With the crazy results of the 2000 Presidential Election a lot of people, including myself, wondered about the usefulness of the electoral college, especially when the elected President didn't have a plurality of the votes. I thought it should be removed and the Presidency should be given to the candidate with the most votes (plurality). That would eliminate the 'meaningless' Democratic Texas vote or Republican Massachusetts vote. I finally did some reading on the matter and found out there was a lot more to the matter.
I drew most of my information from a single website, The Center for Voting and Democracy, which is bad, but it was well written and not slanted in any direction, so I figured it was ok. A bunch of the other websites I read from were really arguing for a specific proposal, even if they presented a wide range of information.
First there are problems with the current electoral college system:
So those are good reasons for reforming the election process in some way, but there are several problems. First any big changes will require a constitutional amendment, which means approval by 2/3 of Congress and 3/4 of the states. The 3-electoral vote states are unlikely to give up the disproportionate representation advantage. It seems to be a reasonable way to do things, because otherwise people in rural areas would have little to no representation. e.g. New York would have the same voting power as a several states. That might seem like it's fair, but the combination of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota would have less say than the city of New York, even though they'd have a signifcant percentage of the nation's land and natural resources. So any proposal which removes the disproportionate representation that small states have now will almost surely never make it past congress and less likely the states.
So what are some options? Read about these at this link.
Even after reading I don't know which option seems best to me, but some of them are really interesting. Instant Runoff Voting could solve the problem of expensive runoff elections. Another option is to give the winner of the popular vote an electoral bonus (say 25 additional votes), and seems kind of neat, but deciding on the actual number would be difficult. Proportionally distributing the current electoral votes seems reasonable, but there's a rounding issue, and if it gets partially adopted (state by state) one party could have a big advantage. (e.g. if Texas started splitting it's electoral votes the Democrats would gain, so the Republicans would try to block the change) I don't have a lot of hope that any of the options will be implemented any time soon.
If you have any opinions or more info on the matter, feel free to leave a comment.
Posted by ramk at September 14, 2004 01:18 AM