NationStates Jolt Archive

I was thinking about the electoral college the other day, and I couldn't come up with a single reason why we use it today! It seems to me to be very out of date. It wouldn't be so bad if the winner of the popular vote was also always the winner of the electoral college, but many times in history, this hasn't been the case. I find this to be a contradiction to what democracy stands for, and I seriously can't find any reason why America still uses it. Does anyone have anything positive to say about the electoral college system?

while you're at it, why not ask 'Why Bill of Rights?" or "Why Congress?" or "Why Supreme Court" or even "Why president?" Afterall, they are all part of the same construct.

There's nothing positive about it. All arguments that can be constructed in favor of it are easily shot down as being undemocratic. The only reason it still exists is that it would require a constitutional amendment, something that would never pass the states required.

while you're at it, why not ask 'Why Bill of Rights?" or "Why Congress?" or "Why Supreme Court" or even "Why president?" Afterall, they are all part of the same construct.
so was slavery, voting age for 21 year old white men, the runner up in an election to be vice president

things get corrected, thats how we dont fall apart. get a clue

while you're at it, why not ask 'Why Bill of Rights?" or "Why Congress?" or "Why Supreme Court" or even "Why president?" Afterall, they are all part of the same construct.

no. the proper analogy would actually be "why 3/5 compromise?"

in one history book it says it was for the weathly to keep the rable in check and stop them from doing anything crazy

Only reason that makes sense

BTW its easeier to bribe them that a million voters

no. the proper analogy would actually be "why 3/5 compromise?"

Exactly.

in one history book it says it was for the weathly to keep the rable in check and stop them from doing anything crazy

Only reason that makes sense

nah, the actual reason - as can be seen from madison's notes on the convention - was that slave states wanted their non-voting slave populations to count (at the previously agreed 3/5 rate). otherwise, states with wider enfranchisement would always out-vote them.

while you're at it, why not ask 'Why Bill of Rights?" or "Why Congress?" or "Why Supreme Court" or even "Why president?" Afterall, they are all part of the same construct.


You couldnt be more wrong.

The electoral college is obsolete. It used to serve a function, a century and a half ago, but it no longer does.

The original reason for the electoral college was to be able to fix a mistake by the people voting. Kindof takes away the point of democracy, but had a good intention of keeping idiots from screwing up the election. Didn't work too well if ya look at some of the presidents we had, but oh well. Voting definately needs to be changed, but they do need to have something to keep idiots from screwing up voting. A IQ test perhaps? Maybe a political awareness test would make more sense. Don't get mad at me and say I'm narrow minded to stupid people. This is just my opinion and I dont need a bunch of people yelling at me about it.

The Electoral College is part of what makes the U.S. the "greatest democracy on earth". A nicely covered dictatorship of the rich and powerful elite who exploit the poor majority. That's how democracy works - especially in the U.S. The Electoral College is undemocratic and there is nothing to debate about this fact, yet it is being accepted by most Americans as part of their (self-proclaimed) great political system which they export into the world with or without the approval of the civilizations of the countries they invade.

And what's the saddest part is, that the U.S. is unable to fix it's own system and remove the plank from it's own eye yet it claims for itself the role of leader of the "free and western world" and inspires weak minds like Kybernetia (a fellow German posting on this forum who continually amazes me with his U.S. buttlicking) into following them unquestioning. The E.C. and the fact that it still exists despite it's worthlessness and blatant undemocratic way it can overrule the popular vote, are just more symptoms of the cancer the U.S. suffers under. A corrupt and easily abused political system, which results in fascisto-religious presidents such as G.W. Bush.

In 1968, the Electoral College came very close to being abolished, apparently.

Recent Boston Globe article about it -

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2004/10/17/peculiar_institution?pg=full

You couldnt be more wrong.

The electoral college is obsolete. It used to serve a function, a century and a half ago, but it no longer does.

Ya - get rid of electorial college, then the Presidential candidates would only have to win over the populous states. Think of all the money they could save on travel, polls and advertisement.

The people in the small populated states could ignore the Presidential elections and really get into the Congressional races.

I have a bridge in Brooklyn for sale - any offers?

The electoral college protects individual states, if you consider it. If most (even by a slim margin) people of a state are for a certain candidate, then the state goes to that candidate. Thus the State as an entity wins because it made the biggest difference it could in occordance to its population.

But then the popular vote would protect individual citizens, which, we would all agree, is better.

United States were founded as United States, so that is why the electoral vote system would kinda make sense.

I was thinking about the electoral college the other day, and I couldn't come up with a single reason why we use it today! It seems to me to be very out of date. It wouldn't be so bad if the winner of the popular vote was also always the winner of the electoral college, but many times in history, this hasn't been the case. I find this to be a contradiction to what democracy stands for, and I seriously can't find any reason why America still uses it. Does anyone have anything positive to say about the electoral college system?


Right now it is acting like a balance of power too.

Removal of the electoral college would lead into almost exclusive pandering to inner city audiences

Not saying if it is good or not but it does bring some representation to those of us out here in the mid west … there aren’t many of us in comparison but we do a lot of the work (agricultural)

I know this may be stupid but pandering to a specific group with only one set outlook really seems like a bad thing to balance a whole country on , what they may vote for in general in flocks while good cant be the whole focus that it will become if essentially new York and cally define just about everything.


I think what needs to happen though to make it a bit more fair is break up the votes like Colorado (where it is not a winner takes all electoral votes)

The E.C. and the fact that it still exists despite it's worthlessness and blatant undemocratic way it can overrule the popular vote, are just more symptoms of the cancer the U.S. suffers under. A corrupt and easily abused political system, which results in fascisto-religious presidents such as G.W. Bush.

Easy, tiger. In almost all cases the electoral college vote and the popular vote produced the same result with 3 (four depending on how you count them) exceptions. In the 19th century cases, the voting had much democratic deficiencies than the EC. And generally while not optimal and probably worthy of abolishment, it hasn't been a critical problem in the American system of government. As to the election fascist presidents, well, there is isnn't much a more direct democracy can do about this sometimes, as surely the history of your own country can tell you.

Right now it is acting like a balance of power too.

Removal of the electoral college would lead into almost exclusive pandering to inner city audiences

Not saying if it is good or not but it does bring some representation to those of us out here in the mid west … there aren’t many of us in comparison but we do a lot of the work (agricultural)

I know this may be stupid but pandering to a specific group with only one set outlook really seems like a bad thing to balance a whole country on , what they may vote for in general in flocks while good cant be the whole focus that it will become if essentially new York and cally define just about everything.

I think what needs to happen though to make it a bit more fair is break up the votes like Colorado (where it is not a winner takes all electoral votes)

Actually the "helps small states" argument has been pretty widely debunked, check out the "America's Worst College" series at slate.com (lots of references there too). Making the electors proportional is going to have an effect no dissimilar to direct elections. Think of the huge number of electors that would suddenly be available to Bush in CA or Kerry in TX - so both the pres and the senator would campaign there as well (and have less time for states like MN).

Ya - get rid of electorial college, then the Presidential candidates would only have to win over the populous states. Think of all the money they could save on travel, polls and advertisement.

The people in the small populated states could ignore the Presidential elections and really get into the Congressional races.

I have a bridge in Brooklyn for sale - any offers?

They wouldn't win states at all- they would have to win the PEOPLE.

Reasons for Electoral College:

1- The more populated states control who becomes president

2- Less votes and less chance it can get hacked. The only way we can record so many votes is either by counting each one for weeks (people screw up), or recording the data on computers. Somebody hacks it, the wrong person wins. Simple as that.

Ya - get rid of electorial college, then the Presidential candidates would only have to win over the populous states. Think of all the money they could save on travel, polls and advertisement.

The people in the small populated states could ignore the Presidential elections and really get into the Congressional races.

I have a bridge in Brooklyn for sale - any offers?

this assumes that people in the big states vote as a bloc. they don't and they never have.

it is only under a system that takes the plurality's votes and counts them as if the whole population voted together that you would see candidates focusing entirely on populous states and states that are up for grabs.

Actually the "helps small states" argument has been pretty widely debunked, check out the "America's Worst College" series at slate.com (lots of references there too). Making the electors proportional is going to have an effect no dissimilar to direct elections. Think of the huge number of electors that would suddenly be available to Bush in CA or Kerry in TX - so both the pres and the senator would campaign there as well (and have less time for states like MN).
It depends, really. The way the two current states that split their electoral votes do split it is by congressional district, most of which aren't really that competitive. It would change the focus from a handful of states to a handful of congressional districts that are competitive, and the vast majority of people would still be ignored.

Demos, the term you were looking for was 'cracks' not 'hacks'.

Secondly, they already count the votes...

I would think they would use a computer or somthing faster. And if the system has an internet, any one who knows what IP address, or even a lucky guess, could hack it.

I would think they could count 50 votes a little easier.

Reasons for Electoral College:

1- The more populated states control who becomes president


They already do, by a pretty wide margin. The electors a candidate gets from the big states "for free" as part of the winner take all arrangement make the small state electors numbers look like statistical noise.

Reasons for Electoral College:

1- The more populated states control who becomes president


Well, that's sort of the idea...who more people vote for....the state of residence is irrelevant.

Ya - get rid of electorial college, then the Presidential candidates would only have to win over the populous states. Think of all the money they could save on travel, polls and advertisement.

The people in the small populated states could ignore the Presidential elections and really get into the Congressional races.

I have a bridge in Brooklyn for sale - any offers?

actually, the current electoral college system allows that too. th smaller states are widely ignored for the large states that can be disputed ( no one ever fights for texas or new york no more). and the smaller states are expected to act like they always have and thus require no real attention.

Ya - get rid of electorial college, then the Presidential candidates would only have to win over the populous states. Think of all the money they could save on travel, polls and advertisement.

The people in the small populated states could ignore the Presidential elections and really get into the Congressional races.

I have a bridge in Brooklyn for sale - any offers?

Despite the heavy sarcasm, this guy is actually correct. The electoral college, whether it was established for this purpose or not, still exists to avoid disenfranchising less populous states, and unpopulated regions of heavily populated states. I live in Texas. If we didn't have the electoral college, campaigning would be limited to DFW, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio. All of the small towns would be more or less forgotten. Sure, the idea of a pure popular vote system sounds attractive, but the fact is that if we began using it, the idea of equal representation would go out the window, as the individual votes of those who live in sparsely populated areas would lose value.

It depends, really. The way the two current states that split their electoral votes do split it is by congressional district, most of which aren't really that competitive. It would change the focus from a handful of states to a handful of congressional districts that are competitive, and the vast majority of people would still be ignored.

That's why I said "proportional" probably should have said "directly proportional". And even in the congressional district case, the election would be far closer to representative. Under the current system, 40% of voters in CA and more than 30% of voters in TX (for example) are not "ignored" their voters are counted for the person they voted _against_.

2- Less votes and less chance it can get hacked. The only way we can record so many votes is either by counting each one for weeks (people screw up), or recording the data on computers. Somebody hacks it, the wrong person wins. Simple as that.
Only if you are stupid and don't know how many fingers you have in each hand. The solution is simple, well tested and works: You divide the country in tiny sectors with 200-300 voters each. You name (by lottery or something) six or seven impartial citizens to handle the station in each sector. Parties can send their own people to observe the elections in each station. At the end of the day these impartial citizens take out the ballots from their boxes, count them all, write the results in a results sheet, everybody signs, put the papers (results, ballots, etc.) in a closed, seal and signed envelope and take it to the electoral centre. Results are passed along from centre to centre and you have a very quick, accurate count, a paper trail and recounts can be made in each mini-sector.

If somebody reports problems in their sector, they just bring out the envelope and count again.

Oh, and did I mention that ballots can be made of paper with the names of the candidates? You only put a cross on the name you want.

But, of course, the more complicated the system the easier it is to rig, eh?

Despite the heavy sarcasm, this guy is actually correct. The electoral college, whether it was established for this purpose or not, still exists to avoid disenfranchising less populous states, and unpopulated regions of heavily populated states. I live in Texas. If we didn't have the electoral college, campaigning would be limited to DFW, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio. All of the small towns would be more or less forgotten. Sure, the idea of a pure popular vote system sounds attractive, but the fact is that if we began using it, the idea of equal representation would go out the window, as the individual votes of those who live in sparsely populated areas would lose value.

That may be the idea except it actually doesn't work.

Take a look at http://www.slate.com/id/2108420

Here's a quote (the other articles in the series and the zillions of references are worth checking out too):


How frequently do presidential candidates visit small states these days? Not very. In his recent book, Why the Electoral College is Bad For America, George C. Edwards, a political scientist at Texas A&M, tabulated all the visits by presidential candidates during the 2000 election. Edwards found that among the seven states with the fewest possible electoral votes (three), only Delaware got a visit. Eleven of the 17 smallest states received no presidential-candidate visits at all. Edwards found a similar pattern when he tabulated visits that year by vice-presidential candidates. "It is clear that, contrary to the arguments of its proponents," Edwards wrote,

the Electoral College does not provide an incentive for candidates to be attentive to small states and take their cases directly to their citizens. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how presidential candidates could be less attentive to small states.



And in http://www.slate.com/id/2105055/


The small-state advantage derives from the fact that the number of electors each state gets equals its total number of House seats (which reflects population size) plus two (for its two Senate seats). If the number of congressional seats is low enough, those two extra electors can make a big difference. Delaware, Wyoming, North and South Dakota, Montana, Vermont, and Alaska each have only a single House member, so their electors exaggerate their proportional representation by a factor of three. But this advantage is outweighed by the advantage conferred on large states by the winner-take-all allocation of electors in every state save Nebraska and Maine. In their book Electoral College Primer 2000 (which, alas, was not updated for 2004), Lawrence D. Longley and Neal Peirce calculated that the states enjoying higher-than-average voting power under the Electoral College were the following (in declining order):

California
Texas
New York
Florida
Pennsylvania
Illinois

The states with the least voting power under the Electoral College were the following (in ascending order):

Montana
Kansas
West Virginia
Maine
Arkansas
Utah
Nevada

Indeed, for all of you that consider the electoral college undemocratic, I would agree. However, our nation is not a democracy, but rather is a Republic, which utilizes a "representative democracy", in contrast to the "direct democracy" that you seem to endorse. As a law student, I can only shake my head at the vast ignorance displayed by individuals who persist with this ridiculous argument. The founders never intended for our nation to be anything but a Republic. Benjamin Franklin responded when asked what kind of government we had, immediately after the completion of the Constitution, "A Republic, if we can keep it." I would point out that those of you who seem to wish to turn this nation into a Direct Democracy are directly in opposition to men who were far more intelligent than any of us.

Indeed, in the Federalist Paper #51 it specifically states that a prime goal of the Constitution is to protect from tyranny of the majority. Not only that, but the individual states must not be completely lost in the national government. The electoral accomplishes all this. To get rid of it merely would display that Americans have become far more unintelligent than most people think we are. However, persist in your course. You apparently need no knowledge of Constitutional law, or even common sense, as long as you have your precious misconceptions.

