Tag: Electoral College

A Change In The Electoral College?

The Massachusetts House of Representatives gave preliminary approval today to a bill that could someday rid the state of the Electoral College system and put presidential elections more directly in the hands of voters.

If the measure is approved by the Legislature and signed by the governor, the state would become the fifth state to join a movement toward switching to a popular vote.

Under the current system, it’s possible for a candidate to win the presidency without winning the popular vote. That happened three times in the 19th century, and it happened in 2000, when Al Gore lost, despite garnering more votes than George Bush.

Proponents of the change say that the current system is confusing and causes candidates to focus on a handful of battleground states. Critics say the change could result in quirky situations in which a state like Massachusetts, typically a Democratic stronghold, would have to pledge its votes to the Republican candidate.

The states have the power under the US Consitution to allocate their electoral votes. Under the proposed bill, all of the state’s electoral votes would be awarded to the candidate who receives the most popular vote nationally.

Slowly but slowly, people are working on ridding the political process of this outdated piece of trash.  Everyone should work hard to pass a similar plan in their state and then the election of a president would truly be in the hands of the people.

Can The Electoral College Be Killed?

This old piece of garbage is long overdue for the scrap heap.  It is NO longer need and no longer wanted.  This is a synopsis of a piece written by Pamela Prah:

First it was the presidential primary calendar that state legislatures across the country upended to give their voters a greater say this year in choosing candidates. Now a few states are orchestrating an overhaul of the way voters select the U.S. president.
Voters this fall will still use the Electoral College to determine the next occupant of the White House, but a movement is bubbling at the state level to bypass the process and instead ensure future presidents are the candidates who get the most votes nationwide — an outcome not always guaranteed under the current system.
Those who remember their history classes know that American voters don’t directly elect a president — states do through “electors” who typically vote for the candidate who drew the most votes in their state.
“Why are all the other elections in this country based on the popular vote except for the most important one, the presidency?” asks Barry F. Fadem, president of the National Popular Vote, a group based in California that aims to persuade state legislatures to implement a nationwide popular election of the president. He called today’s system “flat-out, wrong” and expressed optimism that enough states will pass the legislation in time for the 2012 presidential election.

National Popular Vote was launched in 2006 and is largely founded by its chairman, John R. Koza, a scientist best known for inventing the rub-off instant lottery ticket used by state lotteries and his work in genetic programming at Stanford University. In the 1980s, he and Fadem, an attorney, were active in promoting adoption of lotteries in the states

Calls to reform or abolish the Electoral College were common after the 2000 presidential election, when former Vice President Al Gore won the popular vote, but didn’t have enough votes in the right states to carry the electoral vote over Republican George W. Bush. While Bush won the popular vote in 2004, he could have lost the election if John Kerry (D) had won Ohio.
Despite the hand-wringing over what many call an obsolete election system, little has happened, largely because dumping the Electoral College means changing the U.S. Constitution, an arduous task that requires two-thirds approval of Congress and three-fourths of the states. The National Popular Vote would keep the Electoral College, but change the way electoral votes are awarded.

Under the current system, candidates have no reason to poll, visit, advertise, organize, or pay attention to the concerns of states where they are safely ahead or hopelessly behind, Fadem said. For example, presidential nominees have long ignored California because the state is considered a solid “blue” state that will award its 55 electoral votes to the Democratic candidate.

As was said everything, everywhere is a popular vote, then why is not the president chosen that way.  It is time for the Electoral College to be put in the museum next to T Rex, it is a dinosaur and is an extinct mode for an election.

A Better Way To Pick A President

This article was in the Boston globe and is something to consider:

A better way to elect a president
By Scot Lehigh
Published May 6th 2008 in Boston Globe
IF THERE’S one constitutional idea whose time has come and gone, it’s the Electoral College.

That arrangement for electing a president is a throwback to a different age, designed as a solution to circumstances that no longer exist.

But the antique system continues to present problems of its own.

Consider just two:

First, it poses the regular danger of a president who wins the Electoral College but not the popular vote, depriving the country of a chief executive who is viewed as fully legitimate.

That, of course, happened in 2000, when Al Gore won the national vote, but George W. Bush eventually prevailed in the Electoral College.

But we’ve had three other elections in which candidates who didn’t win the popular vote nevertheless ended up in the White House: John Quincy Adams in 1824, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, and Benjamin Harrison in 1888. In the last case, Harrison actually replaced a sitting president, Grover Cleveland; four years later, Cleveland won a rematch.

Second, the Electoral College lends disproportionate general election influence to a handful of swing states, which become pivotal in each and every close election, while much of the rest of the country is neglected.

But trying to amend the constitution is a Herculean task.

That’s why the campaign for a national popular vote holds such promise. It’s a way of sidestepping the Electoral College without amending the Constitution.

Here’s how the plan would work. Individual states pass legislation to join an interstate compact, under which member states will award all their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. When states representing 270 electoral votes — the number needed to become president — have signed on, the plan goes into effect. Thus it’s in the power of state Legislatures and governors to catalyze the move.

So far, the bill has been introduced in 47 states. It has been passed into law in Illinois (21 electoral votes) New Jersey (15), Maryland (10 ), and, just last week, Hawaii (4), and is under active consideration in any number of others. In Massachusetts, the bill has a majority in both the House and the Senate, says Pam Wilmot, executive director of Common Cause of Massachusetts.

If the plan goes into effect, it would change the nature of campaigns in a big way. Right now, it doesn’t matter if a candidate wins a state by 10 votes or 10,000; once you have a majority, every additional vote is essentially wasted. Thus there’s little point of campaigning in states that lean strongly for either party.

“Presidential campaigns do not visit, do not run ads, do not care about nonbattleground states,” observes Barry Fadem, president of National Popular Vote, the nonprofit organization promoting the idea.

Indeed, according to that group, in the 2004 general election, 99 percent of all the advertisizing money expended on the presidential race was spent in 16 states — with two-thirds of it targeted for just five states.

But in a true national election, that wouldn’t be the case. Each vote would count just as much as any other in determining the outcome. That means it would be just as important for a candidate to attract extra votes in a state he or she was already expected to win as it would be to concentrate on a swing state. That is, it would matter just as much for a Democrat or Republican to attract an extra 1,000 votes in Massachusetts, a predictably Democratic state, or in Texas, a predictably Republican state, as it would be to battle for extra votes in a swing state like Ohio.

“Neither political party is going to be able to say, as they have in every other election, we don’t care about the following states,” says Fadem.

By expanding the effective playing field, a direct national election would also probably change the mix of issues that candidates focus on, with national concerns taking clear precedence over matters dear to populations in the swing states but less vital to voters in other places.

Common Cause thinks a broader campaign would also have the effect of boosting political participation across the country.

Now, this obviously won’t happen before the 2008 election, but Fadem’s optimistic view is that enough states will join to put it into effect for 2012.

It’s a big change, but an outdated arrangement shouldn’t govern something as important as presidential elections. It’s time we graduated from the Electoral College. This is an idea both Democrats and Republicans should get behind.