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National

Federalist No. 68

Due to the number of people in recent years who have called for the abolition of the electoral college I was very interested in what Hamilton would say on the subject in Federalist No. 68. Imagine my surprise then when that paper opened with this:

THE mode of appointment of the Chief Magistrate of the United States is almost the only part of the system, of any consequence, which has escaped without severe censure, or which has received the slightest mark of approbation from its opponents. The most plausible of these, who has appeared in print, has even deigned to admit that the election of the President is pretty well guarded.

Even the opponents of the Constitution in 1788 felt that the electoral college system was praiseworthy. Of course, the electoral college today does not operate as the founders envisioned it back then. They planned a system where the people would choose members of the college to represent them in selecting the best person to become our president (and vice-president). Today the average citizen does not know the name of a single member representing them in the electoral college – we vote for a President and electors who have pledged to vote for the people’s choice (usually on a winner-take-all basis within each state) are assigned to officially cast the votes in the electoral college. no longer do the members of the electoral college deliberate on which presidential candidate will be the best for the nation – they simply vote blindly for the choice of the people if the people choose the same person they have pledged to vote for. In other words, we have already gutted the electoral college system and turned that element of our republic into a democracy while maintaining the weighted balancing between states that the founders sought.

Here is a description of what we have gutted from the process:

The choice of SEVERAL, to form an intermediate body of electors, will be much less apt to convulse the community with any extraordinary or violent movements, than the choice of ONE who was himself to be the final object of the public wishes. And as the electors, chosen in each State, are to assemble and vote in the State in which they are chosen, this detached and divided situation will expose them much less to heats and ferments, which might be communicated from them to the people, than if they were all to be convened at one time, in one place.

Perhaps instead of calling for the abolition of the electoral college we should be calling for the reinstatement of the electoral college.

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National State

Pursue a Real Solution

I have been staunchly opposed to this expansion of the House of Representatives to grant D.C. a voting representative. The political compromise of giving a balancing seat to the Republicans (for Utah) until the next census doesn’t make the move any more legal. Despite what some people may believe I am not opposed to D.C. having a voting representative, but I am opposed to giving D.C. special treatment. As the House of Representatives was intended to represent the people of the United States it would make sense to amend the Constitution to state that:

The House of Representatives shall be composed of members chosen every second year by the people of the several states, districts, and territories of the United States. (changes in bold)

To that ammendment I would add (perhaps as a separate section) the stipulation that:

The size of the House of Representatives shall be determined by the decennial census and the number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand nor fall below one for every two hundred thousand, but each state shall have at least one Representative; (changes in bold)

Such an amendment would provide a legal remedy to the non-voting status of D.C. but would also fix the same issue faces by other U.S. territories. At the same time it would reverse the arbitrary limit on the size of the House of Representatives that was enacted in 1911. This would all be done without resorting to political deal-making in which the deal makers (like our beloved Senator Hatch) feel free to ignore the law of the land in the name of whatever they deem as good.

I have already talked about Thirty-Thousand.org but I was surprised to learn of other groups that oppose Public Law 62-5 (as that bill is known). There was even a good article about it in the Daily Kos back in 2006 (which is where I picked the upper bound at 200,000). Back then the Republicans were in control of both houses of Congress, now that Democrats are in control I doubt that the Daily Kos would be very supportive of such a change since it’s their party that is holding the concentrated reins of power now.

I would like to see all those who are interested in returning to population based representation start working with DC Vote to encourage them to push for a full and legal solution to their issue rather than sadling us with the illegal, “politically expedient” half measure they have been pursuing. Perhaps reminding them that they would be able to get three or four voting members of Congress might pursuade them to take up the banner.

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National

Expand Congress

I was very excited to be introduced to Thirty-Thousand.org. The first introduction on the site states an obvious fact:

435 can not faithfully represent 300,000,000 Americans.

Our constitution designed the House of Representatives to represent the people of the United States (while the senate was meant to represent the states as soverign powers within the union). The number of representatives was intended to expand or contract with the population. In 1913 the Congress capped the number of Representatives at 435 which would be apportioned according to the relative population of the states. This is what causes situations where Utah and North Carolina are essentially competing with each other for a representative (which is what happened in 2000). The result is that representatives can never be truly equal among states. For example, California has 18 times as many representatives in Congress as Utah, but they only have 15 times the population of Utah.

When the Constitution was being constructed the founders settled on 30,000 as the minimum number of people that each district should have (hence the name of the site). Considering the advances in communication I believe that a representative could possibly be expected to represent more than 30,000 people so I would be open to choosing a new number for our modern congressional districts, but I am confident that the number should only be a small fraction of the 700,000 that the average congressional district contains now. The result of returning to the original practice would be that each state would receive the number of representatives that their population warranted without issues of deciding which state was more deserving of "that last seat"

The more I have thought about this the more I realize that it could also address two other issues that I care about. Those who would like to see the electoral college abolished should try expanding the electoral college by expanding the house of representatives. This would increase the chances of the electoral college reflecting the outcome of the popular vote – especially if the states were to discontinue block voting in the electoral college. Also, if the representatives were apportioned not simply according to populate but according to voting population it would provide incentive for people to take their voting seriously since voting in low numbers could lower the number of representatives that would be sent from low voting areas for ten years (I’m assuming that apportionment of representatives would still be based on the decennial census).

We should return to a system where the number of representatives is based on the population of the state and not on the relative population of the state compared to the population of other states. This would bring us closer in line with the constitution in a very important way and has the potential of other very positive side effects.

