We're stuck with the electoral college. But there is a workaround

[lpetrich]

AOC again.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "I see Fox News is big mad about abolishing the electoral college.
So let’s talk about it.
1) If the GOP were the “silent majority” they claim, they wouldn’t be so scared of a popular vote.
They *know* they aren’t the majority. They rely on establishing minority rule for power." / Twitter

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "2) This common claim about “if we don’t have the Electoral College then a handful of states will determine the presidency” is BS.
a. It’s the *EC itself* that breaks down power by state, pop vote decentralizes it
b. The EC makes it so a handful of states DO determine elections" / Twitter

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "3) LASTLY, this concept that the Electoral College is provides “fairness” to rural Americans over coastal states doesn’t hold any water whatsoever. First of all, virtually every state has rural communities. NY. California.
Much of our states are rural. But very importantly..." / Twitter

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "4) We do not give electoral affirmative action to any other group in America. Do Black Americans have their votes count more bc they have been disenfranchised for 100s of years? Do Reservations get an electoral vote? Does Puerto Rico and US territories get them? No. They don’t." / Twitter

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "5) The Electoral College isn’t about fairness at all; it’s about empowering some voters over others.
Every vote should be = in America, no matter who you are or where you come from. The right thing to do is establish a Popular Vote. & GOP will do everything they can to fight it." / Twitter

 

[lpetrich]

 Electoral college - "a set of electors who are selected to elect a candidate to a particular office." In updated language, it would be called "electoral assembly". The article discusses EC's from all over the world, and among representative democracies, EC's are almost always some set of elected officials.  List of electoral systems by country has nation-by-nation details.

This was essentially true of US Senators. They were originally elected by state legislatures, but that was changed to direct election by the 17th Amendment in 1913. It is also true of some of the proposed schemes for electing the President: election by state governors and election by Congress.

Alexander Hamilton in Federalist Paper #68 envisioned it as a sort of search committee, but it quickly became a rubber-stamp body, and with the election of Donald Trump, its failure became complete.

 

[lpetrich]

AOC got this response to her criticism of the Electoral College:
Dan Crenshaw on Twitter: "Abolishing the electoral college means that politicians will only campaign in (and listen to) urban areas. That is not a representative democracy.
We live in a republic, which means 51% of the population doesn’t get to boss around the other 49%. https://t.co/eZilBsVhyP" / Twitter

What a remarkable personality she is:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "I’m so glad the President and I agree that the Electoral College has got to go. https://t.co/aXn4IgwJjv" / Twitter
noting
Donald J. Trump on Twitter: "The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy." / Twitter - 2012 Nov 6 - which it seemed like Mitt Romney might have won the popular vote instead of Barack Obama

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "Well, it’s official: Republicans are now arguing that the US isn’t (& shouldn’t be) a democracy.
This is what they believe. From lobbyists writing their bills to sabotaging our civil rights, the GOP works to end democracy.
In reality, we have to grow it. https://t.co/DWn1uqpAuw" / Twitter noting
Opinion | Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Understands Democracy Better Than Republicans Do - The New York Times - "The idea that proponents of greater electoral equity have to quiet down because we live in a ‘republic’ is absurd."

Such arguments often reach back to the Founders, though without checking on what they meant by "republic" and "democracy".

When James Madison critiqued “democracy” in Federalist No. 10, he meant the Athenian sort: “a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person.” This he contrasted with a “republic” or “a government in which the scheme of representation takes place.” Likewise, in a 1788 speech to the New York ratification convention, Alexander Hamilton disavowed “the ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated.” They “never possessed one good feature of government,” he said. “Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.”

In more modern terms, the founders feared “direct democracy” and accounted for its dangers with a system of “representative democracy.”

As to where "republic not a democracy" came from,

Nicole Hemmer, a historian of American politics and the author of “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics,” traces it to the 1930s and 40s. “When Franklin Roosevelt made defending democracy a core component of his argument for preparing for, and then intervening in, the war in Europe, opponents of U.S. intervention began to push back by arguing that the U.S. was not, in fact, a democracy,” she wrote in an email.

It then became a common slogan on the Right.

 

[lpetrich]

NowThis on Twitter: "‘It’s bogus. It’s a scam.’ — @AOC is not backing down from her criticisms of the Electoral College, no matter what Fox News says https://t.co/ydiGLf4yrt" / Twitter - from some Instagram home video of AOC reiterating some of her criticisms of the EC. Like what makes some subset of rural voters the only ones deserving of electoral affirmative action.

