Wednesday - October 22, 2008

SSDD Part 2

Yeah, get rid of the Electoral College. Because it’s too complicated for us stupid Americans to understand. Because it’s OLD therefore no good. And most especially, because it would remove the quarantine around Chicago style ballot box stuffing, allowing that corrupt practice to have impacts beyond the Illinois border.

Ooh, looky, several of the stupider lefty states have this new idea, one that totally ignores how their citizens voted but allows them all to climb up on the Winner’s Bus. And isn’t that more important in the long run? Good looks and popularity; that’s all that really matters, right?

Is it time to scrap the Electoral College?
Is the Electoral College, America’s quirky system of choosing its presidents, on its way to extinction? Americans do not vote directly for president. They vote for slates of electors in each state.
...
All but two states (Maine and Nebraska) use the winner-take-all system. This means that the candidate who gets the most popular votes in a state gets all of its electoral votes.
...
The system is a relic of the early days of the republic when electors were supposed to be independent agents exercising their judgment in choosing a presidential candidate from a list of several contenders.

Today, electors are party loyalists who almost always vote for their party’s nominee.

Scrapping the electoral vote system would likely require a constitutional amendment since the Constitution itself created the electoral system (Article II, section 1).

But a group called National Popular Vote says it has found another way.

So far, it has persuaded four Democratic-controlled legislatures (in Maryland, Illinois, Hawaii, and New Jersey) to pass a law which commits those states to give their electoral votes to whomever wins the national popular vote.  The accord takes effect once states with a combined 270 electoral votes agree to it.The states would pledge to award their electoral votes to the popular vote winner even if he or she had not been the majority choice in their state.

Take Maryland as an example. Say 80 percent of voters in that state cast their ballots for the Democratic presidential candidate. But if a Republican candidate wins the national popular vote, under the state law, Maryland’s 10 electoral votes would go to that candidate.

And now we get down to the brass tacks ... the part where the MSM’s agenda comes bubbling up, like the more rancid floaters down at the waste treatment plant:

A margin of one-half of one percent
The difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush in 2000 was 540,000 votes out of more than 105 million total votes cast, a victory margin of only one-half of one percent.  With such a slim margin, there’d be every incentive for both the loser and winner to seek recounts so as to get more votes in the states that each one won by a large margin. Another 50,000 votes for Bush in Utah, Georgia and Texas, for example, could have helped him erase the tiny popular vote edge that Gore had.

At the MIT conference, Yale University law professor Akhil Amar dismissed the dire nationwide recount scenario as an exaggerated fear.

Not even the most populous states pick their governors through an Electoral College system, Amar pointed out. If the popular vote is good enough to elect a governor in a state of 8.5 million voters, such as California, then it would work in a national electorate of 120 million voters.

If the States wish to do things their own way, that is their right. And that a system works at a small scale does not imply or prove that it works at a large scale. What if the states adopted an Electoral system based on land area? New York is utterly dominated by New York City - half or more of the population lives there, and another fifth within a 10 mile radius. Yet NYC isn’t 1/2 of 1% of the land area. Why not X Electoral Votes per square mile, which would utterly shift the power to the rural areas? What if some state decided on some other allocation system? Who cares? At the national level we use the Electoral College specifically to limit the power of states with large urban populations. It’s already weighted plenty in favor of population anyway: each state gets one Electoral Vote for each Representative they have, and the Reps are doled out based on population.

Amar said a direct national election would create healthy incentives for states to compete with each other in getting more of their people to vote — for example by allowing voter registration on Election Day and by mandating that Election Day be a day off, with pay, for all workers.

Dream on lefties. The Founding Fathers were smarter than you, and they knew what you’d try to do, 200 years before you were ever born. And that’s why they put this system in place. It’s only too bad that it doesn’t absolutely specify Winner Take All at the state level, because I think that the two states that went and did apportionment ought to be flogged. We stick with the system until we all decide together to change it.

Learn more about the Electoral College here and also here.

Posted by Drew458     on 10/22/2008 at 02:52 PM   
Filed Under: • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat Leftists • Media-Bias •  
• Comments (2) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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