[EM] IRV in Burlington VT

[robert bristow-johnson]

On Jan 9, 2010, at 9:38 PM, Dave Ketchum wrote:

...
>>> Ludicrous, isn't it?
>>
>> about as ludi as the Electoral College.
>
> Here I choke.  Go back to the years in which it was born.  What  
> better could you have proposed then than electing a committee (the  
> EC) to look intelligently for qualified candidates to elect as Pres  
> and VP?  To have campaigns such as we have now would have been  
> impractical.  Now civilization has advanced and it would make sense  
> to move to something new.


i thought that the main concern at the time had to do with decoupling  
the effort a government would have to make if there is a close  
election from the states where it isn't close.  some people claim  
that this is *still* a good reason to keep the EC; in the case of a  
close election, you need not worry about recounting the whole  
country, where the authority at the seat of government would have a  
lot of trouble in the outskirts of Georgia or New Hampshire (when  
information could travel as fast as horses).

so the decoupled census separately determines congressional  
apportionment and, from that the influence of each state on the  
presidential election is a function (a pretty simple function that is  
meant to reduce the influence of the big states a little).  all that  
needs to happen is that, on Jan 6, the Congress at the seat of  
government must decide if a slate from any particular state is valid  
or not, and if so count the electoral votes.  (this, BTW, was an  
issue in early 2001 when deciding if the Florida slate was valid.   
Rep Jesse Jackson and a few other US Reps, objected to the slate but  
they couldn't get a single Senator to agree, so the slate was  
considered valid.)  anyway, by leaving to the states the sole  
authority to decide how their electors are chosen, it left the issue  
of settling close elections, vote padding, etc. to the states which,  
being smaller, could manage such affairs better than the Feds could.   
There is no way that some corrupt election judges in some little  
state could inflate vote totals and change the outcome of a  
presidential election, 6 horse-days away from DC where it would be  
hard to check to accept vote totals.  with the EC, the vote *totals*  
are determined in advance.  it's only the breakdown of the electoral  
vote that congress has to test for validity and accept (or reject).   
it's harder to mess up the counts for the more finite set of  
electoral votes.

that's my spin on why the EC happened.

--

r b-j                  rbj at audioimagination.com

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."