Posted on 12/29/2004 5:15:20 PM PST by CHARLITE
Amendment would provide for direct popular election
Dateline: December 27, 2004
Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California) has announced that she will introduce legislation to abolish the Electoral College system and provide for direct popular election of the President and Vice President when the Senate convenes for the 109th Congress in January.
“The Electoral College is an anachronism and the time has come to bring our democracy into the 21st Century,” Sen. Feinstein said in a press release. “During the founding years of the Republic, the Electoral College may have been a suitable system, but today it is flawed and amounts to national elections being decided in several battleground states.
“We need to have a serious, comprehensive debate on reforming the Electoral College.
"I will press for hearings in the Judiciary Committee on which I sit and ultimately a vote on the Senate floor, as occurred 25 years ago on this subject. My goal is simply to allow the popular will of the American people to be expressed every four years when we elect our President. Right now, that is not happening.”
In further denouncing the Electoral College system, Sen. Feinstein pointed out that under the current system for electing the President of the United States:
Candidates focus only on a handful of contested states and ignore the concerns of tens of millions of Americans living in other states.
A candidate can lose in 39 states, but still win the Presidency.
A candidate can lose the popular vote by more than 10 million votes, but still win the Presidency.
A candidate can win 20 million votes in the general election, but win zero electoral votes, as happened to Ross Perot in 1992.
In most states, the candidate who wins a state’s election, wins all of that state’s electoral votes, no matter the winning margin, which can disenfranchise those who supported the losing candidate.
A candidate can win a state’s vote, but an elector can refuse to represent the will of a majority of the voters in that state by voting arbitrarily for the losing candidate (this has reportedly happened 9 times since 1820).
Smaller states have a disproportionate advantage over larger states because of the two “constant” or “senatorial” electors assigned to each state.
A tie in the Electoral College is decided by a single vote from each state’s delegation in the House of Representatives, which would unfairly grant California’s 36 million residents equal status with Wyoming’s 500,000 residents.
In case of such a tie, House members are not bound to support the candidate who won their state’s election, which has the potential to further distort the will of the majority. “Sooner or later we will have a situation where there is a great disparity between the electoral vote winner and the popular vote winner. If the President and Vice President are elected by a direct popular vote of the American people, then every American’s vote will count the same regardless of whether they live in California, Maine, Ohio or Florida,” Sen. Feinstein said.
In the history of the country, there have been four instances of disputed elections where the President who was elected won the electoral vote, but lost the popular vote – John Quincy Adams in 1824, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, Benjamin Harrison in 1888 and George W. Bush in 2000. According to some estimates there have been at least 22 instances where a similar scenario could have occurred in close elections.
“Our system is not undemocratic, but it is imperfect, and we have the power to do something about it,” Sen. Feinstein said. “It is no small feat to amend the Constitution as it has only been done only 27 times in the history of our great nation.”
It is, by virtue of the 17the Amendment. It was supposed to be appointed by the individual state legislatures.
Or, do you mean that the Senate should be up to a national direct vote, where the nation as a whole chooses 100 Senators?
-PJ
Before I would support the idea, we need safeguards like a national non-partisan elections agency, a uniform national vote standard, a provision for a revote or run-off in a disputed election and a percentage high enough to elect a President while preserving our two party system. As you can see, its simply not enough to abolish the Electoral College. If Feinstein were serious, she'd put all this stuff in her proposed constitutional amendment. Personally, I think giving up the state by state nature of our presidential elections would alter the character of our federal union. My attitude on the subject has always been, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
I would actually prefer a reform to assign Electoral Votes not on a Winner Take All basis but on a District Win Formula basis. In other words, a state's electoral votes would be awarded to whomever won the congressional district in the state and the two bonus votes would go to the statewide popular vote winner. The formula would enfranchise voters who do not now see their candidate win in a state and it would make candidates pay attention even to states in which they don't campaign now since they have a chance to win at least one electoral vote in a state even where they can't win the statewide popular vote. (Very different from the current setup in which people's votes are wasted for a candidate who can't win ALL of the state's electoral votes). It would reduce voter apathy, increase turnout and create a disincentive for electoral fraud. All without the need for a constitutional amendment. State Legislatures would simply have to change the current WTA method to bring fairness and accountability to the Electoral College.
Sorry...I was getting at whether we should still have the Senate up for direct vote per the 17th Amendment. I would say that if they weren't up for election by the public and were selected by the state legislatures, then they would need to be limited in their tenure somehow. Just kicking that out there...and it's bedtime for me right now.
If every state adopted district elections, it would increase their power. You're going to have to have every state legislature adopt it to make it effective. The only reason the WTA method prevails is cause we're used to doing it that way and politicians from the majority party in the states want to keep minority party voters disenfranchised. That's why we should try this simple reform before we go to the drastic step of amending the Constitution to change something we've had for two centuries.
I'm all for repealing the 17th Amendment. I'd let the make-up of the state legislature be the tenure-limiting function. Let their choice of Senator be a factor when voting for state legislators.
-PJ
To make the Senate a more federal institution, I'd like to see Senators take orders directly from the state legislature that named them - like in the German Bundesrat. You know, give the states a real say in federal policy-making.
They both do seem to exist as if the other didn't, don't they?
-PJ
newzjunkey wrote:Liberals see this as a reason that federal spending on social programs and other extraconstitutional spending should be increased in California.
We get about 70 cents back on every dollar sent to the Feds while New Mexico, for example, gets over TWO DOLLARS back for each tax dollar. We can't get even a pittance of what we're rightfully owed for housing illegal immigrants and the Fed's inept border policy, needed for detaining them.
Conservatives see this as evidence that we should reduce federal spending and reduce federal taxes and get the federal government out of many programs for which there is no constitutional authority for the federal involvement that exists today. Sending money to Washington DC so a bunch of corrupt politicians can divvy it up to enhance their own power is stupid, not to mention inefficient. Much of the federal budget should never be routed through Washington in the first place. Most of it should be handled entirely by states and local governments. The entire Department of Education is one example.
I disagree. Of course they're in the same relative position in terms of ranking. But in terms of the influence they yield on the voting process the extra two votes do indeed give the smaller states more power. What you're not taking into account when you "remove" the 2 votes is that they are not evenly distributed by candidate. If candidate A wins 35 states and candidate B wins 15, that means candidate A has a 40-vote advantage that is not proportional to population.
I know what you mean, I live in one of the many red counties of California, so my vote didn't help Bush win. But I don't really mind since it means that the power of the highly corrupt left wing state government can have on the presidential election is limited to the population of the state in terms of a nationally uniform census process.
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