[EM] Electoral College (was Re: Voting by selecting a published ordering)

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 02:29 PM 5/3/2006, Dave Ketchum wrote:
>Presently, with a couple small state exceptions, each state awards all its
>votes to the candidate doing best in that state.

Yes.

>Above you propose one state volunteering to award its votes based on a
>formula that could cause the winner to change from the candidate that that
>state's voters voted for to a different candidate.

Yes.

>I would not expect any state to volunteer to obey such a formula.

Such an action could be favored by a majority of voters in the state. 
Not in all states. I would not expect states where this was not true 
to adopt the reform easily.

Note that there is a current reform movement that would do exactly 
this, it's been getting quite a bit of press, and it has Republican 
and Democratic politicians behind it. This is a similar proposal, but 
it basically bypasses the electoral college as a true part of the 
process; if successful, the college would become a rubber stamp for 
the popular vote. Almost always.

This other proposal has a state decide to select its electors as 
pledged to vote according to the national popular vote.

The problem with a single state reforming to select electors 
proportionally to the vote is that this could have the effect of 
awarding the election to a candidate who was *not* the popular vote 
winner. This has been the big obstacle.

Both my proposed reform and the currently active reform movement 
(essentially a compact between states, to become effective when 
enough states have joined such that a majority of electors will be so 
generated) involve using the pledged elector system -- clearly 
constitutional -- to eliminate the widely acknowledged inequity in 
the existing system.

So what if some states resist? *All it takes is enough states to 
create an electoral college majority.*

And the reform under way, in some senses, is better than what I 
proposed: it is fine-grained, since it produces an election result 
without depending on state electoral college assignments.

What remains, however, is what happens if the electors actually have 
to vote; for example, the winner dies before the election. Who would 
they vote for? Or the popular vote is unclear. How would the electors 
determine the vote.

A good initiative would consider all these things. My preference is 
to keep the deliberative College as it was designed. Among other 
things, the College could create Condorcet results, properly 
constituted. But that's also possible in this popular reform, for how 
the winner of the popular vote is determined might not be the 
simpleplurality winner. What if overvoting were allowed and the 
winner were the plurality winner under those circumstances? But I'm 
not sure it would be tactically worth complicating things at this 
point. The point is that what has traditionally been considered 
politically impossible, reforming the College, actually could be 
relatively easy. "Relatively" is used advisedly.

It is not at all clear which party, if any, would be favored by this 
change. Many of the sponsors are Republicans.... but I don't think 
this means that they think it would favor their party.

>What I see below is mechanics of such volunteering, but nothing convincing
>as to what would get a state to agree to do it.

As an initiative, a majority of voters could implement it. This would 
be easier if a majority of voters were affiliated with other than the 
plurality party, which situation does exist in some states. And 
because, as constituted, the reforms do not injure the popular vote 
winner, many supporters of the majority party might approve of it as 
well. It's not really against their party, it is only against 
candidates winning who did not win the popular vote.

It's actually pretty clear, Dave. Please tell me why, if you think it 
is the case, a state, under the conditions I mentioned, would *not* 
want to implement this?

Remember the conditions under which it would make a difference: A 
candidate wins in the state, but loses in the popular vote. A 
candidate might be winning in the state with less than a majority of 
the popular vote, easily. And quite possibly a majority of voters 
would prefer the alternate winner, who only lost in that state 
because of vote-splitting.

There is no reason to suppose that this would injure a particular 
party, and it would be done long in advance of an actual election.


>There is a difference:
>       A candidate campaigns promising actions if elected - trouble enough,
>but there can be hope.
>       An elector campaigns claiming to know how to select a satisfactory
>candidate - making it even more difficult for the voter to sort out
>getting the best candidate via picking an elector.

An elector need not make campaign promises at all. The idea elector 
is simply someone who is widely considered trustworthy. Dave's 
thinking here is based on the idea that the voter is trying to 
determine, directly, the ultimate outcome. But that is actually an 
impossible goal. Determining a member of the set of people who then 
determine the winner is a more realizable goal.

I actually think that candidates would make good electors. What if 
candidates could directly receive a state's electoral votes, as 
electors? (This would mean that non-state residents would have to be 
eligible, and it would mean that a single person might be exercising 
more than one state's votes, but it would solve this alleged "sorting 
out" problem. Vote for the candidate you prefer, your vote will not be wasted!



>Another detail [in the original conception] is that it WAS NOT 
>POSSIBLE for candidates to have the
>contact with the voters that is now expected.

What a joke! How much contact does, say, GW Bush have with me? This 
"contact" is an illusion, a one-way presentation of a carefully 
crafted image....

If you actually use the College, the College could meet with the 
candidates, face-to-face. It could interview them. I think one of the 
basic defects in our democracy is the lack of deliberative process in 
elections....