The Philadelphia Inquirer has this op-ed by Rob Richie, on the electoral college. Richie criticizes a proposed bill in the Pennsylvania legislature to apportion Pennsylvania’s electoral votes according to the percentage of the popular vote within Pennsylvania. Richie also makes the case in favor of a National Popular Vote.
“a proposed bill in the Pennsylvania legislature to apportion Pennsylvania’s electoral votes according to the percentage of the popular vote within Pennsylvania. ”
Great idea. Go with that one.
NO uniform definition of Elector-Voter in the EVIL NPV scheme from political Hell.
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Const Amdt –
Uniform definition of Elector in ALL of the U.S.A.
P.R. and nonpartisan App.V.
To Hell with the small States and math moron retards who love the EVIL minority rule systems in the U.S.A.
Richie has to cast the elimination of a winner-take-all allocation of electoral votes as a bad thing. The EC is the bad thing. The motives for the reform effort is horrible but highlights and lends integral inferiority to the whole system. In the long view, that’s a good thing.
Voters get no benefit from the EC system now, so complaints that reforms are a disservice to them miss the core fact that if the sturdiness of the awful EC might be compromised, that has real value.
Bad motives and the EC are cousins and what pulls that into view–and also threatens to expose the EC’s least defensible operating instructions (no electoral majority)– is a real goo thing.
In sum:
ALWAYS MESS WITH THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE!
Richie only gives one actual argument against the plan: that it “would condemn [PA] to spectator status, because campaigning would be able to affect no more than three of its electoral votes.”
I have never understood the position that getting people to spend a lot of campaign money in your state is more important than having an accurate election.
80% of the states and people have been merely spectators to presidential elections. They have no influence. That’s more than 85 million voters, 200 million Americans, ignored. When and where voters are ignored, then so are the issues they care about most.
The number and population of battleground states is shrinking.
Policies important to the citizens of non-battleground states are not as highly prioritized as policies important to the handful of ‘battleground’ states when it comes to governing.
During the course of campaigns, candidates are educated and campaign about the local, regional, and state issues most important to the handful of battleground states they need to win. They take this knowledge and prioritization with them once they are elected. Candidates need to be educated and care about all of our states.
Compare the response to hurricane Katrina (in Louisiana, a “safe” state) to the federal response to hurricanes in Florida (a “swing” state) under Presidents of both parties. President Obama took more interest in the BP oil spill, once it reached Florida’s shores, after it had first reached Louisiana. Some pandering policy examples include ethanol subsidies, Steel Tariffs, and Medicare Part D. Policies not given priority, include those most important to non-battleground states – like comprehensive immigration reform, water issues in the west, and Pacific Rim trade issues,
“Maybe it is just a coincidence that most of the battleground states decided by razor-thin margins in 2008 have been blessed with a No Child Left Behind exemption. “ – Wall Street Journal
Six current heavily traveled Cabinet members, have made more than 85 trips this year to electoral battlegrounds such as Colorado, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania, according to a POLITICO review of public speeches and news clippings. Those swing-state visits represent roughly half of all travel for those six Cabinet officials this year.
Pennsylvania has 635,199 voters per presidential Elector (as of the April 2010 census). Delaware next door has one Elector for every 299,311 voters, and Wyoming has an Elector for every 187,875 voters. The Electoral College is a means of cheating residents of large population states out of equal status. Let’s forgo the NPV scheme and simply abolish the Electoral College.
There’s nothing simple about abolishing the Electoral College. It would need a constitutional amendment, and could be stopped by states with as little as 3% of the U.S. population.