the Devil's Own

This bigoted snippet is particularly silly.

Agemegos

Have you considered a single countrywide election with everybody's votes treated the same, and using preferential voting (instant run-off)?

Alter

There are some huge advantages to the Electoral College. One of the biggest is that you can ignore fringe areas of the country, meaning you can ignore fringe moral sets in the country.

By this, I mean that there is no point wasting time campaigning in New York, Massachusetts, Utah, or Oklahoma. We know which way those states will go. Candidates don't pander to the values of New England, or the West Coast, or the South, or the Western Range.

You spend most of your time in the Heartland, the Midwest. These are the states that matter, and they're not called the Heartland for nothing. They do represent the heart of the US, the basic moral fiber that sews together the Northeast with the South, the Pacific Coast with the Wide Open West.

In the Midwest, we elect a lot more moderates and a lot less fringe. We *pick* presidents, but we don't grow them anymore. (Go back: Texas, Arkansas, Massachusetts/Texas, California, Georgia, (Michigan-was a veep), California, (Texas-was a veep), Massachusetts...) The big ideologues come from the fringe states, and either follow their values or backlash against them. But the voters they have to win are in PA, OH, MI, WI, MN, IA, MO (and Florida, where we go to retire).

B_Sharp

It is just psychology. Concentrated city folks have rigid, in your face, boundaries. This is unnatural and abnormal.

Nice place to visit but ...

Man was not meant to live in a sardine can.

the Devil's Own

Perhaps, but if you read the post, you'd have noticed that the reference was to the state of NY, and not the city of Manhattan.
:wave:

J-D

And yet, lots of other countries (indeed, all of them) have different electoral systems from the USA, and seem to manage somehow ...

2sense

Begging your pardon, as someone who has studied both the constitutional convention and the "Electoral College" at length I hope you don't mind if I make a few clarifications about this paragraph.

First off, while the records from the federal convention are sparse and unreliable it seems likely that there wasn't anyone who favored a direct popular vote for president. Certainly some claimed to do so but no one argued consistently for such a system. Wilson, who first brought the matter up, did so in an extremely unconvincing manner and returned the next day with a plan for electors. Madison twice records himself ostensibly arguing in favor of a popular vote by telling Southerners that all they would need to do to counter the extra electoral power the North would gain from European immigrants is to enfranchise their slaves.

Because of this it seems to me that people like Wilson, Madison, and Gouverneur Morris were trying to give the impression that it was a choice between selection directly by the people or selection by Congress to position selection by electors as a compromise. Despite such spin the real choice was between Congress and the electors and they wanted electors. The problems with a direct popular vote were those Styrofoam has already mentioned. No one is recorded as arguing they were surmountable.

It was the electors of a state that supporters of congressional selection argued would always choose a favorite son. To address this objection each elector was given 2 votes for President, one of which had to be given to someone from outside that state. That system was modified by the 12th Amendment into seperate ballots for President and VP ( one of which still has to be cast for someone from outside the state, which is why Dick Cheney "moved" so that Texas electors could pick both himself and Mr Bush. ) The objection to congressional selection was not that it would deny the general populace the right to choose the president ( so far as we know no one even asserted such a right existed or should exist ) but rather that it would upset the balance of power. If the Congress choose the President it was thought that he ( the idea of a female president was, of course, not discussed ) wouldn't be independent unless he was forbidden to serve more than one term. Term limits were unpopular at the constitutional convention ( too democratic ) plus George Washington was sitting right there and it would take a lot of chutzpa to limit his time in office.
The Constitution does not require that voters select the electors. The manner of selecting electors is left up to the states. The states may, and all do, decide to allow voters to pick the electors but they don't have to. For decades South Carolina simply had their state legislature pick their electors. They never held a popular vote until after the Civil War. Today 48 states ( plus the federal district ) do have voters pick from a party slate ( the General Ticket System ) but Nebraska and Maine do not. They use a District System where one elector is elected in each congressional district and the remaining 2 are elected by the statewide vote.
My objections to this plan are those already mentioned by Haener . I see no compelling reason to give states a vote when that necessitates making individual votes unequal. I don't believe the President should represent some Americans more than others. Still, I can agree that your plan would be better than the mess we have now.
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While the battleground states certainly do get the lion's share of attention from the campaigns I'm not sure what you say is accurate. Under the current system the less populous states ( or more accurately the plurality of voters within each ) do benefit greatly because they are overrepresented. Sure since the plurality opinion in so many of them isn't in doubt they don't get extra attention but they still have extra electoral weight to give to their preferred candidate. Under a popular vote those of the plurality opinion would not only not get the extra electoral power to start with but they would also lose the ability to assign the electoral power of those with minority opinions to their preferred candidate. ( Sheesh that was awkward! There must be a way to say that more simply. )
Again, I don't believe this is true. If we had had a single electoral system for any length of time we would have already worked out the bugs through litigation and other means. The balkanized and byzantine system we have now prevents comprehensive solutions. Problems that crop up in one state aren't addressed in others or even, necessarily, within that state itself. If problems always affected everyone then they would always be everyone's problem. More eyes looking for potential foul ups; less places to look.

