Posted on 07/08/2008 9:42:48 AM PDT by buccaneer81
Dukakis calls for end to Electoral College Dave Wedge By Dave Wedge Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Calling it “critically important” to eliminate the Electoral College system, former Bay State Gov. Michael Dukakis called on lawmakers to join a growing number of states supporting a switch to a national popular vote to elect the president.
“I think it is high time we got rid of the Electoral College and elected our presidents the way we elect every other elected official in the country - by a vote of the people,” Dukakis wrote in a letter e-mailed to state lawmakers yesterday. “The overwhelming majority of the American people do, too.”
So far, Maryland, New Jersey, Illinois and Hawaii have supported electing the president through a national popular vote. A bill to add Massachusetts to that list is pending on Beacon Hill.
In his missive, Dukakis, who ran for president in 1988, admitted that he focused mainly on swing states during the stretch run of his race.
“Under the current system, running for president means just one thing: focus on the so-called swing states,” he wrote. “I did it. Al Gore did it. John Kerry did it, and our Republican opponents did it, too.”
“A big turnout in Massachusetts and many other states is irrelevant to winning the election. Only winning the swing states matters.”
Dukakis said a national popular vote would help a smaller state like Massachusetts have a bigger impact on presidential politics. States get one electoral vote for each member of their congressional delegation but under the new initiative would give all those votes to the winner of the popular vote nationwide.
Translation: We Democrats can’t win without cheating and the Electoral College makes it too hard to cheat.
Dukakis must think he can claim that he actually defeated George Bush in 1988.
This is kaka from Dukakis. The initiative referred to in the article would not eliminate the Electoral College. Rather, it would direct that a State’s Electoral votes would have to go to the candidate who gets the most popular votes.
That means the person who wins the most votes in the major metropolitan areas, like LA, NY, Chicago, Dallas, etc., would win the popular vote and force small States to change their EC votes from one candidate to the other.
Therefore, it would actually give smaller States LESS of a voice in the election of the President.
He refers to "every other elected official". Let's examine that. The people do not directly elect the leaders of the House or Senate. We do not elect Supreme Court Justices. We do not elect the cabinet, or the US Attorneys. The VP is picked by the President and they run as a package deal. The presidential candidates themselves are picked by convention delegates, many unelected and even the elected ones are not bound. Powerful Congressional committee chairs and committee memberships are based on the party in power plus seniority. Many town committees select the mayor from among themselves. If the president can't serve you get the VP w/o an election, and then the Speaker of the House, and on down the line.
It's called a Constitution and there are good reasons for it.
ML/NJ
Dukakis who?
Oh, he's QUITE the salesman, isn't he?? LOL!
Good luck getting 3/4 of the states to agree to let New York and California pick the President.
BTW, you still would have lost.
Wasn’t Dukakis on the X-Files?
The electoral college is a necessary part of the compromise that allowed our constitution to pass. It balances the power of the large and small states.
The electoral college ensures that each state has the same say in electing the president as it does in passing laws in congress.
The only logical change to the law would be to apportion electoral votes by congressional district. A presidential candidate would receive an electoral vote for each district he won and the statewide winner would receive two electoral votes representing the state’s senators.
This would ensure that conservative areas in states like New York and California would have their votes count, while liberal areas like Austin, TX would have their votes count.
A national popular vote could make the big city vote fraud a major factor in the presidential race.
Dukakis is about as irrelevant as George McGovern.
Yes. I believe FDR once said when posed with the concern that his programs may be unconstitutional something along the lines of, “we’ll worry about that later”. That’s a good quality in a public servant who has taken an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution.
I think he was the black guy after Deep Throat got iced.
We are a union of states.
Every town, municipality, city, state has different concerns and interests. The electoral college was designed as an "evening" agent: Meaning, to balance.
In farming communities, there is a lower population as compared to an urban population. Given the way urban populations tend to vote, farmers would be forced to give the product of their hard labor away for free, to those in the urban areas.
It'd likewise be in keeping that some "fish rights" activists from the middle of the country might be inclined to vote for someone proposing a ban on any fishing along either US coastline; and then piling on, after the economic crash on both sides of the Country, about how crowded their towns are now that those unemployed on both coasts are moving "inland".
Borrowing a good one from Firesign Theatre: Mr. Dukasis: How can you be in two places at once, when you are really no where at all?
Suggestion: That the Electoral College be modified (as it has been in a couple of states) for EACH Congressional District to get one vote, based on the majority in that district, and each state in which a majority is given to one candidate or the other, gets two votes based on Senatorial representation.
That way, the election of the President remains a representive vote, measuring the relative popularity in EACH Congressional District and on a state by state basis, without this nonsense of a popularity contest nationwide, where there are pockets of fraud. The pockets of fraud will be limited in effect, forcing a district-by-district and state-by-state campaign, with no single political entity able to control the national vote total.
The current policy of “winner take all” for each state leaves open the potential for something like Florida 2000, when the state totals came down to a few hundred votes separating Gore and Bush. MOST of the Florida precincts went for Bush, so there would have been a divided count on the total number of votes for Florida, but the total would have still favored Bush.
This does not require ANY action by the US Congress. Each state legislature would choose the method by which the Presidential electors were selected.
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