How The Electoral College Works
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2012-10-02/how-electoral-college-works
The Electoral College was created by the Framers as a compromise to save the Constitution: America would elect its president indirectly, with individuals chosen by the states based on their representation in Congress. Most states now use a winner-take-all system that awards all electors to the winning candidate. Supporters of the Electoral College say it protects the rights of smaller and rural states. But critics argue the system is undemocratic and gives too much power to battleground states. And polls show a majority of Americans favor doing away with the Electoral College. Diane and guests discuss how America elects its president.
Guests
James Thurber
professor and director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University, and author of "Obama in Office: The First Two Years."
Jeffrey Rosen
professor of law at The George Washington University, and legal affairs editor for The New Republic.
Comments
Please familiarize yourself with our Code of Conduct and Terms of Use before posting your comments.
The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC).
Every vote, everywhere, would be politically relevant and equal in presidential elections. No more distorting and divisive red and blue state maps. There would no longer be a handful of 'battleground' states where voters and policies are more important than those of the voters in 80% of the states that now are just 'spectators' and ignored after the conventions.
When the bill is enacted by states possessing a majority of the electoral votes– enough electoral votes to elect a President (270 of 538), all the electoral votes from the enacting states would be awarded to the presidential candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and DC.
The bill uses the power given to each state by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution to change how they award their electoral votes for President. Historically, virtually all of the major changes in the method of electing the President, including ending the requirement that only men who owned substantial property could vote and 48 current state-by-state winner-take-all laws, have come about by state legislative action.
Americans believe that the candidate who receives the most votes should win.
The bill has passed 31 state legislative chambers in 21 states. The bill has been enacted by 9 jurisdictions possessing 132 electoral votes - 49% of the 270 necessary to go into effect.
NationalPopularVote
Follow National Popular Vote on Facebook via NationalPopularVoteInc
All of us would like to think we got a say in how things are done. But the extent of our say is with who we elect to Congress. Our Representatives are our voice; it's just too bad they've been hi-jacked by special interest and big money. Votes are bought and sold on Capital Hill; as I've yet to understand how a modestly paid Congressman or woman amasses fortunes, houses, boats, condos, etc. Now there's some tax returns I'd like to see posted every year! I really don't care what the process is for electing our "Leader" as long as he or she does a good job of representing the "American" people. Leaders should lead; not hide behind closed doors and hold secret meetings and push their own agendas. I still don't understand what business it was of the President's to push Health Care Reform. That shouldn't be his job! Perhaps if the Executive Office lost a little of it's power and became more of a "mascot" for our Country.
I have lived in different states that are each heavily Republican or Democrat and as an independent I have found the Electoral College to be very frustrating. I feel like if my vote isn't in the majority then it doesn't matter. States which are either die hard Red or Blue don't get the attention via in person visits or advertising that swing states get. It seems the whole presidential election is determined in just a hand full of states and even a hand full of districts in those states. I would support a popular vote system so that every vote will count from every state no matter the politics of state.
With National Popular Vote, big cities would not get all of candidates’ attention, much less control the outcome.
The population of the top five cities (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Philadelphia) is only 6% of the population of the United States and the population of the top 50 cities (going as far down as Arlington, TX) is only 15% of the population of the United States. Suburbs and exurbs often vote Republican.
If big cities controlled the outcome of elections, the governors and U.S. Senators would be Democratic in virtually every state with a significant city.
A nationwide presidential campaign, with every vote equal, would be run the way presidential candidates campaign to win the electoral votes of closely divided battleground states, such as Ohio and Florida, under the state-by-state winner-take-all methods. The big cities in those battleground states do not receive all the attention, much less control the outcome. Cleveland and Miami do not receive all the attention or control the outcome in Ohio and Florida.
The itineraries of presidential candidates in battleground states (and their allocation of other campaign resources in battleground states) reflect the political reality that every gubernatorial or senatorial candidate knows. When and where every vote is equal, a campaign must be run everywhere.
With National Popular Vote, when every vote is equal, everywhere, it makes sense for presidential candidates to try and elevate their votes where they are and aren't so well liked. But, under the state-by-state winner-take-all laws, it makes no sense for a Democrat to try and do that in Vermont or Wyoming, or for a Republican to try it in Wyoming or Vermont.
Even in California state-wide elections, candidates for governor or U.S. Senate don't campaign just in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and those places don't control the outcome (otherwise California wouldn't have recently had Republican governors Reagan, Dukemejian, Wilson, and Schwarzenegger). A vote in rural Alpine county is just an important as a vote in Los Angeles. If Los Angeles cannot control statewide elections in California, it can hardly control a nationwide election.
In fact, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland together cannot control a statewide election in California.
