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The Electoral College and why it matters
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Well, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact has raised its UGLY head again with its passage in Connecticut.
It is clear that even President Trump needs a course on the Electoral Collage [see sidebar] and why it matters so greatly in a REPUBLIC!!!!!!!!!!!!
You may recall that we had a big fight about it here in TN in 2016 led by some Republicans who thought it a great idea to sacrifice the Electoral College.
We don't know if someone will introduce legislation in 2019 to joint the NPV compact, but rest assured that we will, with your help, do every thing in our power to keep Tennessee out of this debacle. |
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Electoral College Under Fire Again
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By Jarrett Stepman | March 5, 2018 | 9:47 AM EST
Having failed to generate enough support to abolish the Electoral College through a constitutional amendment, the institution's detractors are now looking to the courts to upend it.
A new lawsuit, spearheaded by Harvard University law professor Lawrence Lessig and filed in four states, charges that the "winner-take-all" element of how states divvy up their Electoral College votes is unconstitutional.
The District of Columbia and 48 states use this winner-take-all system.
The only exceptions are Maine and Nebraska, which use a proportional allocation of votes.
"Under the winner-take-all system, U.S. citizens have been denied their constitutional right to an equal vote in presidential elections," said David Boies, an attorney who represented former Vice President Al Gore in the contested 2000 election and is leading the current litigation against the Electoral College. "This is a clear violation of the principle of one person, one vote."
A number of similar lawsuits have been filed in the past, but all have failed.
According to Ballot Access News, the biggest impediment to overturning the winner-take-all system is Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, which says, "Each state shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress."
This gives states a great deal of leeway in how they choose their Electoral College process.
It is unfortunate to see yet another attempt to end a presidential election system that has been a model of stability and success for hundreds of years.
In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, in which President Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College while losing the national popular vote, there were widespread calls to upend America's 2-century-old electoral system.
Former Attorney General Eric Holder said "we have to just abolish the Electoral College" in an interview with "Real Time" host Bill Maher.
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Connecticut state Senate passes bill giving electoral votes to presidential candidate who wins popular vote
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BY AVERY ANAPOL - 05/06/18 06:40 PM EDT
The Connecticut state Senate on Saturday voted in favor of a measure to give the state's electoral votes to the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote.
The move puts the state in a position to become the 11th, in addition to Washington, D.C., to join an interstate compact to pool their Electoral College votes for the candidate who wins the popular vote.
The state Senate voted 21-14 in favor of the bill, with the support of three GOP lawmakers, The Guardian reported. The measure passed the state House on a 77-73 vote last month. Democratic Gov. Dannel Malloy is expected to sign the legislation, according to the report.
With the addition of Connecticut's seven electoral votes, the compact would have 172 in total. For the compact to go into effect nationally, it would need 270 electoral votes - the number needed for a candidate to win the presidency.
The nationwide effort to form the compact gained traction after George W. Bush won the 2000 presidential election without winning the popular vote and took on new life after the 2016 election.
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Is it Constitutional ignorance - or perhaps contempt - fueling movement to abolish Electoral College?
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- WRITTEN BYWALTER WILLIAMS
- ON JANUARY 16, 2018 AT 9:30 AM CST
Hillary Clinton blamed the Electoral College for her stunning defeat in the 2016 presidential election in her latest memoirs, "What Happened?" Some have claimed that the Electoral College is one of the most dangerous institutions in American politics. Why? They say the Electoral College system, as opposed to a simple majority vote, distorts the one-person, one-vote principle of democracy because electoral votes are not distributed according to population.
To back up their claim, they point out that the Electoral College gives, for example, Wyoming citizens disproportionate weight in a presidential election. Put another way, Wyoming, a state with a population of about 600,000, has one member in the U.S. House of Representatives and two members in the U.S. Senate, which gives the citizens of Wyoming three electoral votes, or one electoral vote per 200,000 people. California, our most populous state, has more than 39 million people and 55 electoral votes, or approximately one vote per 715,000 people. Comparatively, individuals in Wyoming have nearly four times the power in the Electoral College as Californians.
Many people whine that using the Electoral College instead of the popular vote and majority rule is undemocratic. I'd say that they are absolutely right. Not deciding who will be the president by majority rule is not democracy. But the Founding Fathers went to great lengths to ensure that we were a republic and not a democracy. In fact, the word democracy does not appear in the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution or any other of our founding documents.
How about a few quotations expressed by the Founders about democracy? In Federalist Paper No. 10, James Madison wanted to prevent rule by majority faction, saying, "Measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority." John Adams warned in a letter, "Remember Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy Yet, that did not commit suicide." Edmund Randolph said, "That in tracing these evils to their origin, every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy." Then-Chief Justice John Marshall observed, "Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos."
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Keep the Electoral College, Because States Matter
By Josiah Peterson May 4, 2018 6:30 AM
They have unique geographic and political interests that ought to be reflected in the agenda of the nation's executive.
On Thursday morning, Donald Trump unexpectedly joined his voice to the myriad of Democrats calling for the abolition of the Electoral College. In his freewheeling interview on Fox & Friends, Trump told his hosts: "I would rather have a popular election, but it's a totally different campaign. If you're a runner, you're practicing for the hundred-yard dash as opposed to the mile.
. . . To me, it's much easier to win the popular vote." That statement came as a surprise to many, given that it was the Electoral College that gave him a 304-227 electoral-vote victory over his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, in the 2016 presidential election, even though Clinton had won the popular vote by almost 3 million.
Now that Trump has come out against the College, perhaps it is possible to finally have a discussion of the College's merits that doesn't immediately devolve into political gamesmanship. Does the 230-year-old institution for electing presidents still have a place in modern America? The question is gaining in importance as more states consider joining the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact to impose a popular vote on presidential elections - a state-based workaround that does not require amending the Constitution.
It is worth recapping how exactly the Electoral College works. In the electoral system, Americans are actually voting for slates of electors who then go on to elect the president. Electors are apportioned by the sum of a state's representatives and senators in Congress, reflecting their unequal population (representatives are proportional) and their equality as states (each state has two senators). The electors have previously committed themselves to one party or candidate, and all but two states allocate their electors by a "winner-take-all" system, giving whichever candidate polls higher all the electoral votes from that state.
The electoral system gives lower-population states a small bonus relative to their higher population counterparts - reflecting a belief that rural population interests should not always be overwhelmed by urban interests - but the main effect the College has is to force candidates to campaign to try to win states. .
This keeps states relevant in the raucous federal election system. Candidates must travel - Trump made over 100 campaign stops in the final ten weeks of the campaign - and target their messages to the unique interests of the states they visit. Pollsters survey voters on state issues. Media bring events in Bangor, Maine or Everett, Wash., to the rest of the country. We see candidates visiting local eateries and meeting with local entrepreneurs. Famously, Boston-bred millionaire John F. Kennedy while campaigning in West Virginia was troubled by the real poverty that he saw there, an experience that would shape his economic policy and outlook on American society.
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