I believe someone tried to point out that the smaller states had no voice under the electorate? Just plain wrong. As you should be able to see, when the smaller states unite under a single candidate ("solid south" ring a bell), they have proven several times that being outnumbered does not necessarily equal defeat. Many smaller states that still have a smaller population can make a difference.

Total democracy, much like communism, is impossible. A total democracy would involve every single person voting. That includes babies. Also with all the spun ads and such weak minded people are influences so much, their vote no longer is thier opinion, but the ad creator's opinion. I know everyone (well those that can vote) have their own choice and can vote for whoever, but they still can be influenced by spun or false things which defeats a total democracy. I know this is a bit of the subject but its just for those of you who keep arguing for a "total democracy."
PS Rome was a republic not a democracy.
PSS Rome's greatest time was when it was a dictatorship not a Republic. So the whole if democracy is so great why did Rome fall just doesn't work at all.
PSS im not contradicting myself saying democracy is great, but that comment just annoyed me.

I dont have anything new to say, but i loved what hades just said.

Indeed, for all of you that consider the electoral college undemocratic, I would agree. However, our nation is not a democracy, but rather is a Republic, which utilizes a "representative democracy", in contrast to the "direct democracy" that you seem to endorse. As a law student, I can only shake my head at the vast ignorance displayed by individuals who persist with this ridiculous argument. The founders never intended for our nation to be anything but a Republic. Benjamin Franklin responded when asked what kind of government we had, immediately after the completion of the Constitution, "A Republic, if we can keep it." I would point out that those of you who seem to wish to turn this nation into a Direct Democracy are directly in opposition to men who were far more intelligent than any of us.

Well, clearly however intelligent they were not perfect nor capable of predicting the future - the founding fathers argument certainly has a lot of weight in interpreting the constitution but it is hardly an absolute - the electoral system and a plenty of other mechanisms of government have been modified significantly since then, after all.

Indeed, in the Federalist Paper #51 it specifically states that a prime goal of the Constitution is to protect from tyranny of the majority. Not only that, but the individual states must not be completely lost in the national government. The electoral accomplishes all this. To get rid of it merely would display that Americans have become far more unintelligent than most people think we are. However, persist in your course. You apparently need no knowledge of Constitutional law, or even common sense, as long as you have your precious misconceptions.

It is not clear what the exact argument is here other than invective. Electing the president directly would not turn the US into a direct democracy of any sort - the office of the president is balanced the legislature and judiciary and and in fact the legislature is regionally representative which quite adequately protects the interests of various regions. There is little president can do, in practice, for an particular state whereas congressmen and senators are quite adept at representing the interests of their constituencies vigorously (and collect as much pork as they can from the federal government). The president is the head of the federal government and it makes logical sense to elect him or her directly. It won't change the system of government in any significant way other than to simplify it.

I believe someone tried to point out that the smaller states had no voice under the electorate? Just plain wrong. As you should be able to see, when the smaller states unite under a single candidate ("solid south" ring a bell), they have proven several times that being outnumbered does not necessarily equal defeat. Many smaller states that still have a smaller population can make a difference.

I outlined it in a fair amount of detail and provided a references which you should read and address on the merits. Nothing prevents big states from uniting under a single candidate as well so that argument is fairly specious.

Total democracy, much like communism, is impossible. A total democracy would involve every single person voting.

Ok so you defined some "Total Democracy" and are arguing that it would be a bad idea. Did someone propose such a thing? And what does it have to do with how the president is elected? Electing the president directly is nowhere close to "total democracy". People are talking about electing the president directly, not about letting babies vote.

As a law student, I can only shake my head at the vast ignorance displayed by individuals who persist with this ridiculous argument. The founders never intended for our nation to be anything but a Republic.

And what school are you studying in? Because it can't be very good, I mean, if you believe that somehow Republic and democracy are opposites... dude, your school must suck.

Democracy means that people go and vote for who is in power. No one's asking the US to become an absolute democracy in which each person votes every single easy, but in a representative democracy (that it already is) with a direct presidential vote (which it isn't). It would still be a Republic (there would be distinct bodies of government), but no electoral college (that has nothing to do with a republic).

That's how a lot of the countries in the world work, even those that are federations like the US.

Actually the "helps small states" argument has been pretty widely debunked, check out the "America's Worst College" series at slate.com (lots of references there too). Making the electors proportional is going to have an effect no dissimilar to direct elections. Think of the huge number of electors that would suddenly be available to Bush in CA or Kerry in TX - so both the pres and the senator would campaign there as well (and have less time for states like MN).

Not really. If you did start to break the EC voting up by county lines, all you'd end up with is a greater chance for chicanery. How hard would it be to fake 1000 votes in a county no one has heard of before to put someone "over the line"? Given we have 8 different ways to vote in the US, it's just not feasible at this point -- let's learn FROM Florida, not emulate it. :-)

A total democracy would involve probing everyone's mind and looking into what they like. Then probing the candidates' minds and looking into what they will do if they are elected. On the basis of that the best choice could be made.
But it is impossible to do that.

Not really. If you did start to break the EC voting up by county lines

who is talking about counties?

Not really. If you did start to break the EC voting up by county lines, all you'd end up with is a greater chance for chicanery. How hard would it be to fake 1000 votes in a county no one has heard of before to put someone "over the line"? Given we have 8 different ways to vote in the US, it's just not feasible at this point -- let's learn FROM Florida, not emulate it. :-)

What would be "put over the line" might be a single elector rather than the presidency of the United States :]

Such a system would _still_ be far more representative than the statewide winner-take-all. There is potential for fraud in any election. Winner-take-all on a huge scale in fact encourages fraud and, as you say, chicanery precisely because it enourmously raises the stakes. If the agument had been over whether 500odd votes decide on elector or another rather than 27 it would have not been so heated.

Either way it is hard to argue that the current set up in which the votes of millions of Republicans in CA or Democrats in TX are actually counted for the respective opposite side is somehow logical. The fact that these effects greatl outweigh the "advantage" of small states is an argument for direct elections.

Only if you are stupid and don't know how many fingers you have in each hand. The solution is simple, well tested and works: You divide the country in tiny sectors with 200-300 voters each.


Tested where?

You name (by lottery or something) six or seven impartial citizens to handle the station in each sector.


There is no such a thing as an impartial citizen.

Parties can send their own people to observe the elections in each station.


Right. War, West Virginia alone needs 3 observers from each party. New York City? No less than 26,952 from each party. Where the heck will these people come from, and I can only *hope* they are volunteers!!

At the end of the day these impartial citizens take out the ballots from their boxes, count them all, write the results in a results sheet, everybody signs, put the papers (results, ballots, etc.) in a closed, seal and signed envelope and take it to the electoral centre.


That's great for 1900. Here in New York and Connecticut, we've had 100% mechanical voting machines since the 60s.

Results are passed along from centre to centre and you have a very quick, accurate count, a paper trail and recounts can be made in each mini-sector.


You really think that 26,952 (x2, each party, remember) will come up with the same sums? Riiiight.

If somebody reports problems in their sector, they just bring out the envelope and count again.


Well, at least it's not time consuming. :rolleyes:

Oh, and did I mention that ballots can be made of paper with the names of the candidates? You only put a cross on the name you want.


And that can't ever be a problem. No one's ever crumpled a piece of paper and put it in their pockets or something. Or marked it up so that it's hard to read. :rolleyes:

But, of course, the more complicated the system the easier it is to rig, eh?

who is talking about counties?

Then how else would you break it up?

I think what needs to happen though to make it a bit more fair is break up the votes like Colorado (where it is not a winner takes all electoral votes)

First of all, I had to point out that Colorado *is* a winner takes all state. There's an ammendmant being proposed here that would change that, but it's not very likely to pass (it also already failed in California).

Another thing I don't think has been mentioned, is the winner takes all system protects a state's ability to make a difference in the presidential election. Congress and the Senate were created to protect the rights of individuals in each district / state, whereas the president is elected through a broader "states-interest" outlook.

I actually got a huge letter (about 10 pages) one time when I wrote to my senator (Ben Nighthorse Campbell ... the coolest senator in the senate) about this exact issue. Man, I wish I could find it. He defended the electoral college and its function in today's process /very/ well .... damn .... Maybe you should just write a letter to him yourself ;)

What would be "put over the line" might be a single elector rather than the presidency of the United States :]

Such a system would _still_ be far more representative than the statewide winner-take-all. There is potential for fraud in any election. Winner-take-all on a huge scale in fact encourages fraud and, as you say, chicanery precisely because it enourmously raises the stakes. If the agument had been over whether 500odd votes decide on elector or another rather than 27 it would have not been so heated.

Either way it is hard to argue that the current set up in which the votes of millions of Republicans in CA or Democrats in TX are actually counted for the respective opposite side is somehow logical. The fact that these effects greatl outweigh the "advantage" of small states is an argument for direct elections.

Maybe. IF you had a way to count every single vote accurately. And even then, all it would take is a rinse-lather-repeat to make it a dozen electors. :(

I disagree. If a majority of state X choose candidate B, that's democracy for you -- the will of the majority of the people. Thanks. True.

I still go with the state X/candidate b theory. :) Just my opinion.

Another thing I don't think has been mentioned, is the winner takes all system protects a state's ability to make a difference in the presidential election.

Well the thing is that it ends up protecting the overwhelming advantage of _large_ states to affect the election. If the system were changed to a proportional allocation of electors or direct elections, it is large states that would lose their disproportionate influence.

Then how else would you break it up?

to have a proportional electoral college system? you take the total vote of each state and divide up the electors in proportion to the vote.

(in no way should i be taken to be advocating reform of the electoral college - abolish the fucker, and the sham democracy of representative politics while we're at it. but if we are going to keep representative politics, then we need to institute voting systems that are not grossly undemocratic and prone to severe distortions due to tactical voting. the american system is just about the worst you could have in this respect.)

Maybe. IF you had a way to count every single vote accurately. And even then, all it would take is a rinse-lather-repeat to make it a dozen electors. :(

I disagree. If a majority of state X choose candidate B, that's democracy for you -- the will of the majority of the people. Thanks. True.

I still go with the state X/candidate b theory. :) Just my opinion.

I'm not sure whether the rinse repeat whatnot comes from. The vote is counted, as it is now and electors assigned proportionally. This does not require perfect accuracy of voting in any way. Alternatively the congressional district system can be used as it is used now in two US states which split their electors and this seems to work just fine. Are you saying that is _not_ democracy?

The system as it is now is actually not democratic because the voters are not voting for a state office, they are voting for president. The president is not really a regional advocate.

Alternatively the congressional district system can be used as it is used now in two US states which split their electors and this seems to work just fine.

that's a crappy system because congress draws up the congressional districts (which is absurd on the face of it and needs to be fixed right now). which means the majority party in congress would basically get to choose the president, in addition to assuring their own continued dominance, by drawing up appropriate districts.

in no way should i be taken to be advocating reform of the electoral college - abolish the fucker.

I'm in violent agreement with that. The only advantage to the reform path is that it can be done gradually and without the need of a constitutional ammendment. Although it is unlikely any large state would want to voluntarily disempower itself making that reform path possibly even less likely than top down reform to direct elections (as nearly happened in 1968)

to have a proportional electoral college system? you take the total vote of each state and divide up the electors in proportion to the vote.

(in no way should i be taken to be advocating reform of the electoral college - abolish the fucker, and the sham democracy of representative politics while we're at it. but if we are going to keep representative politics, then we need to institute voting systems that are not grossly undemocratic and prone to severe distortions due to tactical voting. the american system is just about the worst you could have in this respect.)

Is just a larger version of what is done now. With breaking up the votes, all you're doing is creating the probable need for nation wide recounts.

((in no way do I agree with this part of your post. The Constitution does NOT say that the people shall elect the President directly, and I consider that a wise thing. :) )

that's a crappy system because congress draws up the congressional districts (which is absurd on the face of it and needs to be fixed right now). which means the majority party in congress would basically get to choose the president, in addition to assuring their own continued dominance, by drawing up appropriate districts.

It is a crappy system but the states that use it do achieve splits in their electoral college elector alocation so it is inherently more representative than than the statewide winner take all. Generally I think direct election of the president makes a lot more sense, but someone brought up Colorado and a subdiscussion on this got going.

As it is, the largest cities control each state. In California, since LA and the Bay Area usually vote Democrat, the state goes Democrat. All 55 electoral votes go to teh Democratic candidate, even though San Diego and many of the lesser known counties vote Republican.

I've also heard that the electoral college is made up of random people who are not held accountable to anyone and that in one state a member of the electoral college said they would abstain from voting if the state went Republican. I don't have proof for any of this, but I thought that one of you would be able to give some documentation to clear this up for me. Thanks.

As it is, the largest cities control each state. In California, since LA and the Bay Area usually vote Democrat, the state goes Democrat. All 55 electoral votes go to teh Democratic candidate, even though San Diego and many of the lesser known counties vote Republican.

I've also heard that the electoral college is made up of random people who are not held accountable to anyone and that in one state a member of the electoral college said they would abstain from voting if the state went Republican. I don't have proof for any of this, but I thought that one of you would be able to give some documentation to clear this up for me. Thanks.

There is a list of all the "faithless elector" cases in US elections and their effects at
http://www.fairvote.org/e_college/faithless.htm

Tested where?

Mexico, federal elections in 1994, 1997, 2000 and 2003.


There is no such a thing as an impartial citizen.


At least honest will do. And by impartial I rather meant not regitered with any party.


Right. War, West Virginia alone needs 3 observers from each party. New York City? No less than 26,952 from each party. Where the heck will these people come from, and I can only *hope* they are volunteers!!


Not all sectors are going to need people from every party, and if you can't come up with 50,000 selfless people in NYC willing to give one day of their time every four years for their country, you have much worse problems than simply the electoral college.

If that's really the case then I understand how democracy can't work in such a country.


That's great for 1900. Here in New York and Connecticut, we've had 100% mechanical voting machines since the 60s.


Good for you! Now, back to basics.


You really think that 26,952 (x2, each party, remember) will come up with the same sums? Riiiight.


If they are counting from the same ballots, they will, and if they don't they need to recount again (or be sent back to school). Remember, each one will be counting only 200-300 votes. It's not that hard, even US citizens can do it, I'm sure.


And that can't ever be a problem. No one's ever crumpled a piece of paper and put it in their pockets or something. Or marked it up so that it's hard to read. :rolleyes:

I'm sure there've been cases of people taking their paper with them. And I'm sure some have made it difficult to read. Guess what? When that happens the vote is considered null or void. Somebody wants to throw away their vote that way, go ahead, let them do it, but it's not a problem for the system.

Clear, simple rules that everyone agrees on. Clear, simple system that anyone can understand. And Mexico has had the cleanest elections in its history, praised internationally. The politicians are still a bunch of corrupt assholes and there's not much where to pick from, but at least no one doubts the elections now.

