Arizona Representative Doug Coleman (R-Apache Junction) has introduced HB 2015. It would remove the names of presidential elector candidates from the November ballot. Only five states still print the names of presidential elector candidates on ballots, and Arizona is the most populous of those. Printing the names of eleven candidates for presidential elector for each presidential candidate takes up quite a bit of room on ballots, so if this bill passed, the ballot would be smaller and neater.
I’ve voted in Arizona in three presidential elections (2000, 2008, 2012), and I had to think about it whether I remembered seeing the list of electors. Maybe I can speak only for myself, but I don’t really notice it any more than I don’t notice a lot of background noise that just seems distracting.
If all states would go to Nebraska/Maine style district election of presidential electors, there would only be about the same number of electors on the ballot as are currently the names of the party nominees. In fact, the names of the presidential nominees are the ones which should be removed since we vote for their electors and not the nominees. This legislation is all backwards!
Imagine if there were 538 X the number of ballot qualified parties and independent candidates = probably 3000 people running for presidential elector in their respective districts all with local campaigns and campaign contributions. Talk about getting money out of politics! THIS IS THE WAY OUR FRAMERS designed the Electoral College. Restore it, don’t scrap it!
Jeff –
Read Madison’s notes of the constitutional convention. You may be surprised that the Framers didn’t put as much thought into “designing” the Electoral College as you might think. In fact, just one day – ONE DAY – before the EC was accepted by the convention at large, the Framers were figuring on having the Executive appointed by the legislature.
Of course, whatever system they might have decided upon then, it could not have accounted for the changes in technology, polling science, communication, etc. which have transpired since then, as well as the evolution of party politics, changes in voting rights and procedures, societal changes and so on. And it’s worth remembering that most of the people in that room were revolutionaries in the truest sense of the word, and would therefore be the last people to argue that any system they might have devised then should not be subject to revision or replacement if it is found not to work.
You may think that the EC works, and that’s fine. I don’t, and we can argue the pros and cons of the system, as we have in the past. But I doubt any of the Founding Fathers would have wished us to treat any of their work as holy scripture. Heck, many went to Philadelphia with specific instructions to only revise the Articles of Confederation, but in pretty short order they decided to “scrap” them entirely. So the argument that “this is the way the Framers designed” something, in my view, runs exactly contrary to the very nature of the work the Framers did in Philadelphia.
Richard: But you’re a politically active person who pays attention to elections. By contrast, in 1972, 30,000 Arizonans were so confused by the ballot design that told them to vote for electors that they managed to vote both for a major party presidential candidate and the Socialist Workers candidate as well.
In fairness to those voters, you should probably explain more about that weird ballot.
Has the number of confused Arizona electors changed from 33,000 in 1972 to 332,000 in 2014? I wouldn’t be surprised. Most voters are either programmed or told to vote for the “D” or the “R” by the name of the candidates, and probably wouldn’t know how to vote if it weren’t for the “D” and the “R” being by the candidates name.