CATO Institute is the leading think-tank for libertarians, but its leadership strongly supports the Republican Party. Here is an opinion piece on the electoral college by Robert Levy, chair of the CATO Board of Directors. Levy seems to say he is strongly opposed to any electoral college system that would give minor party or independent presidential candidates any electoral votes. He says Ross Perot in 1992 might have won some electoral votes if each U.S. House district chose its own presidential elector, and that this would have been undesirable. Levy is also opposed to the National Popular Vote Plan, so he is stuck with preferring the status quo. Thanks to Jon Roland for the link.
From the article:
“Assume, however, that a state enacts a law giving all its electoral votes to the presidential candidate who wins the national popular vote. And assume further that the law says it will not be effective unless enough other states pass the same law to yield a total of at least 270 electoral votes. That would be perfectly valid under Article II. It would force a majority of electoral votes to be cast for the national popular vote winner — without amending the Constitution.
“But is it a good idea? The Framers meticulously crafted an electoral model that reduced sectionalism and reinforced minority rights. Instead, popular voting would favor regions with high voter density and large states over small. “One man, one vote” may be the rallying cry of a democracy; but that is not our form of governance. We are a constitutional republic; political outcomes are not always determined by majority rule. For example, it takes two-thirds of Congress to override presidential vetoes, approve treaties, impeach a president, or expel a member of Congress. Imagine if NPVIC had been operative in 2004: George W. Bush would have received all of California’s electoral votes even though John Kerry trounced Bush statewide by 10 percentage points.”
I have to give the author credit for denying the common and baseless arguments that NPV is “unconstitutional,” but of course he then follows with the usual mishmash of factual misstatements about how the EC was created, for what reasons, and ends with a statement (about Bush being awarded with California’s EC votes rather than Kerry) which is apparently supposed to have some shock value, but in fact merits only the simple response “Yeah…so?”
And this statement made me laugh out loud:
“Second, winner take all eliminates the pernicious effect of gerrymandering from presidential elections.”
That’s just too funny. In making an argument against determining the president by popular vote, he makes an argument FOR using the popular vote as a defense against manipulation of our elections! And the state by state winner take all method was precisely the reason there was outright fraud in four states in 1876, and in Ohio in 2004.
And in the end, the author lays bare the real basis for this new push to go to CD based allocation of electors. Republicans are seeing their base national constituency – pale, stale males – dwindling as a percentage of the total. They fear outcomes of an EC implementation which is no longer successfully “gamed” by Republicans, and they’re worried that even their racist (yes…RACIST) voter ID laws may not do the trick, either.
So he concludes:
“On the merits, however, there’s much to recommend the Maine-Nebraska system — if for no other reason than to foreclose the popular voting option.”
A refreshing bit of honesty from a Republican.
The president should not be the popular choice of the people at all. He should be the best qualified person to execute the laws Congress makes who doesn’t want the job. We need Cincinnati, not Caesars.
The original concept of the Electoral College was that electors would not be unknown persons nominated by presidential candidates or their parties and pledged to vote for one, but the wisest citizens who would independently and carefully consider the candidates and deliberate among themselves before making their choices. Granted that model had fallen apart by the election of 1800, but it still has merit. The solution is not some kind of national popular vote, but reform of the electoral selection process to get truly wise and independent electors.
I have proposed the following amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would hopefully do that:
Selecting electors for president and vice-president
The electors for president and vice-president shall be selected in each state by the following procedure:
1. An initial panel of citizens qualified to vote in that state equal to one hundred times the number of electors to be selected from that state shall be selected at random, in a process that shall be supervised by a randomly-selected grand jury specially empaneled for that task;
2. Members of this initial panel shall take an examination in which each shall recite from memory 20 randomly selected clauses of this Constitution, and shall receive a score of one for each clause he or she is able to recite without error;
3. A second panel shall be selected from the first, consisting of ten times the number of electors to be selected, with the odds of selecting each weighted by the score he or she received in the examination, and with exclusion of any who scored zero;
4. Members of the second panel shall meet, and each shall rank all the others in descending order of civic virtue, giving a score indicating the rank consisting of the number of panelists for the highest down to one for the lowest;
5. The electors shall then be selected from this second panel at random, but weighted by his or her average rank from the previous round of peer assessments.
