Peter Wallison, a Senior Fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, here argues in The Hill that if the electoral college is abolished, the two-party system will cease to exist. This seems obviously wrong. Every state elects its Governor with a state popular vote, and every state has a two-party system. The classic definition of a two-party system is one in which two particular parties are much stronger than all the other parties.
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No it is not obviously wrong. IMO, Wallison gets it right. Wallison’s premise is not “the electoral college is abolished”. Rather Wallison’s premise is that the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact law is enacted by states with 270+ electoral votes.
On the face of it, one would think that it would make the Ds and Rs even more dominant because they can scare their potential voters who might vote for the Green or Libertarian party candidate in a safe state into voting for the D or R because of the national total vote tabulation. However, I disagree with this possibility — it ignores the fact that one or more H. Ross Perot-like candidates, for example Mark Cuban, would come into play, along with perennial candidates like Bernie. Millennials have zero party loyalty. They would abandon someone like Biden to vote for Bernie en masse, damn the consequences. And the Never-Trumpers would use it as a method for making sure Trump does not get re-elected by splitting off enough voters in safe Trump states.
Clinton got elected in 1992 with 43% of the vote without anyone really questioning the result. If the States Compact was in effect, I can envision candidates like Perot and Bernie getting participating, and someone winning the presidency with < 35% of the vote. Voters in those states that had a plurality of votes for a candidate different than who the electors from their states voted for would be outraged, and the resulting presidency would be as illegitimate as any banana-republic "democratic" election. The country would further fracture, possibly resulting in a BREXIT style movement that might succeed.
First, Peter Wallison asserts “Because they do not have a chance to elect a president, splinter or special interest parties always disappear.”
The reason alternative parties atrophy has nothing to do with the Electoral College. Rather it has to do with the duopoly control of the states monopoly and censorship of the ballot. One element of duopoly ballot censorship is vote quotas for compulsory candidates. Many states require a party to run candidates for either or both President and Governor and those candidates must achieve a certain arbitrary percentage of the vote or else the party loses access to the monopoly ballot to run ANY candidates in a subsequent election. Can you comprehend arbitrary discrimination? The substitution of the popular vote for the Electoral College would do nothing to end the ballot monopoly and the political censorship of the voters to choose autonomously.
A credible reason to oppose the popular vote vote scheme is that the election could hang up on disputed results in one or more states that would be unable to allocate their electoral votes. In effect, the popular vote plan could be “filibustered” by a state(s) refusing to certify its votes. Presumably, the either the U S House would still elect a President from the top three candidates in the popular vote from the rest of the states OR the Supreme National Election Commission Court Justices will simply pick a winner for themselves.
The national popular vote compact is rife with possibilities for manipulation and corruption in addition to further embedding the duopoly parties control of the states’ ballot censorship monopoly.
ALL of the USA regime and MOST of the State regimes are total EVIL rotted monarchs/oligarchs.
PR – legis — multi-party
AppV – exec/judic -NONPARTISAN
— both pending Condorcet
Plurality voting and single member districts are the bulwarks of the two party system. Abolishing the electoral college by itself won’t change that one bit.
The two-party system is simply a product of single-winner election districts under plurality voting.
The new pure proportional representation (PPR) Electoral College is bringing the three-party system to POTUS in 2020, simultaneously with the 539-party system, where the Electoral College is elected as one at-large national election district.
Only pure proportional representation will bring a three-party system but the math and every marked ballot, must be correct by using ranked choice voting, or the math is spoiled.
Candidates and non-candidates alike can claim to have an answer to the two-party system but only PPR provides the correct math.
Libertarian Party 2012 and 2016 POTUS nominee Gary Johnson claimed something to the effect that he was the answer to the two-party system, but we still have a two-party system.
Next month the United Coalition USA is bringing the correct math for PPR for the Los Angeles County Libertarian Party to consider.
The California Green Party appears to want pure proportional representation after blocking our team since 1994, then claiming in 2018 to have adopted it, the fulfillment remains to be seen beyond the rhetoric.
The United Coalition USA has been bringing the correct math for pure proportional representation for more than twenty-four consecutive years despite the party bosses snuffing out our voices.
Eventually the correct math being used in Cambridge Massachusetts city elections will help end the two-party system.
The state of Massachusetts has also recently brought election statutes for PPR in the past ten years and real progress has been made there.
Multiple winner districts under plurality voting will also bring the two-party system because slate voting in multiple winner districts is a winner-takes-all system.
Eliminating the Electoral College might also bring a two-party system for Prez and VP when pluralism and slate voting is used for Prez and VP without PPR.
Slate voting isn’t a bad thing under pure proportional representation because of the nature of limited voting.
All parties (and independents) use slate voting for Prez and VP.
The United Coalition USA is bringing pure proportional representation, where slate voting won’t end up with electing both seats, and that’s because of the nature of limited voting.
How many voters in a single seat district is too many? Too few? At the Philadelphia convention drafting the Constitution George Washington thought a member of the House of Representatives should represent at least 30,000 population. The actual number of white, property owning males who could vote at that time would be far less than 30,000. Some Reps. were elected by districts and some at large back then. As I recall, it wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that districts were mandated by Congress, but some states ignored the law and their Reps were seat anyway.
No one has a cogent rule for accessing how fractional each voter’s influence should be in achieving a plurality. When the population ratio to Representative becomes so large as three-quarter million to one, then it looks so absurd that one may question if voters have any representation at all.
Then when one examines access to the ballot and finds it so restricted that a voter has no feasible alternatives to the two incumbent parties, it goes beyond absurd to oppressive.
Honorable D. Frank, the important question is not “how many voters should participate in a single-winner election district?”.
The important question is “how proportional are the results the multiple winner district”?
Pure poportional representation requires that the total votes cast divided by the number of seats (plus one seat) = the same threshold across the board (plus one vote).
For each addition seat, the threshold gets lowered proportionately and so the more the better.
The 100-member district is a good figure because of the metric systems which serves as a good example for calibrating.
At-large districts of 100 or 1000 are good. But the figure 538 is already written into the US Constitution and so that is a solid figure (538) also.
It’s far easier to work with what we have so to bring the team quickly and efficiently in 2020.
Then after the team is elected the team can elect new rules later, but why make things more difficult than they already, when the US Constitution already lays out good numbers?
Smaller single-winner districts bring the same two-party system and so by creating smaller single-winner election districts no progress gets accomplished for voters. Instead a lot of energy is wasted and the team still gets blocked.