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West Virginian Mayor Might Defy Popular Vote
gleam writes "A maverick Republican mayor in West Virginia is reportedly considering not casting his vote in the Electoral College for Bush, even if Bush wins the popular vote there. South Charleston Mayor Richie Robb says, 'I know that among some in my own party, what I'm discussing would be considered treasonous, but I'm not going to cheerlead us down the primrose path when I know we're being led in the wrong direction.' It wouldn't be the first time a West Virginian Elector defied the popular vote: In 1988 an Elector cast her vote for Michael Dukakis's running mate, Lloyd Bentsen, even though Dukakis won the state's popular vote."
...People that agree with him will call him "honorable". People that don't will call him a "traitor".
I wonder when the IRS is going to start looking very carefully at this man's returns..
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
This is exactly what the electoral college is designed for, as a check against a popularly-elected president that horrifies Congress. It's usually in the best interests of the electors to go with the flow and approve who the voters choose, but it exists in case the next Hitler comes along so that even with a popular vote such a person would not come to power. (No, I don't think anyone running is the next Hitler, but hyperbole is great for driving points home.)
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
I can see the obvious point he's trying to make (I hate bush) but could he also be trying to open people's eyes to the dangers of the entire electoral college system? By making such a wacky move he'll open the eyes of voters (regardless of party) to the fact that there's a slim possibility that their votes may not count after all . . .
Hahah I said may not count - I almost forgot about last election!
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. He said "if he wins West Virginia". The states DO represent the popular vote, and the only way this joker can be the elector would be if Bush does win the popular vote.
If Bush doesn't win the popular vote there, then the Democrat electors will cast the votes in the electorial college.
There are two sets of electoral college voters... one for each party.
Actually, it's 4 for the anti-Bush side, if you count the Democratic PAC.
Unfucking-believable.
What about this story is anti bush or is even bashing anybody?
The man in the story said that he's going to use the power he has in the election to make the choice he believes is right.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
the facts are biased against bush.
This is exactly what the electoral college is designed for...
I am really getting sick of people spouting this BS in articles like this lately.
The electoral college system was designed because 200 years ago, it was the only logical way to do things. You didn't have cars, planes, or busses. All you had was horses.
Imagine a country-wide vote in 1800. Imagine the mountains and mountains of paper that would all have to be delivered to Washington by horseback. Imagine the number of postman involved, any one of which could easily be picked off, or bribed. Imagine how long it would take to count.
The electoral college was developed so that you only had to send one person / state to Washington. The individual states could each count the votes in their state, then they know what to tell their guy to vote for. it is the only thing that made sense logistically.
Nowadays, however, all the reasons for it are gone. Your argument is rubbish - why are the electoral college voters more suited for judging character than the populace as a whole? I wouldn't trust most of the politicians I know with keys to my house, let alone keys to the country's vote.
The Electoral College, for those not familiar with the United States Presidental election system, is a particular group of people charged with electing the president.
The electors are charged with voting for the President - the President is elected by this group of people (much like the Holy Roman Emperor was elected by a select group of German/Italian nobles). The people technically vote for electors.
Electors are "pledged" to vote for who the people they represent voted for - but they aren't required. This (electors voting for someone other than the person the popular vote chose) has happened several times in the past, although it has never affected the outcome of the election.
Several reasons have been postulated for the Electoral College system. One, it's a check on the stupidity of the people - make sure a dicatorial demagogue isn't elected. Another reason was that the Founding Fathers didn't trust the communications of their time. For example, if, after the popular election, it was found out that the President-elect was a serial killer, the electors could change their vote.
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
The US two-party-only system has always baffled me. Every thing I learn more about the system supports the concept that it is pretty much by law only a two-party state.
For example, your above comment. What would happen if an independant candidate won a state? Who would be the electoral college voter?