Is just a larger version of what is done now. With breaking up the votes, all you're doing is creating the probable need for nation wide recounts.

so? in any measuring system you should take at least two measurements and average the results. applies to measuring the volume of liquid in a flask and to counting the number of votes a candidate recieved. standardize the procedure and everyone wins.

There is a list of all the "faithless elector" cases in US elections and their effects at
http://www.fairvote.org/e_college/faithless.htm

Thanks for the clarification.

I'm not sure whether the rinse repeat whatnot comes from. The vote is counted, as it is now and electors assigned proportionally. This does not require perfect accuracy of voting in any way. Alternatively the congressional district system can be used as it is used now in two US states which split their electors and this seems to work just fine. Are you saying that is _not_ democracy?

The system as it is now is actually not democratic because the voters are not voting for a state office, they are voting for president. The president is not really a regional advocate.

As it stands, it is hard to swing a state in most cases. It doesn't pay to try to have, say 1000 dead people vote in Detroit, as it is unlikely to effect the outcome. But to swing a smaller area? Easy. And to have it done in MANY districts? Childsplay with the Internet. Look at the Dean campaign or even those folks who all show up at one place to do something odd. Or the Seattle riot a few years back. Grassroots organization is easy today. That system you're endorsing would be easier to gerrymander, esp. in sideline areas -- it'd be easier to change the results of a district in the smaller towns. And thus pilfer EC votes.

Um, no, not really. Only Maine and Nebraska do that. Maine has yet to split it's votes, and has had the law in place since 1969 (1972 election). Kansas has only had it since 1996 and has yet to split either. Given it has never been done, that's hardly an endorsement.
http://www.fairvote.org/e_college/me_ne.htm
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/10/12/maine.voting.ap/
...and while I'm not saying that it is not democracy, I AM saying that it is not necessarily a better system. I still believe in "the majority of a state voted for X, the people have spoken".

The President is also not directly elected. And we live in the united STATES.
OK, I'll give you a picture: Connecticut. If your system is by county or district and you allow splits, then instead of Kerry winning 7 votes, he'd at best get 3 -- Hartford, New Haven and Fairfield Counties, where the cities are. The other 4 would likely go to Bush, as the 174 towns TEND to vote Republican. So here you'd have the candidate with the MINORITY of the votes getting the MAJORITY of the EC votes!

Want to work it by population? It still doesn't work: (again, 2000 CT as an example):
Bush: 561,094 (38%)
Gore: 816,015 (56%)
Nader: 64,452 (4%)
First, what does Nader get, 4% of 7 electors?
Second, you now have Bush getting 38% of 7 electors, or 2.6 Electoral College votes. How does that make sense? Can you have fractional electors? For that matter, why should the guy who LOST in a state get votes at all?

I like the EC as it is. It's the fairest thing anyone has come up with so far. :)

so? in any measuring system you should take at least two measurements and average the results. applies to measuring the volume of liquid in a flask and to counting the number of votes a candidate recieved. standardize the procedure and everyone wins.

See my post above. I'm not trying to be rude, but I just typed the examples as to why I believe that's not a good idea. :)

The electoral college is the most worthless system ever. It's like major college football's post-season being just plain bowl games. Everything else has a playoff. Why can't D-IA? Just the same, if everything else is done by direct vote, why can't the election for the White House be? It makes no sense.

The electoral college is the most worthless system ever. It's like major college football's post-season being just plain bowl games. Everything else has a playoff. Why can't D-IA? Just the same, if everything else is done by direct vote, why can't the election for the White House be? It makes no sense.

This one first: Not everything else is done by direct vote ... only the vote for congressmen and senators. We don't vote for supreme court judges, members of the chief of staff, appointments to heads of government agencies ... well ... pretty much anything else that's on a national level.

And another reason for not getting rid of the electoral college? It helps preserve the rights of the state to determine how its vote is counted instead of allowing the government it is appointing the right to determine how the vote is counted.

Personally, I'd like to see a split vote in the largest, let's put a random number, 20 states. Then we wouldn't have powerhouses like California and Texas automatically going to one side or the other, but would still preserve the strong voice of the smaller states. In fact, with the strong division in Texas and California, if the top 20 states had split votes, you'd actually probably /see/ the presidential candidates pulling more for the little states like New Mexico and Louisianna! Wouldn't that be interesting!

As it stands, it is hard to swing a state in most cases. It doesn't pay to try to have, say 1000 dead people vote in Detroit, as it is unlikely to effect the outcome. But to swing a smaller area? Easy. And to have it done in MANY districts? Childsplay with the Internet. Look at the Dean campaign or even those folks who all show up at one place to do something odd. Or the Seattle riot a few years back. Grassroots organization is easy today. That system you're endorsing would be easier to gerrymander, esp. in sideline areas -- it'd be easier to change the results of a district in the smaller towns. And thus pilfer EC votes.

I'm actually not advocating that system but saying it would be more representitive than the current one. I still don't see how it is more prone to fraud than any other system of election, to be honest. It is hard to imagine a more fraud-prone situation than a closely contensted large state under the current system, as was showin in Florida in 2000.

Um, no, not really. Only Maine and Nebraska do that. Maine has yet to split it's votes, and has had the law in place since 1969 (1972 election). Kansas has only had it since 1996 and has yet to split either. Given it has never been done, that's hardly an endorsement.

Fair enough but I don't see how it is a non-endorsement. It can easily happen in Colorado for instance.


The President is also not directly elected. And we live in the united STATES.


I did not say the president was. I said the president should be. It is a position that has very little to do with the states and the name of the country is hardly an argument. By that line of reasoning, the Supreme Court ought to somehow be made to reflect the wishes of individual states.

OK, I'll give you a picture: Connecticut. If your system is by county or district and you allow splits, then instead of Kerry winning 7 votes, he'd at best get 3 -- Hartford, New Haven and Fairfield Counties, where the cities are. The other 4 would likely go to Bush, as the 174 towns TEND to vote Republican. So here you'd have the candidate with the MINORITY of the votes getting the MAJORITY of the EC votes!

Yes the problem with this scenario is that nobody actually advocated the county arrangement - you brought it up. I'm not sure I understand the details of it anyway so let us ignore it for now.


Want to work it by population? It still doesn't work: (again, 2000 CT as an example):
Bush: 561,094 (38%)
Gore: 816,015 (56%)
Nader: 64,452 (4%)
First, what does Nader get, 4% of 7 electors?
Second, you now have Bush getting 38% of 7 electors, or 2.6 Electoral College votes. How does that make sense? Can you have fractional electors? For that matter, why should the guy who LOST in a state get votes at all?

I like the EC as it is. It's the fairest thing anyone has come up with so far. :)


Fractional electors are trivial, you round them, the effect evens out across the various contests. Inaccurate? Absolutely which is why it is a suboptima system but the current system does exactly the same sort of "rounding" except for on a huge scale - the entire state. Optimal is direct election.

Why should a candidate who lost the state get votes? Well, because people voted for him or her. They did not vote for the person to have some position in the state, they were voting for the top position in the federal government. For the state's interests itself, the state is amply represented in the legislative branch. The question is not "why should some person get votes if the lost the state" but "why should millions voters have their votes counted for the candidate they did not vote for" which is precisely the case now.

And now we get to the meat of it - the canonical answer is because it is more fair because it avoids small states from becoming disenfranchised. But that has been shown to be untrue - the opposite is true, it is large states that get an overwhelming advantage.

So then the question is, why should the president not be elected directly? Why should a winning vote in California count for much more than one in Nebraska? How is this "fair" and what advantages does this system provide to offset this unfairness? We haven't really heard any answers to that.

This is not some rarefied academic issue. In fact, the electoral college system has been has come close enough to breaking before. As I mentioned previously in 1968 an ammendment abolishing it came close to passing:

"On Sept. 18, 1969, the House of Representatives passed the amendment by a huge bipartisan vote of 338 to 70. President Nixon endorsed it, and prospects for passage in the Senate seemed reasonably good. A poll of state legislatures indicated that the amendment would likely be approved by the requisite three-quarters of the states.

The effort ultimately failed -- but not because of concerted opposition from the small states. In fact, many political leaders from small states supported the amendment. What blocked the reform movement was a more troublesome cleavage -- one involving race and the political power of the South."

See the full story at http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2004/10/17/peculiar_institution?pg=full

As it stands, it is hard to swing a state in most cases. It doesn't pay to try to have, say 1000 dead people vote in Detroit, as it is unlikely to effect the outcome. But to swing a smaller area? Easy. And to have it done in MANY districts? Childsplay with the Internet. Look at the Dean campaign or even those folks who all show up at one place to do something odd. Or the Seattle riot a few years back. Grassroots organization is easy today. That system you're endorsing would be easier to gerrymander, esp. in sideline areas -- it'd be easier to change the results of a district in the smaller towns. And thus pilfer EC votes.

that's only if it went to the congressional district system - which i agree would be utter crap, only slightly better than the ec as it stands. but it wouldn't see any worse gerrymandering than we already see.

under a proportional system or a direct system, you would have to engage in absolutely massive fraud on a national scale to affect the outcome. a mindbogglingly huge amount of it actually. not that i doubt the ability of parties to try it, i just highly doubt it would go unnoticed. we already need un election monitors, what's a few more among friends?

OK, I'll give you a picture: Connecticut. If your system is by county or district and you allow splits, then instead of Kerry winning 7 votes, he'd at best get 3 -- Hartford, New Haven and Fairfield Counties, where the cities are. The other 4 would likely go to Bush, as the 174 towns TEND to vote Republican. So here you'd have the candidate with the MINORITY of the votes getting the MAJORITY of the EC votes!

Want to work it by population? It still doesn't work: (again, 2000 CT as an example):
Bush: 561,094 (38%)
Gore: 816,015 (56%)
Nader: 64,452 (4%)
First, what does Nader get, 4% of 7 electors?
Second, you now have Bush getting 38% of 7 electors, or 2.6 Electoral College votes. How does that make sense? Can you have fractional electors? For that matter, why should the guy who LOST in a state get votes at all?

I like the EC as it is. It's the fairest thing anyone has come up with so far. :)

bah, counties.

anyway, i don't see what the big deal with fractional electoral votes is - you could decide to have it either with them of without them. either way works. with them, electoral votes would be automatic, instead of being cast by people. without them, you'd need to decide how to deal with rounding and remainders, but that's no biggie.

let's see, we could divide that up as
b: 2.7
g: 3.9
n: .3

or

b: 3
g: 4
n: 0

scary, isn't it?


the thing that electoral college supporters need to explain to me (probably slowly and in small words) is why exactly they think that only the plurality of the votes in each state should count in a national election.

Mexico, federal elections in 1994, 1997, 2000 and 2003.

Ah, Mexico, bastion of fair elections. :rolleyes:
Please see the bottom retort.

At least honest will do. And by impartial I rather meant not regitered with any party.
I'm not registered with either party, but just the fact that I've decided on a candidate makes me partisan. QED.

Not all sectors are going to need people from every party, and if you can't come up with 50,000 selfless people in NYC willing to give one day of their time every four years for their country, you have much worse problems than simply the electoral college.

Why? I thought they would WANT to make sure everything was fair?
I disagree as to what you call selfless. I do agree, we have many worse problems than the EC. I think it works just fine, thank you. ;)


If that's really the case then I understand how democracy can't work in such a country.

Well, that's the pot calling the kettle black, IMHO.


Good for you! Now, back to basics.

You do realize that I'm saying your system is obsolete and not workable, right?


If they are counting from the same ballots, they will, and if they don't they need to recount again (or be sent back to school). Remember, each one will be counting only 200-300 votes. It's not that hard, even US citizens can do it, I'm sure.

Please see "The 2000 Election in Florida".


I'm sure there've been cases of people taking their paper with them. And I'm sure some have made it difficult to read. Guess what? When that happens the vote is considered null or void. Somebody wants to throw away their vote that way, go ahead, let them do it, but it's not a problem for the system.

It is when it is the counters doing it.

Clear, simple rules that everyone agrees on. Clear, simple system that anyone can understand. And Mexico has had the cleanest elections in its history, praised internationally.

It also has less than half the US population on one fifth of the land. Much easier to regulate, and that's not counting the little detail of population density, which is (lets face it) considerably lower in the desert.
As for cleanest elections in it's history, that wouldn't take much.

The politicians are still a bunch of corrupt assholes and there's not much where to pick from, but at least no one doubts the elections now.

I wouldn't say that. I would say that the PRI lost having its hands on monitoring the elections and lost its catbird seat. Please see below. It seems to have worked in 1997 and 2000.
http://www.globalexchange.org/countries/mexico/dem/ap050900.html
1994? Please. "Despite improvements, however, the elections were neither fully free nor fair. The elections preserved a virtual monopoly on power for the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which has governed Mexico for two-thirds of a century."
http://www.fairvote.org/reports/1995/chp7/reding.html
1997? The first time PRI lost in 50 years? About time!
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/latin_america/july97/mexicoa_7-15.html
2003? Looks like at 27% turnout? You call that a success?
http://www.crossborderbusiness.com/voto2003.htm

Yes the problem with this scenario is that nobody actually advocated the county arrangement - you brought it up. I'm not sure I understand the details of it anyway

i imagine it would be something like plurality winner-take-all in each county. which means that it would be everything that is wrong with the electoral college currently and then some. though really, its problems would be mostly identical to those of the current system - which makes using it as an argument for the ec a little strange.

Ok this will probably make some people mad, and be humourous to others. How bout we ditch democracy totally and move to DICTATORSHIP :) . Well maybe not, but do you really want some dumb ignorant loser :sniper: having any part in the future of the country? Lets just take the top 20% smartest people in the country and have them pick a dictator. Maybe a monarchy? hell maybe we should consider anarchy. But every single person 18+ having the ability to vote just doesn't make sense. Even Greece didnt let everyone vote. Sure all citizens could, but that only made up about 3% of the population. Well anyway if anyone even reads this is cares they are probably gonna tear me up or ignore me. Oh well go tyranny ;) !! :headbang:

the thing that electoral college supporters need to explain to me (probably slowly and in small words) is why exactly they think that only the plurality of the votes in each state should count in a national election.

And in English (although I'll take German, Russian or Bulgarian in a pinch.

I think the proponents of direct elections have done a pretty exhaustive job explaining why it is a better system and why the current system is flawed.

The proponents of the EC have done two things:

- Rraised some, as I see them, rather weak objections to direct (and proportional) cases - bringing up possible problems which are in fact far more pronounced and worse under the EC.

- Defended the EC by repeating words like "fair" "small states disenfranchisement" and "founding fathers" but not actually making _any_ cogent arguments. So the defenders of the EC should explain why the EC is a good idea on its own merits and why it is preferrable to other approaches.

