New Mexico Representative Matthew McQueen (D-Santa Fe) has introduced HB 425. It says if a presidential elector does not vote for his or her party’s presidential nominee, he or she will be replaced. The text of the bill is here. It seems to imply that an independent presidential candidate will never carry New Mexico, because it only deals with party nominees for presidential elector. Here is the legislative analyst’s description of the bill.
See this article for more on how electors are chosen.
New Mexico should permit a voter to sue the political party that named the elector. The party represented to the SOS and the electorate that the elector would vote fore the presidential candidate.
The party that was out millions of dollars could countersue the elector, and use more care in the future.
Alternatively, electors should file as individual candidates. They could only have a presidential candidate’s name appear on the ballot in conjunction with their name with permission of that candidate.
Absolutely Electors should file as individual candidates. AND, they should be doing so in single elector districts AND be the ones actually out campaigning. This is an important part of the creation of the Electoral College that most people miss. The REASON our Framers did this was so that the eventual president would owe no political or financial debts to anyone. i.e. no favoritism when in office… because the president would never have really been campaigning. The presidential nominees would have just been speaking with the various PEs to instill them with their philosophies and ideas and THEY would be relating that information to the voters.
Thus ends the media circus that is a presidential election. Imagine the media talking heads trying to report on and predict 538 different election results.
AND A FURTHER BENEFIT of single Presidential Elector districts and PEs filed as individual candidates is that access for independent and minor party candidates would be much alleviated. Smaller district size means far fewer petition signatures required for ballot access. All those individual persons (and write-ins) running for president would actually be running as their own presidential elector unless they could get a team of another 534 people together. Parties which don’t have fifty-state ballot access could still effectively compete for a Presidential Elector in the larger states here and there.
Perhaps the intent of the bill is actually to ALLOW electors of independent candidates to vote for someone other that the candidate to whom they are pledged.
The United Coalition USA has been bringing pure proportional representation (PPR) to US Presidential Elections since 1996 when I filed my campaign as a member of the Free Parliamentary Party. And Sergey Brin joined my campaign’s conversation and got his logo from my email address joogle@cruzio.com after he asked our team “What is a joogle”?
As it turns our, we’ve been conducting elections correctly, and PPR changes everything. It isn’t like anything before and so we build around our team, make our own team better and forget about everything else.
The party bosses have only done everything to place road blocks, while we demonstrate the correct way, teamwork for the good of the whole.
PPR help mitigate fighting in politics because under PPR small incremental changes and improvements instead of the “all or nothing” that the two-party system brings. PPR is the wave of the future so we must pass the knowledge down to the younger generations.
In the early years of the Republic, many states chose electors by electoral district. The reason that they switched was that they could, and they perceived that their state would have more influence if all the electors were chosen at large.
The same was true for the House of Representatives. Some smaller states did elect their representatives at large, or from multi-member districts. It was out of concern that other states might adopt at-large elections that Congress imposed single member districts on all states.
After the 1800 election, Alexander Hamilton proposed a constitutional amendment that would require election from single-member electoral districts drawn by Congress. Instead, the 12th Amendment was passed, after they decided that they had to “something”. This just reinforced the idea that the electors would be party men who wouls simply vote for their party ticket. This only failed in 1824, when the Demo Rep party failed to choose a presidential candidate. An oddity of that election was that though the presidential vote was split, that the vice-presidential vote was almost unanimous.
A constitutional amendment should be passed that would
(1) Apportion electors among the United States and their territories based on citizen population over the age of 18, with at least one elector for every 50,000 such persons. This would create a body of at least 4000 persons, and would reflect the available electorate, and recognize that citizens residing in territories should participate in presidential elections.
(2) Electors would be elected by popular vote (this is not a current requirement). States would have time, place, manner, regulation,subject to override by Congress. This would permit Congress to specify proportional representation, or single member districts.
(3) Electors would meet as a single deliberative body to elect the president.
(4) Vice President would be chosen from among Senators by the House of Representatives.
(5) Repeal 23rd Amendment.
How many regimes survive by having chief exec officers be elected by ALL the voters in the area involved — nations, states/provinces, local govt units ???
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ABOLISH the super-timebomb EC — See the est. 0.75-1 million DEAD in 1861-1866 due to Lincoln minority rule election in 1860.
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UNIFORM definition of Elector/Voter in ALL of the USS
PR and AppV
@DR,
Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, France.
How about those NATION-State members of the *United* States of America
esp. CA, TX, NY, FL, etc. ???
— noting however the various UN-equal schemes for ballot access in all/most of the above regimes.