Posted on 09/12/2004 7:28:05 PM PDT by El Conservador
DENVER - Colorado Republican Marcy Benson remembers getting calls four years ago from people asking if she was going to change her vote when she cast her ballot as a presidential elector.
For years, few paid much attention to the Electoral College (news - web sites). But in the close election of 2000, every vote counted in the battle between Republican George Bush (news - web sites) and Democrat Al Gore (news - web sites). The GOP was worried that "faithless electors" might jump ship and vote for Gore.
"It surprised me that people thought I would change my vote," Benson said.
This year, the Electoral College system is getting a critical look even before the election from voters in Colorado. And what happens here could affect the outcome of the presidential fight between Bush and Democrat John Kerry (news - web sites).
On Nov. 2, voters will consider a proposal to immediately scrap the state's winner-take-all electoral vote system and allow candidates to keep a proportion of the delegates they win. In theory, a candidate could win 55 percent of the statewide vote and get only five of the state's nine electoral votes.
If the proposal had been in place four years ago, Gore would have earned enough electoral votes to go to the White House.
Only two other states divide electoral votes, Nebraska and Maine. Each gives two votes to the winner of each state, and the remaining votes are cast to show who won each congressional district.
Colorado would be the first state to allocate all its electoral votes proportionately according to the popular vote — something supporters say would make every vote count.
"When a winner gets 51 percent and the loser 49 percent, and you give all the electoral votes to the winning candidate, that's not representative government," said Julie Brown, a spokeswoman for sponsors of the initiative.
Republicans, who hold a 185,000 edge in registered voters over Democrats in Colorado, say the plan is a plot to take the state's nine electoral votes from Bush and give them to Kerry.
Katy Atkinson, a GOP pollster, said Colorado could end up always splitting its votes 5-4, in effect giving it one electoral vote. That would make the state a political backwater no candidate would waste time visiting.
"If this succeeds, we will become the least influential state in the country," said Atkinson, who helped found an opposition group that calls itself Coloradans Against a Really Stupid Idea.
Advocates of the idea in Colorado gathered 134,821 signatures to get the proposal on the ballot.
The Electoral College was criticized as unfair and outdated after the disputed 2000 presidential election, in which Gore won the vote of the people but narrowly lost to Bush in the Electoral College by a vote of 271-266.
Atkinson promised a court challenge if the Colorado measure passes to determine whether it can be applied retroactively.
That raises the possibility of a judge holding up Colorado's results in what is expected to be a tight race between Bush and Kerry. Secretary of State Donetta Davidson did not return calls for comment.
State Democratic Party chairman Chris Gates said the party has not taken a position on the initiative, but said the measure has little support.
"Many Democrats feel this state is in play and this is a state we can win. They think this is a way to give George Bush (news - web sites) four electoral votes in Colorado," Gates said.
University of Colorado law professor Robert Dieter — one of the electors who sat around a desk in the office of Gov. Bill Owens in 2000 to cast votes for Bush — said the system shouldn't be changed.
"The electoral college, for all of its flaws, is a necessary check and balance for ensuring that the president is elected from a dispersed geographical portion of the United States," he said. "The organizational plan of the founding fathers was to make sure we didn't have a system where a president could be elected simply based on popular votes from population centers."
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On the Net:
Make Your Vote Count: http://www.makeyourvotecount.com
Electoral College Web Magazine: http://www.avagara.com/e_c
Ballot Analysis: http://www.state.co.us/gov_dir/leg_dir/lcsstaff/balpage.htm
The Dem dream of getting rid of the EC, so NY, CA and IL can repeatedly elect a prez... a Dem prez.
They can't get out of the Electoral College system can they? Aren't they bound by the constitution to be part of the voting process?
The individual states are responsible for how electors are chosen.
However, this measure would be a disaster for Colorado. If the difference between winning and losing Colorado is ONE electoral vote, why would anyone ever bother campaigning there?
That's sad. Theoretically, every other state under liberal influence could opt out and try to swing like colorado, and win on the "popular vote"?