Similarly, Republicans dominate Texas politics without carrying big cities such as Dallas and Houston.
There are numerous other examples of Republicans who won races for governor and U.S. Senator in other states that have big cities (e.g., New York, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts) without ever carrying the big cities of their respective states.
Candidates would need to build a winning coalition across demographics. Candidates would have to appeal to a broad range of demographics, and perhaps even more so, because the election wouldn’t be capable of coming down to just one demographic, such as soccer mom voters in Ohio.
The idea that recounts will be likely and messy with National Popular Vote is distracting.
The 2000 presidential election was an artificial crisis created because of Bush's lead of 537 popular votes in Florida. Gore's nationwide lead was 537,179 popular votes (1,000 times larger). Given the miniscule number of votes that are changed by a typical statewide recount (averaging only 274 votes); no one would have requested a recount or disputed the results in 2000 if the national popular vote had controlled the outcome. Indeed, no one (except perhaps almanac writers and trivia buffs) would have cared that one of the candidates happened to have a 537-vote margin in Florida.
Recounts are far more likely in the current system of state-by-state winner-take-all methods.
The possibility of recounts should not even be a consideration in debating the merits of a national popular vote. No one has ever suggested that the possibility of a recount constitutes a valid reason why state governors or U.S. Senators, for example, should not be elected by a popular vote.
The question of recounts comes to mind in connection with presidential elections only because the current system so frequently creates artificial crises and unnecessary disputes.
We do and would vote state by state. Each state manages its own election and is prepared to conduct a recount.
The state-by-state winner-take-all system is not a firewall, but instead causes unnecessary fires.
Given that there is a recount only once in about 160 statewide elections, and given there is a presidential election once every four years, one would expect a recount about once in 640 years with the National Popular Vote. The actual probability of a close national election would be even less than that because recounts are less likely with larger pools of votes.
The average change in the margin of victory as a result of a statewide recount was a mere 296 votes in a 10-year study of 2,884 elections.
No recount would have been warranted in any of the nation’s 56 previous presidential elections if the outcome had been based on the nationwide count.
The common nationwide date for meeting of the Electoral College has been set by federal law as the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December. With both the current system and the National Popular Vote, all counting, recounting, and judicial proceedings must be conducted so as to reach a "final determination" prior to the meeting of the Electoral College.
With the current system of electing the President, no state requires that a presidential candidate receive anything more than the most popular votes in order to receive all of the state's electoral votes.
Not a single legislative bill has been introduced in any state legislature in recent decades (among the more than 100,000 bills that are introduced in every two-year period by the nation's 7,300 state legislators) proposing to change the existing universal practice of the states to award electoral votes to the candidate who receives a plurality (as opposed to absolute majority) of the votes (statewide or district-wide). There is no evidence of any public sentiment in favor of imposing such a requirement.
If an Electoral College type of arrangement were essential for avoiding a proliferation of candidates and people being elected with low percentages of the vote, we should see evidence of these conjectured apocalyptic outcomes in elections that do not employ such an arrangement. In elections in which the winner is the candidate receiving the most votes throughout the entire jurisdiction served by that office, historical evidence shows that there is no massive proliferation of third-party candidates and candidates do not win with small percentages. For example, in 905 elections for governor in the last 60 years, the winning candidate received more than 50% of the vote in over 91% of the elections. The winning candidate received more than 45% of the vote in 98% of the elections. The winning candidate received more than 40% of the vote in 99% of the elections. No winning candidate received less than 35% of the popular vote.
Since 1824 there have been 16 presidential elections in which a candidate was elected or reelected without gaining a majority of the popular vote.-- including Lincoln (1860), Wilson (1912, and 1916), Truman (1948), Kennedy (1960), Nixon (1968), and Clinton (1992 and 1996).
Americans do not view the absence of run-offs in the current system as a major problem. If, at some time in the future, the public demands run-offs, that change can be implemented at that time.
With the current system, it could only take winning a plurality of the popular vote in the 11 most populous states, containing 56% of the population of the United States, for a candidate to win the Presidency with a mere 26% of the nation's votes.
"IndieLady7 wrote:
The electoral college DEFINITELY needs to be done away with. It was designed to mainly cater to the elites AND, for any libertarians out there, it's NOT in the Constitution. We don't want to go against the Constitution, do we?
It is outdated and is not respresentative of each voice that is heard. Why is doing away with this is such a huge problem?
October 2, 2012 - 10:49 am"
I don't like it much either, but you need to remember that ours is a Republic, not a Democracy.
Ie. we, the People, don't vote on each issue or law, but elect representatives who will go to the Capital and speak for us in making the Laws.
Likewise, election of the President by the Electors.
