FEINSTEIN WILL MOVE TO ABOLISH ELECTORAL COLLEGE - (They'll never give in or give UP!)

USGOV.INFO.COM ^ | DECEMBER 27, 2004 | ROBERT LONGLEY

[William Tell]

Ready4Freddy said: "The Framers didn't expect slates of electors to be beholden to political parties - they wanted the electors to be able to vote for whomever they wanted. "

I'm sure that they didn't ignore the fact that electors would be elected based on which candidate the electors favored. Being beholden to political parties is just a consequence of needing to win in order to rule. The solution to this problem was to limit the power of government. Our Founders did that. Treasonous Supreme Courts have defeated it.

[Dat Mon]

Understand.

One interesting debate is whether the feds should mandate that universal standards be applied to vote counting / tabulation in federal elections. This would be done to try to eliminate the BS we have seen in the local election recount in King County, and in the Florida election debacle in 2000.

Of course, this then involves a fundamental infringement of states rights, in how each state chooses to conduct its elections.

Its an interesting topic for debate IMHO.

[woodb01]

Feinstein is a Crazy lunatic. SOMEONE in California has got to be able to run this crazy nut out of office...

Visit the ANTI-DNC Web Portal at --->
http://www.noDNC.com

Radical new changes coming in a few weeks!!

[Thoro]

EC votes are determined by population. Again, I come back to the point that Bush won the popular vote by several million. Why, in this day and age, should we defer to the EC on this issue? A few hundred thousand votes the other way in Ohio and Kerry would have won -- notwithstanding the popular vote in favor of Bush.

You missed the point. I doublechecked my assumption, did some research, and believe I'm right about how the number of electoral votes each state has is determined. Representatives are determined by population, however, Senators are not. So in essence, regardless of your population, you only get two electoral votes for your senate representation, whether you're Alaska or New York. It's the equalizer clause that the founding fathers intended.

Getting rid of the electoral college would primarily be like subtracting two electoral votes from your state's influence in presidential elections.

[Always A Marine]

It will never happen. There are too many small states whose representation in the Electoral College is larger in proportion to their population. Voting for this amendment would reduce their citizen's voting power. Why would they do that? Since an amendment needs 38 states to pass, it's just not going to happen.

BINGO! The purpose of the Electoral College -- and the Senate -- is to protect minority rights by giving smaller states a greater vote than their strict proportional shares of the population would warrant. In 1770, the five largest colonies (VA, PA, MA, NC, MD) comprised 63% of the total colonial population. The eight smaller colonies rightly feared domination by the larger few until the Senate and the Electoral College were devised to protect their minority interests. Today, the imbalance is even greater -- in 2000, only 15 of the largest states comprise 65% of the total U.S. population!

Fortunately, the 70% of the states which hold only 35% of the popular votes are not about to surrender their powers under the Constitution.

[mcg1969]

The Framers didn't expect slates of electors to be beholden to political parties - they wanted the electors to be able to vote for whomever they wanted.

Now how do you know that? The Founders made sure the states could select the electors in any manner they chose. In fact, we didn't even have direct election of electors until the 1800s. And I'm sure it didn't take long for states to figure out that to maximize their influence on the election, they should assign all their electors to a single candidate.

[lonestar]

I don't see why they waste their time.

They don't have any GOOD ideas. All they care about is the Dem party.

[Arkinsaw]

No, actually they'd love it. Why? Because a few densely populated cities on both coasts will rule the nation forever more. Those cities are all that's left of the Left/Dem power base.

You are right, but like them, you are looking only at the surface. What will happen is that the cities will elect the President and it will encourage both parties to put forward their most liberal candidate.

For awhile, city liberalism will reign supreme. But the people in flyover country will seek to balance it, and stop the liberal onslaught, in the only way they can....by driving the liberals out of power where they DO have control.

I suspect you would see that the divisions we see now would be nothing. Right now, we see some conservative Democrats elected in rural areas, and some liberal Republicans elected in high density areas. I think that would cease. I think the Democratic Party would effectively cease to exist in the red states and the Republican Party would cease to exist in blue areas.

