Rob Richie has this analytical, fact-filled, lengthy op-ed in San Diego’s Union-Tribune, making the case for the National Popular Vote plan. Lots of opinion pieces on both sides of this issue are filled with cliche and add little but emotion to the debate. But Richie’s piece rises above the usual opinion piece.
Real Democracy NOW —
Uniform definition of Elector in the U.S.A. —
P.R. for legislative bodies
NONPARTISAN nominations and elections for ALL Fed/ State / Local elected executive officers and ALL judges using Approval Voting — vote for 1 or more — highest win – to elect *moderate* executive officers and judges.
Way too difficult for the EVIL MORONS who want left/right extremists to be elected to be Presidents, Governors, Mayors, etc. using IRV / NPV type schemes.
I guess facvs are not the way to appeal to some of the readers of this site, like #1 above. Since his posts are always the same, regardless of the subject, I’m beginning to believe that Demo Rep is a bot. Can he surprise me and respond like a human? Magic 8 ball says, “Situation cloudy”.
How would the proposed NPV compact “meet the goals of voter equality and majority rule”? (a) It does not apply to the nomination process; (b) it does not ensure that all voters may vote for the same candidates; (c) that voting procedures would be similar; (d) that voter qualifications would be the same; (e) it has no effective recount procedure; and (f) it has no runoff procedure.
If a majority of States have approved the NPV compact by July 2012, Congress will have time to institute procedures for a national recount? I think this is wishful thinking along the lines of thinking that 1880 never really happened.
Wouldn’t a national popular vote for the presidency cause State, congressional, and local elections to be overawed to an even greater extent than they are today? Why do more people vote in congressional elections in presidential election years vs. off years even in so-called “spectator States”? Is it healthy to have mass interest in the Superbowl, if people end up spending less time tossing a football around with their children? If one is concerned about the “unit rule” on individual States, shouldn’t one be even more concerned about its application to the United States?
Wasn’t the controversy about 1960 whether or not Richard Nixon had won the popular vote, but lost the electoral vote? How would the NPV compact have helped out with determining how the popular votes cast in Alabama should be allocated?
Why wouldn’t it be better to start with the nomination process? After all, it was only last year that the Democratic Party nominated someone who was not favored by most Democrats.
Jim: If your point is that NPV will not solve all the problems of the current system and won’t create perfection, then I agree. But the quesrion is, will it represent an improvemnt over the current system? And I think the answer is yes.
You are right that it won’t change the nomination process, which is controlled by the parties. But parties running under NPV would have a powerful inducement to change their nominating process so as to get the candidate with the best chance of winning under NPV. If they didn’t they would risk the consequences.
As far as the “overawing” of down-ticket races by a presidential race, I don’t think NPV will affect that either way. National media will inevitably focus on the one national race over thousands of local ones. The solution there is to offset congressional and other races from the presidential. This is done in France, where the presidential race stands alone, and parliamentary elections are held months before or after.
As far as recounts, the parties have only so many resources. In 2000 they poured all of them into Florida. Under NPV, they would have had to disperse those resources into all the states, or at least many. But statistics says that the liklihood of an election being within a few hundred votes is much greater with 50 separate state counts than 1 national count. In 2000, both FL and NM came down to a few hundred votes and NH was very close as well. However, the NPV was not all that close-Gore won by about 300,000 votes, which would have been impossible to overturn by recount.
As an aside, Obama was a much better candidate then Hillary. Had she won the nomination, McCain could have easily won the election.
I think it would be much better to use IRV to award E.C. votes.
#4: You can’t assume that the numbers would be the same under NPV, as it would change the very nature of campaigns. In 2000, for example, Gore would have spent much more time in such places as NYC, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Detroit, Cleveland, etc. Bush would have spent much more time in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Phoenix, etc. Under NPV, in fact, the candidates would spend almost all of their time in the big population centers and on the airwaves.
I like having congressional and presidential elections on the same ballot, as congressional candidates are prodded to take stances on the presidential candidate(s)’ positions.
Imagine the uncertainty of a national vote recount. We would be chewing our nails as we awaited the returns from Honolulu and south Chicago.
#5: Once the economy tanked in September, McCain’s goose was cooked.
Steve — the match doesn’t support your assumption. When every vote is equal, you need to get votes wherever they can be earned. If you ignore some folks, you’re making a mistake.
Katrina vanden Heuvel has a good piece here on the same subject:
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut/435782/let_s_make_every_vote_count
Keep in mind that the main media at the moment, namely TV, costs much more per impression in big cities than in smaller towns and rural area. So, if you just looked at TV, candidates get more bang for the buck in smaller towns and rural areas.
