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Colorado To Vote on Electoral College Plan
siriuskase writes "Is it too much to ask of our technology/math skills to award electorial votes in proportion to the popular vote? Colorado might be up to the task. From the article:
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.
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Why is the electoral college good for democracy?
This article (Discover, Nov 1996 [coral cache]) suggests that the mathematics governing elections favors YOUR vote in an electoral college system.
Whatever your political slant, I am sure you would like YOUR vote to be more favored.
Imagine the electoral college as what happens if you're a "swing" voter in your family, your family contributing all its votes with its internal winner to your town's election, in which it is a "swing" voter in your small town, your town being a swing voter in the county election, your county being an important vote in the state election. In this case you weild extreme power. You are more likely to be in "this case" under the electoral college than in a pure vote.
There's nothing partisan in the way in which this empowers YOUR vote - rather, all that happens is that there is a more causative effect between YOUR political idea and what actually HAPPENS. It's rather like playing both sides against each other, with those who are actually making a decision having a huge return on their investment in making that decision. In other words, your decision about how you are going to vote = larger effect on what happens in the election.
I have not reviewed the mathematics myself, but this is how I understand the situation.
Comments from anyone who has reviewed the issue?
How has Natapoff's work held up over the past few years?
That's not entirely true. Statewide it's not likely that maine will go republican in this election, at least AFAIK southern maine is strongly liberal and has a much larger population than northern maine.
I don't believe we are actually a battleground STATE. We simply have a battleground district, our more northern half could go either way, with its one vote and one vote only.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but that's how I'm seeing it.
I live down in south-western colorado; a majority of the people in this county are registered republicans, yet from talking to them, they really seem to be more democrat-leaning. I've yet to figure out how this works -- perhaps there are just one or two issues that take it all in their minds?
Regardless of whether or not our voting system attracts presidential candidates to "care" about our state (it's lip-service everywhere, I don't think we're missing out on much), do we expect people to say "I want the way I vote to possibly count less if I'm on the winning side"? If the republicans have the voting majority, they'll want to get the biggest bang out of it, which means keeping the all/nothing system. (The same would be true of democrats, I'm pretty sure. We're all power-hungry.)
For senate/congress -- if we're going to have everyone campaigning on party platforms, how 'bout we just all select the party platforms we like best (with an oz-style system so the votes to rare entries can still count for something) and then later elect people to fill those positions? 35% republican? Fine, republicans get 35% of the available seats, and you get to pick which candidates you want for those. Greens get 5%? That's fine, they may just get one seat, but at least they get one. Yes, it's two-phase, and yes, I'm sure some of us will hate it. But it'd be nice for the little guys to get a little say, as opposed to no say at all.
For president -- even if our state is proportional, our president isn't. Once elected, the fact that a president won by a margin of 1% doesn't seem to phase him; he'll continue to act as if they're the leaders of the whole country, representing the values of half of us. Our proportional vote would still be swaying a winner-takes-all at the national level. Every four years or so we bounce back and forth, hoping to equalize the various extreme measures taken. Nobody seems willing to say "yes, I was elected by people who mostly believe X, but on the whole, the people I work for believe Y -- so I'll do Y." Once you're elected, you're working for all of your constituents, not just those who voted for you. I don't see any good way to enforce this, but maybe we could try to convince them it's only ethical. (And yes, nobody who does this, they'll be called "whiners" and told they'll get another chance when the next election comes around.)
Well, that's why it's called a "compromise". Historically, the reason was that New York and Virginia had so many votes that all the other colonies wouldn't join the Constitution unless there was a counterbalance. No election scheme can avoid "disenfranchising*" some number of voters -- at worst, (0.5000 x population) -1.
Here and now, we have the problem that the entire state of Colorado has only half the population of New York City. (I used to work in the WTC -- and that one building had ten times the population of my home town.)
Without the counterbalance, New York and California could vote to move everyone out of Colorado and turn it into a buffalo preserve and we couldn't do anything about it.
There's another reason that we kind of forget having had the aberrant case of a near-perfect split last election: by having a "thresholding" effect, it's much less common for a presidential election to be really close. It is, I believe, a theorem that no election scheme can completely avoid the problems we had last time, but the chances that an election will come down to a couple of thousand disputed votes in three or four counties is damn near zero. Imagine if every election had to be settled by the Supreme Court or the House.
* quotation marks because you've hit a pet peeve: losing an election isn't the same as being "disenfranchised". To be disenfranchised is to be deprived of the right to vote -- not being deprived of having the guy you want, win.