[EM] electoral college/Serious thoughts

[Adam Tarr]

Dave Ketchum wrote:

>Adam seems to dream of some magic that would make an amendment doable:
>      His magic is not convincing.

I never said That the change I suggest would make passing an amendment a 
snap.  You made a specific point, and I responded to it.  You said: 
[removing the EC] "requires at least some of the low population states to 
approve a Constitutional amendment that gives them less voice in electing a 
President."  I proposed a way to eliminate the EC that preserved their 
current relative share of the votes.  Nothing too fancy, no magic... just 
responding to a specific point.

>      Needs clarification as to how 3/N and 54/M are even useful in magic.

Just scale the number of votes coming out of any given state so that its 
share of the total votes case is equal to its share of the electoral 
votes.  So California's voters, after scaling, would always be 54/535 of 
the total vote, no matter how many ballots were actually cast 
there.  Similarly, North Dakota voters would be 3/545 of the total.

>Adam dreams that a near tie in a popular vote national election is not 
>worth preparing for:

I never said that.  I said that I wouldn't shy away from a national vote 
just because a tie MIGHT happen.

>      There HAS to be a law somewhere that the bigger the problem 
> associated with not being prepared, the greater the odds of the event 
> happening.
>      Remember that near tie is not an absolute number, but based on how 
> big a change might result from a recount.

Yes, of course.  Recounts are still a possibility.  But that's not enough 
of a reason to eschew a national vote.

-Adam

P.S.  Let's remember for a moment that the EC was not implemented as some 
high-concept method of guaranteeing small states' rights.  It was a method 
of abstracting out the vote so that the southern states could get some 
credit for their non-voting slave populations.  Not exactly the proudest 
legacy left in our system of government.