 

[lpetrich]

I'm a bit disappointed that AOC hasn't discussed Alexander Hamilton's advocacy of the EC in Federalist Paper #68. But she is correct to call it electoral affirmative action, and she is correct to ask why a certain group of people and not others.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a point about the Electoral College (Opinion) - CNN

Crenshaw, who is a Republican, defended the body, stating that "we live in a republic, which means 51% of the population doesn't get to boss around the other 49%."

Yet, the Electoral College process can lead to outcomes where the 46% may look to boss around the remaining 54%. Recall that Donald Trump earned 46% of the vote in 2016 and lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million ballots. His victory marked the second time in the past five elections where the winner of the popular vote failed to ascend to the presidency.

After discussing Trump's 2016 victory and the possibility that he may have a similar victory in 2020,

In spite of the claim that so-called "misfire elections" are infrequent, the winner of the Electoral College has failed to win the popular vote in 10% of all presidential elections. The elections of 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016 are generally recognized as misfire elections. Yet close inspection of the election of 1960 suggests that John F. Kennedy's victory should also be included as a misfire, given the composition of Alabama's Electoral College delegation.

...
These presidents have not been judged very kindly in rankings of presidents by historians and political scientists. Most fall in the bottom half of all presidents who have served. Out of 43 presidents, John Q. Adams is ranked at 21, Benjamin Harrison is at 30, Rutherford Hayes is 32, and George W. Bush is at 33. Notably, Bush is the only misfire president to win re-election.

Although I believe it is too soon to assess the Trump presidency, early results are not flattering, with several lists ranking him among the very worst. His tenure has undoubtedly been controversial, with few legislative victories to his credit. He stands alone as the only president since Gallup began conducting polls to not crack at least 50% job approval.

How the EC makes misfire presidents:

The selection of the president was one of the most confounding decisions the Framers faced. Notably, the Electoral College of today bears little resemblance to the one they devised in 1787. They viewed the electors as people who would exercise independent judgment and pick presidents who would be well suited to carry out the responsibilities of the office.

Popular selection of electors, the use of the winner-take-all method to award electoral votes, and elector loyalty were not prescribed by the Framers, but have become commonplace in presidential elections.

It was to be a sort of search committee, but it degenerated into a rubber-stamp body, and with the election of Donald Trump, its failure became complete.

Popular and electoral votes rarely come close, though the electoral vote usually magnifies the popular vote.

The electoral college is in trouble - The Washington Post

And there is also nothing neutral or random about how our system works. The electoral college tilts outcomes toward white voters, conservative voters and certain regions of the country. People outside these groups and places are supposed to sit back and accept their relative disenfranchisement. There is no reason they should, and at some point, they won’t. This will lead to a meltdown.

...
Defenders of such a departure from one-person, one-vote say that if Democrats run up big leads in a few states and regions — especially California but also, say, New York, Illinois and New England — that shouldn’t count. Their strained claim is that a president is somehow more “representative” of the country if he wins by eking out tiny margins in several Midwestern states. This transforms our democracy into a casino. If you narrowly hit the right numbers in some places, you take the pot.

What they are really defending, without explicitly saying so, is the idea that states with a higher percentage of white, non-Hispanic voters should have a disproportionate influence on who becomes president.

That's what AOC was saying about electoral affirmative action.

 

[lpetrich]

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Airs Trump Tweet Attacking Electoral College - "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Brought the Receipts on Donald Trump and the Electoral College - Meanwhile, the only real argument from The College Defenders is "we like it this way."

MSNBC and Fox News Hosts Go Head to Head after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Electoral College Criticism

On Friday, MSNBC's Chris Hayes came to the defense of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez during his show All In with Chris Hayes. Ocasio-Cortez faced intense criticism from the president, Fox News, and Republican legislators during the week for calling the Electoral College a "racist scam."

Delving into Ocasio-Cortez's claim that the system propagates "minority rule for power," Hayes opened his live show arguing the Electoral College was a "major fault line" in American politics, as Democrats seek to dissolve the centuries-old electoral body while many Republicans defend its legitimacy.

Followed by responses on Fox News and the like.

The debate on the fairness of Electoral College over popular vote has been going on for decades, but it sparked national outrage in 2016 when Donald Trump was elected president despite losing popular vote to Hilary Clinton by a margin of 2.87 million. Trump received 304 electoral votes and Clinton garnered 227.

Moreover, rather than trying to win the most votes in the country, contemporary presidential campaigns routinely strategize to amass more than 270 electoral votes, focusing only on key, "swing" states. As a result, candidates tend to ignore every noncompetitive state and pour resources to the few states have previously fluctuated between electing Democrat and Republican candidates. Ultimately, a vast majority of the country can be ignored, according to Vox's December 2016 report.

