Kevin Drum says re Jonathan Alter’s Newsweek piece on electoral fiddling:
I see that the latest crackpot initiative from the Golden State has now gotten national attention.
Alter says – accurately:
Our way of electing presidents has always been fertile ground for mischief. But there’s sensible mischief – toying with existing laws and the Constitution to reflect popular will – and then there’s the other kind, which tries to rig admission to the Electoral College for strictly partisan purposes. Mischief-makers in California (Republicans) and North Carolina (Democrats) are at work on changes that would subvert the system for momentary advantage and – in ways the political world is only beginning to understand – dramatically increase the odds that a Republican will be elected president in 2008.
Kevin doesn’t see fit to mention North Carolina’s plan to grab some electoral votes for Team Blue. But Jerome Armstrong at MyDD did:
Great news for the Dem candidate in ’08:
North Carolina appears headed to becoming the third state in the nation to abandon the winner-take-all method for awarding its electoral votes as the House tentatively agreed Thursday to shelve the method.
In its place, according to the measure approved on a largely party-line vote, would be a more proportional method that would reward the presidential candidate who receives the most votes in each of the state’s congressional districts.
The Senate already has passed the meaure, which would take effect in 2008. A final House vote could come Friday, then the bill would go to Gov. Mike Easley, a Democrat, just like the majority in the Legislature, which has backed the change. The state Democratic Party also supports it.
The Democratic candidate would be sure to receive at least 3 EV’s from NC, and probably as high as 7-8, depending on the nominee. Eye on ’08 points out that Dems have the trifecta in Arkansas and Louisiana as well, where they could possibly also make this change. At the least, it ensures that candidates are going to be coming to NC during the 2008 contest. If this had been in effect during 2000, Gore would have been President.
I know it’s impossible to read everything. But it’s not hard to realize that rules that benefit the GOP in California are likely – if applied elsewhere – to benefit the Dems elsewhere.
I’ve got a basic position; fairness matters more than partisan advantage. I have no problem fighting hard for what I believe in. But partisan issues – while important – are fleeting. A fair political system that everyone can look to as legitimate needs to last us a long time.
(fixed dumb misspelling of Alter’s name)
Anybody got some math to back that one up, or is it just the Zima talking again?
Splitting electoral votes is a bad idea, though not as disastrously stupid as abolishing the electoral college. Abolishing the electoral college would turn 90% of the nation into fly-over country, since it would be a waste of time to campaign outside of the big urban areas where the fat votes are.
If a trend towards vote-splitting starts – and each state that does it will make it easier for another state to do it – will bode very ill for the Democrats. As much as they would like to have some electoral votes from the deep South again, it is not worth having a big Bluish state like California carved up.
A Democratic Party crawling with Netroots cooties does not have the broadest appeal. It can still win, but it must rely more than ever on big money, strategy and political gamesmanship. Above, bagging lots of big states. Winner-takes-all is good for them, and they will tamper with it at their peril.
The California effort deserves to fail, but if Dems are pushing the same thing elsewhere they will not be helping it to fail.
The biggest problem with all of these brilliant schemes is that the country needs to build confidence in the electoral system after all the contention of recent years, and a bunch of court battles that will likely end with inconsistent results is not going to help.
bq. Anybody got some math to back that one up, or is it just the Zima talking again?
Not sure. If it were according purely on percentage of the popular vote, Gore got 43% and Bush got 56% in NC. That works out to 8 (7.84) votes for Bush and 6 (6.02) votes for Gore. The final 2000 tally was 271 to 266, so that would make it 265 – 272 for Gore.
But this bill actually makes it winner-takes-all at the congressional district level, which I can’t find numbers for. CNN has numbers for the county level: http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2000/results/NC/P.county.html
If you consider counties a rough approximation of districts, Gore won 25 out of 100 counties, which would give him 3.5 votes… rounding down to 3, makes it 268 to 269 for Gore. So going by counties, yes, this would have changed the outcome. If anyone can find data by districts?
Regardless, I agree that trying to snipe states with these initiatives one at a time is a poor idea, likely to increase distrust of the election process and likely to backfire on the Democrats if they push it. Are they going to get every R-leaning state to adopt this and prevent every D-leaning state from doing the same? I rather doubt it.
The article is by Jonathan Alter, not Jonathan Adler.
An electoral college system based on capturing Congressional districts would be fairer than the status quo only if gerrymandering were to be abolished nationwide. Good luck that happening anytime soon.
Steve Smith,
You can argue for or against that point if you’d like, but who said “fairness” (however defined) is a significant design goal of the EC in the first place? Surely “broad geographic legitimacy” is more the point, isn’t it?
The EC was designed to protect the states from the uneducated masses. How would this change affect states rights?
