[EM] The Electoral College could lead to civil war.

[robert bristow-johnson]

> Dump the Electoral College of the United States of America before it leads to civil war.

 
i dunno if it would ever get that bad, but i agree the U.S. should ditch electing presidents using this funky non-linear function of 51 different subtotals of the popular vote. (the term "Electoral College" does not appear in the U.S. constitution, and i doubt that it does in
law, but the term "electors" does appear and maybe "presidential electors" and vice-presidential electors.)  it should be just the aggregate popular vote.
BTW, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact gets us there without a constitutional amendment.
but some
things that don't exactly make sense:
>
> Going back to the drafting of the constitution, several suboptimal compromises went into the Constitution. 1 was that when choosing the President, one votes for electors whose numbers are equal to the number of Senators and Representatives.
BTW, the reason the founding fathers did this
was really for facilitating the administering of elections by the states (without federal involvement) and to keep any state from swinging an election by padding its own vote.  The states are assigned a number of electors and they get to choose their electors any way their legislature chooses
to.  Even when states throw all of their electors to one candidate, that is the limit to how much they can effect the outcome.
> Small states hoped that this would boost their influence on the election of the President. It does not:
>
hey, one of the arguments people are making for ditching the so-called Electoral College **is** that it grants voters in Wyoming and Vermont and D.C. much more weight than voters in California or Texas.  as in
this: https://onsizzle.com/i/electoral-college-math-the-population-of-california-is-38-800-000-the-4175736  so you have people on your own side that disagree with your claim above.
 
> States soon figured that if all of the electors vote alike, candidates would focus on
the state because its electors will all go to 1 candidate. This race to the bottom leads to 48 of 50 states having all of the electors of their states voting for the plurality winner of the state. The result is that 30 states are ignored in each election:
>

> ¿What do California, the 6 states with 3 electoral votes and the District of Columbia have in common? ¡They are all FlyOverCountry!:

>

> Basically only states where the republicrat and democan are closer than 45% 55% are worth campaigning. Beyond those parameters, they are either out-of-reach or in-the-bag. That means that only 5-10 states are competitive. Because of polling uncertainty, that is dozen-score in practice. The
other 30 states are irrelevant and can be safely ignored.
>

> Certainly, a 3-electoral-vote state could be a swing state and become part of the battleground, but so can a large state (in 1960, Texas was a swing state).

>

> The Electoral College makes fraud much easier:
well, that's debatable.  say in 2000, if there is an election that ends up decided by one state that came out close, then recounts need only happen in that state.
but it *would* make it easier to defraud the election in just a
single state, rather than widespread
>
> Let us suppose that 1 Politician receives 51% Of the popular vote and another politician receives 48% of the popular vote with 1% of the popular votes going to independents and 3rd parties with 200 million presidential ballots cast. The candidate with 51% carries 27 states and the District of
Columbia. In the Electoral college it is 323 to 215 in favor of the 51%.
>

> The looser notices that in California, it is very close (the winner wins California by only a few hundred votes). The looser pays 1 thousand registered voters who did not plan to vote 1 thousand dollars to vote for him and confirm the vote by taking a selfy with the completed ballot
—— ¡this is why BallotSelfies should be illegal, as they are in many places! The Looser now caries California and wins the Electoral College 270 to 268.
>

> ¡The Cheater just used the Electoral College as an huge ForceMultiplier!:

>

> It would take changing 3 million popular votes under that scenario to achieve the same effect without the Electoral College. ¡That is a 3-thousand-to-1 multiplier!

>

> This brings us to how the Electoral College could lead to civil war:

>
you could have the Cheater cheating an election with popular vote, too.  if it comes out close, with the popular vote the recount and re-examination would be nationwide.




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r b-j                  rbj at audioimagination.com
 


"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
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