 

[Trausti]

The EC was part of the deal when the original 13 States ratified the Constitution and part of the deal when Alaska and Hawaii joined. If you’re going to abolish the EC, then States should be free to leave.

 

[ZiprHead]

The EC was part of the deal when the original 13 States ratified the Constitution and part of the deal when Alaska and Hawaii joined. If you’re going to abolish the EC, then States should be free to leave.

You do realize that amending the constitution was part of the deal too, don't you?

 

[zorq]

The EC was part of the deal when the original 13 States ratified the Constitution and part of the deal when Alaska and Hawaii joined. If you’re going to abolish the EC, then States should be free to leave.

The nice thing about this workaround is that it DOESN'T abolish the Electoral college. The EC will continue working exactly the same. Electors will show up and vote for whomever the state that sent them tells them to vote for. Even Alaska and Hawaii.

 

[lpetrich]

Just Four States are Likely to Determine the Outcome of 2020 Presidential Race | National Popular Vote
noting
The 2020 electoral map could be the smallest in years. Here’s why. - The Washington Post

Just four states are likely to determine the outcome in 2020. Each flipped to the Republicans in 2016, but President Trump won each by only a percentage point or less. The four are Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Florida. Many analysts point to Wisconsin as the single state upon which the election could turn.

That's far from what Alexander Hamilton advocated about the EC in Federalist Paper #68.

 

[lpetrich]

- It’s doubtful even Alexander Hamilton believed what he was selling in “Federalist No. 68.” - by Garrett Epps

Starts off with Alexander Hamilton.

As a political figure, Hamilton was volatile, mercurial, choleric, vindictive, conniving, disloyal, and incontinent; those personal flaws eventually led to his death in a duel with Aaron Burr. We remember him because he was also smart, creative, dashing, and decisive. And if you’d had a case in front of a New York court, he’d have been the lawyer to hire. Brilliant doesn’t do justice to his advocacy skills.

Then about his advocacy job for the new Constitution.

I love The Federalist. It is like a particularly well-done brochure for a Las Vegas timeshare, written to sell more than to inform. Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay had one job: to ensure that the draft Constitution was ratified. The alternative, to these patriots, was disaster—the division of the new nation into hostile confederacies, and possibly the transformation of some or all of the states into clients of the European powers. There was no chance of a do-over; it was this Constitution or nothing. For this reason, The Federalist insists that every word, every comma, of the Constitution added up to the best of all possible rules in the best of all possible worlds.

However, the authors knew the document’s flaws. When Madison sent a copy to Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson discreetly replied: “In some parts it is discoverable that the author means only to say what may be best said in defense of opinions in which he did not concur.”

That may also be why the North was so intent on keeping the nation together in the Civil War. That was because a divided-up US would have been very vulnerable to foreign meddling.

That would explain why AH presented the EC as a sort of search committee, but one that was designed to resist demagogues and foreign meddlers.

About the 12th Amendment,

But it didn’t fix the real flaw: the electoral system is grossly undemocratic and devised in large part as a protection for slave states, which feared being outvoted in a popular-vote system. In fact, after Adams, what contemporaries called “the slave seats” ensured the dominance of slave-master presidents for the next quarter century. Then, in 1824, it gave us the first president to lose the popular vote, the unfortunate John Quincy Adams.

He was followed in 1876 by Rutherford Hayes, in 1888 by Benjamin Harrison, in 2000 by George Bush II, and in 2016 by Donald Trump. The latter two being among the worst presidents in history.

 

[lpetrich]

Washington Monthly | The Electoral College Is Not What Its Defenders Say It Is

Perhaps sensing that it represents their best chance to win the White House in 2020 and beyond, or because four states have joined the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact this year, conservatives have recently come out in droves to defend the Electoral College. Many of their arguments cannot withstand even the mildest scrutiny.

Then rebuts some common arguments.

Does the EC make Presidential candidates campaign nationally? No. Instead, they campaign in a few swing states, like FL, NC, OH, PA back in 2016.

Does the EC prevent the "tyranny of the majority" of 51% ruling 49% of the population? No. It allows for 43% ruling 57%. The way to avoid 51%-49% problems is to require supermajorities, like 60% or 67% or 75% or higher.The early-modern Polish Parliament had an extreme version of this, the "liberum veto" - one member could veto anything. That effectively required 100%.

Does the EC keep rural areas from being "silenced"? It's the opposite, and as AOC states, it's electoral affirmative action.