I'm actually not advocating that system but saying it would be more representitive than the current one. I still don't see how it is more prone to fraud than any other system of election, to be honest. It is hard to imagine a more fraud-prone situation than a closely contensted large state under the current system, as was showin in Florida in 2000.


And I maintain that it's not more representative, it's just splitting the hair of "majority of the state" vs. "majority of district". Either way, it's still representative.
Florida was not fraud, it was too close to effectively call. I seriously believe that had Florida had voting machines in all counties, or if Gore had not conceded, or if any one of a dozen other things went the other way, it'd be Gore in office today. But it's *over* and we must move on.

Fair enough but I don't see how it is a non-endorsement. It can easily happen in Colorado for instance.


In this election. Maybe. I'm just pointing out that since it's never happened, it can't be said to be proven a good idea.


I did not say the president was. I said the president should be. It is a position that has very little to do with the states and the name of the country is hardly an argument. By that line of reasoning, the Supreme Court ought to somehow be made to reflect the wishes of individual states.


That's fine. But I disagree with fiddling with the Constitution. :)
It has everything to do with the states -- they decided how the state decides to send reps.
It already does. Every state has a supreme court of its own.


Yes the problem with this scenario is that nobody actually advocated the county arrangement - you brought it up. I'm not sure I understand the details of it anyway so let us ignore it for now.


Can you give me a better way?


Fractional electors are trivial, you round them, the effect evens out across the various contests.


So Bush wins 3 or 4 in CT? Imagine counting the whole country this way. Chaos.

Inaccurate? Absolutely which is why it is a suboptima system but the current system does exactly the same sort of "rounding" except for on a huge scale - the entire state. Optimal is direct election.


Yep. But it is fairer than anything else anyone has come up with.
Yes, if it were feasible. I doubt that will happen for at least another hundred years or so.

Why should a candidate who lost the state get votes? Well, because people voted for him or her. They did not vote for the person to have some position in the state, they were voting for the top position in the federal government.


Immaterial. You're giving voice to a minority over a majority in a geographical area. And if you're advocating a straight populace vote with no geographical ties, then candidates will just campaign in cities and not give a rats a__ about issues in smaller areas. Who cares about Albany when you've got NYC?


For the state's interests itself, the state is amply represented in the legislative branch. The question is not "why should some person get votes if the lost the state" but "why should millions voters have their votes counted for the candidate they did not vote for" which is precisely the case now.


No, it isn't. Their votes DETERMINE who gets the pot. Your candidate lose? Hard cheese, but your state's EC votes go to the winner. That's why it is MAJORITY rule. BTW, Kerry will win in my state. I'm still not voting for him, tho.

And now we get to the meat of it - the canonical answer is because it is more fair because it avoids small states from becoming disenfranchised. But that has been shown to be untrue - the opposite is true, it is large states that get an overwhelming advantage.


How? *Iowa* is a battleground state in this election. 7 votes. New York, Illinois, California and Texas are not.


So then the question is, why should the president not be elected directly? Why should a winning vote in California count for much more than one in Nebraska? How is this "fair" and what advantages does this system provide to offset this unfairness? We haven't really heard any answers to that.


Because the average American is a moron who doesn't know the names of both his senators? (No fair looking it up!) ;)
It actually isn't. If you divide the state's EC by number of voters in a state, you'll find that Cali votes aren't weighted more heavily -- they're actually less than places like Wyoming.


This is not some rarefied academic issue. In fact, the electoral college system has been has come close enough to breaking before. As I mentioned previously in 1968 an ammendment abolishing it came close to passing:

"On Sept. 18, 1969, the House of Representatives passed the amendment by a huge bipartisan vote of 338 to 70. President Nixon endorsed it, and prospects for passage in the Senate seemed reasonably good. A poll of state legislatures indicated that the amendment would likely be approved by the requisite three-quarters of the states.

The effort ultimately failed -- but not because of concerted opposition from the small states. In fact, many political leaders from small states supported the amendment. What blocked the reform movement was a more troublesome cleavage -- one involving race and the political power of the South."

See the full story at http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2004/10/17/peculiar_institution?pg=full

My guess is that the 60s were already enough upheaval for everyone at the time. :)

Let me see if I've got this straight (and can help simplify the arguments somewhat). The options are (so far) a split state vote that's either split by vote or district, a fully democratic election, or the current system where states decide their own voting methods ... the only one of which abolishes the electoral college being the democratic vote. So ... plusses and minuses?

The democratic vote:
Pros: Well ... it's democratic, which everyone seems to think is just peachy. California and Texas no longer carry the vote.
Cons: Large populations carry the vote. Cities or largely solidified political groups carry the vote. Something the founders wanted to avoid. Also, according to generally accepted ideology, the smaller states become less important than they already are.

The split state vote along voter percentages:
This really isn't much different than the democratic vote

The split state vote along district lines:
Pros: This would actually be an interesting experiment and I'm partial to it, living in the country and I like the values the country folk out here have. It would give rural areas a much larger say in the election process. Large population densities no longer carry the vote. Cali and TX don't carry the vote. Presidential candidates have to court the entire country to be elected.
Cons: The vote would be hugely disproportionate and not fair to the city folk (just as it's currently not fair to the country folk)

The way we currently have it:
Pros: Any state can decide to split or not split their vote however they choose.
Cons: Any state can decide to split or not split their vote however they choose.

Ah, Mexico, bastion of fair elections. :rolleyes:
Please see the bottom retort.


We'll go there in a minute


I'm not registered with either party, but just the fact that I've decided on a candidate makes me partisan. QED.


But at least you're honest, right? I mean, you would count the votes straight and not interfere, right?


Why? I thought they would WANT to make sure everything was fair?
I disagree as to what you call selfless. I do agree, we have many worse problems than the EC. I think it works just fine, thank you. ;)

Sure, if they want to they can send people everywhere. The thing is there is more than one counter in each station, and people who don't count too. This gives the parties enough confidence to not send people to each and every station.


You do realize that I'm saying your system is obsolete and not workable, right?

Yes, but it's not. Sure, it's slower, more expensive and weights more, but still works.


It is when it is the counters doing it.


Hard with your neighbors watching. Unless no one in the town gives a flick about free, democratic elections.


It also has less than half the US population on one fifth of the land. Much easier to regulate, and that's not counting the little detail of population density, which is (lets face it) considerably lower in the desert.
As for cleanest elections in it's history, that wouldn't take much.


And even a lesser fraction of the economic capacity. That easily offsets the larger size and population difficulties the US would have.


I wouldn't say that. I would say that the PRI lost having its hands on monitoring the elections and lost its catbird seat. Please see below. It seems to have worked in 1997 and 2000.

That's right. And by doing so created a system that's actually fair, balanced and independent. Keep in mind that by having had such a corrupt and unbalanced system for so long Mexicans have created something that is really far superior and almost foolproof. Don't simply disregard it.


http://www.globalexchange.org/countries/mexico/dem/ap050900.html
1994? Please. "Despite improvements, however, the elections were neither fully free nor fair. The elections preserved a virtual monopoly on power for the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which has governed Mexico for two-thirds of a century."

And nobody questioned those elections. There were isolated issues but there was no doubt in the end that PRI had won fair and square. A sharp contrast to the elections in 1988. The PRI won by playing the fear card, by positioning themselves as the only party strong enough to contain the menace of the zapatista guerrilla and continue the economic prosperity started by the previous president. Both notions turned out to be false and the party was kicked out of power, first in mid-term Congress elections in 1997 and then from the presidency in 2000. PRI has also lost several states since 1988 and the balance of power is much more... well, balanced.


http://www.fairvote.org/reports/1995/chp7/reding.html
1997? The first time PRI lost in 50 years? About time!


That's right. And it was thanks to the new electoral system.


http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/latin_america/july97/mexicoa_7-15.html
2003? Looks like at 27% turnout? You call that a success?
http://www.crossborderbusiness.com/voto2003.htm

After having been promised a change and not getting it, Mexicans were clearly disilussioned, but that's not a problem of the electoral system. Problems in Mexico go beyond elections, which I can tell you, now are totally free and democratic, and I would put it to the test against the US or any one else's any time. 2006 promises to be a very contested year in Mexican elections.

Keep in mind that I'm not saying the Mexican system is necessarily the right one for the US. History in both countries is very different, but I'm using it as an example that you can count individual votes and have very clean and clear cut direct-vote elections without going into that much trouble, which has been part of your objections.

that's only if it went to the congressional district system - which i agree would be utter crap, only slightly better than the ec as it stands. but it wouldn't see any worse gerrymandering than we already see.

Then you are an optimist. :)

under a proportional system or a direct system, you would have to engage in absolutely massive fraud on a national scale to affect the outcome. a mindbogglingly huge amount of it actually. not that i doubt the ability of parties to try it, i just highly doubt it would go unnoticed. we already need un election monitors, what's a few more among friends?

Not at all. All I would do is pay the homeless in large cities to vote for me. Just try to prove that one. Or I'll do one better: suppose I know I'm going to be within 500,000 votes (sound familiar?). If I can get just 5 fraudulent votes per town in the US (presumably, not hard to do with the big GOP/Dem machines), I win. And very likely, not noticed.
WE DO NOT need UN election monitors. Not until they can fix just ONE thing in the world without the US.

bah, counties.
If you ban geographic ties on any level, you just disenfrancised the states, or, more to the point, people that don't live in cities. Why campaign in Montana when you have more votes in Boston?

anyway, i don't see what the big deal with fractional electoral votes is - you could decide to have it either with them of without them. either way works. with them, electoral votes would be automatic, instead of being cast by people. without them, you'd need to decide how to deal with rounding and remainders, but that's no biggie.

let's see, we could divide that up as
b: 2.7
g: 3.9
n: .3

or

b: 3
g: 4
n: 0
[QUOTE=Free Soviets]
scary, isn't it?

Scary that you just have a guy with a minority of the votes half of the state's EC votes? Yes.

the thing that electoral college supporters need to explain to me (probably slowly and in small words) is why exactly they think that only the plurality of the votes in each state should count in a national election.

Majority rules. The people of (say, Connecticut) have decided on election day that John Kerry is the better candidate by whatever margin. Done.
If you want to drag it out and break it down as you posted above? All it does is say that the majority in an area no longer speak for the area. Which is what representative government is all about, anyway. I can't make it any smaller. :D

Why do we use it today? To give small states a chance to have their issues heard by candidates as opposed to just major states (like New York and California). You cannot rightly contradict this because otherwise you are advocating rule by a few centralized states. The electoral college was actually a compromise between Democratic-Republicans and Federalists in the 1700s. Also, the college itself exists to give more weight to delegates, whom are said to have a greater respect for the system than a layman. Democrat or Republican in modern society, politicians from mostly any small or medium sized states (population wise), which are most states, are pro-electoral college because it keeps those states' issues considered. We're seeing this in the importance of low-population swing states even now. The electoral college is more democratic than the popular election of the President could ever be.

Not at all. All I would do is pay the homeless in large cities to vote for me. Just try to prove that one. Or I'll do one better: suppose I know I'm going to be within 500,000 votes (sound familiar?). If I can get just 5 fraudulent votes per town in the US (presumably, not hard to do with the big GOP/Dem machines), I win. And very likely, not noticed.


So the entire organizations have to be engaged into attempting to get a few openly fraudulent votes and this somehow is unnoticed by all? What about the entire organisation of the other side? The logistics of this are essentially impossible. Now, the entire national organisations _do_ engage in various fairly unsavoury tactics as it is and these efforts mostly balance out (Arguably the Republicans have an edge here with their vote supression efforts). There is no reason to suppose they wouldn't in a direct election.


If you ban geographic ties on any level, you just disenfrancised the states, or, more to the point, people that don't live in cities. Why campaign in Montana when you have more votes in Boston?


Disenfranchised the states how? Disenfranchised CA and TX from having an influence on the election disproportionate to their voting population? As to the campaigning this is already the case:

See http://www.slate.com/id/2108420

"How frequently do presidential candidates visit small states these days? Not very. In his recent book, Why the Electoral College is Bad For America, George C. Edwards, a political scientist at Texas A&M, tabulated all the visits by presidential candidates during the 2000 election. Edwards found that among the seven states with the fewest possible electoral votes (three), only Delaware got a visit. Eleven of the 17 smallest states received no presidential-candidate visits at all. Edwards found a similar pattern when he tabulated visits that year by vice-presidential candidates. "It is clear that, contrary to the arguments of its proponents," Edwards wrote,

the Electoral College does not provide an incentive for candidates to be attentive to small states and take their cases directly to their citizens. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how presidential candidates could be less attentive to small states."


Scary that you just have a guy with a minority of the votes half of the state's EC votes? Yes.


The guy with a minority of the votes got a minority of the electors. Nothing scary here.


Majority rules. The people of (say, Connecticut) have decided on election day that John Kerry is the better candidate by whatever margin. Done.
If you want to drag it out and break it down as you posted above? All it does is say that the majority in an area no longer speak for the area. Which is what representative government is all about, anyway. I can't make it any smaller. :D

Well, "Majority rules" sounds great but it is a nonargument. If "Majority rules" is the primary criterion then that's an argument for direct election.

Why do we use it today? To give small states a chance to have their issues heard by candidates as opposed to just major states (like New York and California). You cannot rightly contradict this because otherwise you are advocating rule by a few centralized states.

Trivial to contradict with the data. See my other post with the slate ref but here is the summary - "among the seven states with the fewest possible electoral votes (three), only Delaware got a visit. Eleven of the 17 smallest states received no presidential-candidate visits at all." I.e small states are not having their issues heard. On top of that large states have a disproportionate influence on the outcome, far greater than they would have under direct elections.

Why do we use it today? To give small states a chance to have their issues heard by candidates as opposed to just major states (like New York and California). You cannot rightly contradict this because otherwise you are advocating rule by a few centralized states. The electoral college was actually a compromise between Democratic-Republicans and Federalists in the 1700s. Also, the college itself exists to give more weight to delegates, whom are said to have a greater respect for the system than a layman. Democrat or Republican in modern society, politicians from mostly any small or medium sized states (population wise), which are most states, are pro-electoral college because it keeps those states' issues considered. We're seeing this in the importance of low-population swing states even now. The electoral college is more democratic than the popular election of the President could ever be.

1) false, small states are disproportionately ignored, in favor of securing the large states that are mostly safely your's and any battle ground states. non-battle ground small states are completely written off by both parties. these are the actual facts on the ground in terms of candidate visits and campaign issues. anything else is just ideology.

2) i think you mean federalists and anti-federalists. but that's not entirely acurate - it was more of a compromise between everybody, because nobody could agree on how to elect the president. the electoral college was good enough to appease the slave states and the direct electioners and the "masses aren't to be trusted" faction and the election by state governors faction. it was a pro-slavery anti-democratic compromise, just like the 3/5 compromise.

3) the important swing states this time are ohio and florida and pennsylvania and to a lesser extent wisconsin and such. those are big states. nobody cares about small states when big states are in play.

