Posted on 08/23/2020 1:46:00 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
On September 18, 1969, the U.S. House... voted by an overwhelming 338 to 70 to send a constitutional amendment to the Senate that would have dismantled the Electoral College, the indirect system by which Americans elect the president and vice president...
The House vote, which came in the wake of an extraordinarily close presidential election, mirrored national sentiment about scrapping an electoral system that allowed a candidate to win the presidency even while losing the popular vote. A 1968 Gallup poll found that 80 percent of Americans believed it was time to elect the nation's highest office by direct popular vote... the Senate came five votes shy of breaking the filibuster...
Birch Bayh was a young Democractic senator from Indiana first elected to Congress in 1963... Bayh inherited what was thought of then as a "sleepy" assignment, says Wegman, chairmanship of the constitutional amendments subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
No one could have predicted what would happen next. Fifty-three days after Bayh took his post on the subcommittee, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Kennedy's shocking death raised important questions about what the Constitution says, or doesn't say, about presidential succession. Less than a month after the assassination, Bayh introduced a resolution to amend the Constitution to provide clear rules for who is in charge if the president and vice president are incapacitated or unable to do their jobs. Winning approval from the House and Senate, the 25th Amendment went into effect in 1967.
Bayh's skillful work garnering bipartisan support for the 25th Amendment caught the eye of President Lyndon Johnson, who tasked the young senator with addressing the Electoral College. Johnson didn't want to trash the system completely, just to outlaw the existence of so-called "faithless electors."
(Excerpt) Read more at history.com ...
True.
Nearly abolished? So a proposal passed both the House and the Senate and then was approved by 36 state legislatures???
This is idiocy. This requires ratification by 3/4 of the states. All it takes is for 13 states to decide that NY and California should not control the election of the President and it is dead.
I think it is a dead cinch cert that this would never pass.
They just keep pushing and pushing until they get what they want. Our folks don’t do that.
Mathematical proof of the merits of the Electoral College - “Math Against Tyranny”:
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/from-the-archive-math-against-tyranny
Yeah, if Germany hadn't lost WWII, it might have WON!!! /jk
“Definitely a misleading headline”
Yes.
That’s what I meant by sounds like a bunch of bs.
The EC was not “nearly abolished”.
I was a kid at the time, but I don’t recall this.
I cannot see enough “small” states approving this. But who knows?
The Dems want CA and NY to rule the world.
Nice, thanks!
you are wrong about california. the wasted votes from CA would be so much more useful for Democrats than the 55 electoral votes. we should be happy to yield the 55 EC votes, only that and nothing else.
In a few states like CA NY and IL Hillary ran up her vote margin so much that she got that multimillion vote margin in the popular vote. The strong Trump states were nowhere as close in running up their votes for Trump.
he was correct, it is 56 contests.
You are casting votes to elect pre-selected people who are running on slates of electors. In NE and ME each voter casts their vote for a slate of 1 elector to represent their district and also a slate of 2 electors to represent the state.
Here are the GGG topics, one for each amendment, that I posted as a series in 2009. BTW, this is for your edification and delight, so if you just want to snark about this or that amendment, please don't direct it at me, or better yet, just snark about it to yourself under your bare light bulb. And just FYI, the fly on your pajamas is hanging open.
Of course the House voted to end the Electoral College. The House is the branch of government that represents the people. And, of course the Senate killed the proposal. The Senate is the branch of government that represents the states. Our system, while awkward, nevertheless involves checks and balances.
Direct election with a 40 percent threshold to avoid a runoff is ridiculous. Most larger countries that directly elect their head of government have a 50 percent threshold. France, the example cited in the article, has a 50 percent threshold. It is not a valid sample.
Some countries that directly elect their head of government have a lower threshold provided the first place finisher has a big lead over the second place finisher. This is to avoid the expense and bother of another election when the result is obvious. For example, Bolivia avoids a run-off election if the first place finisher has at least 40 percent and is at least 10 points ahead of the second place finisher.
The thing is, there is no reason to worry about run-off elections anymore. You can have instant run-off. With this system, voters indicate all acceptable candidates in order of preference. If the first place finisher has less than 50 percent, check the “second preferences” of candidates that finished out of the money. This system works well in Ireland and Australia.
As to why the New York Times wants a 40 percent threshold, probably it’s because they still haven’t accepted the fact that Abraham Lincoln was elected with 39.8 percent of the vote, but a majority in the electoral college. Not only do they suffer Trump Derangement Syndrome, they also suffer Lincoln Derangement Syndrome.
It should be amended to A) get rid of electoral votes for non-states (specifically, DC), and while we're at it, B) term limits for both houses of Congress with straight limit and no grandfather clause. It would be huge-uh, because it would be an immediate way to clean house.
Thanks
Depends, if I have standing in front of me near the edge of a cliff, or an open elevator shaft...
Aliens?!!!
Democrats don't trust anything that isn't rigged.
“And then there were and are states that probably not ratify for the selfish reason that they don’t want the larger states deciding who will be President forever.”
I wouldn’t call it “selfish” for a state to not want to be entirely irrelevant when it comes to electing the nation’s next president.
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