CDIH

What is the alternative to the electoral college without stepping on states rights?

Kerry is doing ok,
and he needs to announce a Veep.

He is getting hammered on all sides right now.
Republican's have the white house and congress, and are using the bully pulpit well against him.

The RNC manufactures smear stories,
Conservative Talk Radio reads the talking points,
it gets picked up by the Washington times and Faux news,
and lately the "liberal" media is simply running the stories hot off the RNC press without any sort of fact checking.

if Kerry tries to run a campaign without passion and sticking only to issues,
he will be steam rolled.

what do states rights have to do with a federal election?

the electoral college negates the freedoms and liberties we have in this country?


HUH?

For one, he cannot simply run on the environment. While one of the great things I admire about Kerry is his stance on the environment, the culture in this country is such that, I believe, only a 1/3 actually consider it a major issue. I don't have a source on that at the moment, so it might not be true, but the culture of this country is oriented very much about focusing on the now, and not worrying about the later. We are all about consumption, all about expending more energy than necessary, and totally shut out from alternative, renewable energies. The conservatives, of all people, should know that you do not put your eggs in one basket. The major cities, like New York, in this country that are sucessful have diversified sources of economy, and if one industry bombs, there are others to support until that industry gains strength again. Former major cities, like Buffalo, centralized their industry in steel and grain, and we know what happened with steel after WWII, and the interstate highway systems, and better modes of transport killed off the grain industry. What's left is a city hungover for a half-century, totally lost and dependent on the rest of the state for money. If we maintain our stance on oil usage, what happens if one day, boom, oil manufacturers in Middle East are bombed, and production drops to zero. That's not just an economic crisis, that's a national security threat when we all go insane and start killing one another for oil to heat our homes and drive our cars? We have absolutely no alternatives in place to deal with that, and what's most upsetting is that corporations have bought up all the patents for any new technology, and totally limited the market of the US to begin manufacturing of such necessary things.
I find it to be a very big issue, but, more than likely, the next two guys you ask could really give a shit.

Ken'sPen Wrote:the electoral college negates the freedoms and liberties we have in this country?


HUH?

doesn't negate them but it limits them. it's an archaic system that was started because the government didn't trust the common man to elect a president. you should be as much a supporter as anyone of getting rid of it, since your boy Gore won the popular vote in 2000.

because this country is not a democracy, it is a representative republic. the powers that be will be damned if that is gonna change, you think they want you to take that power away from them? good luck.

The Sleeper Wrote:what do states rights have to do with a federal election?

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Quote:The current workings of the Electoral College are the result of both design and experience. As it now operates:

Each State is allocated a number of Electors equal to the number of its U.S. Senators (always 2) plus the number of its U.S. Representatives (which may change each decade according to the size of each State's population as determined in the Census).

The political parties (or independent candidates) in each State submit to the State's chief election official a list of individuals pledged to their candidate for president and equal in number to the State's electoral vote. Usually, the major political parties select these individuals either in their State party conventions or through appointment by their State party leaders while third parties and independent candidates merely designate theirs.

Members of Congress and employees of the federal government are prohibited from serving as an Elector in order to maintain the balance between the legislative and executive branches of the federal government.

After their caucuses and primaries, the major parties nominate their candidates for president and vice president in their national conventions traditionally held in the summer preceding the election. (Third parties and independent candidates follow different procedures according to the individual State laws). The names of the duly nominated candidates are then officially submitted to each State's chief election official so that they might appear on the general election ballot.


On the Tuesday following the first Monday of November in years divisible by four, the people in each State cast their ballots for the party slate of Electors representing their choice for president and vice president (although as a matter of practice, general election ballots normally say "Electors for" each set of candidates rather than list the individual Electors on each slate).


Whichever party slate wins the most popular votes in the State becomes that State's Electors-so that, in effect, whichever presidential ticket gets the most popular votes in a State wins all the Electors of that State. [The two exceptions to this are Maine and Nebraska where two Electors are chosen by statewide popular vote and the remainder by the popular vote within each Congressional district].


On the Monday following the second Wednesday of December (as established in federal law) each State's Electors meet in their respective State capitals and cast their electoral votes-one for president and one for vice president.


In order to prevent Electors from voting only for "favorite sons" of their home State, at least one of their votes must be for a person from outside their State (though this is seldom a problem since the parties have consistently nominated presidential and vice presidential candidates from different States).


The electoral votes are then sealed and transmitted from each State to the President of the Senate who, on the following January 6, opens and reads them before both houses of the Congress.