I also don't understand the fear of recounts. Why not accurately count every vote in every election?
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Why? Do you believe popularly elected electors should decide for the rest of us?
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This is the very proposal JOEBIALEK offered in the opening post. And as has been alluded to, it still violates the one-man-one vote principle.
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Every poll I have seen on the subject, from last year all the way back to 1950, invariably show a majority of Americans in favor of abolishing the "electoral college". Trying to claim this feeling is nothing more than sour grapes just won't wash.

Nor could "the 2 leftists big cities of New York and Los Angeles" elect the president if we had a direct popular vote. Between them they have around 12 million residents or less than five percent of the total American population.
This won't wash either. A direct popular vote doesn't take political power from states and give it to the central government. Instead it puts it directly in the hands of the citizenry. It is the proponents of the "electoral college" who condone dictating to people how their electoral power will be assigned. Under a direct election each individual voter would be free to combine their votes with others throughout the nation to create a majority. The current system denies us this freedom.
A popular vote is a vote of people. That's what "popular" means. Under a direct election no state would be able to dictate anything because a state isn't a person and so wouldn't have a vote.
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I have and there are problems with the various IRV methods rooted in the complex math. Basically they only remove the incentive to vote strategically when the smaller parties remain small. Once alternative candidates have enough popularity to have a chance against the Big 2 then it again becomes possible for a vote for an alternative candidate ( in this case ranking one or more first ) to spoil the election for the major candidate the voter prefers.
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I fail to see why ignoring voters should be considered an advantage in an electoral system. If the government is going to decide beforehand which viewpoints are worthy of being represented then why bother holding an election at all? This is the post B_Sharp's anti-tyranny rant should be directed against.
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Just my 2sense

Tsurmon

Just think about how expensive it would be to campaign if we got rid of the electoral college. Imagine, having to run a republican ad in New York? Or a democratic ad in Texas? Insane!

With the electoral college, we have the heavy campaining narrowed down to a handful of states. It also helps discourage people from voting. Not to mention it gives power to both major parties and takes away power from all third parties.

No politician is going to vote to give himself less power.

2sense

Someone making this argument 2 decades ago might have said, "Why, it might take 100 million dollars to run such a campaign!" Today, of course, each campaign spends double that and there is the money spent by outside groups as well. Campaigns doesn't raise a certain amount and stop, they get as much money as they can because they know the other side will do the same. A national ad campaign could be run for less than $200 million. And the price tag could be lowered with some reform of our campaign finance system.

I don't see discouraging Americans from engaging in their duty to vote as a good thing. Quite the contrary.

And it isn't the entire structure of the "electoral college" that discourages minor parties but merely that electors are chosen in plurality elections. A nationwide popular vote would discourage third parties just as well so long as it also was a plurality election. Better even since it would weed out candidates with strong local or regional support that now can gain pluralities and thus electoral votes in certain states such as George Wallace in 1968.

It's not the parties themselves that would necessarily lose power... it's the powerbrokers at the state level. They would no longer be able to leverage their influence to gain the entire electoral power of the state. They could only offer those votes they can directly influence. So they would be reluctant to change things but political pressure can be brought to bear. Politicians can be convinced to give up part of their power... if the option is to lose it all.



Just my 2sense