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Electoral College Abolition Amendment and IRV Bill
scoobrs writes "Two bills, H.J.R. 109 and H.R. 5293, were introduced in the US House by Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-IL). The first is a constitutional amendment abolishing the electoral college. The latter is a bill providing for instant runoff voting in all federal elections by 2008."
People have a hard time with something as simple as a butterfly ballot, and now you want them to rank their choices?
Wow, talk about being optimistic about the voting public.
Even if IRV is the most "accurate", I think Approval voting is lot simpler to understand, especially since it is used in many of the local elections (school board, etc), so it is familiar to most voters.
- Tony
Abolishing the Electoral College in favor of a straight popular vote is a bad thing because it eliminates the representation from small populations. The Founding Fathers were not stupid. They devised a solution to a problem that still exists today: Ensuring that large populations do not dicate law to smaller populations.
What I WOULD recommend is working on a better way to handle multi-party elections such as runoffs, etc.
In addition, Congress should instead be working harder to develop better solutions to validate voters, better solutions to develop more secure, reliable voting methods, and to develop legislation that eliminates the current loopholes in campaign funding laws.
Remember that the United States is NOT a Democracy, but a Federal Republic. To change that is to change the fundamental foundations of this country.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
Better than eliminating the electoral college would be to require each state to allocate its electors proportionately instead of winner-take-all for the state.
That would completely eliminate the concept of a "battleground state" as it exists now, and "florida" situations in the future - there would never be a situation where a small increase in real votes could net you 21 electoral votes in one shot. Any recounts would be, at most, fighting over one electoral vote at a time instead of a whole state's worth, because the margin of error is never so large that it would cover more than that proportion of the state's voters.
I think this would probably have to be federally or constitutionally mandated, because individual states that apply it to only themselves instantly *dis*advantage themselves: where they might previously have gotten lots of attention from the candidates because 20+ electoral votes were up for grabs, the candidates would now concentrate on the states that *hadn't* implemented the change.
I'm all for the protection of the rights of the minority, but that isn't the same as letting the minority have a bigger say in how the country is run than the majority. And that is the current situation: rural voters have a disproportionally large say in how the country is run. There are fewer rural voters, yet they have (approximately) the same amount of pull as urban voters.
What would happen if 95% of all Americans lived in cities? Would the 5% of rural voters still get 50% of the representation? That would mean rural voters have 20 times the influence as urban voters. 20 times! Those are going to be some hefty argriculture subsidies!
I am left wondering why geographical boundries should determine representation. Why should 5% of the population have the same amount of say as 95% of the population? We don't have representatives based on race or religion, right? About 13% of Americans are black, yet they don't have an equal share of representation as white people. On the logic that minority groups should have equal representation, they should get their representation boosted, right?
The question I am trying to expose (and to which I don't have an answer) is: what constitutes a minority group that should get equal representation in our legislature? It seems to me that determining a minority on the basis of population density and geography is a pretty arbitrary metric. What makes rural America as a minority group so special as to warrant higher legislative representation (or voting clout)? Why not blacks, too? Or latinos? Or Jews? Or amputees? Or homosexuals?
It seems to me that the current system is disproportionately assigning representation based on somewhat arbitrary standards. What is a better standard? I'm not sure. But I'd be open to suggestions. Or critiques of my logic. :)
Taft
I tried reading the Condorcet Method summary. It's too complicated when compared to Instant Runoff. You're not going to get any support for a voting system which confuses the electorate.
I'm trying to imagine sitting down with your "average voter" and explaining how "A defeated B, B defeated C, C defeated A, and due to these complex and technical rules of ambiguity resolution, B is really the winner." She'll decide that the system is just picking the guy the ballot counters wanted, and never voting again.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
OK let me break this down for you....
Senate - each state gets two Senators, Senators are the STATE's representative's, not the people of the states - that's the house. So, each state gets an equal 2% respresentation of the entire Senate.
House - OK, now the House does represent the people broken up into little districts. But how on god's green earth can you say that the House gives larger representation to smaller populations? I live in Delaware, we have one Representative. That means 1 vote out of 435 in the House. California on the other hand has 56 Representatives. If it were just between us two states, California would win every time. And furthermore, Resprentatives are awarded per population (I don't have the numbers offhand, but it's somewhere around a million citizens per Representative). So as populations change, so does representation.
President - Are you kidding me? Like an earlier post said, the founding fathers were not stupid. The electoral college is in place to even things out. My home state of Delaware has a population of slightly over a million people. We're small. Don't blink or you'll miss us. The point is, the electoral college ensures that the President is elected by the States - as in President of the United STATES (not President of the Popular Vote). If the Prez was elected by the popular vote, then the Candidates would be in California, Texas, and New York for the duration of the campaign and would never set foot in Delaware, Rhode Island, Wyoming, Vermont, et al. However, as it stands, because of the electoral college, both Bush and Kerry have made multiple stops to this little tiny dot on the map called Delaware. We only have slightly over a million people, but the STATE has 3 electoral votes so while the candidates spend most of their time in the states with the huge populations, tiny states like ours don't get a lot of attention, but the electoral college makes sure we're not forgotten.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur