Welcome to the first formal debate hosted by SC and open to multi-blog participation! We will be discussing the pros and cons of the Electoral College .
Click here to join the debate at cruxlux on the Electoral College
Essays written for this debate:
** Electoral College 101
** Major flaws in the Electoral College
** Keep the Electoral College
** Third Parties and the Electoral College
You are invited to participate in the debate at the neutral third-party site cruxlux, which has a format specifically tailored to structured point-counterpoint debate and incorporates user feedback on specific arguments. We have created a skeleton framework for the debate and now you can add arguments, comment, and give points on any aspect of the topic of interest to you. We are also linking all essays written today on this topic here, so if you write something on your blog please comment below and it will be added to the list. Comments at the original post are encouraged, of course, but please feel free to incorporate that discussion into the large-scale cruxlux debate as well. Finally, we will have a live debate at 10:30 Eastern between advocates for and against the EC, featuring moderated questions (feel free to suggest below). This is somewhat experimental, so by all means let us know what you liked or didn't like so we can adjust the format for future debates. Let the debate begin!
10:30-11pm: live debate in chat .
__________________________
Come, my friends. 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world -- Tennyson
Scrap it. It's an anachronism to an age we no longer
live in.
Why should any one citizen's vote count more than another? That's how it is now with an electoral college.
Just imagine if we had had Al Gore as President. We might have gotten the 9/11 hijackers before they hijacked those planes. We certainly wouldn't have attacked Iraq because of Saudi hijackers.
Ammo for your argument
This site
has some convenient results that you can access here 
-- for example, use the General by Year menu to see popular result, electoral result, and all kinds of maps (watch out, read the key for coloring) -- mouse over the tabs. Great stuff.
__________________________Come, my friends. 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world -- Tennyson
Hey guys, check out the cruxlux thing when you get a chance
It's pretty intuitive, and you can pick and choose what (if anything) you want to address.
In addition to working out the pros and cons of the EC, I'm hoping we can get a good idea of the capabilities and limitations of this platform for future debates.
__________________________Come, my friends. 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world -- Tennyson
10:30 Eastern?
I'll probably be a bit late for that. I hope I don't miss too much.
My two cents is that since we are a federal republic, the electoral college should be kept, but with either of the following reforms:
1) States should allocate electors proportionally according to vote:
If X gets 25% of the vote, X should get 25% of the electors in that state. This eliminates the power of swing states and eliminates much of the wasted vote effect.
2) States should list electors on the ballot, rather than who the electors intend to vote for.
This would be more interesting as the primary season wouldn't be as important. People could run as electors independent of any candidate and then make their decision based on which candidate made the best impression on them. In a perfect world, this would make the campaign season only 41 days long -- the time between when the people vote and when the electors vote.
Now that I have it down on "paper", I prefer #2 better than #1, but both are infinitely better than winner-take-all.
__________________________I'm listening to...
I'm still certain that what motivates me
Is more rewarding than any piece of paper could be -- Dennis Lyxzén
Your second idea is quite original
but I'm not sold on it. How would voters decide which candidates for elector to support? Why is it better to elect these elites to make the decision than just let voters pick for themselves?
Your first idea is an interesting cross between the EC and a straight popular vote. I wonder what it would mean in practice -- I'd be curious to see the results of past elections under this system.
__________________________Come, my friends. 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world -- Tennyson
Re:
The electors would campaign based on issues and then vote for the Presidential candidate who gave them the best deal. Why is it better? I'm not really sure. I usually brainstorm and come to conclusions based on some high-level principles and then look at their implications later on. I haven't fully thought through the implications yet.
The proportional representation idea ... I know 2000 would have ended up being decided in the House/Senate with no candidate receiving a majority of EVs (Nader would have poached a few in California). I believe the House would have chosen Bush since the majority of states had Republican-majority delegations. The Senate was controlled by the Democrats at that time, so I believe they'd have voted for Lieberman.
Wouldn't that have been odd? Bush/Lieberman from 2001-2005.
Alternatively, the Green electors in California could decide to vote for Gore to give him a majority. Of course, they'd want some consideration for their vote...
__________________________I'm listening to...
I'm still certain that what motivates me
Is more rewarding than any piece of paper could be -- Dennis Lyxzén
Seems to me that in that case
(voting for electors rather than a president) then why not just have the president elected by congress? More of a prime minister arrangement. We already elect congressmen to represent us based on how we regard their take on the issues.
__________________________I came. I saw. I posted.
Veni, Vidi, Bitchy.
Private sector efficiency
Just got this email from my wife.
So, yeah, I really buy into the whole "theprivate sector is so much more efficient than government" line. Really, I do.
