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.”
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.
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.
Feinstein is a Crazy lunatic. SOMEONE in California has got to be able to run this crazy nut out of office...
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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.
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.
They don't have any GOOD ideas. All they care about is the Dem party.
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
You can take your "democracy" and put where the sun don't shine!
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?
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.
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.
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.
Read The Federalist Papers, 68 in particular.
-PJ
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