Electoral College Reform vs. the EP Clause

[Steve Eppley]

DEMOREP1 wrote:
>If the popular votes within a State are weighted unequally based on
>the results in some other States, then the courts may easily rule
>that the Equal Protection Clause has been violated as not being one
>person- one vote within that, repeat, that State.
-snip-

Nothing proposed would weight the votes of a state's citizens
unequally.  The wrinkle is that the votes of other states' citizens
would be added to the pool.

>If a State legislature passed a law saying that only the voters in
>county X in that State could elect all of its presidential electors,
>then is there any doubt that the courts would say that such law
>violates the Equal Protection Clause ?

True, but what's being proposed isn't like that.  The voters in 
county X, Y, and Z are all equal to each other even after the 
out-of-state ballots are added to the pool.

>Weighting the popular votes to produce unequal ratios of
>presidential electors/popular votes for different candidates is
>just another unconstitutional variant.

I don't know what you're referring to here.  Who talked about 
weighting?  Who talked about ratios?

>The KIS (keep it simple) principle applies.  A constitutional
>amendment having an uniform definition of elector for federal
>elections should be enacted
-snip-

KIS is overruled by the difficulty of enacting constitutional
amendments, compared to the relative ease with which citizens of
a state can pass initiatives. 

Possibly the clause dealing with the electoral college should be
separated into its own initative, if its complexity would hurt the
chances of passing the rest of the single-winner reform initiative.

---Steve     (Steve Eppley    seppley at alumni.caltech.edu)