I think the Senate would go Republican in a huge way. Even if they kill the electoral college, people in the red would figure out that they could control things somewhat by controlling the Senate and presenting a united face (sort of like the South did pre-Civil War).

Then you would see the rise of sectionalism again in our legislative bodies and the red section feeling that they were screwed every time in the Presidential arena and the blues feeling they were being screwed out of their utopia in the Senate. A house divided against itself and all that....

I think, even Democrats, in the long run would regret eliminating the electoral college since it would finally completely push them out of the rest of the country and into enclaves in the cities. Its a sure way that they can enshrine their party as nothing but a party of the city.

They are of course too power hungry and dumb to realize this right now.

[Political Junkie Too]

Sen. Feinstein announces that Democrats no longer respect the concept of States.

In a way, I see this as a Separation of Powers issue. On the one hand, the Electoral College is the State representation of the Executive Branch. On the other hand, the Senate is the State representation in the Legislative Branch. The Congress already threw away its own State representation with the passing of the 17th amendment. Now the Congress wants to take away the States' representation in the Executive Branch, too?

Someone should argue that the Legislation is tampering with the Executive Branch, which is a Separation of Powers issue.

-PJ

[Studebaker Hawk]

HEY Pistol Packin' Mama!

You can take your "democracy" and put where the sun don't shine!

[newzjunkey]

If she really wanted to do something she could work inside California to have us moved to a proportional electoral vote. That is, if she was really concerned about disenfranchising those who vote for the loser and candidates ignoring a state as large as CA because it's seen as a given.

But this idea of hers cannot stand... it would increase the likely event of endless court battles. How could you recount only state-by-state? We'd have to have recounts in every state to ensure there aren't another half million votes out there... And since those "faithless electors" are picked because of their party loyalty who's fault is it that a few voted for someone else?

[Thoro]

I have an easy resolution to our problems pertaining to demoRats. 1: Load all demoRats onto a huge ship, preferably one you don't mind losing.

I propose the Douglas Adams approach. ;) We build two giant spaceships and tell the liberals that a giant space goat is about to consume the earth and they need to board the first spaceship to escape, and we'll board the second one after they've left. Let them blast off, and we stay here.

I'm going to go clean my phone now. /obscure Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference off

[Alberta's Child]

". . . today it is flawed and amounts to national elections being decided in several battleground states."

Ms. Feinstein doesn't even understand how a presidential election works. A presidential election is not a "national election" at all . . . it is a weighted combination of 50 individual state elections (plus the District of Columbia).

What I find most amusing about her complaint about the Electoral College system is that she has obviously realized the paradox in which she finds herself: She is entrenched in the U.S. Senate because California is such a consistently Democrat state, and yet this is precisely what makes it largely irrelevant in presidential elections.

The bitterness you hear in her comments comes from her realization that she'd be better off in a state that was 49.9% Republican.

[this_ol_patriot]

Go with the popular vote and Bush won big time, go by district and Bush would have had PA and from the looks of it a lot of NY too.

[Thoro]

That's right...senators have nada to do with population. Each state is 100% equal w/ respect to senators -- 2 each -- they have nothing to do with the EC.

They have everything to do with the EC. Each senator is worth one electoral vote. Without the EC, those electoral votes are gone, and that state's given up a tiny bit of equalizing power that it previously had.

[Alberta's Child]

That idea discussed in that thread is not the same as the elimination of the Electoral College. That thread contains some very interesting ideas about replacing a "winner takes all" system for each state with one in which candidates are awarded electoral votes based on congressional districts (and the candidate who gets the most votes statewide gets the two additional electoral votes for the two U.S. Senators). That's exactly how Maine and Nebraska already apportion their electoral votes.

[Ready4Freddy]

Read The Federalist Papers, 68 in particular.

[Political Junkie Too]

Don't panic.

-PJ