The candidate for president with the most electoral votes, provided that it is an absolute majority (one over half of the total), is declared president. Similarly, the vice presidential candidate with the absolute majority of electoral votes is declared vice president.


In the event no one obtains an absolute majority of electoral votes for president, the U.S. House of Representatives (as the chamber closest to the people) selects the president from among the top three contenders with each State casting only one vote and an absolute majority of the States being required to elect. Similarly, if no one obtains an absolute majority for vice president, then the U.S. Senate makes the selection from among the top two contenders for that office.
At noon on January 20, the duly elected president and vice president are sworn into office.

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Quote:One idea was to have the Congress choose the president. This idea
was rejected, however, because some felt that making such a choice would be too divisive an issue and leave too many hard feelings in the Congress.

Others felt that such a procedure would invite unseemly political bargaining, corruption, and perhaps even interference from foreign powers. Still others felt that such an arrangement would upset the balance
of power between the legislative and executive branches of the federalgovernment.

A second idea was to have the State legislatures select the president.
This idea, too, was rejected out of fears that a president so beholden to the State legislatures might permit them to erode federal authority and thus undermine the whole idea of a federation.

A third idea was to have the president elected by a direct popular vote. Direct election was rejected not because the Framers of the Constitution doubted public intelligence but rather because they feared that without sufficient information about candidates from outside their State, people would naturally vote for a "favorite son" from their own State or region. At worst, no president would emerge with a popular majority sufficient to govern the whole country. At best, the choice of president would always be decided by the largest, most populous States with little regard for the smaller ones.


Finally, a so-called "Committee of Eleven" in the Constitutional
Convention proposed an indirect election of the president through a College of Electors.

The function of the College of Electors in choosing the president can be likened to that in the Roman Catholic Church of the College of Cardinals selecting the Pope. The original idea was for the most knowledgeable and informed individuals from each State to select the president based solely on
merit and without regard to State of origin or political party.
The structure of the Electoral College can be traced to the Centurial Assembly system of the Roman Republic. Under that system, the adult male citizens of Rome were divided, according to their wealth, into groups of 100 (called Centuries). Each group of 100 was entitled to cast only one vote either in favor or against proposals submitted to them by the Roman Senate.


In the Electoral College system, the States serve as the Centurial groups (though they are not, of course, based on wealth), and the number of votes per State is determined by the size of each State's Congressional delegation.


Still, the two systems are similar in design and share many of the same advantages and disadvantages.


The similarities between the Electoral College and classical
institutions are not accidental. Many of the Founding Fathers were well schooled in ancient history and its lessons.


The First Design
In the first design of the Electoral College (described in Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution):

Each State was allocated a number of Electors equal to the number of its U.S. Senators (always 2) plus the number of its U.S. Representatives (which may change each decade according to the size of each State's population as
determined in the decennial census). This arrangement built upon an earlier compromise in the design of the Congress itself and thus satisfied both large and small States.


n The manner of choosing the Electors was left to the individual State legislatures, thereby pacifying States suspicious of a central national government.


n Members of Congress and employees of the federal government were specifically prohibited from serving as an Elector in order to maintain the balance between the legislative and executive branches of the federal
government.


n Each State's Electors were required to meet in their respective States rather than all together in one great meeting. This arrangement, it was thought, would prevent bribery, corruption, secret dealing, and foreign
influence.


n In order to prevent Electors from voting only for a "favorite son" of their own State, each Elector was required to cast two votes for president, at least one of which had to be for someone outside their home State. The idea, presumably, was that the winner would likely be everyone's second favorite choice.


n The electoral votes were to be sealed and transmitted from each of the States to the President of the Senate who would then open them before both houses of the Congress and read the results.


n The person with the most electoral votes, provided that it was an absolute majority (at least one over half of the total), became president. Whoever obtained the next greatest number of electoral votes became vice president -- an office which they seem to have invented for the occasion since it had not been mentioned previously in the Constitutional
Convention.


n In the event that no one obtained an absolute majority in the Electoral College or in the event of a tie vote, the U.S. House of Representatives, as the chamber closest to the people, would choose the president from among the top five contenders. They would do this (as a further concession to the small States) by allowing each State to cast only one
vote with an absolute majority of the States being required to elect a president. The vice presidency would go to whatever remaining contender had the greatest number of electoral votes.

If that, too, was tied, the U.S. Senate would break the tie by deciding between the two.


In all, this was quite an elaborate design. But it was also a very clever one when you consider that the whole operation was supposed to work without political parties and without national campaigns while maintaining the balances and satisfying the fears in play at the time.