The randomization phases are intended to dispel undue influence of special interests or rent-seekers. None of the participants could control the ultimate result, so all would have an incentive to choose wisely.
The E.C. is one more giant EVIL minority rule gerrymander.
1/2 votes in about 1/2 of the areas having a bare majority of the total ECV = about 25 percent of the total popular votes.
i.e. EVERY Prez/VP since 1832 has de facto been elected by a minority of ALL of the voters.
Means nothing to math morons.
Result – Each New Age Prez is an undeclared WAR tyrant/ killer, with INSANE annual deficits and the accumulated INSANE national debt.
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Uniform definition of Elector in ALL of the U.S.A.
Nonpartisan App.V. for executive/judicial offices.
How many States manage to survive by having the State Guv/Lt. Guv elected by ALL of the voters in such States ???
The Electoral College system is vital to the maintenance of Liberty in the US. Direct elections or the sneaky backdoor attempt toward the same goal would be a step toward becoming a banana republic.
We should move the whole nation to the ME/NE system where 1 Electoral vote is awarded for the winner of each Congressional district and 2 votes for the statewide winner – to match the makeup of the House and Senate. This would most closely match with the intent of the framers in the context of today’s realities.
Swithching to the Maine/Nebraska system would make the system more fair and responsive to the voters and give 3rd parties and independents the chance to win Electoral votes on a reasonable basis while preserving the strengths of the EC. It would mean that candidates and parties would have to campaign in many states currently ignored, such as California, due to the numerous competitve Congressional districts at the presidential level of voting.
CDs are easier to swing and harder to predict, so this would benefit the voters most of all. It would give millions of voters who currently stay home a reason to actually vote in November. In the end, this means the will of the voter would be recognized while reducing the tendency toward massive fraud that is prevalent in all nationwide voting and also comes from statewide winner take all systems.
Moving to the Maine/Nebraska system will give us the best possible electoral system.
Of course, the functioning of the ME/NE system and its fairness would be improved, as would Congress itself, by increasing the number of US House seats to at least 600 (maybe 800 or 1200 would be even better) but that’s a separate issue.
2 –
You are a little closer to an accurate description of why the EC was “meticulously,” as the author suggests, devised by the Founders. (In fact is wasn’t particularly “meticulous” at all. We were one committee report away from having the Executive appointed by the national legislature, and the alternative, the EC, was adopted very quickly and without much debate by a group of people weary of the convention and eager to get home. Anyone who doesn’t believe these assertions is encouraged to read Madison’s notes to the ConCon).
The primary concern with the appointment of the Executive by the legislature was “intrigue” and “cabal.” Some among the group did not trust the Executive to work independently of a group of legislatures to whom he was beholden for his job.
They were also concerned with other factors, some of which simply do not exist today. One was timely tabulation and accumulation of popular votes in their non-electric world. Another was fear that a largely uninformed electorate might be counted upon to vote only for names familiar to them because of national prominence or common state residence. So you are right in asserting that some among them preferred to vest in small group of astute citizens the task of choosing the electorate. I submit that some of those factors do not exists today.
But…and this is a very important point…they also did not anticipate to any degree the growth of the power of the Executive branch of government. Over the years the presidency has usurped much of the power the ConCon delegates would to a man have assumed, without any serious debate whatsoever, belonged to the national legislature. We now have a whole body of agency law which they would have considered anethma. Would they entrust in a relatively few “wise” men the ability to deliver that kind of power? I think not? Should we? No.
It is also an erroneous conflation of facts to conclude, as many opponents of NPV reflexively do, that because the allocation of EC votes is made in the same proportion as those determined by Sherman’s Great Compromise, that somehow the EC was just another facet of the solution to the problems the Compromise was designed to address. Put another way, the assertion that the EC was designed primarily intended to protect the “rights” of smaller states is tenuous at best. A lot of people say that, but they don’t provide a whole lot of evidence to support the claim.