No doubt much of the right-wing fervor to defend the Electoral College is motivated by the desire to win elections. Polls show that Democrats have long supported a national popular vote, while Republican support dropped from 54 percent to 19 percent after the 2016 election.

But more than partisanship or a misunderstanding of the concept of tyranny, the defense of the Electoral College, at its core, is based on a lie—the idea that places like states, cities, or counties have opinions, and that the Electoral College is the best way to represent those opinions. This is clear from the way defenders talk about the institution.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/201...-grows-closer-to-270-vote-mark/6361560294210/

June 13 (UPI) -- Five times in U.S. history, the presidential candidate who won the national popular vote did not win the White House -- including two of the last five elections. Those losses have spurred a national movement to change the way elections are won.

Since Democrat Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 race, with nearly 3 million more votes than Donald Trump, a number of states have passed laws to award their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. Fifteen states and Washington, D.C., have so far enacted such laws -- with the latest, Oregon, joining Wednesday.

It's a movement that's been growing since 2006, when the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact -- a non-profit with the goal of enacting a system to elect the popular vote winner -- formed to persuade states to join.

"The purpose of this legislation is to guarantee the presidency to the candidate who gets the most votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia," National Popular Vote Director John Koza said.

----

The EC may become moot if this effort succeeds.

 

[ZiprHead]

The astounding advantage the Electoral College gives to Republicans, in one chart

In 2016, Donald Trump won the presidency despite receiving nearly 3 million fewer votes than Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. In 2000, George W. Bush pulled off a similar trick. According to a new study, these are not flukes. They are the kind of results we should expect from the Electoral College.

The study, by three economics researchers at the University of Texas, quantifies just how often the Electoral College will produce an “inversion” — that is, an election where one candidate wins the popular vote but the other walks away with the presidency. The numbers are simply astonishing.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/9/17/20868790/republicans-lose-popular-vote-win-electoral-college

 

[lpetrich]

Five Common Misconceptions About the Electoral College - The Atlantic - "Defenders of the Electoral College argue that it was created to combat majority tyranny and support federalism, and that it continues to serve those purposes. This stance depends on a profound misunderstanding of the history of the institution."

Starts out by noting that 2 of the last 3 presidents became president despite losing the popular vote. George Bush II and Donald Trump. In between was Barack Obama.

Despite this, defenders of the Electoral College argue that it was created to combat majority tyranny and support federalism, and that it continues to serve those purposes. For example, Representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas, responding to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s recent criticism of the Electoral College, tweeted that “we live in a republic, which means 51% of the population doesn’t get to boss around the other 49%,” and that the Electoral College “promotes more equal regional representation and protects the interests of sparsely populated states.”

Author G. Alan Tarr then got into those misconceptions.

Mistake Number 1: Many supporters of the Electoral College assume that the debate about presidential selection at the Constitutional Convention, like the debate today, focused on whether the president should be chosen by the Electoral College or by a nationwide popular vote.

He notes that it was actually whether or not the President should be elected by Congress. That was the Constitution's creators' first idea, but they were concerned that it would make the executive branch too dependent on the legislative branch. Some of them proposed a one-term limit,

... but as Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania observed, this could deprive the nation of a highly qualified executive, eliminate the hope of continuation in office as a spur to good behavior, and encourage the executive to “make hay while the sun shines.” James Madison added that election by the legislature would “agitate and divide the legislature so much that the public interest would materially suffer” and might invite the intervention of foreign powers seeking to influence the choice.

 

[lpetrich]

About the legislature itself, the first proposed system was the  Virginia Plan.

It proposed a two-chamber legislature. The first chamber would be elected by popular vote. The second chamber would be elected by the first one, using nominations submitted by state legislatures. Both chambers would have each state represented in proportion to its free population.

The President would be elected by the legislature.

Large-state delegations liked it but small-state ones didn't, and that led to the second proposed system, the  New Jersey Plan.

It proposed a one-chamber legislature, with each state having the same representation in it. Its members would be elected by state legislatures.

The President also would be elected by the legislature.

Not surprisingly, small-state delegations liked it but large-state ones didn't.

The two sizes of delegations agreed to the  Connecticut Compromise, what was adopted. The House is proportional to population, and elected by popular vote, and the Senate is two Senators per state, originally elected by state legislatures.


The delegates considered various alternatives to election by the legislature, like popular vote and election by state governors, but they didn't like any of those possibilities. So toward the end of their deliberations, they came up with the Electoral College. It was to be appointed by state governments, and it was to disperse after electing the President, so as not to threaten the independence of the executive branch.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

We already have a solution to the EC. It doesn't involve amending the constitution. It doesn't involve unenforceable compacts.