Indeed, it is probably because the Electoral College was originally designed to operate in an environment so totally different from our own that many
people think it is anachronistic and fail to appreciate the new purposes it now serves. But of that, more later.


The Second Design
The first design of the Electoral College lasted through only four presidential elections. For in the meantime, political parties had emerged in the United States. The very people who had been condemning parties publicly had nevertheless been building them privately. And too, the idea of political parties had gained respectability through the persuasive writings of such political philosophers as Edmund Burke and James Madison.


One of the accidental results of the development of political parties was that in the presidential election of 1800, the Electors of the Democratic- Republican Party gave Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr (both of that party) an equal number of electoral votes. The tie was resolved by the House
of Representatives in Jefferson's favor -- but only after 36 tries and some serious political dealings which were considered unseemly at the time.


Since this sort of bargaining over the presidency was the very thing the Electoral College was supposed to prevent, the Congress and the States hastily adopted the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution by September of
1804.


To prevent tie votes in the Electoral College which were made
probable, if not inevitable, by the rise of political parties (and no doubt to facilitate the election of a president and vice president of the same party), the 12th Amendment requires that each Elector cast one vote for president and a separate vote for vice president rather than casting two votes for
president with the runner-up being made vice president. The Amendment also stipulates that if no one receives an absolute majority of electoral votes for president, then the U.S. House of Representatives will select the president from among the top three contenders with each State casting only
one vote and an absolute majority being required to elect. By the same token, if no one receives an absolute majority for vice president, then the U.S. Senate will select the vice president from among the top two contenders for that office. All other features of the Electoral College remained the same
including the requirement that, in order to prevent Electors from voting only for "favorite sons", either the presidential or vice presidential candidate has to be from a State other than that of the Electors.


In short, political party loyalties had, by 1800, begun to cut across State loyalties thereby creating new and different problems in the selection of a president. By making seemingly slight changes, the 12th Amendment fundamentally altered the design of the Electoral College and, in one stroke,
accommodated political parties as a fact of life in American presidential elections.

It is noteworthy in passing that the idea of electing the president by direct popular vote was not widely promoted as an alternative to redesigning the Electoral College. This may be because the physical and demographic circumstances of the country had not changed that much in a dozen or so years. Or it may be because the excesses of the recent French revolution (and its fairly rapid degeneration into dictatorship) had given the populists some pause to reflect on the wisdom of too direct a democracy.


The Evolution of the Electoral College
Since the 12th Amendment, there have been several federal and State statutory changes which have affected both the time and manner of choosing Presidential Electors but which have not further altered the fundamental workings of the Electoral College.

There have also been a few curious incidents which its critics cite as problems but which proponents of the Electoral College view as merely its natural and intended operation.


The Manner of Choosing Electors
From the outset, and to this day, the manner of choosing its State's Electors was left to each State legislature.

And initially, as one might expect, different States adopted different methods.


Some State legislatures decided to choose the Electors themselves.


Others decided on a direct popular vote for Electors either by Congressional district or at large throughout the whole State.

Still others devised some combination of these methods.

But in all cases, Electors were chosen individually from a single list of all candidates for the position.


During the 1800's, two trends in the States altered and more or less standardized the manner of choosing Electors.

The first trend was toward choosing Electors by the direct popular vote of the whole State (rather than by the State legislature or by the popular vote of each Congressional
district).

Indeed, by 1836, all States had moved to choosing their Electors by a direct statewide popular vote except South Carolina which persisted in choosing them by the State legislature until 1860.

Today, all States choose their Electors by direct statewide election except Maine (which in 1969) and Nebraska (which in 1991) changed to selecting two of its Electors by a
statewide popular vote and the remainder by the popular vote in each Congressional district.



Along with the trend toward their direct statewide election came the trend toward what is called the "winner-take-all" system of choosing Electors.


Under the winner-take-all system, the presidential candidate who wins the most popular votes within a State wins all of that State's Electors.


This winner-take-all system was really the logical consequence of the direct statewide vote for Electors owing to the influence of political parties.

For in a direct popular election, voters loyal to one political party's candidate for president would naturally vote for that party's list of proposed Electors.

By the same token, political parties would propose only as many Electors as there were electoral votes in the State so as not to fragment their support and thus permit the victory of another party's Elector.


There arose, then, the custom that each political party would, in each State, offer a "slate of Electors" -- a list of individuals loyal to their candidate for president and equal in number to that State's electoral vote.


The voters of each State would then vote for each individual listed in the slate of whichever party's candidate they preferred.