PS:
This move is all about abolishing the electoral college and moving to a simple majority vote of the people. When that happens you will probably see a marginalization of the less populous states.
davvod, to all intents and purposes, there are no states’ rights, and haven’t been since at least the 1960s, possibly the 1930s. This is the probably inevitable outcome of the Civil War and the following suppression of blacks in the South.
As to whether the change would be good or not, I haven’t done the math. No, not the math for who would win more, but the math for how many votes it takes to flip an election. Under the current system, a few hundred votes in a key state are sufficient to flip the election from the actual winner to the actual loser. That is a huge amount of voting power to give to people, and that’s a good thing.
But it is dependent on an assumption: that certain big states (California, Texas, New York, etc) vote predictably, and thus that those states’ voters have little to no actual voting power. That is a bad thing.
I suspect from gut feel that the result would be a net positive, increasing the voting power of Americans generally, but a strong negative for voters in current “swing” states. I suspect, too, that part of that net positive is that campaigns would have to go to a lot more places to try to get votes, because there are a lot more borderline districts than borderline states.
Note, by the way, that Nevada and Maine have been that way for years.
If we were to change the drawing of electoral districts, to ensure that they are as compact as possible (for example, requiring the sum of the boundaries to be a minima), in combination with changing the method of awarding electors, I think that it would be an overwhelmingly good thing.
fairness matters more than partisan advantage
Then why not just do away with the electoral college altogether and determine the winner by popular vote? What could be more fair than the popular vote?
The “flyover country” argument gets a big yawn from me. Who cares (except, of course, those in flyover country)? As it is now, the candidates spend all their time in places like Missouri, Ohio and Florida, the swing states. How is that better than having them neglect California, New York and Texas? As the current system works, those states are marginalized.
I’m not sure fairness is an issue. I live in a city in which the courts ordered the city to use neighbor districts to enhance the voting power of underprivileged neighborhoods. That may not have been fair to those who prevailed under the winner-take-all system, but the losers under that system tended not to get their streets taken care of, their schools updated, etc.
Instead, gerrymandering and the accuracy of our voting machines loom as larger issues.
That would be “neighborhood districts.”
Jeff: _it is dependent on an assumption: that certain big states (California, Texas, New York, etc) vote predictably, and thus that those states’ voters have little to no actual voting power …._
AFAIK North Carolina is a heavily gerrymandered state that created a number of minority districts and Republican districts. It would seem to me under the proposal that North Carolina would become a collection of predictable districts with perhaps one or two swing districts. So I think to get to your desired outcome (expand voting power), you would have to deal with the electoral district lines first. Without it, North Carolina becomes less important to candidates (perhaps only 1-2 votes in play). Though it may make other states more important.
(OTOH, N.C. has a democratic governor and it strikes me that it could easily be a swing state with the right national candidates)
Pug,
Anyone cares who doesn’t think the Next American Civil War will be just fine.
The big problem I have with this proposal is that, by apportioning electors by congressional district, it exacerbates the effect of gerrymandering.
A proportional system which wasn’t tied to congressional districts would be easier for me to get behind.
_A proportional system which wasn’t tied to congressional districts would be easier for me to get behind._
That’s possible. States used to create electoral districts distinct from the congressional districts, but I got to wonder how that gets explained: For Congress we are going to use districts that favor our incumbents. For President we are going to use districts that are fair to our voters.
PD Shaw: you don’t need to create seperate districts; you could have a rule that just says that electors will be allocated based on percentage of statewide popular vote.
#9 from Pug:
Legitimacy and stability matter most. Trust is a must.
Remember the train-wreck of “comprehensive immigration reform”.
Politicians who have proved over decades that they are not to be trusted on this issue went for a huge, all-embracing solution to be pushed though quickly with the masses having no choice but to blindly trust the demonstrably untrustworthy or rebel. Bad idea.
When those who must manage reform are not credible, the right idea is incremental reform. Start at the ground floor, or in this case the voting machine. Are the machines trustworthy? They are not. So get rid of them.
After many, many piecemeal reforms addressing the worst and most straightforward abuses, the politically engaged segment of the general public might develop more faith in the goodwill and competency of politicians who at the present time are very obviously phonies on the topic of electoral fairness. When the politicians have proved that they can reform things to good effect, and when they have proved that fairness and not incumbency protection really guides them, then if radical reforms are still considered necessary the topic could be raised to advantage.
Not now. Not with the barons of creative redistricting in power. Not with the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, sacrificing the First Amendment on the altar of incumbency protection, still the law of the land.
If you want radical reforms of the election laws, the best thing you can do is help Armed Liberal promote his modest reforms. There’s no other way to get from here to there.
aphrael, good point.
