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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."
I'll be sure to write my Congressman to vote against both!
Canthros
Why must it be *IRV*? Why can't it be condorcet or something a little less flakey than IRV?
I don't know why modern political-reformists are so fixated on IRV. Of all the technical criteria of "fair voting" IRV fulfills NONE. In this respect it's worse even than "majority vote".
I mean, why would you want to go with a voting scheme, that makes possible situation that adding votes for a candidate causes him to lose, and converselly, removing votes for a candidate causes him to win?
Why not go directly with "aproval" or even "condorcet"?
Robert
PS Go, read the above link to find out what's exactly wrong with IRV.
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
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!
Democrats think the Electoral College cost them the presidency. We better change the constitution. Republicans think they have a potential president in a popular Austrian. We better change the constitution. 3rd parties want more votes. Better go PR, IRV, or some other method that lets people vote without "throw away" syndrome. I'm a Libertarian, and I say "Just say no" to these knee-jerk reactions. I feel the same about redistricting. We shouldn't allow ANYONE to attempt to engineer favorable outcomes. They never turn out the way we expect any way. And I say better the devil you know. As soon as we Libertarians stop running marginal candidates, more voters will be convinced to vote for us without throwing away their votes. Despite our crappy ballot access laws, we manage to do alright. When we lose, it's our fault. Let's stop blaming a system that is not half-bad and stop trying to engineer new structural outcomes. It always seems to make the mess bigger.
This article suggests approval;
The Mathematical Association of America and the American Statistical Association each elect their committees by a new method called approval voting.
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 wouldn't mind the electoral system, if there was also a REQUIREMENT to vote and maintain your citizen ship.
I'd rather see the entire populous vote for a gibbering idiot than see less than a quarter of it vote for the same idiot.
~Donald
~Donald / Just RTFM
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
Though I agree there are better things than IRV (approval voting is my favorite), IRV is better than what we have now. It allows 3rd parties to be get almost 1/3 of the vote before it screws up and reverts to the equivalent of popular vote, so at least there is a measure of what support those 3rd parties have.
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
Easy. The president represents the STATES. United States.
The State is supposed to represent and protect you.
If we go to some form of popular vote, that means the power of the states have actually been taken away, and given to the President, in the sense that the President only has to care about big cities: the SF Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York, Boston, etc.
Right now he has to court the 'swing states', but with popular vote, he'd court 'swing cities'. It changes the balance of power. The Founding Fathers had a two tier system in mind: Federal power and State power, and over the past 200 years Federal power has been growing at the expense of State power, and by proxy personal power since a person has MUCH more pull in a local situation than a global situation.
GPL Deconstructed
What would happen if 95% of all Americans lived in cities?
That wouldn't change the presidential vote unless these cities were all in the same state (or a small number of states).
Congressional districts within states are broken up roughly in terms of the same population for each. I would assume that this would mean lots of geographically small districts and a few large ones.
Even in the extreme case you describe the system is nowhere near unbalanced as you make it out to be,
About 13% of Americans are black, yet they don't have an equal share of representation as white people.
This is only relevant if blacks are inherently different from whites. I don't believe that and I thought our politically correct overlords were trying to teach us all races are equal. I wouldn't vote based on race... I wouldn't even vote based on my religion (which describes me a whole lot more) because I'm Catholic and wouldn't vote for Kerry. Qualities like race, sex or geographic home, hair style, speaking style, or obnoxiousness of a candidate's spouse should not be relevant (I realize they often are). Qualities like political attitudes, philosophical stands, and history of public life (and to a large extent, personal life) should dictate how people will vote. I think the differences in racial politics are really largely based on differences in socioeconomic standing. I would expect middle-class blacks to vote similarly to middle-class whites, and the same for lower- and upper-class people. It just so happens a disproportionate number of blacks are lower in economic standing. If we help all poor people, the blacks will come into parity with other races, and their politics will probably follow suit. I don't see it as a black thing, but as a people thing. But then again I'm a pasty-white computer nerd who understands black culture about as well as I understand ancient Greek. Maybe I'm completely wrong. I just try to see people as people.