It's just another layer of "check and balance" that's been built into this system. I'm not surprised that you (and I imagine many like-minded people) want to throw it out as I'm sure it seems arcane, but you must more carefully consider it. A lot of people said the same thing about US Senators, that the people should be trusted to choose them directly instead of letting the legislatures choose them. Are we better off now with direct election of Senators, or worse off?
I'd tend to say that we are worse off now. Senators operate largely on the same basis as the House: whoever brings home the most bacon gets re-elected. It also means the legislative body represents the interests of the people only and not of the states. While the Founders were distrustful of power and authority, there were also distrustful of allowing direct control of all government by the people as a whole.
I think you need to do a little reconsidering of your position. After having read on several of the Founders, I doubt they were more concerned with election fraud than direct elections.
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
Yes, politics section is good - for all the political posts.
/. front page.
/. would have worked that out, may be from my "Time Zone / Daylight Savings Time" information - which puts me in GMT +10
/. front page along with YRO. All of which should HAVE BEEN FILTERED.
1. I'm not in US, I don't really understand or care, really, who these people are. But I'm open to accept that Americans probably care about their politics. And they probably want it on their
2. A smart
3. I go to my preferences and check off both "Politics" (did anyone notice there are two?
4. As usual, politics posts still appear on my
Gosh, damn. A nerd website that is broken and buggy? Where's your pride?
Yes! Of course it would have you stupid paranoid fuck. This is a big issue regardless of party affiliation. After the beating the electoral college took in the last election and the claims of illegitamcey that haunted bush through his whole first term, if this actually happens and has a deciding factor on the election it will be of insane importance.
It will likely kill the electoral college, it will further decrease voting turnout and it will be a serious albatrose around the neck of the elected president.
Be better in bed. Wikiafterdark!
Electors for each STATE do cast their vote based on the popular tally of their state. Electoral math starts to get weird when elections get close, like last time when several states were won or lost by only a few thousand votes. That's when you get a situation where enough electoral votes to win (270) going for one candidate, while the grand TOTAL individual votes from ALL states is actually for another candidate. This election in particular, I wonder if the members of the electoral college are mulling thier power and choices this year, either to throw a wrench in a candidate's win (like the W. Virginia Mayor) or to correct weird math when the national numbers go to one guy, but their vote would give it to the other guy. Either way its gonna be a nailbiter..
The electoral college was developed so that you only had to send one person / state to Washington
Then why wasn't the system codified to require the elector to merely report the majority vote for the state, and not allow him/her the option to ignore the will of the people?
The electoral votes/popular vote problem is a result of a 10 year census (and the congressional redistricting/electoral college rebalance that follows). I'd be all for a system that redistributes every two years, but the census bureau budget would have to be increased and there would be bitter redistricting fights every two years instead of every 10. Actually what would be best would for the census to be a headcount of all eligible voters done in the 1st half of even numbered years. Redistricting would then be done on the odd years before congress went on summer recess. This would take out the illegal (and legal) alien population, felons who haven't had their voting rights restored, etc, basically the people who don't have a vote shouldn't determine population tallys for voting purposes. This would also clean up any confusion like what was done in florida where they just had massive purges of the voter rolls based on name instead of actual felon status, which was friggin braindead.
09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0
Thank you, thank you, thank you, for expressing something I've been thinking about for a long time:
Popular election of Senators may be a bad idea.
"How", you say? "How dare you!", some of you scream. Well, how long have we been complaining that real statesmanship is missing from Congress? The Senate was supposed to be the wise check on the popular passions of the day when the Constituion was written. The Senate was not supposed to be anti-democratic. It was not meant to block the will of the House, those popular representatives of the citizenry. It was mereley supposed to be a group of older and wiser men that would provide moderation in the expression of the democratic will. It didn't always work out this way, but for the exception of the tenure of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster (and those two also served in the Senate), the Senate was always known as the chamber of Congress that had the deepest debates about what we would call the Big Picture today. Congressmen were too busy trying to get roads built and budgets passed. The Senate always debated the truly lofty issues of the day.