For example, in California state-wide elections, candidates for governor or U.S. Senate don’t campaign just in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and those places don’t control the outcome (otherwise California wouldn’t have recently had Republican governors Reagan, Dukemejian, Wilson, and Schwarzenegger). A vote in rural Alpine county is just an important as a vote in Los Angeles.
If the National Popular Vote bill were to become law, it would not change the need for candidates to build a winning coalition across demographics. Any candidate who yielded, for example, the 21% of Americans who live in rural areas in favor of a “big city” approach would not likely win the national popular vote. Candidates would still have to appeal to a broad range of demographics, and perhaps even more so, because the election wouldn’t be capable of coming down to just one demographic, such as voters in Ohio.
#6-I realize the popular vote numbers in 2000 might have been somewhat different under NPV, but that doesn’t alter my point. Statistically the chances of at least one race being within a margin where a recount has a good chance of changing the outcome (say <500 votes) is much higher when you have 50 independent state races than when you have 1 national race. Even in 2008, which was not terribly close overall, IN, NC and MO were very close. While the candidates under NPV might tend to focus on urban areas, under the current system, at least over the last few cycles, they have spent almost all their time in the larger swing states, mostly OH, FL, PA, MO and perhaps, CO and NM. You can forget about seeing them in the Northeast outside PA and maybe NH, anywhere on the West Coast, anywhere in the plains states and anywhere in the deep South outside FL.
You raised the issue of the presidential ticket hogging the attention from congressional races. I don’t see any way of avoiding that except to separate them in time. Candidates for Congress would still have to take a stand pro or con the president and his positions and the president would be free to campaign for his supporters.
In the end both systems are workable and have their plusses and minuses. In most cases they will give the same result. After all, only 2/44 elections showed a discord between the popular and electoral votes.
How many IRV elections will have a Stalin clone and a Hitler clone in the final top 2 — for Prez, Guv, Mayor, etc. ???
Place your bets — on the survival of Western Civilization.
Attention flippant MORONS on this list — election systems do matter.
Count the circa 620,000 dead after the 1860 Prez gerrymander election in 1861-1865.
This AIN’T trivial stuff — like the latest and greatest movie, TV show, etc.
The link doesn’t work.
#4 Rob Richie in his editorial claimed that other systems for the electing the President did not “meet the goals of voter equality and majority ruleâ€, which suggested that he thought these were worthy goals and that the NPV scheme would fulfill them.
It would be as if someone had made a proposal, and Richie had said “it won’t meet the goal of getting us to Chicago.” But then if some examines the scheme he is proposing, and suggests that it won’t achieve the goal of getting us to Chicago, he might reply that he simply wanted to ride a bus.
If there were an official popular vote, the media would focus even more on the presidential election. Your proposed solution is unlikely to happen.
There is no reason that political parties need control the nomination process. They don’t for other offices. And even now, independent presidential candidates qualify on a State by State basis. A State could simply require that anyone who wanted to be on the general election ballot as the presidential nominee of a party would run in the primary, just like if they were running for governor. Or they could do like Washington and Louisiana do and let anyone run and let anyone vote, and then have a runoff.
If there were partisan primaries, a State could simply let its State party designate primary results from affiliated parties in other States that it wished to have included in the local State party’s nomination count – subject to certain requirements such as the same candidates on the ballot, equivalent opportunity to vote, and a comparable time frame.
In 1880, the national popular vote may have been as close as 2,000 votes (the variation in the margin from various published sources is greater than that 2,000 votes). And there was a greater shift than 2,000 votes in a single contested congressional election held on the same date.
Yet, despite the 0.02% national margin, only two States were as close as 1.0% (New Jersey at 0.8%, and California at 0.1%). In most States the margin was greater than 10%.
Only 4 States had numeric pluralities as close as the national plurality, and three of those were from very small States of Oregon, Delaware, and Nevada.
And the results were just like in Florida 2000, parties had piled up massive margins in some States, 45%+ in Texas for Hancock, 40%+ for Garfield in Vermont. In States with a single party dominance you can afford to be lax about dead people voting, or people voting twice, since they are likely to vote the right way.
#5 There is nothing that prevents the use of runoffs for presidential elections. In 1845, when Congress set the uniform (appointment/election) date for President, they specifically allowed for procedures for handling non-majority conditions. These were used in Massachusetts in 1848 at the first presidential election conducted under the uniform date, and in 1860 by Georgia.
The NPV compact could simply provide for a runoff election to be held in the member States, plus any others who wanted to join in. I suppose they could use IRV, but they would have to treat votes from non-member States as having expressed a single preference.
The truth is that NPV will not encourage candidates to campaign in less populated areas. It won’t happen. Also, the candidates will still spend the same amount of time in their strongholds. NPV will not make a difference in their campaigns. It will only change our method, whether good or bad. Of course, I feel for the worse.