And there it is. Tie up the election in the activist courts, just like They did in FL four years ago.
The left thinks they have all their playing pieces in place for the big move. The MSM educates The Sheep; the courts provide legitimacy; Hollywood provides mass-media propaganda; and the era of American Socialism is ushered in, given legitimacy by "popular" vote.
Yes I just heard a republican delegate from west virginia say on WABC, that he isn't committed to george bush and refused to rule out not giving him his vote.
Actually if those states split their votes proportionally the RATs would never win. The GOP would get at least 40% of those e votes which would mean hundreds more.
This is an exercise in futility since the legislature of a state must decide these matters. So this would go from a vote to a court to overturned.
already posted:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1214063/posts
The kicker is the Dems don't want the states you listed to split their EC votes as they almost always go Dem. What they want is the mid-sized EC states that typically go Republican to allow the splitting of THEIR EC votes.
It sure would be nice if CA and NY would do this. There were quite a few red counties in each state in 2000. I'd take 40% of NY and CA's electors. Even 2000 would have been a relative landslide!
Then again, I kind of like the system as it is. It's been that way for 200+ years. Why tinker with perfection?
I hope the voters of Colorado realize their state would cease to be a factor in the the presidential race with this type of system and would essentially be ignored.
...and $hrillary is STILL waiting for the Electoral College to change....and you know how $hrillary really hates to wait for the change/"little people".
Did it not go through the legislature? If so, this is unconstitutional. The legislature must determine how the Electors are divided.
The Constitution says it is the State legislatures which determine this. A referendum/initiative doesn't cut it.
They should file suit on this BEFORE the election.
I wonder if the people who want to scrap the EC system realize that it would end the two party system we have in this country.
Imagine that everyone could vote for whoever he wanted to. Now imagine small political parties springing up to take advantage of voters who don't have a real affection for the Dems or the GOP. What you get are multiple parties going after their piece of the voter pie. The larger the pie the more the political parties try to take away a piece of it.
The last I heard Italy had 23 parties - with more taking root. The only reason multiple parties doesn't work in the states is our EC system. Take that away and all hell breaks loose.
So a few months ago, I wrote a piece that described how I understood our political system, what I saw as its structural defects today, and how I would amend the Constitution to address these defects. The piece is here. One of the amendments I proposed was to adopt nationally the Maine-Nebraska system for allocating electoral votes. (Maine and Nebraska allocate their electoral votes as follows: 2 votes go to the winner of the state-wide vote, while 1 vote goes to the winner of each electoral district in the state.) As I mention in the piece, such a reform would make far more sense if combined with an amendment to prohibit gerrymandering (e.g., by having every state adopt the Iowa districting system). But even without such a reform, the Maine-Nebraska system has the virtue of (a) reducing leverage in the system (fraud in one location could steal at most 3 electoral votes - one for the district and two for the state - as against the current potential to steal an entire, closely-contested state) and (b) pushing campaigns toward the political center (candidates could not win a diverse state like Pennsylvania by running up their base in the state; more would depend on winning voters that actually occupied the political center).What I didn't have a view on at the time was: would such a reform help either political party? But now I have the data to opine on this important question. Here can be found the district-by-district electoral results for the past nine Presidential elections. (I got the link from this article in Slate about the electoral prospects this year in Maine, which may well split its electoral votes for the first time since the district-based allocation system was adopted in 1969.)
The data yield the following results, by year:
Year EV change Change Election Result?
2000 GOP + 16 NO
1996 GOP + 33 NO
1992 GOP + 45 NO
1988 DEM + 49 NO
1984 DEM + 57 NO
1980 DEM + 94 NO
1976 GOP + 27 NO (but almost; new result is 270 to 268!)
1972 DEM + 47 NO
1968 DEM + 11 NO (George Wallace would also have gained electoral votes)
Apart from the most recent election, the pattern is clear. In each case, had the Maine-Nebraska system obtained nationwide, the election would have been closer in terms of electoral vote count.This makes sense. Even in a landslide election like 1984 or 1972, a big chunk of the country votes for the loser, and to some extent this portion of the country is concentrated in certain Congressional districts. So it makes sense that, if you allocate the vote by district, you'd give somewhat greater representation to the losing side in the election.
