Edward B. Foley, Director of the Election Law project at Moritz College of Law, has this interesting article about problems with the Electoral College that are not usually discussed. His article focuses on the potential problems when one state’s popular vote is disputed, and the entire presidential election turns on which way that state goes. Thanks to ElectionLawBlog for the link.
Uniform definition of Elector.
Nonpartisan A.V.
Abolish the EVIL time bomb Electoral College.
Count the about 620,000 dead on both sides in 1861-1865 — directly due to the minority rule election in the E.C. of Prez Lincoln in 1860.
I don’t quite follow the professor’s point. Congress has the authority to accept the Electoral College votes as is, or to challenge them. The late Rep Stefanie Tubbs Jones and Sen Boxer did in fact challenge the Ohio results in 2004. http://www.cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS/01/06/electoral.vote/index.html
The issue was resolved. I suppose you could imagine a tie vote in the House, but this could be fixed by having an odd number of members. As far as a dispute between the House and the Senate, article II provides that the House would choose the President and the Senate the Vice President (the sitting Vice President would break ties). If they were from different parties, so be it.
I see nothing wrong with allowing Congress this limited role in selecting the President-to be used only where there is a real dispute. At least they are accountable to the voters, unlike judges or some committee appointed by some mechanism to be determined.
I don’t think his point is that it’s wrong to give Congress a say. I think his point was, it may not work very well, especially if the two houses disagree.
#3-The Constitution provides that where they disagree, the House gets its way on the President and the Senate gets its way on the Veep. That might result in having a Pres and Veep of different parties, but so what?
The party hacks in the Congress have judicial power ONLY in judging election results for the Congress and in impeachments — for history reasons inherited from England/U.K.
Both MAJOR violations of separation of powers.
Everything else is in the Art. III U.S.A. courts.
Under the National Popular Vote bill, one presidential candidate is guaranteed to get a majority of the nation’s electoral votes. Under the bill, all of the state’s electoral votes would be awarded to the presidential candidate who gets the most popular votes in all 50 states and DC. The legislation would take effect only when enacted, in identical form, by states possessing a majority of the electoral votes (270 of 538). So, the winning candidate will always get at least 270 electoral votes. There will never be a tie in the electoral votes and never be a situation in which no candidate gets a majority of the electoral votes. Hence the election of the President would never be thrown into the U.S. House (with each state casting one vote) and the election of the Vice President would never be thrown into the U.S. Senate.
I don’t think mvymvy read the interesting article by Edward B. Foley.