After the 17th Amendment passed, and Senators became directly elected by popular vote, they became less statesmenlike. For all intents and purposes, they're just "Super-Congressmen" now, just as concerned with bringing home the pork as their fellow House members.
I'm not saying there wasn't abuse of the old system (with state legislatures electing them), or that common people aren't fit to elect their leaders. Far from it. But I wish we could get a better caliber of Senator, regardless of party.
How many truly great Senators have there been last century? Truly wise men that had the best interests of the country at heart, and at times bucked their own party to follow that instinct? In the latter half of the 20th century, I can think of only two I'd apply this label to: Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, and John C Stennis of Mississippi. DPM was Liberal, but had common sense. He was a Democrat, but respected Republicans. And keep in mind, I'm a Republican. How often do you hear someone of one party praise someone of another party? Not often. Stennis was a lifelong Democrat that is remembered as the father of the modern navy for his contributions. What about the House? Despite the more partisan nature of the House, Congressmen have more often made their mark in the public memory than Senators have, becoming both famous, and infamous. Sam Rayburn, Jim Wright, Newt Gingrich.
Maybe it's just wishful thinking on my part.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I believe electors should not be allowed to decide who they will vote for before the national election. Each party can put electors on the ballot, but each elector runs separately. It would increase representation. It would allow you to vote mostly democrats, but vote against the anti-gun democrats, if that is how you wish to vote!
After the polls close the electors gather together and come to an agreement (by the deadline in the constitution or it goes to congress). Since each electors is independent, electors can compromise on someone in the other party, but with important beliefs to shared with the other. (for example, a anti-abortion democrat)
The electoral college is there because a good leader may have to piss people off.
So I don't really see what's so wrong if he openly declares his wishes. If people vote him in and they want him to vote for Bush they're stupid.
We don't vote for the electors, we actually vote for the presidential candidates. The popular vote within a state determines which party's electors are then sent to the electoral college.
Yes, it made more sense two hundred years ago when news and electors traveled by horse. However there are still some benefits to the indirect election of a president. Smaller states have more of a say and therefore can not be ignored. With a direct popular vote candidates would not really care what people outside of major metropolitan areas care about.
Go read the original constitution. Originally, people didn't vote for the president. In fact, the people didn't have a say on how the president was chosen.
Article II, section 2, clause 2: 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: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.
The legislature of a state chose the electors, not the people! The popular vote is just as important as the world-wide popular vote. It is irrelevant. All the states have delegated that responsibility to various systems. I believe Rhode Island and Maine appoint electors according to the proportion of the vote.
The electors assembled in their own states and chose two people to be president, one of which must not be from their state. (That's why Cheney moved to Wyoming and claimed residency there - he could not be voted as the second because he was a Texas resident.) They had to send the number of votes for each person, signed and sealed, to the federal government. Whereupon the president of the senate opens the envelopes and reads the votes. The one with the majority is the president. The second place is vice-president, and president of the senate. If there is a tie and both have majority, then the house decides who is president and who is vice-president. If no one gets a majority, then the house chooses one from the top five candidates. In the case the house is tied, the senate breaks the tie.
That's how the president was chosen at first. In fact, in the first election, nobody ran for president. However, George Washington won overwhelmingly. It was said that each of the electorates actually debated and took seriously their duty to choose a president. How I wish we elected representatives to choose the most important office in the land! And how I wish those people would debate and choose outside of the visibility of the people and legislatures the president!
Eventually, we got rid of the "second place is vice-president" rule by amendment because it always meant that the president of the senate was in opposition to the president, and the government was constantly gridlocked due to that.
When the Florida debacle occured, the Florida state legislature could've stepped in and changed the law permitting them to appoint electors without regard to the people's voice. That was their right under the constitution. Then they could've appointed their own electoral college and then sent them off to vote whichever way they pleased. However, because so few Americans have even read the simple document that our nation is built on, they refused to do so for fear of open rebellion. Instead, they allowed the courts to settle the matter.