This is all about the legitimacy of government, so Kirk and David are right on point. With Congress polling as low as 3% approval, it’s not fearmongering to worry about the integrity of the American system.
Seen that way, EC reform, voting machines, and hanky-panky on the floor of the House are all of a piece. Done right, institutional reform in the direction of more transparency can increase legitimacy. Done wrong, with obvious partisan overtones and the decision delivered by fiat from above, and the moral authority of the government is further diminished.
State-by-state changes in the EC rules seem almost certain to fall into the trap of opacity and partisan jiggering. How will the rest of the nation feel if the outcome of the presidential election does turn out to be decided by a change in NC or CA in which they had no voice? This may be a path worth walking, but it should be national in scope, and with as much involvement of the people as possible. That speaks for the Constitutional amendment approach. With all its perils, it’s the right way to change the mandate of the governed.
I favor a staight up popular election for the President.
An election where EACH American’s vote is equal to any and all others. Not where a few hundred votes in any one stae can effect what is supposed to be a NATIONAL election.
As for all the gripping about flyover states too bad. One man one vote period. Wven if you live somplace that no one else wants to live.
Any way you look at it the Electoral College has 230 years of legitimacy. The Constitution blocks direct democracy in many ways. The EC is just one of them. I think this has shown to be be a good thing, and moves to a more direct system, like direct Senatorial voting and the weakening of the Commerce Clause, have arguably shown to be negative developments WRT respect for political institutions.
So, don’t count me in the “let’s scrap the Great Compromiise” camp.
Kirk Parker:
That’s not much of an exaggeration, either. It’s bad enough to see people who once stood for Voting Rights to support the disenfranchisement of everybody who doesn’t live next door to Starbucks. Worse yet if they assume they can quell that discontent with federal agents.
Glen,
My statement isn’t an exaggeration at all, at least not if I add the caveat that I’m not worrying about it happening next year. But going to direct popular election of the President would be a bad thing, one of the many small steps along the way to disaster.
I would have been inclined to think that the electoral college had accomplished its task. By forcing national candidates to form coalitions outside their region, we’ve promoted a national consciousness. People are more apt to see themselves as Americans and not citizens of a state.
And then I read the disparagement of fly-over-country and realize that man’s habits are not so easily ordered.
Indeed. And as a long-time resident of flyover country of various forms and kinds, I assure you that I care about the votes from flyover country.
Moreover, consider this: while the population is stacked along the coasts (which is why the electors are similarly stacked there), the votes are about half and half between the coasts and flyover country, because there are a lot more states in the middle than on the ends. That is, in fact, why George Bush’s margin over Kerry was enough to win, and also why John Kerry came close despite winning only something like 5-10% (IIRC) of the counties in the nation.
I don’t think that we want to stand up for a government in which the residents of a few dozen cities pick the President, and everyone else is just left out. An even stronger statement: the closer we move to a direct democracy, the closer we move to absolute disaster. History is littered with examples.
The electoral college may be the most sophisticated component of the Constitution. I marvel at the fact that the Convention came up with a plan to avoid the tyranny of the majority as intelligent and precient as the College of Electors.
The country was never meant to be a democracy for very good reasons.
The US Senate (2 votes per state regardless of population) and the Electoral College, are two institutions that allowed the US to form in the first place and stay together so long.
Start trying to move to an absolute democracy and the whole enterprise fails. Pure democracy–rule of the mob–sucks.
It’s good for us to have a senate to slow down legislation etc. Why rhode island should have two senators … that’s a historical accident. We can survive it but it isn’t a good thing in itself.
We don’t need the electoral college any more than we need the rule about adding 3/5 of a vote for each slave. It doesn’t help us at all.
Say we did have direct elections. About half the votes are in “flyover country” and whatever politicians find ways to collect those votes will benefit. The votes are spread out over a bigger area so shaking hands with those voters doesn’t work as well. OK, find another way. To the extent that those voters agree on policy, proposing policy they like will tend to get their support. Nothing wrong with that. Being the sort of person they want for president, having the right character, that can help provided they see it. That doesn’t have to come from shaking hands with as many of them as possible either. And why would it change much? Candidates who’re flying from one coast to another can stop in cities along the way and give speeches and meet-and-greets etc, just as they do now. “Fly-over country” isn’t all isolated. Cities with airports are hardly out of the way at all when you’re flying over them anyway.
It’s an accident of geography that some of us are concentrated together while others are spread out. The packed-together people are easier to meet physically. That doesn’t have to mean much. It’s only a marketing challenge, not an existential dilemma.
J Thomas —
IMHO you are being disingenuous. The EC protects the nation from a destructive single-geographic base President, determined to reward his backers and screw over everyone else.