Just increase the size of the House, you flatten the differential between number of people per elector.

 

[lpetrich]

Mistake Number 2: Another common belief is that the convention rejected popular election of the president because the delegates feared majority tyranny. People make this claim as though to say that because the Framers were skittish of a national popular election, so should we be today.

But they had two reasons, reasons valid back then, though not as valid today.

First, they feared that people would lack the information to make an informed choice as to who might be an appropriate candidate for the presidency or who might be the best choice among candidates. ...

But his reason was that “the extent of the Country renders it impossible that the people can have the requisite capacity to judge of the respective pretensions of the Candidates.” In such circumstances, he thought, voters would naturally gravitate to candidates from their own state. ...

Thus having lots of favorite-child candidates. Traditionally called favorite sons, there is nowadays a possibility of favorite daughters.

Supporters of a popular vote stated that “the increasing intercourse among the people of the states would render important characters less and less unknown,” and that “continental characters will multiply as we more or more coalesce.” That is indeed what happened. Communications got better and better, and national political figures emerged, to the point where the states are nowadays essentially administrative districts and not quasi-sovereign entities.

Second, some southern delegates feared that popular election of the president would disadvantage their states. James Madison noted that, given less restrictive voting laws, “the right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern states,” which would give them an advantage in a popular election. Beyond that, a popular vote would not count the disenfranchised enslaved population, reducing southern influence.

In colonial days and in the early days of the nation, each colony then state had property qualifications for voting. But those qualifications were less steep in the North than in the South, meaning that a greater fraction of the adult male population could vote in the North than in the South.

The Electoral College solved both problems.

Third, some small-state delegates opposed popular election because they feared that larger states, with their greater voting power, would dominate. Yet these same delegates also objected to the Electoral College, insisting it too gave excessive power to the large states.

Because it is (proportional) + 2 for each state.

 

[lpetrich]

Mistake Number 3: Similarly, some defenders of the Electoral College have argued that the delegates who favored the Electoral College opposed popular election of the president.

Some of the supporters of the EC had also been supporters of popular-vote election, and they considered it an good alternative. At least if the electors are chosen by popular vote.

Mistake Number 4: Many people also believe that the Electoral College was designed to preserve federalism and states’ rights.

James Madison described the Constitution as “in strictness neither a national nor a federal Constitution, but a composition of both.”

The executive was carefully walled off from state governments. The delegates rejected state legislatures and state governors for electing the President, and they also rejected states' recalling of the President. So the EC is not a states'-rights sort of thing.

 

[lpetrich]

Mistake Number 5: And finally, perhaps the most widely believed and, at the same time, most incorrect of the arguments for the Electoral College is that it has vindicated the hopes and expectations of its creators.

I see that all the time from the EC's defenders. So let's see what they really thought.

George Mason thought that “nineteen times in twenty” the EC would not have a majority of votes for any one candidate, and that the election would go into the House.

Other delegates thought that most of the time, the EC would settle on a single candidate.

The operation of the EC has changed over time. Originally, each elector had two votes, with the Vice President being the Presidential candidate with the second most votes. Hillary Clinton as Donald Trump's Vice President? That was changed in 1800 with the 12th Amendment to each elector voting for one candidate for President and one for Vice President.

Even more important have been changes in political practice. In “Federalist No. 64,” John Jay maintained that the Electoral College “will in general be composed of the most enlightened and respectable citizens,” and in “Federalist No. 68,” Alexander Hamilton described the electors as “most likely to possess the information and discernment” necessary to choose the chief executive.

In effect, the EC was to be some search committee.

But by 1800, political parties had developed, and the electors voted on party lines, thus making the EC a rubber-stamp body. In fact, some states have laws against being a "faithless elector", someone who does not vote for their party's candidate.

More recently, Presidential candidates have preferred to campaign in "swing states", states that are on the fence between the two major parties. They thus neglect states where they are likely to win or lose. That's not what the Constitution's creators had in mind, I'm sure.

In “Federalist No. 68,” Alexander Hamilton contended that the Electoral College would frustrate “the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.” It would also “afford a moral certainty that the office of President [would] seldom fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.” In addition, it would keep from the office candidates with “talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity.” In evaluating the Electoral College today, one must judge whether Hamilton’s hopes have been vindicated.

The article ends there, but it seems to me that by that standard, the Electoral College has completely failed. Becoming a rubber-stamp body was a big part of its failure, and Trump's election completed its failure.