Yet the business of presenting separate party slates of individuals occasionally led to
confusion. Some voters divided their votes between party lists because of personal loyalties to the individuals involved rather than according to their choice for president. Other voters, either out of fatigue or confusion, voted
for fewer than the entire party list.

The result, especially in close elections, was the occasional splitting of a State's electoral vote.

This happened as late as 1916 in West Virginia when seven Republican Electors and one Democrat Elector won.


Today, the individual party candidates for Elector are seldom listed on the ballot. Instead, the expression "Electors for" usually appears in fine print on the ballot in front of each set of candidates for president and vice president (or else the State law specifies that votes cast for the candidates
are to be counted as being for the slate of delegates pledged to those candidates).

It is still true, however, that voters are actually casting their
votes for the Electors for the presidential and vice presidential candidates of their choice rather than for the candidates themselves.

Keyser Soze Wrote:because this country is not a democracy, it is a representative republic. the powers that be will be damned if that is gonna change, you think they want you to take that power away from them? good luck.

If we were a democracy, first, we would need a new constitution. And then about 300 million people have to ratify it.

Quote:A third idea was to have the president elected by a direct popular vote. Direct election was rejected not because the Framers of the Constitution doubted public intelligence but rather because they feared that without sufficient information about candidates from outside their State, people would naturally vote for a "favorite son" from their own State or region. At worst, no president would emerge with a popular majority sufficient to govern the whole country. At best, the choice of president would always be decided by the largest, most populous States with little regard for the smaller ones.

I do believe that in the age of cable and internet, we have sufficient information to choose a president. and I don't get how the most populous states would decide elections when each persons vote is weighted equally.

If we were to have direct election, first of all, there would need to be an amendment to the Constitution, which would never be accepted by a majority of the states, and even if so, would be found unconstiutional by the Supreme Court. But, say the amendment went through. At that point, you can eliminate the party system, because how would you nominate candidates? State primaries would no longer be necessary, because you have removed the ability for a state to choose presidents. So, now you have a large list of candidates, from all over the country, and the one who gets their message out to the most people wins. If you are a canidate from North Dakota, you are not going to go to NYC and win votes, because they probably have a candidate just as qualified, and supports the same issues, except he's from NYC. And the NYC canidate isn't going to beat the candidate in LA. You will have a bunch of candidates from populus areas of the country, and no vote in any state other than California, Illinois, New York, Texas, and Massachusettes matters.

I'm all for eliminating the party system

How bout we start a new thread where we all have to get together to come up with a new government?

Bush is leading in the polls because he has a message whether you agree with it or not.
Kerry is a yes man to everyone and anyone who will listen.

I like to think the American people can see through it.
Maybe not foreign leaders but I'm not concerned with them.

The Jays Wrote:How bout we start a new thread where we all have to get together to come up with a new government?

sounds like a great idea

The Jays Wrote:But, say the amendment went through. At that point, you can eliminate the party system, because how would you nominate candidates? State primaries would no longer be necessary, because you have removed the ability for a state to choose presidents.

why couldn't there just be a national primary for each party? and i'm not sure on this, but i think not every state gets a primary, so how is that fair? the only way for every vote to be counted equally is if every vote is counted and the result is who gets elected. period. and as far as your claim that people would vote for the local guy, wouldn't al sharpton have won new york then?

States reserve the right to develop their own system of how candidates are selected.

well, that's fine and good for local elections. but if it's a national election shouldn't it be governed by the nation and not the states. i thought that was the whole difference between state and federal government.

yup, I don't get why states rights should have so much influence in something that effects each state exactly the same. plus I don't see what's so unconstitutional about a popular vote. you can leave the process of picking candidates the way it is and make the final vote a popular vote. how is this not fair?

Quote:n The manner of choosing the Electors was left to the individual State legislatures, thereby pacifying States suspicious of a central national government.

Quote:It is noteworthy in passing that the idea of electing the president by direct popular vote was not widely promoted as an alternative to redesigning the Electoral College. This may be because the physical and demographic circumstances of the country had not changed that much in a dozen or so years. Or it may be because the excesses of the recent French revolution (and its fairly rapid degeneration into dictatorship) had given the populists some pause to reflect on the wisdom of too direct a democracy.

Quote:yup, I don't get why states rights should have so much influence in something that effects each state exactly the same.

Quote:At worst, no president would emerge with a popular majority sufficient to govern the whole country. At best, the choice of president would always be decided by the largest, most populous States with little regard for the smaller ones.

A canidate wouldn't have to do anything in Delaware, because he only needs to suck up to people in New York. Basically, the people of New York are more important than the people in Delaware because there are so many people in one general area.