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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 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!
The electoral college does need to remove winner take all...but this aint gonna solve that.
And why, oh why, did they choose IRV? Possibly one of the worst systems they could have chosen. Alright, you could make an arguement that it might be better than the current system, but its vastly inferior to concordent(which is unfortunately complex) and my personal favorite, Approval Voting.
On the bright side, Im glad people are taking note of this, though I fear this will be used as a reason to ignore other pushes for election reform.
Support more choices in goverment-Vote 3rd party.
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.
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 suppose I'm a hardliner; I favor leaving the broader system as is.
I think the electoral college works fine, and the state-level winner-take-all approach forces candidates to appeal to a broader base of voters in most states (New York and California being anomalies in which very large urban areas completely dominate the whole state).
Likewise, I see nothing wrong with the present voting system. It's simple, and it works. While I don't disagree that this can limit national support for third party candidates in marginal situations, I am also fairly convinced that the existing style of voting works plenty well provided that there is broad enough support for the third party in the first place. Which is to say, if a third party candidate were to provide a platform that was interesting to a broad enough number of Americans, I am pretty sure that they could win the Presidency. Especially if they can cough up the funds to campaign effectively.
Canthros
I was for eliminating the electoral college until I read this: Math Against Tyranny. It also makes the analogy to baseball runs vs. games. Alan Natapoff has mathematically shown that voters have more power with the current system where power is defined as the ability to tip an election in any one direction. Basically, if it was purely a popular vote, the only way your vote would matter is if the rest of the voters split exactly down the middle. Given the size of the US population, the probability of this is extremely low. Especially given that people tend to lean towards one candidate or the other, the chance of deadlock is essentially nil under a popular vote. That means each voter has no power to tip an election and thus politicians have no reason to listen to them. Dividing into smaller groups means that each group is more likely to deadlock and so each voter has more power. Thus, what happened in Florida in 2000 was a good thing. In fact, the best thing to do is to re-divide up the nation into groups such that every single group would be very likely to deadlock. The winner would then take-all from each group, making it so that all politicians would have to work to win votes in every single group.
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
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?