If you ban geographic ties on any level, you just disenfrancised the states, or, more to the point, people that don't live in cities. Why campaign in Montana when you have more votes in Boston?

no, "bah counties" as in:

only you are talking about some imaginary proposal to somehow move to a county based system of electoral representation and its not only a strawman, but a dumb one that doesn't help your position.

and the reason you campaign in montana is that bush got more votes out there than he did in boston. and you need all the votes you can get in a nationwide election. if you abandon some part of the country, somebody else will take up trying for their votes. which means that you will have less votes, and be less likely to win, even if the person taking those votes you used to have isn't going to win either.

And I maintain that it's not more representative, it's just splitting the hair of "majority of the state" vs. "majority of district". Either way, it's still representative.
My point is one is more representative of the other. In a two-stage winner take all system, the smaller you make the district, the more representative the result in the makeup of the second stage. Limit case being a "district" of one, in which case you have a proprtional alocation.
Florida was not fraud, it was too close to effectively call. I seriously believe that had Florida had voting machines in all counties, or if Gore had not conceded, or if any one of a dozen other things went the other way, it'd be Gore in office today. But it's *over* and we must move on.

I did not say it was fraud. I said that it makes it more fraud-prone or more tempting for fraud. A closely contested big state with a winner-take all system encourages fraud by disproportionately amplifying the potential rewards of fraudulent behaviour. In a two-stage winner take all system, a small number of fraudulent votes can result in millions of votes "gained". In a direct election, a small number of fraudulent votes gets you exactly that - a small number of fraudulent votes.

I did not intend to bring out the actual political issues of the last election since they are not relevant to whether one system of voting is better than another one. But while we are at it, you might enjoy an excellent recent piece from the Washington Post that makes a good case that Bush would have likely won the presidency without the intervention of the Supreme Court.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56446-2004Oct23.html (and thus, conceding or not would have made little difference).
In this election. Maybe. I'm just pointing out that since it's never happened, it can't be said to be proven a good idea.
I don't think that's a very strong argument. I showed above that smaller district proportional representation is more representative, so it is a good idea. As to "it has never happened" this is akin to saying that wearing a seat belt has not been shown to be a good idea because you've never been in a car crash.
That's fine. But I disagree with fiddling with the Constitution. :)
The constitution is not holy writ and has been fiddled with a number of times, almost always with rather positive effect. Obviously, not a task to be undertaken lightly but that is why it is difficult to do. But that is orthogonal to whether one system of voting is better than another one. Imagine we were talking about the Imaginary Republic of Smapty.

It already does. Every state has a supreme court of its own.

Which is subordinate to the Supreme Court so that doesn't quite work. By a similar argument, then, you should also agree to either appointment (or, hey, here is a better idea! Direct election! :]) of the president as every state already has a governor.

Can you give me a better way?

Yes, direct elections of the president.

So Bush wins 3 or 4 in CT? Imagine counting the whole country this way. Chaos.

Not 3 OR 4, whatever the rounding says (I don't have your original numbers in front of me). The rounding error is amortized across the different states.

Yep. But it is fairer than anything else anyone has come up with.

I think I've shown is not "fairer" and you haven't made a strong argument that it is.

Yes, if it were feasible. I doubt that will happen for at least another hundred years or so.

It very nearly happened in 1969, also we are not strictly arguing about immediate feasability but about the merits of one method of electing a president over another.
Immaterial. You're giving voice to a minority over a majority in a geographical area. And if you're advocating a straight populace vote with no geographical ties, then candidates will just campaign in cities and not give a rats a__ about issues in smaller areas. Who cares about Albany when you've got NYC?
I'm not sure how I'm advocating giving a minority a voice over a majority, in fact, it is the EC that has done that about 4 times. And yes, I am advocating a direct vote with no geographical ties because the office of the president really has very limited influence over geography specific issues. Plus this argument can easily be reversed - as an artifact of the EC system, in certain elections, such as this one, candidates do not campaign, in non-battleground major states. Are the concerns of those voters somehow less important? A direct election system turns every place into an equal-opportunity battleground.

No, it isn't. Their votes DETERMINE who gets the pot. Your candidate lose? Hard cheese, but your state's EC votes go to the winner. That's why it is MAJORITY rule. BTW, Kerry will win in my state. I'm still not voting for him, tho.
Again, if "majority rule" were the principle we were looking for in a presidential election, a direct election is the best way to achieve it.
How? *Iowa* is a battleground state in this election. 7 votes.
Iowa is a battleground state but that has nothing to do with its size. It is simply a battleground state. So is Florida. So is New Mexico. A few relatively small states that happen to be battlegrounds in a very very closely contestested elections happen to get some attention. This is far more a factor of the closeness of the election than the fact that they are small and the EC somehow makes them important. The notion that the EC somehow intrinsically bestow campaign attention is wrong - even in a closely contested election. At the risk of getting hugely repetitive, here again is the data from the 2000 election:

"Among the seven states with the fewest possible electoral votes (three), only Delaware got a visit. Eleven of the 17 smallest states received no presidential-candidate visits at all. "
New York, Illinois, California and Texas are not. ... If you divide the state's EC by number of voters in a state, you'll find that Cali votes aren't weighted more heavily -- they're actually less than places like Wyoming.
It might not be immediatelly obvious but yes, the EC gives more voting power to voters of big states than to voters of large ones. It seems counterintuitive but voting power (the ability to affect the outcome of an election) is not proportional to electors per voter. If you'd like to look at the maths of this, see: http://www.eleves.ens.fr:8080/home/madore/misc/us-voting.html
A simple example of why it works out that way -
"It does not take much reflection to understand that the relation between the number of votes given to an entity, and the power that the entity draws from these votes, is somewhat complex. At any rate, it is not simply linear (though in approximation, for some special cases, it can be). For example, if one entity gets more than half of the votes, then that entity receives all the power. To take a more interesting example, suppose Alice, Bob, Carol and David have, respectively, 4, 4, 2 and 1 votes in an election: a quick check shows that the outcome of a yes/no vote between them (with majority being at 6 votes; and where we assume that parties cannot abstain) will be determined by the majority of Alice, Bob and Carol; so in fact, Alice, Bob and Carol hold equal power, whereas David has none. Real-life examples, of course, need not be so clear-cut, but there's more to an electoral system than meets the eye."

If you do the maths, you'll find that a vote in California has 2.77 times the voting power of one in Wyoming.
Because the average American is a moron who doesn't know the names of both his senators? (No fair looking it up!) ;)
Well, I luck out in this one, hitting the trifecta, in the words of our illustrious president. I am not American but since I live in San Francisco, both my senators AND my congressperson are significant figures on the national political stage and almost everybody knows who they are.

My guess is that the 60s were already enough upheaval for everyone at the time. :)
Heh. While amusing, this is not much in the way of argument. I hope you have a chance to read the story since it is both interesting and informative. It outlines the near catastrophic failure of the EC in the presence of a strong, regionally-based third candidate.

So the entire organizations have to be engaged into attempting to get a few openly fraudulent votes and this somehow is unnoticed by all? What about the entire organisation of the other side? The logistics of this are essentially impossible.

Entire organizations? Sort of. It happens even now. I just read in this week's TIME that there is a county in Ohio with more voters registered than it has people. Under the system you propose, this would become *more* endemic.
What about it? I assume that *both* major parties are playing shennanigans with the local voting authority.
The logistics are not only possible, they are EASY.


Now, the entire national organisations _do_ engage in various fairly unsavoury tactics as it is and these efforts mostly balance out (Arguably the Republicans have an edge here with their vote supression efforts). There is no reason to suppose they wouldn't in a direct election.

I'm dubious about one party being more deft than the other. (I'm pretty much a centrist, agreeing with the GOP on some issues and the Dems on others.)
Exactly. And that is why a direct election without a unified, national voting system (all the same method and traceable) is not a possibility.

Disenfranchised the states how? Disenfranchised CA and TX from having an influence on the election disproportionate to their voting population? As to the campaigning this is already the case:

See http://www.slate.com/id/2108420
Disenfrachise the smaller population states, as you'd basically moving to a city system.


"How frequently do presidential candidates visit small states these days? Not very. In his recent book, Why the Electoral College is Bad For America, George C. Edwards, a political scientist at Texas A&M, tabulated all the visits by presidential candidates during the 2000 election. Edwards found that among the seven states with the fewest possible electoral votes (three), only Delaware got a visit. Eleven of the 17 smallest states received no presidential-candidate visits at all. Edwards found a similar pattern when he tabulated visits that year by vice-presidential candidates. "It is clear that, contrary to the arguments of its proponents," Edwards wrote,

the Electoral College does not provide an incentive for candidates to be attentive to small states and take their cases directly to their citizens. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how presidential candidates could be less attentive to small states."

Untrue. Small states like Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico have gotten more coverage than usual. I would also posit that the states that as a counter arguement, the candidates also shy away from large states they can't win. I don't see Bush visiting New York or Kerry in Texas much.

The guy with a minority of the votes got a minority of the electors. Nothing scary here.

Not if (like me) you advocate state's rights and believe in the Constitution where it states that the STATES elect the President.

Well, "Majority rules" sounds great but it is a nonargument. If "Majority rules" is the primary criterion then that's an argument for direct election.

Not if (like me) you advocate state's rights and believe in the Constitution where it states that the STATES elect the President. ;)

no, "bah counties" as in:

only you are talking about some imaginary proposal to somehow move to a county based system of electoral representation and its not only a strawman, but a dumb one that doesn't help your position.

and the reason you campaign in montana is that bush got more votes out there than he did in boston. and you need all the votes you can get in a nationwide election. if you abandon some part of the country, somebody else will take up trying for their votes. which means that you will have less votes, and be less likely to win, even if the person taking those votes you used to have isn't going to win either.

I'm not saying it helps my position, I *like* the EC the way it is.

Not if you had direct representation. The population of Boston and suburbs is higher than all of Montana. Why waste the time? Just concentrate on the big places and win the highest number of votes.
Exactly. Why visit War, West Virginia or Walla, Walla Washington when you could be in Houston or Detroit? The logic doesn't work here, IMHO.

Don't blame the College!!!

Yes, the Electorial College is quite old, and it was designed before political parties originated. It was also before very many people had the right to vote.

The original system was to elect by "popular vote". Supporters of Andrew Jackson went to work on state levels and got the vote extended to the common man. They also got most states to allow the Electors to be elected by popular vote. Long before this idea went into effect an Elector was elected by the House.

This eventually was reformed by holding a National Convention to nominate a candidate, and the idea was borrowed from the Anti-Mason Party.

Today, the overwhelming majority of the delegates to both party conventions are chosen by the Presidential Primary. It is this long and drawn out primary system that has made the U.S. Presidential contest the longest and most confusing in the Western World.

This one first: Not everything else is done by direct vote ... only the vote for congressmen and senators. We don't vote for supreme court judges, members of the chief of staff, appointments to heads of government agencies ... well ... pretty much anything else that's on a national level.
I should have been more clear. I meant everything else that the people vote for. My goof-up.

My point is one is more representative of the other. In a two-stage winner take all system, the smaller you make the district, the more representative the result in the makeup of the second stage. Limit case being a "district" of one, in which case you have a proprtional alocation.

And that is where we disagree. I don't believe that splitting into smaller groups makes it any more or less representative, just more balkanized. (Please see below regarding the 4 votes.)


I did not say it was fraud. I said that it makes it more fraud-prone or more tempting for fraud. A closely contested big state with a winner-take all system encourages fraud by disproportionately amplifying the potential rewards of fraudulent behaviour. In a two-stage winner take all system, a small number of fraudulent votes can result in millions of votes "gained". In a direct election, a small number of fraudulent votes gets you exactly that - a small number of fraudulent votes.


So we agree. Nice.
As for the two stage: yes, and if you don't have a result like 2000, that's not a problem. I still hold that without a nationwide voting standard, it is not possible to enforce disenfranchisement/vote destruction anyway.
Consider: If Bush could have "fabricated" just 1115 votes in each of the 538 EC voting seats in the US, he'd have won the popular election in 2000. That really isn't that much.


I did not intend to bring out the actual political issues of the last election since they are not relevant to whether one system of voting is better than another one. But while we are at it, you might enjoy an excellent recent piece from the Washington Post that makes a good case that Bush would have likely won the presidency without the intervention of the Supreme Court.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56446-2004Oct23.html (and thus, conceding or not would have made little difference).


Yep. I've read similar articles in TIME and elsewhere. Either way, the last election was sloppy.


I don't think that's a very strong argument. I showed above that smaller district proportional representation is more representative, so it is a good idea. As to "it has never happened" this is akin to saying that wearing a seat belt has not been shown to be a good idea because you've never been in a car crash.


I disagree, you stated that you believe that they are more representative. I do not consider it a good idea. I come from a small state, and we have little enough voice as it is. It may not always go my way, but as least it's the majority of the citizenry saying they want X, not some watered down decision. This is the same thinking, IMHO, which makes children's sports so wishy-washy today: everyone is a winner, there is no reward for excellence/being first.
Not a very good analogy, as we have the data on seatbelt use/disuse -- it has been used before. The break-away district has not. SDI would be a better one to make your case. :)


The constitution is not holy writ and has been fiddled with a number of times, almost always with rather positive effect.


Sort of. Consider:
Article 16: Income Tax.
Article 18: Prohibition.
Article 27: Compensation of Members of Congress

... that is 3 of 14 since the Civil War, plus one to repeal 18 (21) and 3 for the succession of the Presidency (20,22,25). By my count, that makes the Amendments a 50/50 shot over the last 130 years.

Obviously, not a task to be undertaken lightly but that is why it is difficult to do. But that is orthogonal to whether one system of voting is better than another one. Imagine we were talking about the Imaginary Republic of Smapty.


Why? My CT examples were poo-poo'ed. :D

Which is subordinate to the Supreme Court so that doesn't quite work. By a similar argument, then, you should also agree to either appointment (or, hey, here is a better idea! Direct election! :]) of the president as every state already has a governor.

Not subordinate -- but can be overruled if the case is taken by the SC.
I'm not the one making a differentiation between state and national elections. A state election is relatively easy to recount vs. a national one. (Please note my thinking on having a standard, nationwide way to vote a bit below.)


Yes, direct elections of the president.

Not 3 OR 4, whatever the rounding says (I don't have your original numbers in front of me). The rounding error is amortized across the different states.


So it works out about the same as the current EC, just with smaller units. As I said above, I see that as less, not more representative of the will of the people in a state.


I think I've shown is not "fairer" and you haven't made a strong argument that it is.

I still disagree, and I believe that my arguement is as strong as yours. Your POV is rational and valid. You're certainly entitled to it, but I don't believe that you are correct. (That's what is great about this nation. )


It very nearly happened in 1969, also we are not strictly arguing about immediate feasability but about the merits of one method of electing a president over another.