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National

Rethinking the Electoral College

I have long been a staunch supporter of keeping the electoral college despite the weaknesses I see in having most states take a winner-take-all approach to their electoral college votes. The calls to abolish the current system in favor of a national popular vote have been growing for as long as I have been interested in politics. Today I started to wonder if we could honor the purpose of the Electoral college while using the support for a popular vote to institute reforms for the weaknesses that have grown in the current system.

The idea that I had in mind would be comparable to the way the BCS chooses a national champion for college football. (Stick with me here, I know the BCS is unpopular.) Consider our current system to be like the pre-BCS method of choosing a champion based on who the polls ranked as #1 at the end of the season. With the BCS, those polls become only part of a broader equation without resorting to a playoff (the equivalent of a national popular vote in my analogy).

My idea would be to implement a national popular vote where every vote counts equally and where the results weigh in as 82% of the final choice. Each state then has two representatives in the reduced electoral college with the electoral college votes accounting for the remaining 18% of the final tally. The reason for the 82% weight for the popular vote is because that represents 441members of the current 541 member electoral college which are supposed to be comparable to the representation in the House of Representatives. The states are represented as sovereign entities with the remaining 100 votes with the ability to apportion those votes as they see fit – winner-take-all or with a representative split (such as one vote for each candidate with more than 40% of the vote or both votes if one candidate exceeds 60% of the popular vote in the state).

The 18% weight from the reduced Electoral College would decide close elections, but it would do so in a way that would virtually eliminate any value in selective recounts for disputed elections. Recounts would not materially affect the 82% weight of the popular vote and would only be able to swing up to one vote of the remaining 18%.

I have not had time to consider all the nuances of this idea but I would love to hear what others thing of such a plan.

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National

Original Intent

While I fully agree that the Electoral College was not an arbitrary decision and should not be abolished, I also think that we need to articulate the arguments in favor of the Electoral College better than simply stating:

Our Forefathers specifically wanted the STATES to elect the President and Vice President, not the general public.

That argument is about as compelling as the argument often used by those who want to abolish the Electoral College that we have the means to count every vote today (as if addition had not been invented back in 1789). Our Founding Fathers did want the states to elect the President and Vice President, but they also wanted the states to elect Senators. We passed the 17th Amendment to change that for Senators so reading history books may tell us that the Electoral College was a conscious choice by the founders, but those same history books also remind us that we have ignored the founders in the past and we could do so again in the 28th Amendment.

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National

Cracking the Blocks

Thanks to electoral-vote.com I discovered the efforts of Colorado Democrats who hope not to be disenfranchised in the presidential election this year as reported in the Rocky Mountain News at the beginning of August.

This is exactly in line with what I was advocating in response to the New York Times editorial about abolishing the electoral college. Right now there are too many states taken for granted in every election but if we put the vote of every elector in play to some degree we will have a much more democratic system as it was designed to be. I suggest that the voiceless Republicans in California and New York try to get similar measures on their ballots for November.

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National

Right Data – Wrong Conclusion

When the New York Times publishes an editorial I always read carefully. I do not agree with some of their columnists, but I have never disagreed outright with the columns of their editorial board – until they said that we should Abolish the Electoral College. I fully agree that “the Electoral College makes Republicans in New York, and Democrats in Utah, superfluous. It also makes members of the majority party in those states feel less than crucial.” But I cannot agree that “The small states are already significantly overrepresented in the Senate.”

The apparent disparity built into the electoral college by the founding fathers was not an accident based on a desire to not have to count each individual vote nationally back when it was more difficult to count each vote. The fact is that even back then every state had to get a tally of each vote within the state to choose the electors and even today it would only take a couple of minutes with a paper and pencil to add the numbers certified by each of the fifty states.

Let’s think about the effect that abolishing the Electoral College would have on national campaigns to remind ourselves why it was invented in the first place. We have seventeen states in play during this election. Without the Electoral College a solid majority in the ten largest states would allow a person to get elected so long as they did not lose by large margins in the other forty states. Not only that but since the concerns of voters break more along regional lines than strictly along state lines the campaigning would actually take place in two or three regions that comprise a solid majority of voters. That is not any better than the current situation. It actually sounds like the situation with the South when Lincoln was elected in 1860. It would mean that we would always know which ten or fifteen states all the campaigning would take place in well ahead of time. If you live in one of those largest of states it makes perfect sense to call for the abolishment of the Electoral College where the politicians will pander to your wishes perpetually.

As for the smaller states being over-represented in the Senate, that fact is balanced by their underrepresentation in the house where agreement of the ten largest states can override the interests of the other forty states and all the other representatives in the House. These “smaller” states tend to be among the largest states with regard to land and resources for the nation. In these under-populated states the federal government often controls huge amounts of the land which means that they must have adequate representation lest their rights be trampled by states with higher populations and far different concerns.

It is presumptuous to say “it’s a ridiculous setup” without allowing the system to function as it was designed – which it does not do currently. We must eliminate block voting by all the states which, unlike the Electoral College, is not established by the US Constitution if we are to see how the Electoral College was meant to work. Until we have tried the more representative version of the Electoral College that the founding fathers envisioned we cannot accurately say that it is fundamentally flawed.

It would probably be useful for me to note here that Maine and Nebraska do not practice block voting. In Colorado the Democrats are trying to put a referrendum on the November ballot to stop block voting there as well. I know that in these states the votes corresponding to their representatives are divided proportional to the vote and the votes corresponding to their senators are blocked for whoever carries the state. That is one example of how to not vote as a block. I am sure that there are more options than how these two states do it or straight block voting.

It is possible that we could still find that the Electoral College does not work and that we need to change the system but we should try to fix the problem without altering the constitution before we jump into yet another ill-conceived constitutional amendment debate.