__________________________I came. I saw. I posted.
Veni, Vidi, Bitchy.
All large bureaucracies are incompetent
It's just that the federal government is a particularly large and therefore particularly incompetent bureaucracy.
Not only that
but its shortcomings are not treated the same way as large private bureaucracies.
When such things happen in the private sector, the entity weakens and withers or it adapts and changes....(or it seeks special favors thru laws :))
In the public sphere, they become even larger since they are not bound by the same consequences or incentives from day to day feedback from market information and individual choice.
That's backwards, John
In the private sector the consequences for being inefficient are usually, well, nothing. Companies can almost always insulate themselves from the consequences of the action, and if they can;t what are you going to do? go to a competitor who is just as bad?
Take a look at the phone companies and cable companies. They are all terrible. Just abysmal in terms of efficiency, and not one of them has even the slightest impetus to improve. Why would they? Improvement costs money which means it hurts them to do. They lose nothing by staying bad because all their competitors are just as bad, and any customer lost is made up for by new customers coming in, either lured in through bogus deals, or as the loss of their competitors due to their inefficiency.
On the other hand government is directly responsible to the people. It is not focused on profit but on maintaining power and that power comes through keeping the people more or less happy. When the government screws up it has (as a whole) an impetus to correct in order to keep their collective jobs. Our government is virtually always more responsive to "customer" complaints.
Simple example- look at Katrina. Giant cluster&^%$. And the government knew it and had to take steps to change things. But the government wan't the only one to screw up. A number of companies did too. You really imagine any of them have changed one whit? Do you imagine Halliburton has made big changes in he wake of its many many scandals?
Hell no. it doesn't have to. It can sit back and rake in the cash anyway.
Government (speaking here of fairly liberal democracies or republics, not autocracies) depends on the good will of the people. Business just depend on people needing stuff. That means business is always more firmly seated, and thus harder to change.
__________________________I came. I saw. I posted.
Veni, Vidi, Bitchy.
That makes sense with higher-level government,
where politicians have to perform or be voted out of office, but what's the actual turnover in lower-level government jobs? Or would you say that doesn't matter so much because that's not where the big mistakes happen?
There's an interesting read on Katrina here
, saying that the Just-in-Time model makes business efficient but removes redundancy and storage that government requires. Basic idea:
__________________________Come, my friends. 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world -- Tennyson
Government accountability at federal level is impossible
They do?
How am I personally to hold the federal government "accountable"? By changing my vote? That isn't going to make a dime's worth of difference. By renouncing my citizenship and leaving the country? That's pretty drastic.
At least I was able to hold the (horrendously incompetent, in my view) California government accountable by moving to Texas. But that was a pretty big step.
Now, if I don't like how Travis County is doing things, I can always move to Williamson County. Or if I don't like how Austin runs things, I can move to Round Rock or Pflugerville. That's not so bad.
Compare to the private sector. If, next time I buy a car, I decide that Toyota is getting fat and lazy, I can just buy a Hyundai instead. I could buy my next computer from Dell instead of HP. I could shop at Target rather than Walmart. I could do my web searches through Yahoo rather than Google. I don't have to reshape my whole life just to punish an incompetent company in the private sector.
Private sector accountability is real. Public sector accountability is a farce.
I hate to break it to you, but
you buying from Dell instead of HP doesn't matter to HP either.
Same as with votes, it's when a lot of people share your feelings that their combined message of accountability gets heard (politician loses election, company loses significant $$). It's not just voting, anyway -- writing a few letters to the editor or helping campaign against whatever politician you don't like or kicking in a few dollars to one you do like is hardly reshaping your life.
If you want to argue the relative weight of one vote versus one computer purchase that's fine -- how many votes does a politician get, versus how much of HP's annual revenue does your computer purchase make? [Arguably this should be either 2 or 4 years of HP revenue, since elections are generally not annual, but then again HP is national and elections are mostly local... hard to make an exact comparison.] There's also the issue of how closely the consequences accrue to the responsible party -- I bet the politician who gets voted out of office had a lot more to do with the policy you didn't like than the folks who lose their job at HP had to do with the actual decisions or implementations that gave you a crappy computer.
__________________________Come, my friends. 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world -- Tennyson
Not the same
I know it doesn't matter to HP. That's not important. What matters is that I am not stuck buying an HP computer that I don't want -- heck, I can choose to buy no computer at all if I don't like the options out there -- whereas I *am* stuck paying taxes for government programs that I don't want.
If I don't pay my taxes, the IRS will take the money from my bank account or slap a lien on my property. It's not exactly optional.
If I feel that I am getting poor service from the federal government for the money I pay, and I do in fact feel that way, I have almost no recourse.
