[EM] Expressing pairwise preferences

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 03:00 PM 8/19/2005, RLSuter at aol.com wrote:
>No. There are no second votes by the electoral college, nor
>does it meet as a national body.

Oops! Well, I'm only about 200 years out of date.... How embarassing!

I've been affected by the original vision of the Electoral College, which 
was a great idea, and gradually that erased my knowledge about what had 
subsequently happened to it.... living in a dream, I am....

>The bias in favor of Republicans today
>in a House vote for president would be even greater. It's one
>of many reasons that I argue that the U.S is really not a
>democracy, despite all the patriotic rhetoric to to the
>contrary.

We agree on that, at least partially. It is a democracy, but with a host of 
rules which make it difficult for real democracy to function. It is still a 
democracy because if the people were to actually act coherently, they could 
manage it. It is only the failure of the people to organize independently 
of the defective structures of our electoral democracy that makes the flaws 
in that democracy result in such obvious inequities.

>As for how electors are chosen, states can do it any way
>they want. All but two states now do it with winner-take-all
>plurality, but they could use any voting method they chose
>and could also delegate electors according to vote percentages
>of candidates in each state. They could also allow candidates
>and their electors to negotiate prior to the electoral college
>votes in each state, though about half the states now require
>that electors vote for the candidate they are committed to.
>Many constitutional scholars don't think such restrictions
>are constitutional, but it's never had to be tested.

Yes. The electoral college could indeed be reformed without federal 
constitutional amendments, it is a state-by-state issue. However, as I've 
noted before, the change is not likely to happen in any state except at 
points where major party power is more or less balanced, perhaps at a point 
where the majority party (in the state legislature) fears that it will be 
the minority party in the next presidential election.