Now, go read that document! You have to understand what is in it and what is not, and it is an easy read for techies like us. If we forget what checks and balances are in there, and why they are there, we are doomed to end up like France, Germany, Russia, or China one day.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Source: http://www.issues2000.org/askme/Faithless_Electors .htm
The first clear case of the faithless elector happened in 1820, where one of James Monroe's electors voted for John Quincy Adams instead. Monroe carried every state in the Union, so the outcome was not affected.
In this century, there have been 7 faithless electors. The first was in 1948, when Strom Thurmond was running for president on the Dixiecrat platform. Preston Parks, a Truman elector for Tennessee, voted for Thurmond, who was a distant third in the popular vote. W.F. Turner, an elector for Adlai Stevenson, voted in 1956 for a local judge from his home district.
The first appearance of a faithless elector in a close election happened in the 1960 race between Nixon and Kennedy. An Oklahoma Kennedy elector named Henry D. Irwin voted instead for Harry F. Byrd, a senator from Virginia. Byrd ran as an independent and gained in addition all the 8 electoral votes from Mississippi and 6 of the 7 votes from Alabama. Reportedly Irwin, a southern Democrat, objected to Kennedy's civil rights policies. Although this election was very close, Irwin's vote did not affect the outcome.
In 1968 however, the independent candidate's appeal and his corresponding electoral votes almost did change the outcome. Lloyd Bailey, a North Carolina Nixon elector, voted instead for George Wallace, who ran as an independent. In this case, Wallace gained a total of 46 electoral votes, which came close to preventing either Nixon or Humphrey from getting the number needed to win.
In 1972, a Nixon elector named Roger L. McBride voted for the Libertarian candidate John Hospers. The publicity McBride received culminated in his own run for President in 1976, also as a Libertarian.
A Ford elector from Washington, Mike Padden, voted in 1976 for Ronald Reagan. Reagan has lost the party's nomination to Ford. The most recent case was in 1988, where Margarette Leach, a Democratic elector from West Virginia, voted for Democratis Vice-Presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen instead. She said, "it was nice to make a mark on history... I wish every year somebody... would make a statement and it would be heard."
What happens when an elector is faithless? It turns out that only about half of the states have laws binding their electors to vote for the popular vote winner in their state. But wait, the situation is even worse. In the states that do bind their electors, either there is no penalty, or the penalties range from a fine ($1000 in Wisconsin) to conviction of a fourth-degree felony (New Mexico). And, although there are clear documented cases of faithless electors, no faithless elector has ever been punished. Of course, no faithless elector has ever changed the outcome of an election. So far.
The entire system of the electoral college was supposed to shield the decision of selecting a president from an ignorant public. In my opinion, the situation in Florida in 2000 was a perfect example of the sort of buffer it provides. I desperately wished that Florida's electoral college representatives would have just split their votes and given the odd one to Bush. That would have been a fair resolution to all the recounting. If it really was too close to call, then make it up in the electoral vote. If it was due to Republicans trying to disenfranchise black voters, if it was due to Democrats trying to disenfranchise military absentee voters, if it was due to Dan Rather calling the election for Gore an hour before the polls closed, whatever the case, make it up in the electoral vote. If all of these battleground states -- if ALL the states -- would cast their votes according to the percentage of the votes that go towards the candidates, we'd have a system that could still correct this sort of confusion, and would still get really close to a system of a popular vote. Don't let anyone fool you, we've had craziness in our voting all along. It's just that technology has provided both the insight to catch it and, more importantly, the means to communicate it immediately. The electoral college may be even more forward-thinking than we knew, but the people who make up the system are going to have to change their attitudes. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's only tradition that keeps things the way they are. I don't know of any laws that force the delegates to cast their votes a certain way. If they think that the public of their state has made a mistake, it's their duty to cast their vote according to their conscience. (But then we get into a situation were we need to examine how those people get into the position of casting their vote. I have no idea how they are selected.)
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."