Here is a summary of U.S. Senator Bill Nelson’s speech to the Florida Senate on March 27. In the speech, he said he will soon introduce federal legislation, and a proposed constitutional amendment, to do these things: abolish the Electoral College, establish a regional rotating schedule of six presidential primary dates, mandate no-excuse absentee voting for federal elections, mandate a paper trail for all vote-counting systems for federal elections, and provide grants to states for all-mail voting.
It would be valuable for Florida constituents of Senator Nelson to ask him to also include ballot access reform in federal elections. Although ballot access reform has been introduced in the U.S. House ten times, and a bill is pending there currently (HR 3600), no U.S. Senator has ever introduced a bill on ballot access.
I think the Electoral College should stay but needs to be improved. Maybe a nice twist would be to have a reformed Maine-Nebraska Method. That is allocate Electoral Votes at-large and by Congressional District. At-large: if a candidate gets an absolute majority of the votes statewide, it gets all EV; if not, each candidate getting a number of votes equal to 100/ number of candidates plus 1 is able to get EV. The same would apply for allocating Congressional District EV.
The trouble with the Maine-Nebraska method is that we already have severe gerrymandering of US House districts in many states already. Giving every US House district its own elector would give state legislatures even more incentive to gerrymander.
But, Derek’s idea for proportionality would greatly improve the Maine-Nebraska system. The Maine-Nebraska system, if applied in all states, would have given George W. Bush a comfortable margin in the November 2000 election (in the electoral college), despite the fact that he lost the national popular vote by 560,000 votes.
Well, I got this idea from a biorregional system proposal. Or we could have a weighed EV system, with each Congressional District getting at least 0.5 EV, depending on the population. The question would be what about the states with 3 EV. Possibly use districting according to legislative districts and make these electoral districts. Unless each voter was given 1 or 2 votes and could vote for as many candidates as they want (with each candidate getting the same % of your vote), we have to find something.
Attention Senator Nelson —
Uniform definition of Elector-Voter in ALL the U.S.A.
ONLY equal nominating petitions for ballot access for all candidates for the same office in the same area.
P.R. for all legislative body elections.
Approval Voting for all elected executive / judicial offices.
NO party hack primaries, caucuses and conventions are needed.
Difficult ONLY for EVIL party hack monsters — like those around for the last 6,000 plus years.
Granted, with the severe gerry-mandering that occurs
in the larger states there would likely be a minimum
number of certain Electoral votes for both major
party candidates. However, it would likely bring all
campaigns to some areas of the country that really
don’t normally see the Candidates in a fall campaign.
Additionally, it would provide SOME opportunities for
alternate candidates to possibly win a very few seats
when you would have 4-6 active campaigns. Out here
in California, the 4 small parties in the past have
been able occassionally to poll 15-25% votes for both
Congressional & legislative campaigns. Furthermore
this is more in keeping with the original intent of
the Founding Fathers on the voting for President. In
many elections before the Civil War states would vote
for multiple candidates in the Electoral College. In
pretty much stopped when the Republicans came to power
in most of the states and adopted the Unit Rule for
Presidential Electors.