True and true. I'm just talking about why I prefer the EC to any other plan currently afoot. I *could* go for direct elections, if there was a safeguard of everyone voting the same way and a near failsafe recount ability. As I've said before, I don't think that is possible within our lifetimes.


I'm not sure how I'm advocating giving a minority a voice over a majority, in fact, it is the EC that has done that about 4 times.

Because by splitting up a state's EC votes, all you are doing is balkanizing the process. Again CT. The *majority* of the state will vote for Kerry. Yet you want to give votes away to Bush. By breaking the state votes up, you are giving votes to the minority and therefore creating a LESS representative system. Please roll that around for a moment. :)


And yes, I am advocating a direct vote with no geographical ties because the office of the president really has very limited influence over geography specific issues.

Oh? That line item veto does do wonders for which state gets to keep their military bases. Never mind the actual pork on bills.

Plus this argument can easily be reversed - as an artifact of the EC system, in certain elections, such as this one, candidates do not campaign, in non-battleground major states.

Exactly. Or, more to the point, in ANY SIZED non-battleground states.

Are the concerns of those voters somehow less important? A direct election system turns every place into an equal-opportunity battleground.
No, but their votes are rewarded. You think Bush gave nearly 8 billion to Florida just for humanitarian reasons after the hurricanes? If so, you're much less jaded than I.


Again, if "majority rule" were the principle we were looking for in a presidential election, a direct election is the best way to achieve it.


Unless, like me, you believe that the states elect the president. :)

Iowa is a battleground state but that has nothing to do with its size. It is simply a battleground state.

I was countering the conjecture that small vote states don't matter. I hope you can concede that in elections like this one and 2000 that every EC vote matters. Heck, had Gore won Tennessee, Florida would have been moot!


So is Florida. So is New Mexico. A few relatively small states that happen to be battlegrounds in a very very closely contestested elections happen to get some attention.

Florida is not a small state. Yes, NM is. Exactly.


This is far more a factor of the closeness of the election than the fact that they are small and the EC somehow makes them important. The notion that the EC somehow intrinsically bestow campaign attention is wrong - even in a closely contested election.

I didn't say that. I said that the small pop states weild more importance that they otherwise would, as you can't have less than 3 votes for any state. Checks and balances, checks and balances...


At the risk of getting hugely repetitive, here again is the data from the 2000 election:

"Among the seven states with the fewest possible electoral votes (three), only Delaware got a visit. Eleven of the 17 smallest states received no presidential-candidate visits at all. "

It might not be immediatelly obvious but yes, the EC gives more voting power to voters of big states than to voters of large ones. It seems counterintuitive but voting power (the ability to affect the outcome of an election) is not proportional to electors per voter. If you'd like to look at the maths of this, see: http://www.eleves.ens.fr:8080/home/madore/misc/us-voting.html
A simple example of why it works out that way -
"It does not take much reflection to understand that the relation between the number of votes given to an entity, and the power that the entity draws from these votes, is somewhat complex. At any rate, it is not simply linear (though in approximation, for some special cases, it can be). For example, if one entity gets more than half of the votes, then that entity receives all the power. To take a more interesting example, suppose Alice, Bob, Carol and David have, respectively, 4, 4, 2 and 1 votes in an election: a quick check shows that the outcome of a yes/no vote between them (with majority being at 6 votes; and where we assume that parties cannot abstain) will be determined by the majority of Alice, Bob and Carol; so in fact, Alice, Bob and Carol hold equal power, whereas David has none. Real-life examples, of course, need not be so clear-cut, but there's more to an electoral system than meets the eye."

If you do the maths, you'll find that a vote in California has 2.77 times the voting power of one in Wyoming.

Um, no:
"For example, the largest state, California, has 12.03% of the US population but its 55 Electoral College votes represent only 10.22% of the College total. Wyoming, a sparsely populated state, has 0.18% of the US population but its three seats in the Electoral College give it 0.56% of the College votes. "
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3736580.stm


Well, I luck out in this one, hitting the trifecta, in the words of our illustrious president. I am not American but since I live in San Francisco, both my senators AND my congressperson are significant figures on the national political stage and almost everybody knows who they are.

Fair enough.

Heh. While amusing, this is not much in the way of argument. I hope you have a chance to read the story since it is both interesting and informative. It outlines the near catastrophic failure of the EC in the presence of a strong, regionally-based third candidate.

Thanks, I think. :)
I still disagree with the "failure" of the EC, but c'est la vie.
Thank you for an interesting debate. I hope we at least understand each other's point of views better, even if we didn't utterly convince the other.

Peace,
- Markreich

I was thinking about the electoral college the other day, and I couldn't come up with a single reason why we use it today! It seems to me to be very out of date. It wouldn't be so bad if the winner of the popular vote was also always the winner of the electoral college, but many times in history, this hasn't been the case. I find this to be a contradiction to what democracy stands for, and I seriously can't find any reason why America still uses it. Does anyone have anything positive to say about the electoral college system?

Firstly, there would be no point in having the electoral college if the winner of the popular vote always won the EC. You could just have a popular vote.

Check out an earlier discussions of the matter here (http://forums2.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=343987):
http://forums2.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=343987
or here (http://forums2.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=359018):
http://forums2.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=359018

Another good resource is here (http://www.electoral-vote.com/info/electoral-college.html):
http://www.electoral-vote.com/info/electoral-college.html

I didn't say that. I said that the small pop states weild more importance that they otherwise would, as you can't have less than 3 votes for any state. Checks and balances, checks and balances...
Um, no:
"For example, the largest state, California, has 12.03% of the US population but its 55 Electoral College votes represent only 10.22% of the College total. Wyoming, a sparsely populated state, has 0.18% of the US population but its three seats in the Electoral College give it 0.56% of the College votes. "
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3736580.stm


Well, this one is one that we can reduce to straight mathematics. It is _mathematically provable_ that a California voter has more voting power (greater ability to affect the outcome) than a Wyoming one. It might look otherwise but what you're measuring is not voting power. I'll use the paper's illustrative example again. Imagine not 50 but 4 states with elector allocation:

A: 4
B: 4
C: 2
D: 1

Suppose these states were voting for president and state A has a population of a billion and state D has a population of 1. By your measure, a voter in state D is more empowered than a voter in state A because a voter in state D gets "more elector per voter" so to speak. Except this mathematically naive analysis would be obviously inaccurate. A voter in state D has exactly 0 voting power because there is no way the D can ever influence the outcome of two candidate election no matter which way it votes. By similar logic (if you look at the winning combinations) states A, B and C have identical voting power (thus, if state C had a population of half a billion, it's voters would have twice the voting power per voter than state A or B).

Such analysis can be done on the entire 50 states. It is more convoluted of course but the results are pretty straightforward and you can see them in the last column of the table at the bottom of http://www.eleves.ens.fr:8080/home/madore/misc/us-voting.html

So, no, the EC does not help small states. On the contrary, the EC helps big states in a way that is wildly disproportionate to their populations. The founding fathers were just a little weak on the maths. Or perhaps very cunningly this is what they intended. Even if you believe that "states should elect the president" the current system is quite broken for that - a state like CA gets nearly four times greater ability to influence the outcome per voter (i.e. irrespective of poplation) than a state like Montana.

Incidentally, if you think the maths is the drunken dreams of some chain smoking French guy, the exact same analysis is done, with the same results in Electoral College Primer 2000 by Lawrence D. Longley and Neal Peirce.

Well, this one is one that we can reduce to straight mathematics. It is _mathematically provable_ that a California voter has more voting power (greater ability to affect the outcome) than a Wyoming one. It might look otherwise but what you're measuring is not voting power. I'll use the paper's illustrative example again. Imagine not 50 but 4 states with elector allocation:

A: 4
B: 4
C: 2
D: 1
I like how you fail to refute my numbers from the BBC site, BTW.


Suppose these states were voting for president and state A has a population of a billion and state D has a population of 1. By your measure, a voter in state D is more empowered than a voter in state A because a voter in state D gets "more elector per voter" so to speak. Except this mathematically naive analysis would be obviously inaccurate. A voter in state D has exactly 0 voting power because there is no way the D can ever influence the outcome of two candidate election no matter which way it votes.

Point of failure: 11 Votes? This example fails right from the start! In order to match the EC, you need to add 2 to each one!

A: 6
B: 6
C: 5
D: 3

…since all states get 2 votes (1 per senator) and 1 for each Congressional Rep. Now, you’ll note, D CAN influence the outcome.


By similar logic (if you look at the winning combinations) states A, B and C have identical voting power (thus, if state C had a population of half a billion, it's voters would have twice the voting power per voter than state A or B).
This no longer holds true.



Such analysis can be done on the entire 50 states.
And is still wrong.

It is more convoluted of course but the results are pretty straightforward and you can see them in the last column of the table at the bottom of http://www.eleves.ens.fr:8080/home/madore/misc/us-voting.html

So, no, the EC does not help small states. On the contrary, the EC helps big states in a way that is wildly disproportionate to their populations.

If you re-read my numbers, you can see that large states actually give up a little power to the smaller states, due to the 2 senatorial votes per state.


The founding fathers were just a little weak on the maths. Or perhaps very cunningly this is what they intended. Even if you believe that "states should elect the president" the current system is quite broken for that - a state like CA gets nearly four times greater ability to influence the outcome per voter (i.e. irrespective of poplation) than a state like Montana.

No, that's something the founders called "Checks and Balances." :)
And that has been proved incorrect above. Thanks.


Incidentally, if you think the maths is the drunken dreams of some chain smoking French guy, the exact same analysis is done, with the same results in Electoral College Primer 2000 by Lawrence D. Longley and Neal Peirce.
No, I just think they read Huff’s “How to Lie with Statistics”.

Point of failure: 11 Votes? This example fails right from the start! In order to match the EC, you need to add 2 to each one!

A: 6
B: 6
C: 5
D: 3

…since all states get 2 votes (1 per senator) and 1 for each Congressional Rep. Now, you’ll note, D CAN influence the outcome.

read the paper that was linked to. the point is not that small states have no power under the electoral college. it is that they have disproportionately less than big states. the amount of sway the the individual voter has in small state is higher in terms of the state, but much much lower in terms of the national outcome, because small states have very little sway compared to large ones overall.

and you should probably do the math on you "counter" example. 6+6+5+3=20. which means you need better than 10 to win. the only way to get better than 10 is to take at least one of a and b, and then take either the other of the two or take c. d still has no sway. if you take a and d you lose. if you take b and d you lose. if you take c and d you lose. if c votes for the winning candidate, that candidate would still have won without c's vote. in other words, the small state is irrelevent.

I like how you fail to refute my numbers from the BBC site, BTW.
Point of failure: 11 Votes? This example fails right from the start! In order to match the EC, you need to add 2 to each one!


I did refute your BBC numbers. I said you were using the wrong measure. The elector per voter measure is not an accurate measure of voting power (ability to influence outcome). More precisely, elector/voter is not proportional to voting power. If it were, then yes you would be right. But it isn't, this is counterintuitive but demonstrable mathematically. My example was not supposed to model the electoral college but to show that elector/voter (in fact, number of electors themselves) are not a proportional measure of voting power. This is not some artifact of the specific example where D has no voting power and C has as much voting power as A and B despite having half the votes. This is an inherent property of such block-allocated voting systems. And since the EC is such a voting system, it can be analyzed to get voting power numbers for all the states. This is neither controversial nor rocket science but yes it is counterintuitive - but it does not make it untrue. In order for you to show that it is untrue you have to show either that there is some flaw with the underlying assumptions (as I have shown about your model - that voting power and electors/voter have a linear relationship) or that there is a mistake in the analysis. You haven't really done either, you've simply said you don't buy it. That's a little bit like going to the zoo, seeing the improbable figure of the giraffe and saying "There sure ain't not such animal". I certainly can't stop you from taking that position but I have pretty convincingly shown that it is not factually supported.

just to let u all know the people actually have very little power in voting compared to the electoral college.
if they wanted to they could have all the people vote for one canidate and the electoral college could vote the opposite way and noone could do a real thing about it which kid of sucks

On the notion that the Electoral College was somehow designed by the founding fathers as a finely tuned element in a system of checks of balances, it is educational to take a look at how some of them felt about it.

Jefferson, no bleeding-heart pal of the role of the common man in government (see "Jeffersonian Democracy") wrote in an 1823 letter to George Hay:

"I have ever considered the constitutional mode of election ultimately by the Legislature voting by States as the most dangerous blot in our Constitution, and one which some unlucky chance will some day hit and give us a pope and antipope"

Hamilton wrote:

"It was ... desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the [office of the Presidency] ... A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations"

If you want to be a cynic you could take that as Hamilton considering the unwashed masses too stupid to pick the president so they should pick some wise men instead to do the picking. More charitably, one could interpret it as a concern that few voters could be expected to be aquainted with the details of each candidate's platform, in an age without parties, national campaigns or rapid mass communication. This is clearly no longer a significant issue.

It's so that smaller states don't always get ouvoted. a vote in South Dakota has more sway than one in California. Plus no administration is going to change the system that put them there.

It's so that smaller states don't always get ouvoted. a vote in South Dakota has more sway than one in California. Plus no administration is going to change the system that put them there.

Neither of these are true - read the last few pages of this thread.

Neither of these are true - read the last few pages of this thread.

No No No, and instead you could tell me why they aren't true. How do you know?

It's so that smaller states don't always get ouvoted. a vote in South Dakota has more sway than one in California.

in addition to this being proven to be absolutely false, it was never the reasoning behind the creation of the ec. the only argument at the convention even remotely like it was that it might be fair to give each state 1 vote for president, possibly cast by the governors or state legislatures. it was rejected because it would allow small states to dominate elections. the electoral college was just a pro-slavery compromise made so that slaves (and women, and poor people, etc) would count towards electing the pesident without actually letting them vote. that was one of the two real arguments made against direct election - that states that allowed larger percentages of their population to vote would always win.

No No No, and instead you could tell me why they aren't true. How do you know?

Why is me telling you somehow easier than you reading a page of text?
Anyhow, on the "small state" issue, I'll just repaste - basically it turns out voting power of a state is not linearly related to the number of voters represented by an elector.

" It is _mathematically provable_ that a California voter has more voting power (greater ability to affect the outcome) than a Wyoming one. It might look otherwise but what you're measuring is not voting power. I'll use the paper's illustrative example again. Imagine not 50 but 4 states with elector allocation:

A: 4
B: 4
C: 2
D: 1

Suppose these states were voting for president and state A has a population of a billion and state D has a population of 1. By your measure, a voter in state D is more empowered than a voter in state A because a voter in state D gets "more elector per voter" so to speak. Except this mathematically naive analysis would be obviously inaccurate. A voter in state D has exactly 0 voting power because there is no way the D can ever influence the outcome of two candidate election no matter which way it votes. By similar logic (if you look at the winning combinations) states A, B and C have identical voting power (thus, if state C had a population of half a billion, it's voters would have twice the voting power per voter than state A or B).