However, in answer to your question, if we somehow institutionalize race into our political system we will never rise above racism we are struggling to escape completely from today. It's bad enough as it is because treating people without regard to color isn't good enough any more.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I am quite puzzled about the reactions I read here.
I remember reading here that the vast majority of slashdotters think the current system for electing the president of the USA is bad. Some complains that voting third party is more or less a waste. Others complain that their home state is so democrat/republican that their vote for the other party won't count. Others complain about the winner take all present in most states.
Yet, when someone proposes a bill that tries to adress these problems, people here bitch that it is not perfect.
Althrough I am not American (or maybe because I am not), I think this is a step in the right direction.
First, about the abolishion of electoral college. I've read many comments complaining that it would lessen the power of small population states. I fail to see how it is a problem. Look at Europe. Most countries in Europe directly elect their president, without consideration about the region where one votes. Yet, you don't see in Europe the tyranny of the cities. Hell, even with this system, the agricultural people have a political clout much higher than their number would indicate. They are not oppressed by cities resident people.
A citizen is a citizen, and I fail to see why some should get more power in elections than others. Isn't the definition of a democracy (or a constitutional republic) that each citizen be equal ? Equality means same power in elections, me think.
Second, about IRV. Sure IRV is technically inferior to Condorcet. But Condorcet will not be a way for elections. The vast majority of people don't understand it. Even the short explanations some slashdotters proposed are not simple. If you don't believe me, try to explain Condorcet to some 85 years old grandma, or to someone that dropped school at 14 because they didn't catch maths. These people won't trust Condorcet, they find it too convulted. The fact that it is mathematically superior doesn't get in the line for these people.
OTOH, IRV can be understood by everyone. Sure it's buggy. But so is the current system. Remember, this is a proposed bill, and representatives will discuss it. That means that it may be corrected to allow more sane methods.
Remember people, we are discussing two bills ( *two* bills, even if you hate IRV, you can approve the dropping of electoral college), and will be amended and corrected multiple times before passing to final vote. It seems silly to me to oppose them.
Why not try to be positive, and write your representatives that the idea of the bills are good, and then proposing alternate voting methods ? If you just oppose them, don't complain latter when the only choice you get is a republicrat and a demoblican. Instead, support the senator that proposed the bills, and encourage their perfection.
America's presidential election is the worst of all presidential elections in first world. Multiple (and sometimes brain-dead) voting scheme, near-impossibility for third parties to get votes, people in democratic states who can't show their support for republicans, people in republican states who can't show their support for democrats, election determined by Florida and a few other key swing states, people having votes that count twice just because they live in a small state, etc...
That should be corrected, and even if these bills are not perfect (I don't like IRV either), they sure are a step in the right direction.
What about stopping bitching that the whole world is dumb and accepting that sometimes, to get a good system, you have to be patient and support a temporary solution if it is the right direction ? This is how the real world works, you know.
The obvious question to follow up with is "Which cities?" If 95% of all Americans live in Chicago, the West Coast cities, and the stretch from Boston to Washington, D.C., (call it 12 states) then they will be under-represented. Very badly in the Senate, where they would have 24 out of 100 senators, least badly in the House where they would have a large majority of the representatives but still not 95%, and somewhere in between in presidential elections.
Speaking as someone from a large western state with relatively few people, great scenic beauty, and rich in natural resources, let me say that replacing the current system with one that was based solely on population would be terrifying. I can easily envision the 95% who live in the 12 states (in this example) passing federal laws that do a variety of things: requiring that we strip-mine the resources; requiring that we operate massive land-fills in the non-scenic areas to dispose of waste from the urban states; requiring that we ban all development in scenic areas (even though the large majority of that 95% will never visit them); requiring energy-efficiency standards that make sense in an urban setting but are simply not practical in my state.
One of the key issues that the Founders wrestled with in writing the Constitution was how to make it difficult for a small group of states with large populations to impose their will on the other states. I would be happy to entertain systems other than the current one. Can you suggest one that guarantees my state's ability to have a meaningful say in governing the nation that doesn't give me "over representation" relative to our population?