Tossup question for those opposing the NPV because it would supposedly shift the campaigns’ focus to the large population centers:
In the general election 2008, how much time did the candidates spend, in the general election, *under the current Electoral college system* in the following states:
VT, MA, RI, CT, NY, NJ, MD, DE, SC, MI, AL, LA, TX, OK, KS, SD, ND, NV, MT, WY, ID, HI, AK.
I’m sure I missed a few, and if so I apologize to those other states where as many as 35-30% of their voters of both major persuasions are effectively disenfranchised every four years by the current EC system.
Also, I’d like examples of how the current system of electing a president encourages candidates to spend any less than 80-85% of their war chests on media buys, all in media centers, all of which are in …cities.
I live in small state, and frankly I’m getting tired of the implicit insult being levied at me that somehow I can’t keep track of the candidates and their positions on the issues and how they might impact me just because I live in a small town in s small state. I traded in my ox and wagon years ago for a car that runs on real gasoline. I’ve managed to move into the 21st century all by myself. I see no reason why our system of electing the president can’t as well.
A small state that got a lot of attention in 2000– especially from Bush– was West Virginia. Under NPV, West Virginia would never receive a personal visit from a major party presidential nominee.
16 –
Steve. Thank you.
OK. You’re right. West Virginia in 2000. Bush campaigned there right up until the last few days.
Any others?
I’ll answer my own question. I’ll add NH, NM, and MAYBE Nevada.
That’s a total of about 7.7 million people, or less than 2% of the population of the US.
But these small states – VT, RI, DE, SC, MI, AL, OK, KS, SD, ND, MT, WY, ID, HI and AK – saw precious little if anything of BOTH candidates.
In other words, it’s not the “smallness” of the state that assures the candidates’ presence, but the red/blue balance that does. And this is nothing near what the Founding Fathers contemplated when they created the EC. In fact, there was no such thing as “campaigning” in the first several presidential elections, and there barely were political parties of the type we recognize now. But that’s another story for another time.
So we’ve developed the list of small states (four of them) which received some attention of both candidates in the form of personal visits, in one particular election. Now please make your case why the citizens of those states SHOULD have received disproportionate attention by the candidates because they happened to have lived in “tossup states.”
Also please make your case as to why those citizens should have been given disproportionate representation in the Electoral College, which they were.
But be careful. If you make the case that certain small states SHOULD have received disproportionate attention by candidates in the general election, it’s only logical that you be asked to make the case that certain large states SHOULD have been ignored.
So I’ll ask you – do you think it’s proper that large states like Texas, NY, California and North Carolina should have been ignored by the candidates in 2000 (other than an occasional breeze-in to speak to well-heeled supporters at $2,000/plate dinners and breeze-out before the coffee gets cold)?
And if so, why?
Now, WV is an excellent example to consider so I’m glad you brought it up.
Let’s say the word first and get that out of the way. “Coal.” WV is all about “coal.”
Agreed?
So what special benefit(s) did West Virginians who depend on the coal industry reap from having Bush personally visit them during the general election? Obviously his appearances were to Bush’s advantage since he won the state, but what did WV’s “win?” Is it your contention that had the current EC system not been in place, we would never have had a discussion of coal use and coal technologies in the campaign? Would West Virginians not have been able to discern the differences in the candidates’ positions on those matters if Bush had never visited them?
If not, why not?
Would they never have learned about Bush’s positions on clean coal technology, EPA regulatory authority, pollution, carbon credits, Kyoto…? Or Gore’s?
If not, why not?
And because Gore made the tactical, political decision that WV was “safe” for him and allocated his resources to other states, not visiting WV as often as Bush, does it necessarily follow for WV voters that he would have been a president whose policies would have been economically injurious to them? If that’s the case, suppose Gore had visited Texas many times. Would Texans have concluded by the same political “logic,” just from those visits alone, that Gore was “their guy?”
It doesn’t make any sense.
Let’s try to keep in mind that this is the 21st century. We’re well along in the information age. Information on the candidates is readily available to any voter whether or not the candidate crosses their state line. Part of the reason the EC was crafted was because of a fear of how long it would take to tally popular votes in a day when information traveled no faster than the fastest horse. We no longer have that limitation. Another reason the EC was crafted was to ensure that the people voting for president would know all the candidates well enough to make an informed choice, rather than voting only for “favorite sons.” Those limits of technology and information dissemination no longer exist. The EC is nothing more than a quaint artifact of the 18th century.
All this said, IMO if the true value of the EC is to make sure small states get attention in the general election, a list of only four states, in one of the most hotly and closely contested elections in our history, is a pretty small list indeed to offer in support of a central argument in support of the EC.
Thanks.