Furthermore, the FF’s did not, could not, imagine an America in which it would be possible to predict, with great accuracy, how an individual electoral entity would cast its collective votes. If they had, I doubt that they would have “meticulously” designed a system which now has the effect of concentrating the attention of the campaign in a handful of states. Neither would they have been able to anticipate the scope of current day campaigns and the obscene amount of money that’s poured into obtaining the hold on one office.
Things change. They certainly knew that, and I doubt seriously that they would have expected that we as a country would remain tethered to any process which becomes antiquated for a variety of reasons, especially in any manifestation of our democratic electoral process. Remember that they were convened to propose solutions to the failings of the Articles of Convention and in fairly short order decided to chuck the dysfunctional government for something entirely new. Would they refuse to revisit the EC a few centuries later if they felt it needed a change? Not a chance.
4 –
If the electoral process is allowed to become even more granular (i.e., CD’s) an even greater number of voters will become effectively disenfranchised, and the prospects for fraud that can swing the election will be increased. The mathematics of that assertion are easy to understand. And CD’s are no hard to predict than are the states as a whole, as you assert. As to perpetrating fraud, I suggest you think of it this way – if you wanted to swing an election fraudulently, would you rather orchestrate efforts to fraudulently deliver a few million votes nationwide, or a few thousand votes in 10 or 12 key CD’s?
Maine and Nebraska voters support a national popular vote.
A survey of Maine voters showed 77% overall support for a national popular vote for President.
In a follow-up question presenting a three-way choice among various methods of awarding Maine’s electoral votes,
* 71% favored a national popular vote;
* 21% favored Maine’s current system of awarding its electoral votes by congressional district; and
* 8% favored the statewide winner-take-all system (i.e., awarding all of Maine’s electoral votes to the candidate who receives the most votes statewide).
***
A survey of Nebraska voters showed 74% overall support for a national popular vote for President.
In a follow-up question presenting a three-way choice among various methods of awarding Nebraska’s electoral votes,
* 60% favored a national popular vote;
* 28% favored Nebraska’s current system of awarding its electoral votes by congressional district; and
* 13% favored the statewide winner-take-all system (i.e., awarding all of Nebraska’s electoral votes to the candidate who receives the most votes statewide).
NationalPopularVote
Dividing more states’ electoral votes by congressional district winners would magnify the worst features of the Electoral College system.
If the district approach were used nationally, it would be less fair and less accurately reflect the will of the people than the current system. In 2004, Bush won 50.7% of the popular vote, but 59% of the districts. Although Bush lost the national popular vote in 2000, he won 55% of the country’s congressional districts.
The district approach would not provide incentive for presidential candidates to campaign in a particular state or focus the candidates’ attention to issues of concern to the state. With the 48 state-by-state winner-take-all laws (whether applied to either districts or states), candidates have no reason to campaign in districts or states where they are comfortably ahead or hopelessly behind. Nationwide, there are now only 35 “battleground” districts that were competitive in the 2012 presidential election. With the present deplorable 48 state-level winner-take-all system, 80% of the states (including California and Texas) are ignored in presidential elections; however, 92% of the nation’s congressional districts would be ignored if a district-level winner-take-all system were used nationally.
Awarding electoral votes by congressional district could result in third party candidates winning electoral votes that would deny either major party candidate the necessary majority vote of electors and throw the process into Congress to decide.
Because there are generally more close votes on district levels than states as whole, district elections increase the opportunity for error. The larger the voting base, the less opportunity there is for an especially close vote.
Also, a second-place candidate could still win the White House without winning the national popular vote.
A national popular vote is the way to make every person’s vote equal and matter to their candidate because it guarantees that the candidate who gets the most votes in all 50 states and DC becomes President.
We don’t live in the Founders’ world and it would seem that we don’t really live in the world of democracy today either.
Around the world, people participate in politics through ideas as represented by political parties, however imperfectly.
We have a dysfunctional Congress that seems bound and determined to set up the conditions for a future Napoleon to step in.
A great American Solon would: (1) Replace the Congress with a national parliament elected through proportional representation; (2) Confine the President to the role of Head of State (and then it wouldn’t matter so much who it was); and (3) Recreate the chains of the Constitution with titanium links perhaps through some national veto referenda process on a law the parliament passed, and thus abolishing the Supreme Court for their abject failure to do their sworn duty.