking that justice-for-life positions are a bigger threat to the constitutional rights of the citizenry (or PR's) than the voters should tolerate.

welcome to the 1890's folk

[fallen-x-ashes.livejournal.com]

Is it me, or would this interstate compact basically mean that people from outside each of the states in the compact suddenly have an impact on how those states get represented?

I'm not sure if I would go for such a scenario, and I can't see how such a scenario would get poular support. In a way this sort of stuffs the ballot box. It would would make more sense for me if the interstate compact simply looked at the total popular vote within the region of the compact.

I could be wrong though.

[pooperman.livejournal.com]

"the masses are too dumb, uneducated, and gullible to trust with the solemn duty of selecting a President"

You know, after 2004 when W. got not only a plurality, but a majority, of the popular vote (62.0MM of 122.3MM, or 50.7%, exceeding Kerry by 3.0MM votes), I find it difficult to disbelieve the quoted sentiment.

(Looking up the results for accuracy, I found out something I didn't know before--one of the electors, for the first time in history, voted for someone for whom they were not pledged. One elector pledged to Kerry voted for John Edwards instead. How come I didn't know that?)