Ian wrote:ScholasticSpastic wrote:If I'm still in Utah I plan to vote for the Socialist candidate. Not because I think it'll help, but because the voters here march in lock-step and there's nothing I can do about it. Voting Socialist ensures that my vote will count. Possibly, it'll count for 50%.
I'd like to take this opportunity to gripe about the Electoral College system. I think it's deeply, horribly flawed and counterproductive towards democracy. I've got three main reasons:
1) Disproportionate representation. I don't have exact figures right now (and they'll shift once the 2010 Census is published), but the numbers of Electors is
not directly tied to the populations of each state. Voters like to think it's roughly equal, but it's not. For example, in North Dakota there's something like one Elector for every 300k people, whereas in California it's something like one Elector for every 900k. So a single person's vote is three times more likely to sway an Elector's vote in North Dakota than in California. That's a massive injustice, and it's not fair to any state's citizens - certainly not to the under-represented ones like in California.
It's designed to make states like North Dakota something other than irrelevant in Presidential elections. The idea was that we were not a single nation, but a union of independent nations. States like Delaware and Georgia, with less than 50,000 citizens, would never have joined the union without representation as states - they would be at the mercy of New York and Virginia.
It's a very slight shift nowadays, anyway. Wyoming and North Dakota have 3 electoral votes each, and California 55. The only thing the EC really helps with is that a candidate can accumulate, say 10 smaller states instead of needing 12 or 13 smaller states, to match another candidate's win of California.
The EC was a very nice compromise to give some shifting of power from more powerful states to less powerful states. Like the Senate - the same reasons for doing away with the EC would apply even more strongly to doing away with the Senate. The Senators represent States, not populations, therefore North Dakota has 2 senators for it's population of about 2,000,000 (or less, I didn't look it up), and California has 2 Senators for its population of 50 million, or thereabouts. So, when it comes to legislation in the Senate, North Dakotans have a greater impact per capita on the passage of laws than do Californians. One North Dakotan senator represents about a 1,000,000 people, and one Californian Senator represents about 25,000,000 people!
However, since States are political units with independent political interests, it makes sense to make some provision for States to have a representative body and be accounted for in the political process as part of the checks and balances.
Ian wrote:
2) National campaigns are too battleground-centric. Except for occasional landslide elections, close contests always come down to a handful of battleground states. All things being equal, California and New York vote Democrat, Texas votes Republican, etc. And those examples also happen to be the three biggest states in the union! But often times the political issues in those states aren't addressed as much as industry outsourcing in Ohio or Medicare in Florida, because those smaller states are politically split down the middle. Presidential candidates rarely even show up in thoroughly blue or red states except to do fundraising.
And, they would show up even LESS in those smaller states if the EC was removed. The elections would be even moreso decided by California, NY and Texas. Once a candidate landed the whales, the election would be even LESS likely to turn on winning smaller states. That's because the smaller states would have fewer votes to provide to a candidate if the EC is removed.
But, that's the main reason the EC won't change. You need an amendment to the Constitution which requires ratification by 3/4 of the states. Why would 3/4 of the states vote to give more power to NY, CA and TX? Not gunna happen.
Ian wrote:
3) Disinclination towards citizen involvement. There are Republicans in places like Massachusets and Maryland, and there are Democrats in places like Utah and Alabama. But how inclined are those minority citizens to become involved in a campaign (or even bother to vote) if their state's Electors are all but guaranteed to vote for the other party's guy? As a Democrat, I sure wouldn't want to knock on doors in Idaho. But if I were only thinking about the national vote instead of my state's Electors, I might actually have that conversation with my neighbor who's on the fence about a candidate.
It would actually make it LESS likely that citizens in Idaho or Utah or Alabama would be involved. They'd say - "shoot, it don't matter who we vote for, them lily-livered liberals in New York and Callyfornia is gonna elect a liberal anyhoo!" That's even the case now, except that the EC provides just that little nudge of electoral power toward states like Allybama, Utah an Idaho, etc. -- it gives the opportunity for fewer of those states to join together to match a bigger state.
Ian wrote:
The solution? Do away with the Electoral College! If Presidential candidates really do have to win over the national popular vote, they'll have to look beyond which states they can ignore and which states they can win, and concentrate on the people of the entire nation.
Actually, they'd know they need to win New York and California, or they've lost.
Ian wrote:
More people will become involved, more issues will be addressed in more areas, and it will be truer to the principles of democracy.
No no no - fewer issues will be addressed in fewer areas, because the Presidential candidates would have even less of a reason to care about Wyoming, North Dakota or Utah than they do now.