Iowa Seeks To Remove Electoral College

Zebano writes "Since changing the US constitution is too much work, the Iowa senate is considering a bill that would send all 7 of Iowa's electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote in a presidential election. This would only go into affect after enough states totaling 270 electoral votes (enough to elect a president) adopted similar resolutions."

Comments

One way to get more registered voters

[Vandil X]

If the popular vote truly counted, that would be a very compelling reason to register and/or go out and vote.

Re:Yawn.

[Overzeetop]

#1 is true only on paper, and we both know that (you even admit it yourself)

#2 a national recount is trivial, actually, since it's not really a national recount, but simply tens of thousands of individual precinct recounts. In other words, it's a parallel process. Sure, it would be expensive due to the manpower, but it's a trivial process.

Finally, the US doesn't apportion federal votes by population, but by slightly weighted version which gives additional weight to the least populous states (reps + senators). It would shift the balance slightly to change the voting. It's not a perfect system, but unless we start giving out fractional electors even a proportional representation electoral college could anoint a winner due to round-off error (which is already the case when the electoral and popular votes don't match). With the unbalanced weighting, even a split to 6 significant digits could result in a popular-electoral mismatch.

I would prefer a representative electoral system, but I'd be even more happy if there were a way to undo the gamemanship of the whole process.

Re:Federal Republic

[houghi]

Fun is that in those tiny homogeneous European countries you have much more choice to whom you want to elect then in your huge friggin' landmass with diverse wants and needs.