Such analysis can be done on the entire 50 states. It is more convoluted of course but the results are pretty straightforward and you can see them in the last column of the table at the bottom of http://www.eleves.ens.fr:8080/home/.../us-voting.html
"

If you want a less mathsy version, take a look at

http://www.slate.com/id/2105055/

As to it "never happening", this is an easy one - it has come quite close to happening as recently as 1969 when such a proposal passed the house and had the approval of the administration that was just elected. See:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2004/10/17/peculiar_institution/

hey, your all american, right? whats all this about south carolina wanting to be a theocracy? (possibly not true)

I was thinking about the electoral college the other day, and I couldn't come up with a single reason why we use it today! It seems to me to be very out of date. It wouldn't be so bad if the winner of the popular vote was also always the winner of the electoral college, but many times in history, this hasn't been the case. I find this to be a contradiction to what democracy stands for, and I seriously can't find any reason why America still uses it. Does anyone have anything positive to say about the electoral college system?
1. The US is not a democracy, it is a republic. With that in mind, the electoral college is very reflective on the overall American System.
2. See the Connecticut Compromise in your history book. The reasons why the Connecticut Compromise took place are the same reasons why the US still needs to use the electoral college system to elect its President and Vice President.

And while we're at it, let's get rid of the two Senators per state rule. Why should Wyoming get the same number of Senators as California when they have one tenth the people? If they don't like it, they can move!

(sarcasm font=on)

And while we're at it, let's get rid of the two Senators per state rule. Why should Wyoming get the same number of Senators as California when they have one tenth the people? If they don't like it, they can move!

(sarcasm font=on)

other than the fact that i do support the abolition of the senate (but that's because i'm an anarchist), what does that have to do with an argument about the electoral college? especially when it is objectively true that states like wyoming are harmed by the electoral college, which disproportionately grants even more power to the big states at the expense of the small ones...

1. The US is not a democracy, it is a republic. With that in mind, the electoral college is very reflective on the overall American System.
2. See the Connecticut Compromise in your history book. The reasons why the Connecticut Compromise took place are the same reasons why the US still needs to use the electoral college system to elect its President and Vice President.
with the utter size differences between states the electoral college is wholly and completely counter productive

with the utter size differences between states the electoral college is wholly and completely counter productive

explain...

I ran down to the coner store for a snack and overheard some talking heads on the store's TV (CNN) - "60% of Americans support abolishing the Electoral College". This isn't really a significant argument for such a change on it's own but it does belie the "it is never going to happen in a 100 years" rhetoric somewhat

I ran down to the coner store for a snack and overheard some talking heads on the store's TV (CNN) - "60% of Americans support abolishing the Electoral College". This isn't really a significant argument for such a change on it's own but it does belie the "it is never going to happen in a 100 years" rhetoric somewhat

I garuntee you if there is some sort of problem this election relating directly to the Electoral College (tie, repeat of 2000, etc.) there will be a strong movement to abolish it within the next 10 years.

elctoral college should just be the only deciding factor in elections it would make it a whole lot easier

read the paper that was linked to. the point is not that small states have no power under the electoral college. it is that they have disproportionately less than big states. the amount of sway the the individual voter has in small state is higher in terms of the state, but much much lower in terms of the national outcome, because small states have very little sway compared to large ones overall.

I did. But what you just said above is quite a bit different than what was said in the post. :) (BTW, I agree with the way you state it above.)


and you should probably do the math on you "counter" example. 6+6+5+3=20. which means you need better than 10 to win. the only way to get better than 10 is to take at least one of a and b, and then take either the other of the two or take c. d still has no sway.

You forget that all I did was add 2 to each letter in his example, to show he forgot the senate seats.
As for D having no sway, consider this: if you add up all the states with 7 or less votes, you end up with 115 electoral votes. That's 42% of 270 -- and victory. IMHO, that's sway.


if you take a and d you lose. if you take b and d you lose. if you take c and d you lose. if c votes for the winning candidate, that candidate would still have won without c's vote. in other words, the small state is irrelevent.


True, in his flawed example. :D

I did. But what you just said above is quite a bit different than what was said in the post. :) (BTW, I agree with the way you state it above.)
You forget that all I did was add 2 to each letter in his example, to show he forgot the senate seats.

You are repeatedly misrepresenting what I said to the point where I think I can fairly say you are being either willfully ignorant or sincerely obtuse. This was not supposed to be a model of the EC but a trivial example that EC vote/voter is NOT a linear measure of voting power. It just isn't. I've shown it quite definitely mathematically and the ball is in your court to disprove it. You haven't. You simply keep going back to that measure which is demonstrably inaccurate. You have to show that my measure is inaccurate or that yours somehow is.


As for D having no sway, consider this: if you add up all the states with 7 or less votes, you end up with 115 electoral votes. That's 42% of 270 -- and victory. IMHO, that's sway.

True, in his flawed example. :D

Again, this is not good enough because you continue to assume EC vote/voter is equivalent to voting power (i.e. ability to influence election). I have shown this is not the case. You have to address the mathematical argument instead of repeating one that has been shown as inaccurate. I have referred to a full analysis of why that is the case which you have done absolutely nothing to address. In fact, I have given two completely independent references, one that is full specified online, the other in The Electoral College Primer 2000. The method is open to refutation. The book itself is published by Yale University Press, the authors are:

Lawrence D. Longley a professor of government at Lawrence University

and

Neal R. Peirce, a prominent Washington journalist who writes a national column on state and local government themes syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group

An insinuating reference to How To Lie With Statistics without any details or concrete refutation and repetitions of arguments I've given detailed analysis to refute is the only thing you have come up with.

If your viewpoint is "well, I don't understand/buy it, no matter what" that is fair enough.
If your viewpoint is "No conceivable piece of factual evidence will change my mind" that is also fair enough.

It is, though, intellectually dishonest to continue to both misrepresent and mischaracterise my arguments as "flawed" or "wrong" simply because you disagree with them without providing any factual basis whatsoever. I have no issue with the disagreement. But disagreement that is based on nothing but innuendo and endless repetition of a demonstrably inaccurate mathematical analysis should not be represented as anything but that - if you disagree but can't articulate a factually defensible argument, or perhaps need time to build one up, that is another matter. Nobody can be faulted for beliefs alone, whether substantiated in reality or not. But I will not accept baseless characterisations without concrete, testable and falsifiable arguments.

You are repeatedly misrepresenting what I said to the point where I think I can fairly say you are being either willfully ignorant or sincerely obtuse. This was not supposed to be a model of the EC but a trivial example that EC vote/voter is NOT a linear measure of voting power. It just isn't. I've shown it quite definitely mathematically and the ball is in your court to disprove it. You haven't. You simply keep going back to that measure which is demonstrably inaccurate. You have to show that my measure is inaccurate or that yours somehow is.

Again, this is not good enough because you continue to assume EC vote/voter is equivalent to voting power (i.e. ability to influence election). I have shown this is not the case. You have to address the mathematical argument instead of repeating one that has been shown as inaccurate. I have referred to a full analysis of why that is the case which you have done absolutely nothing to address. In fact, I have given two completely independent references, one that is full specified online, the other in The Electoral College Primer 2000. The method is open to refutation. The book itself is published by Yale University Press, the authors are:

Lawrence D. Longley a professor of government at Lawrence University
and
Neal R. Peirce, a prominent Washington journalist who writes a national column on state and local government themes syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group

An insinuating reference to How To Lie With Statistics without any details or concrete refutation and repetitions of arguments I've given detailed analysis to refute is the only thing you have come up with.

If your viewpoint is "well, I don't understand/buy it, no matter what" that is fair enough. If your viewpoint is "No conceivable piece of factual evidence will change my mind" that is also fair enough.

It is, though, intellectually dishonest to continue to both misrepresent and mischaracterise my arguments as "flawed" or "wrong" simply because you disagree with them without providing any factual basis whatsoever. I have no issue with the disagreement. But disagreement that is based on nothing but innuendo and endless repetition of a demonstrably inaccurate mathematical analysis should not be represented as anything but that - if you disagree but can't articulate a factually defensible argument, or perhaps need time to build one up, that is another matter. Nobody can be faulted for beliefs alone, whether substantiated in reality or not. But I will not accept baseless characterisations without concrete, testable and falsifiable arguments.

Um, no, I'm not. I'm holding you to your own standard.
Now, before you get angry let me explain that.

I entreat you to please re-read post #85.
At this point, you launched into this whole defensive sprawl with the mathmatical paper. "Reducing to straight mathmatics".

However, at no point in the forum have you ever countered what I said regarding population vs. the percentage of electoral votes with anything more than "it is the wrong measurement" (post #88). By that, I mean with a logical arguement.

Instead everything else from your side has come out of that paper, whose mathmatics (lets face it) most people cannot grasp, let alone refute. I freely admit that I haven't seen math like this in over 10 years, and am not willing to put in the time to pick it apart, if that is even possible.
Now, I freely admit I've not bothered to mathmatically prove the paper being wrong. But by the same token, you haven't proved me logically wrong, either.

However, had you (at *any* point) made a logical arguement as to *why* your way was a better measurment, I'd have considered it. In fact, I still will, if you can make such a case.

Um, no, I'm not. I'm holding you to your own standard.
However, at no point in the forum have you ever countered what I said regarding population vs. the percentage of electoral votes with anything more than "it is the wrong measurement" (post #88). By that, I mean with a logical arguement.


I gave a very concrete example of the nonlinear behaviour of elector vote/voter with respect to voting power. This holds for all block-voting. If the mathematical argument in that is unclear then I guess we are stuck. A mathematical argument is a logical argument. This one is fairly straightforward and requires no understanding of the mathematical details of the paper.

Instead everything else from your side has come out of that paper, whose mathmatics (lets face it) most people cannot grasp, let alone refute. I freely admit that I haven't seen math like this in over 10 years, and am not willing to put in the time to pick it apart, if that is even possible.
Now, I freely admit I've not bothered to mathmatically prove the paper being wrong. But by the same token, you haven't proved me logically wrong, either.


The very simplistic example shows that the proportionality measure is inaccurate in block votes. An indication that this is true is the fact that when you modified the example, the behaviour was still nonlinear. This is not a rigorous proof but a very solid intuitive indication that voting power is inherently not proportional to a simple "number of votes" in block-allocated voting systems. If this is unclear, I'm at a loss to simplify it further. As to generalizing the analysis to the 50 states - this is done both in the paper and the book I mentioned. The book has a prestigious publisher and has been widely referred to and reviewed. If there was some trivial objection to the analysys (and the proportionality argument is, mathematically, a trivial objection) it would have been mentioned or disputed at least somewhere.

I do think your argument boils down to it being counterintuitive. It is counterintuitive. But it is also true. I tried to present a simple example to give an basic idea how the intuitive model fails _without_ having to invoke the full analysis of 50 states with their particular electoral allocation. All I can suggest is that you can give it a second look, free of preconceptions about "states" or "electoral colleges" - then it should be clear on basic logical grounds.

Lots of mathematical results are counterintuitive but true. Such results are particularly common in probability theory or combinatorial analsys. A classic case are problems involving Bayesian reasoning such as

"1% of women at age forty who participate in routine screening have breast cancer. 80% of women with breast cancer will get positive mammographies. 9.6% of women without breast cancer will also get positive mammographies. A woman in this age group had a positive mammography in a routine screening. What is the probability that she actually has breast cancer?"

There have been several, well repeated studies that show that not laypeople, doctors, who have some training in analyzing such problems analyze and solve such problems incorrectly. In fact, for the one above, 85% of doctors get it wrong.

Feel free to ask if something is unclear but I'm fairly sure that in this particular case you are just falling for the apparently obvious but mathematical incorrect interpretation.

Another data point you might consider, even though it is far weaker than the logical and mathematical argument - when the '69 ammendment was passed in the House and the factors that eventually lead to its abandoment had absolutely nothing to do with small states. Small states did not oppose it - if the "small state advantage" was an irrefutable reality one would have expected vehement small state opposition.

I agree with Ulungba, infact I used similar logic in another debate.

The problem really is why should the Democrats favor a system that harms them, and why should the Republicans favor a system that harms them? Also, who decides how to change the system and how can you trust they wont try to affect the election. Changing how you elect people is very difficult. Everyone screams when a elecoral voter votes against his candidate. A similar thing would happen in basically any system.

Here, I will try to again outline a simplified argument that shows that elector/voter measure is not representative of "voting power" which measures the ability to affect the outcome of the election.

The Republic of Simpletonia is located on a pacific archipelago consisting of four islands, Alpha, Bravo, Charlie and Delta. The republic elects its president through a simplified version of the US electoral college system - every island gets a number of electors proportional to its population. Since the republic is populated by vat-grown clone cyborgs, all members of the population are created fully adult and with the right to vote, there is no distinction between "citizen" and "voter". Additionally, all citizens are genetically programmed to vote in all elections. For every presidential election, a convoluted primary system aided by powerful supercomputers nominates two candidates. Below are the island population statistics and their respective electoral vote count.

Alpha : 400,000 : 4
Bravo : 400,000 : 4
Charlie: 200,000 : 2
Delta : 100,000 : 1

If we measured voting power by "how many voters does it take to get an elector" all states are equally powerful. In each state, 100,000 voters are represented by one elector. This seems fair and square until one considers the ability of each state to influence the outcome of the election. A simple analysis shows that any two of Alpha, Bravo or Charlie are enough to win the election. What Delta votes never matters. In terms of actual voting power, the states can be ranked like this -

Alpha: 1
Bravo: 1
Charlie: 1
Delta: 0

Even though they have as equal voter to elector ratio, Delta is actually entirely irrelevant. It makes no difference whatsoever what Delta votes. Delta citizens might as well be throwing their ballots into the sea.
Even more interesting is the situation of the state of Charlie. Charlie has half the population of Alpha or Bravo but in terms of voting power (ability to influence the outcome of an election), Charlie is an equal of Alpha or Bravo. Despite the fact that Charlie has, proportionally, the same number of voters per elector, in terms of individual voting power, a Charlie voter is effectively twice as powerful as an Alpha or Bravo voter.

What does this show? It shows that in such block-allocated voting systems, how many voters are represented by an elector does not actually measure voting power. Delta could have 1 total voter and its voting power would still be zero. Alpha could have a billion voters and its voting power would still be 1, more importantly, its voting power per voter would still be greater than that of Delta.