To the Guy who wonders how to get rid of it- amend the Constitution, just like we made Vice President an elected office, Term Limits for the President etc. etc.
I wondered if the number of Electors is related to the number of Congressional Seats? Is there a correspondence between each Elector and a specific District?
Monte Haun mchaun@hotmail.com
Just modify it a bit.
Select the 435 electors representing Congressional seats by the popular vote of each congressional district.
Select the 100 electors representing Senate seats by the popular vote for the entire state.
This gives a closer representation of the popular vote while still mitigating some of its fallacies.
Additionally, voting times need to be synchronized across all polls. Or at least across the mainland. Remove the East Coast bias. I'm actually for a two day voting period over a weekend, preferably for the entire 48 hours. Give plenty of time for everyone, regardless of schedule, to vote and remove some influence of exit polling. And make the election federally funded. Sure, it's not cheap, but it should not be expensive either.
You're describing how Maine and Nebraska award their electoral votes.
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 have been only 55 "battleground" districts that were competitive in presidential elections. 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, 88% 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 without winning the national popular vote.
The U.S. Constitution specifically permits diversity of election laws among the states because it explicitly gives the states control over the conduct of presidential elections (article II). The Founding Fathers in the U.S. Constitution permit states to conduct elections in varied ways. The National Popular Vote compact is patterned directly after existing federal law and preserves state control of elections
Good show, but it would have been more appropriate to have one person on each side of the issue, rather than two advocates for the same position. There are always arguments for the status quo, whether you agree with them or not.
Thank you for doing this topic! As a resident of New York City, I feel completely disenfranchised.
The only topic I thought was neglected in today's excellent discussion was that the likely strongest proponents of the Electoral College are probably the two political parties. The way we have it now, they both get to put most of their resources into just a few places, trying really hard to move the percentages just a point or two. Without the winner-take-all Electoral College, the parties really would have to appeal to all of us - diluting the targeted money each can spend in a few places.
One thing that almost never fails to drive me nuts over what passes for public debate these days is how some people can be so blinded by their partisan or ideological positions that they don't realize what absolute nonsense they're spewing. A good case in point is the last caller on the show: Collin of Harrisburg, Pa. He starts out defending the Electoral College, but then offers a classic example of how it can go wrong!
Even allowing for his "defense" that it was all one party's fault that the system was corrupted and manipulated, that still ignores the fact that if there were no Electoral College system, it couldn't have been corrupted or manipulated!
I shall retire to Bedlam.
Ms. Rehm's introduction to the discussion compels me to make the following observations.
First, the 2000 election (determined by whom? the Electoral Dukes? cf. the Holy Roman Empire, and Voltaire's take on that, as a reality no less than a rhetorical construct) elicited the following (on my apartment wall --and the resident manager still likes me):
WAR IS PEACE
SLAVERY IS FREEDOM
CAPITALISM IS JUST
AMERICA IS A DEMOCRACY
--ORWELL, PARAPHRASED.
Second, only especially in reference to recent legal developments in Pennsylvania, here's why there are two major American parties. The Democratic party is, at least by contrast, THE Democrat-Ic (Thank you) Party. Precisely because the other one is NOT.
In Gallup polls since 1944, only about 20% of the public has supported the current system of awarding all of a state's electoral votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most votes in each separate state (with about 70% opposed and about 10% undecided). Support for a national popular vote is strong among Republicans, Democrats, and Independent voters, as well as every demographic group in virtually every state surveyed in recent polls in closely divided Battleground states: CO – 68%, FL – 78%, IA 75%, MI – 73%, MO – 70%, NH – 69%, NV – 72%, NM– 76%, NC – 74%, OH – 70%, PA – 78%, VA – 74%, and WI – 71%; in Small states (3 to 5 electoral votes): AK – 70%, DC – 76%, DE – 75%, ID – 77%, ME – 77%, MT – 72%, NE 74%, NH – 69%, NV – 72%, NM – 76%, OK – 81%, RI – 74%, SD – 71%, UT – 70%, VT – 75%, WV – 81%, and WY – 69%; in Southern and Border states: AR – 80%,, KY- 80%, MS – 77%, MO – 70%, NC – 74%, OK – 81%, SC – 71%, TN – 83%, VA – 74%, and WV – 81%; and in other states polled: AZ – 67%, CA – 70%, CT – 74%, MA – 73%, MN – 75%, NY – 79%, OR – 76%, and WA – 77%.
Most Americans don't care whether their presidential candidate wins or loses in their state. . . they care whether he/she wins the White House. Voters want to know, that even if they were on the losing side, their vote actually was directly and equally counted and mattered to their candidate. Most Americans think it's wrong for the candidate with the most popular votes to lose. We don't allow this in any other election in our representative republic.
NationalPopularVote