Michael Medved has this column at The Daily Beast, warning that the U.S. would be severely troubled if the 2012 election turns out like the 2000 election. Medved believes it is somewhat plausible that Mitt Romney might get a majority of the electoral college, but President Obama would have had a substantial popular vote plurality.
Medved does not mention the possibility of an electoral college tie, but that is conceivable. There have been an even number of presidential electors starting with the 1964 election.
Not happening. People might want to fire Obama but they definitely don’t want to hire Romney. Obama wins both the popular and electoral vote due to low turnout.
The only paragraph in the article that I agree with is as follows:
“GOP partisans may blithely dismiss such calculations as meaningless since the Constitution unequivocally declares that the candidate with the most electoral votes becomes the next president, and the national tally of popular votes means nothing in the eyes of the law.”
The popular vote doesn’t matter, whether you like it or not. It would be completely foolish for Romney to follow this article’s advice of campaigning in Illinois and New York.
I like the scenario of 50 groups of Electors each huddled in their state capitals while angry mobs are just outside the doors battling each other and the police. While states do have laws requiring Electors to follow the majority in the state, no one has ever challenged the authority of a state to punish a faithless Elector. So that question might get to SCOTUS along with other ones. I like what Justice Jackson said in dissenting in Ray v. Blair (which upheld the above requirement):
“Electors, although often personally eminent, independent, and respectable, officially became voluntary party lackeys and intellectual nonentities to whose memory we might justly paraphrase a tuneful satire:
They always voted at their Party’s call
And never thought of thinking for themselves at all.”
He added:
“As an institution, the Electoral College suffered atrophy almost indistinguishable from rigor mortis.”
William J. Kelleher, Ph.D.
Twitter: wjkno1
Quoted in Internet Voting Now, page 144.
@3 – It has been brought to SCOTUS. They have set that it is a state issue and states can punish faithless electors if they choose to do so. The federal government cannot punish them.
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I don’t think the US would be severely troubled. Democrats yes, but not the US. Republicans would disregard the popular vote and simply continue measuring for new curtains in the White House.
The 3 EVIL minority rule gerrymander systems in the nearly dead U.S.A. Const —
H. Reps.
Senate
Electoral College
How many minority rule Prezs/VPs since 1832 [Jacksonian *democracy*] — with or without the help of SCOTUS ???
———-
Uniform definition of Elector-Voter in ALL of the U.S.A.
P.R. and nonpartisan App.V.