Without making undue parallels to the US Electoral College voting system, what we have shown here is that the number of voters represented by an electoral college vote is not proportionally related to voting power

Clearly, the Sipletonian Republic is in a bit of a jam. Taking another page out of the US system of government, the Simpletonians attempt to fix the obvious inequity of their system. They figure, the way to go is to boost the elector/voter count of the smaller states. If two electors were added to each states, clearly, the smaller states would benefit most since their elector vote/voter ratio would increase the most. The Simpletonians, forgetting the fact that the behaviour of the system is nonlinear, eagerly implement the new, more balanced system. The new population/EC vote allocation becomes:

Alpha: 400,000 : 6
Bravo: 400,000 : 6
Charlie: 200,000 : 4
Delta: 100,000 : 3

At first glance, things look much fairer in Simpletonia. The tiny island of Delta now boasts an impressive 1 elector per 33,333 voters, compared to 1 elector per 50,000 in Charlie and the meagre 1 elector per laughable 66,666 voters in Alpha and Bravo. So, Delta has become twice as powerful (per voter) as Alpha or Bravo, right? Sadly, it does not work out that way. A win under the new system requires 10 votes. No matter how things are sliced, the twice more powerful-per-voter Delta is still completely irrelevant in the Simpletonian presidential election. Paradoxically, Alpha, Bravo and evenCharlie still have the exact same voting power they did before. The advantage they had was so great that it was not countered by the tweak even though proportionally, now an elector in Alpha or Bravo represents twice the number of voters in compared to one in Delta.

What have we shown here? Not only is elector/voter nonlinear with respect with actual ability to influence the election, when the discrepancy of voting block size is big enough, even adjustments of proportionality by a factor of 2 or so do not necessarily outweigh the inherent advantages of the holders of large blocks.

Now, one might say, you just rigged it this way. But the answer is no. While this example is very small and demonstrates extremes (for the purposes of easier explanation and analysis) this problem is inherent in block-allocated voting schemes. The US Electoral College is one such scheme. It is much larger and its analysis is more complex. There is no such thing as a state whose vote is totally immaterial (this becomes increasingly unlikely the more states one has). At the same time, the voting power of states is very similarly, not linearly related to to the elector vote/voter metric. Even though small states have a great advantage in that metric, it ends up not conferring them enough voting power to outweigh the disproportionate (per population) advantages of larger states. The votes of small states voters are still much, much less signficant than the votes of voters of big states - precisely the situation the Electoral College supposedly addesses. For a full discussion of the analysis of voting power of the states in the particular case of the US, see:
http://www.eleves.ens.fr:8080/home/madore/misc/us-voting.html

However, had you (at *any* point) made a logical arguement as to *why* your way was a better measurment, I'd have considered it. In fact, I still will, if you can make such a case.

In my message titled "The Simpletonian Republic" I tried to outline in detail why it turns out that EC vote/voter is not a linear measure of voting power. Please note - the Republic of Simpletonia is a made up example - it is supposed to show, in rather stark terms how block allocated vote arrangements are inherently nonlinear with respect to elector/voter ratios. It is not an analysis of the actual US Electoral college - for that, you pretty much have to read and parse the full paper. What my post intends to do is logically show how and why this property of block-allocated voting systems arises, without going into the gory and hard to follow details of a more complex analysis. Feel free to comment or ask for any clarifications

other than the fact that i do support the abolition of the senate (but that's because i'm an anarchist), what does that have to do with an argument about the electoral college? especially when it is objectively true that states like wyoming are harmed by the electoral college, which disproportionately grants even more power to the big states at the expense of the small ones...
If you knew how the electoral votes were allocated you could answer your own question. Now we see how little you know.

If you knew how the electoral votes were allocated you could answer your own question. Now we see how little you know.

what, just because currently electoral votes are allocated on the basis of the total house and senate votes a state has (and dc gets three for good measure)? in an argument about the usefulness and justness of the ec, how exactly does abolishing the senate fit in? the senate wass not created to justify giving states two more electoral votes. so really, i'm mystified as to what you are talking about.

In my message titled "The Simpletonian Republic" I tried to outline in detail why it turns out that EC vote/voter is not a linear measure of voting power.

No kidding... and I've never said it was. I thought we were debating:
a) that the EC gives small states more say in an election than they would have in a directly representative vote
b) that with the EC, a citizen's vote in a small state (in my example, Wyoming) does or does not have more proportional value than one from a large state (in my example, California).

I will of course review the post. :)

Please note - the Republic of Simpletonia is a made up example - it is supposed to show, in rather stark terms how block allocated vote arrangements are inherently nonlinear with respect to elector/voter ratios.


Ok. Here is the point of the communication breakdown...
You're doing a proof. In fact, you keep doing the same proof.
But (and please, bear in mind I haven't read that other post yet) you still haven't done comparitive analysis of what we're talking about. I'll go into this a little more after reading the other post, should it be in there.

It is not an analysis of the actual US Electoral college - for that, you pretty much have to read and parse the full paper.
What my post intends to do is logically show how and why this property of block-allocated voting systems arises, without going into the gory and hard to follow details of a more complex analysis. Feel free to comment or ask for any clarifications

Sounds good.

Perhaps it's undemocratic, but since the US is not now nor ever has been a democracy, what's the beef?

For the 10,000th time, CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC! THE U.S. IS A CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC! Not a democracy. The popular vote is counted within the many states, as it should be. Of course California, Oregon, Washington, New York, Pennsylvania, Florida and New England would like to be the only people who have a say in who is elected the President. Not gonna happen.

You'll overthrow the Electoral college over YOUR dead body, I kid you not.

You couldnt be more wrong.

The electoral college is obsolete. It used to serve a function, a century and a half ago, but it no longer does.
It serves the same purpose now as it always has, to keep heavily populated states from dominating elections to the detriment of the smaller states. Nothing has changed.
The Electoral College is part of what makes the U.S. the "greatest democracy on earth". A nicely covered dictatorship of the rich and powerful elite who exploit the poor majority.
Wrong, as usual. The electoral college's function is to PREVENT a tyrannical majority, something that is inevitable in the purely democratic popular vote.
1.)The electoral college protects individual states, if you consider it. If most (even by a slim margin) people of a state are for a certain candidate, then the state goes to that candidate. Thus the State as an entity wins because it made the biggest difference it could in occordance to its population.

2.)But then the popular vote would protect individual citizens, which, we would all agree, is better.

1.) Correct. The popular vote within a state wins the victor the state's electors which are based on it's population. The EC is a nescessary buffer to prevent 51% of people based in 10 or 12 large states from over-ruling the other 49% in the 38 or 40 other states.
2.) Incorrect. For the reasons in 1.) and above, an individual's vote would be diminished by a purely popular vote.
Right now it is acting like a balance of power too....

...I think what needs to happen though to make it a bit more fair is break up the votes like Colorado (where it is not a winner takes all electoral votes)
It is intended to be a balance of power, and should stay that way.
Apportioning electoral votes according to a state's popular vote is the exact same thing as a purely popular vote and is a bad idea for all the same reasons. Not to mention constitutionality.
Sure, the idea of a pure popular vote system sounds attractive, but the fact is that if we began using it, the idea of equal representation would go out the window, as the individual votes of those who live in sparsely populated areas would lose value.
Correct, score yourself 10 bonus points.
The president is the head of the federal government and it makes logical sense to elect him or her directly. It won't change the system of government in any significant way other than to simplify it.
I disagree. Having the President elected every time by the same voters in a handful of high population states might be simple, but certainly not logical in the American construct of a constitutional representative republic.

That's how a lot of the countries in the world work, even those that are federations like the US.
Perhaps, but those countries don't have a constitution which dictates a 2 party system and that a president shall be elected via votes apportioned by state. If the EC falls, the 2 party system must fall with it, otherwise one party will dominate presidential politics ad infinitum.

Personally, I'd like to see a split vote in the largest, let's put a random number, 20 states. Then we wouldn't have powerhouses like California and Texas automatically going to one side or the other, but would still preserve the strong voice of the smaller states. In fact, with the strong division in Texas and California, if the top 20 states had split votes, you'd actually probably /see/ the presidential candidates pulling more for the little states like New Mexico and Louisianna! Wouldn't that be interesting!
An interesting idea that could never happen. Any election law that doesn't apply universally to all states would get shot down on constitutionality. Besides, the elected are already restricting our right to political speech via McCain-Feingold, do we really want to let them to tell us how we may run the elections too? Ack!
under a proportional system or a direct system, you would have to engage in absolutely massive fraud on a national scale to affect the outcome. a mindbogglingly huge amount of it actually. not that i doubt the ability of parties to try it, i just highly doubt it would go unnoticed. we already need un election monitors, what's a few more among friends?
UN monitors? Surely you jest! They already crap up anything they come near, and are no friends of the American political system. They would see or not see any fraud as nescessary to manipulate the American government toward their ideal of worldwide socialism, with them at the helm. Pah!
Not if (like me) you advocate state's rights and believe in the Constitution where it states that the STATES elect the President.
AMEN!

No kidding... and I've never said it was. I thought we were debating:
a) that the EC gives small states more say in an election than they would have in a directly representative vote
b) that with the EC, a citizen's vote in a small state (in my example, Wyoming) does or does not have more proportional value than one from a large state (in my example, California).
You did imply that elector/voter was a measure an actual measure of voting power (your BBC figures, etc) and therefore small states do get the oft-cited advantage (i.e. if elector/voter measured voting power then small states do get an advantage because it takes fewer voters to get an elector. This is true, they do get an advantage but the it turns out the advantage of the big states in the block voting system outweighs it by a wide margin - the two examples attempt to demonstrate exactly that - in fact, you made up the second example).


Ok. Here is the point of the communication breakdown...
You're doing a proof. In fact, you keep doing the same proof.
But (and please, bear in mind I haven't read that other post yet) you still haven't done comparitive analysis of what we're talking about.

Well of course, I'm trying to explain something that you seem to be not understanding or at least, having a difficult time accepting. So I clarify it, it seems more sensible than making up some entirely new argument. Plus, the nice thing about this one is it is pretty simple and can be analyzed by inspection, without reading lengthy maths papers. So if we can agree my analysis of the example is correct, we can move on to showing that a similar analysis is applicable to the EC.

Perhaps, but those countries don't have a constitution which dictates a 2 party system and that a president shall be elected via votes apportioned by state. If the EC falls, the 2 party system must fall with it, otherwise one party will dominate presidential politics ad infinitum.

Where does the Constitution is there such a thing as a requirement for a two-party system? The Constitution, and in fact many of the founding fathers' argument regarding the EC took place when there were, in fact, no political parties.

Perhaps it's undemocratic, but since the US is not now nor ever has been a democracy, what's the beef?

For the 10,000th time, CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC! THE U.S. IS A CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC! It serves the same purpose now as it always has, to keep heavily populated states from dominating elections to the detriment of the smaller states. Nothing has changed.
The electoral college's function is to PREVENT a tyrannical majority, something that is inevitable in the purely democratic popular vote.

If that is the purpose of the EC, then it is not working. Small states do not get the supposed advantage the EC confers. Large states do, in fact, dominate the election. Read the post:
http://forums2.jolt.co.uk/showpost.php?p=7345410&postcount=110
to see why that is the case. Take a look at the paper listed at the bottom for a full analysis for the 50 states. For a less technical overview see:

http://www.slate.com/id/2105055/

"The small-state advantage derives from the fact that the number of electors each state gets equals its total number of House seats (which reflects population size) plus two (for its two Senate seats). If the number of congressional seats is low enough, those two extra electors can make a big difference. Delaware, Wyoming, North and South Dakota, Montana, Vermont, and Alaska each have only a single House member, so their electors exaggerate their proportional representation by a factor of three. But this advantage is outweighed by the advantage conferred on large states by the winner-take-all allocation of electors in every state save Nebraska and Maine. In their book Electoral College Primer 2000 (which, alas, was not updated for 2004), Lawrence D. Longley and Neal Peirce calculated that the states enjoying higher-than-average voting power under the Electoral College were the following (in declining order):

California
Texas
New York
Florida
Pennsylvania
Illinois

The states with the least voting power under the Electoral College were the following (in ascending order):

Montana
Kansas
West Virginia
Maine
Arkansas
Utah
Nevada
"

If voter turnout rate were 100% then maybe the electoral college should be eliminated. However, that is not the case. Given how low voter turnout is, one could liken the vote to the only poll that really matters. Even polls need to account for those who do not participate, so you can look at it as such. Under this scenario, the election falls within a margin of error, so, what to do? Well, the EC.

To strenghthen the EC, pehaps the it should be prorated, that way each district has a vote. That way voter turnout per district can be assessed and results are less likely to be outside of the margin of error. This, coupled with a majority requirement for the EC seems more rational than a straight popular vote.

However, not much time has been spent on my part addressing this question, so I do not consider this analysis of note.

Another thing I don't think has been mentioned, is the winner takes all system protects a state's ability to make a difference in the presidential election. Congress and the Senate were created to protect the rights of individuals in each district / state, whereas the president is elected through a broader "states-interest" outlook.

The Senate was intended to protect the "states-interest", not the individuals, that's why senators were selected by the state legislature, not its citizens.

If voter turnout rate were 100% then maybe the electoral college should be eliminated. However, that is not the case. Given how low voter turnout is, one could liken the vote to the only poll that really matters. Even polls need to account for those who do not participate, so you can look at it as such. Under this scenario, the election falls within a margin of error, so, what to do? Well, the EC.

so because not everyone votes, we should assume that all of them voted for the plurality winner of the state, including everyone that voted for somebody else, in order to be fair?

To strenghthen the EC, pehaps the it should be prorated, that way each district has a vote. That way voter turnout per district can be assessed and results are less likely to be outside of the margin of error. This, coupled with a majority requirement for the EC seems more rational than a straight popular vote.

However, not much time has been spent on my part addressing this question, so I do not consider this analysis of note.

the only way that could work is if you took control of the districting process away from congress. otherwise whoever controls congress controls the presidency nearly directly.

You did imply that elector/voter was a measure an actual measure of voting power (your BBC figures, etc) and therefore small states do get the oft-cited advantage (i.e. if elector/voter measured voting power then small states do get an advantage because it takes fewer voters to get an elector.
This is true, they do get an advantage but the it turns out the advantage of the big states in the block voting system outweighs it by a wide margin - the two examples attempt to demonstrate exactly that - in fact, you made up the second example).

Note: I still haven't had time to read through post #110.
Right. Please note that at no time did I ever say that the small state's EC votes were weightier than the large states, just that proportionally, a voter in a small state has slightly more pull.

Well of course, I'm trying to explain something that you seem to be not understanding or at least, having a difficult time accepting.

I'm just stating that so far (again, have not gone through #110), your arguement has not been persuasive.

So I clarify it, it seems more sensible than making up some entirely new argument. Plus, the nice thing about this one is it is pretty simple and can be analyzed by inspection, without reading lengthy maths papers.

Yet the lengthy math paper was the context for your arguement. This makes it hard to debate a point, as I have to read up on your POV in order determine if it is something I agree with or not. Had, for example, it been presented and then explained (maybe not in bullet points, but whatever) how it relates to the numbers I have for my context, things would likely have gone differently.

So if we can agree my analysis of the example is correct, we can move on to showing that a similar analysis is applicable to the EC.

As soon as I can devote some time to 110, (likely tonight or this weekend) probably. I've scanned it but need to work out how it interrelates to the debate.