Posted on 10/18/2024 4:21:30 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Democrats, still hurting after two losses in which their candidates won the popular vote but not the Presidency, have been making noise about eliminating the Electoral College (EC). Recently Tim Walz came out in favor of eliminating the EC, but he was quickly cautioned to not say the quiet part out loud again.
Many believe this to be sour grapes, another ploy to obtain the real desire; a one-party Democrat nation. Short of actual takeover by a foreign nation, or a nuclear holocaust, there is nothing that would be more damaging to our nation.
There exists a constitutional alternative worth considering, one that would accomplish two things: First, decrease the likelihood of a President elected while not winning the popular vote. Second, maintaining the equalization of voice of individual states in the process.
Currently Maine and Nebraska do this by allocating their EVs based on the winning candidate in each congressional district. The overall winner of the popular vote, in that state, is awarded the two senatorial EVs.
The question that begs to be asked is: if this had been done in past elections, what would be the impact? The table below illustrates this.
[Table at link]
Looking at the above results two items are noteworthy:
- Only the outcome of one election would have changed: 2012 would have been a Romney victory, pyrrhic though it may have been.
- Second, in all cases (except 2016) the Republican would have increased his electoral vote count.
The second point warrants further consideration, as we need to know the cause. One could say that there could be no significance in that, however the consistency of Republican increase in EVs would negate that argument....
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
I doubt that many people here know that you, Michael.SF., are the author of the article.
One-Party Democrat Nation = Bogus Ballots
We’ve seen how that turns out in 2020
How do we fight Ranked Choice Voting?
Where would the Republican party get the needed representation without the Electoral College? Do we want a one party system? Already seen how those work & there is probably not enough room left on this planet to start over again.
Because they stuff the ballots in their blue cities. We don't have blue states, we have blue cities run by Democrat machines that control the states through ballot box stuffing. That's why they are so concerned about the popular vote... they can inflate that by stuffing ballot boxes in NYC, Chicago, LA, San Francisco, Oakland, Sacramento, Philadelphia, Seattle, Portland, Denver, Atlanta, Austin, Phoenix, Milwaukee, Detroit, DC, and Miami.
Thank our Founding Fathers and God above for the Electoral College!
"When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe."
-- Thomas Jefferson
Neither the Founders nor the Framers of the U.S. Constitution dictated that a state's Electors should be appointed on the basis of state-wide "winner take all." Rather, how that was to be done was to be left to the discretion of each state's legislature:
"Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or person holding an office of trust or profit under the United States, shall be appointed an elector."
U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section 1.
The winner-take-all approach didn't become the universally accepted method of "appointing" Electors until the election of 1836 (although, even then, South Carolina had gone its own way).
Which is to say, there is nothing constitutionally sacrosanct about the winner-take-all approach. Rather, it was something states eventually settled upon for various pragmatic political reasons.
“Pennsylvania was considering doing this some years back. It would have meant that the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh regions going democrat and the rest of PA going republican.”
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As a lifelong PA resident, I was, and still am so PO’d the PA wasn’t brave enough at the time to do this proportional district based system!!
Republicans had the Gov, Senate, and House, yet they wouldn’t do it-—IDIOTS!!!
So does Alaska.
For the same reason.
You are right on that note. But, that is not as important as getting the messages out and having as many people as possible read my pieces.
Thanks again for posting it.
My thought on RCV is that it will die a slow death. People will see it is complex, their votes are being cancelled out, and people who would not otherwise be elected are getting in.
It is a horrible idea, one only a Democrat would like.
Congress representatives win by Congressional districts but it was never considered appropriate that Presidents be elected by Congressional districts; Main and Nebraska have it wrong and their method should be undone and others not follow it.
I’d like each county to get one vote for the EC.
All of those very red maps of the USA with much smaller blue islands on each coast and around the Great Lakes are an indication that, if counted by county, we would never have a Democrat president.
While one ev per congressional district is constitutional, one per county would not be, as counties are not proportionally equal.
I’ve been arguing for this for years.
The ‘point of sale’ for this method of electing our Presidents is that it enfranchises lots of voters whose votes would be otherwise ignored. Republicans in Massachusetts, New York, Illinois and California have essentially no voice in the outcome of national elections. Similarly, Democrat votes in Alabama, Wyoming, Montana and Mississippi are essentially meaningless when it comes to national elections. The scenario proposed by the author resolves that imbalance. The conclusion of the article is also correct: to work, ALL the states must agree to use the Congressional District method to determine the winners in elections.
Just my 2 cents ...
Except the founder said the legislatures could select and divvy up electors however they wanted.
Really all this system does is tie the electors to how the number gotten in the first place. Perfectly sensible. The only real problem is with the amount of gerrymandering that goes on most of the EC would be “permanently assigned”. But that’s a problem with the 2 party system we were never supposed to have.
With DC, Its 51
It makes some of the electoral votes be subject to House district gerrymandering as well.
PA didn’t go to proportional elector allocation because the media would have lost huge amounts of ad revenue, and would have been out for blood on the legislators.
Currently, PA is a swing state, and gets lots of ads at election time. With proportional allocation, Philadelphia would always go Dem, the rural part of PA always Republican, and there would be no point in spending on ads to change it.
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