The EC FORCES regional compromise. It is according to Madison ESSENTIAL to keep the nation together in a way that prevents destructive coalitions. It means that no Republican candidate can garner enough suburban/ex-urban votes and screw over the cities on the coasts; and no Dem can garner enough urban (wealthy and poor) votes and screw over the suburbs and exurbs.
It isn’t broken. Don’t fix it.
Instead go after Earmark reform; get rid of McCain-Feingold (and require financial transparency on the internet for every donor matched to every amount). Get rid of e-voting and go to paper ballots with optical scanners.
Screwing with the Electoral College will reduce election margins and may force a couple presidential elections on Congress. (Won’t that make marvelous TV?)
What I’d like to see is more efforts along the line of one eligible voter, one vote and all eligible votes counted.
To assure one vote per voter, I suggest a thumbprint on the paper ballot. The ballots & thumbprints will still be secret and would still be destroyed when the election is certified. If voter irregularities are claimed, it becomes relatively easy to scan the thumprints & identify someone submitting multiple votes.
To ensure all ballots are recorded, I suggest an optional tracking scheme similar to the Post Office’s registered letter process where the voter is given a tracking number that can be checked on the website. This will reduce the likelihood of precincts ‘losing’ absentee ballots; especially when they are deemed contrary to desired results.
_Screwing with the Electoral College will reduce election margins and may force a couple presidential elections on Congress._
I don’t see that but I’m ready to be convinced.
I do see that the EC divides things geographically and so to the extent that geography is destiny, it reflects political reality. Sure, the EC was the main thing that prevented the Civil War, but that doesn’t mean we need it today. Lebanon had a similar system to share power between christians and muslims, and that was the main thing that prevented the lebanese civil war. I’m beginning to see a pattern here….
I suppose if I lived in DC I might like the EC better since my vote would then be worth about 3 times as much as that of somebody from wyoming, the next-best-represented location. But then, I’d be voting with the people in DC and my vote might tend to lose. I dunno.
There’s a simple solution then. Anyone who wishes to have disparate power to elect a president, can take the simple measure of moving to Washington DC.
Political parties ought to be illegal. Maybe then decisions will be made on the merits of the case rather than partisan advantage.
“#33 from Fletcher Christian: “Political parties ought to be illegal. Maybe then decisions will be made on the merits of the case rather than partisan advantage.”
That trick’s been tried before.
Making political parties illegal means important decisions will be made by whoever defines what the non-party position is.
That person is likely to be the readiest to stigmatize and legally bar any dissent from their own views as factional and partisan rather than disinterested. This loads the political dice in favor of tyranny.
They are also likely to be in some naturally political collective that’s not technically a political party.
If you’re in a political religion, you have a great advantage, because your sect is your faction. On the other hand, those who believe in keeping their religion in the temple or church where it belongs and organizing their politics on a secular political basis are at a disadvantage.
Also, people who are direct and honest in their intentions will be at an increased disadvantage compared to, for example, Maxists who will eagerly argue that they aren’t a “party” they’re a “tendency” or whatever.
In other words, banning political parties advantages phonies, fanatics and flatterers – courtiers of the first to seize power, define his own views as non-party or above party, and define other opinions, or organizations to promote them, as partisan and illegal.
Political parties that aren’t just disguised sects of cheering squads for a charismatic leader are a fine invention.
If you want big decision to be made with less vicious partisanship and more regard for the common good, there are factor that can facilitate that. But a ban on political parties isn’t one of them.
David Blue, I agree completely. Political parties are like drugs or guns. If you make parties illegal then only criminals will have parties.
Maybe we’d do better with more parties. Like, with just one party you have a giant problem. And with two parties you have two great big parties. But with 30 parties maybe things would settle down.
I remember an old BC comicstrip where a caveman had invented a wheel with three sides. Somebody asked him how this was better than the square wheels he’d been making before. “One less corner!”
As long as the electoral reforms place the vote in the congressional district AND the statewide for the senators I don’t think the electoral college is being subverted. It in fact makes it much more difficult for fraud to change an election. After all every vote stolen in California now affects 50+ electoral votes. After the change each stolen vote only affects 3 (one district and 2 senate).
This system still preserves the geographicalness of the electoral college but dilutes the power of cities to take away the county vote. It also allows 3rd parties to actually capture some electoral votes. This is a good thing since it makes the major parties wake up and pay attention to their concerns.
I have tried to gage the effect of such a vote on national elections, but it is very hard to get presidential election returns by congressional districts. Its easy enough to calculate if that data is available.
Incidently, if you want to really challenge the country, how about runoff votes if no one has a majority? This changed a senator in Georgia a few years back!