But the 2000 election results suggest that this might not be the case with the current electoral map. Indeed, that result suggests that under the current 50-50 red-blue division of the country, switching to a district-based system would slightly favor the Republicans.
Why? The simple reason is that the GOP dominates more states, and more low-electoral-vote states, while the Democrats dominate fewer, but large and diverse states.
The GOP controls more states. In the 2000 election, the GOP took 30 states; the Democrats took 20, plus the District of Columbia. The popular vote split almost 50-50 in the last election. Imagine if each state had similarly split nearly 50-50, with 50% of the districts going Democrat and 50% going Republican (if the number of districts is odd, give the extra district to the state-wide winner). That's what the "maximum splitting" result would be. (The "minimum splitting" result would be exactly the same result as under the existing syste, - i.e., the state-wide winner would win each district in the state). With "maximum splitting" under the Maine-Nebraska system, the GOP would have won 281 electoral votes - 11 more than they actually won in 2000 - which entirely reflects the fact that they won 9 more states than the Democrats did.
The GOP takes 60% of states in a 50-50 year, but even in a losing year they do better than you'd think. In 1996 - a solid Democratic victory year - the GOP took 19 states. In 1988, the Democrats took only 11 (including DC), even though Mike Dukakis got a greater percentage of the popular vote than Bob Dole. If we look at the number of states in each party's "base" - narrowly construed - I count 17 GOP base states (Alaska, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, Kentucky and Indiana) versus only 10 Democrat base states (Hawaii, California, Illinois, Maryland, District of Columbia, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Vermont). So in any given election, not just 2000, the GOP should be favored to win more states than the Democrats which, all things being equal, should benefit them in a Maine-Nebraska system of splitting electoral votes.
Relatedly, the GOP controls more small states, and more states with uniform political complexions. Of the 8 states (including DC) with 3 electoral votes, 5 (Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming) are solid GOP states. The Democrats control only 3 such states. None of these states' votes would be changed by moving to the Maine-Nebraska system, since they have only one district each. And a number of other key GOP states - Mississippi, Utah, Oklahoma, Nebraska (which splits its votes currently, not that you'd notice) - do not have much political variety internally from district to district. So for many core GOP states, there would be no change resultant from the switch to a Maine-Nebraska system.
By contrast, the Democrats' strength comes from clear dominance of three mega-states: California, New York and Illinois. But all three states show real internal diversity, and if their vote was split by Congressional district, the GOP would pick up a nice minority of votes (32 electoral votes between the three states in 2000, as many votes as New York has in the current scheme all by itself). Yes, the GOP controls one mega-state - Texas - which in 2000 would have given 10 electoral votes to the Democrats under the Maine-Nebraska system. And the GOP would have lost electoral votes in swing states that they won in 2000 (Ohio, Florida, Missouri). But these would have been offset by Democrat losses in states that they won (Michigan, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Oregon). All-told, because there are fewer states that are wall-to-wall Democrat (e.g., Massachusetts, which would have lost no electoral votes under Maine-Nebraska) than there are states that are wall-to-wall Republican (e.g. Alabama, which actually would have lost 1 electoral vote under Maine-Nebraska, but close enough), the GOP would have a structural advantage today if the country shifted to a Maine-Nebraska system.
Of course, if the country did shift to such a system, campaigning would change and this could erase part of the structural advantage. But it does seem to me that at the present moment, my proposed reform of the electoral college would slightly tilt the playing field towards the GOP.
Just thought you might like to know.
posted by Noah Millman at 2:50 PM
ping
Actually, only since Andrew Jackson.
In fact, the EC has nothing to do with it. It's because we use first-past-the-post districts.
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