On April 17, the Colorado Senate passed SB223, which is identical to bills pending in 4 other states. It would authorize a compact among like-minded states, to change the electoral college system. Cooperating states would promise to appoint electors who would vote for the presidential candidate with the highest popular vote, nationwide. If enough states joined the compact, it would be impossible for anyone ever again to win the presidency who did not poll the most popular votes.
No offense but I hate this idea, without meaningful multi-party ballott access reform all it will do is skew all future elections for the Democrats.
Wouldn’t this have to pass supreme court challenges in order to become law?
Brian, it will only favor the Democrats because the current electoral system favors Republicans and the new one is more fair because it favors the winner of the popular vote, and thus one might argue, the actual winner of the election. If you can’t get rid of the Electoral College, then this is the next best thing.
It will also take away the majority vote in the individual state. If the majority of voters in Colorado vote Republican and the majority of voters in the entire county vote Democrat, you have negated the choice of the voters in Colorado.
It effectively amends the Constitution without actually amending it and is also a blatant violation of Article I, section 10:
No State shall, without consent of Congress…enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State…
Not to mention that if we ever have a close election again there won’t be one Florida, but rather 50 of them. This is a horrible, horrible law. If you don’t like the EC, then amend the Constitutioon properly.
The electorial college was put in place to give small states some relevance. Without it it would be possible for one large state to have a candidate winn by a large number of votes and anothe candidate win by a few votes in every other state and still be elected.
The only change I would support is that all state use the proportional system. That is the system that a candidate gets 1 electorial vote for each congressional district that he caries and 2 for carrying the state.
These agreements between states are made all the time. For example, States have laws allowing wine to be delivered from another state if the state of origin recipricates.
States are allowed to change how they vote in the electoral college. Some states already split thier electoral vote.
Small states have an advantage because they get at least three complete votes. Large states took the advantage back by using a all votes for the winner which increases the weight of winning the state, even when the state is highly divided.
I don’t see how the change would help democrats. For example, small population states with one district would still vote their entire three votes republican. One per district, Two winner of whole state
Large population Democratic states like CA, NJ, NY for example would split their votes, helping repubicans.
It is more likely that one district in the country vote third party, than a whole state, so could help third parties in presidential races.
Since our founders never intended for us to be a democracy I would rather leave the Electoral College as it is. I could agree to the method used by Maine and Nebraska but that choice should be left up to the individual states.
I agree with the first Michael. Switching votes from R to D or the other way around would only cause a revolt and a four year court fight.
^ Fine by me.
Politicians have shown themselves incapable of fixing long-standing problems. If that happened, they’d be forced to fix it.
Commenter #7 doesn’t want us to be a democracy? Shameful.
And (s)he also wants to leave it up to the states on how to cast their electoral votes. Well, that is what is going on here. States will have to vote to adopt this new strategy.
I think it is a good move.
I think if you check your history and government texts from high school you will see that we were never intended to be a democracy. We are a republic and a constitutional republic at that. There is a huge difference between the two.
New Federalist hit it right on the button. The Founding Fathers knew the dangers and perils of democracy, which is a nice sounding name for Mob Rule. Sadly, however, we have been so hypnotized by democracy’s propagandists. We have been lead to believe that majority rule at all times is such a good thing. We have grown intellectually lazy and dishonest. We must be reminded of the reasons the Founders gave us what Ben Franklin called “A republic, if you can keep it.” We have done an absolutely abysmal job of keeping it.