Heck, at least with the local phone company (AT&T here), I may only have one option, but I am allowed to cancel my service and do without. I do without TV service...
Lordzorgon
that's not true though. You are talking about he federal government as if it is one monolithic entity when that is far for true. You can easily have small federal departments (and hence small bureaucracies).
__________________________I came. I saw. I posted.
Veni, Vidi, Bitchy.
How can you compare?
The problem with this statement is that you have absolutely nothing to compare it too...
Where on earth is there a completely privatized health care system?
In fact there are very few industries that are!
And from this email
The same is said about government bureaucracies DMV, Education, Welfare, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid... and the list goes on and on...all inefficient!!!
__________________________"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
Hmm... I'm sensing a good topic for a future debate ;-)
Which is more efficient, government or the private sector?
It's a very broad question, need to define what is meant by efficiency and compare across similar areas of service, but it's so fundamentally important to how we decide policy.
__________________________Come, my friends. 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world -- Tennyson
agreed...
...as this is a fundamental difference between the two ideologies
__________________________"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
Need another good argument against the EC
to add to the cruxlux post, which is somewhat unexpectedly tilting anti the assertion that "The Electoral College is outdated and unfair and should be abolished."
__________________________Come, my friends. 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world -- Tennyson
Is there some easy way to see which side is "winning?"
is there like a chart or something, or even a tally?
__________________________I came. I saw. I posted.
Veni, Vidi, Bitchy.
good question
I am guessing not, because it looks like each sub-category gets turned into a new debate that is embedded in the parent, so they might not be able to associated points correctly with the top-level position. Dunno. I don't see anything obvious, and that would certainly be nice.
I would also like a "site map" of the debate with every single comment linked in an indented list, so I don't have to go through and open up or mouse over individual parts. Just for those times when I want the big picture overview.
__________________________Come, my friends. 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world -- Tennyson
Agreed.
maybe send feedback to the guy from cruxlux?
__________________________I came. I saw. I posted.
Veni, Vidi, Bitchy.
*interesting*
I would've anticipated that it would go the other way...
Live debate @ 10:30
I'm thinking we use the chatroom (upper left) since it doesn't require people to log in and is more conducive to a conversational exchange than cruxlux and much faster than typing out posts.
Whaddya think? I'm not super hung up on this part of the debate but I would like to try it out so we know more about what works and what doesn't for future. Although we probably need a few more people to drop by for chatting to be interesting.
__________________________Come, my friends. 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world -- Tennyson
I think the chatroom is a great idea.
Somehow I had failed to take note of the fact that there's NO ER ON TONIGHT and so I can manage to be more present than I would've been otherwise. Criminy.
But seriously, I like the chatting idea because it's quicker and you don't have to have a fully-formed thought before you try it on...plus, you guys seem like a fun bunch. :)
+1
Cruxlux makes my head hurt. The interface is way too cumbersome for me. To each his own, I guess.
__________________________I'm listening to...
I'm still certain that what motivates me
Is more rewarding than any piece of paper could be -- Dennis Lyxzén
The old Y prayer....
Lord give me the strength to change what can be changed
The serenity to accept that which cannot be changed
And the wisdom to know the difference.
The Electoral college will not be changed because the states with the smaller population will not ratify an amendment to do so. It is equally unfair that the voter in North Dakota has around 50 times the representation in the Senate of the voter in California (where I live) More accurately, I have 1/50th of their clout. (that's why Boxer never answers my emails)
Injustices abound in any system, and this is one of them. It would be more practical to talk about changing how the large states allocate their electoral votes, proportionate or winner takes all.
If proportionate, then the large states would get attention even if one party has a lock on winning. This would seem like an advantage to me.
What is most absurd is that a few thousand white farmers in Iowa are about to narrow the field, and perhaps actually determine who will be the candidates of the main parties for President.
Now that is something we can change, and damn well should. The future candidate who has the guts to boycott this caucus will have my vote.
With the senate, though,
that's a "feature" not a "bug." In other words the senate is deliberately intended to work that way for a reason. in the case of the EC it seems to be an unintended consequence of states having such radically different populations.
__________________________I came. I saw. I posted.
Veni, Vidi, Bitchy.
Agree on Iowa
The primary system is just dumb right now. They should randomly rotate the order, and only announce it a few weeks ahead of the first vote.
__________________________Come, my friends. 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world -- Tennyson
Constitutional amendment is not necessary
If a sufficient number of large states formed a compact to require their electoral votes go to the winner of the popular vote, they could make it a popular vote by fiat.
If this were accomplished, then the country might be willing to discuss a constitutional amendment if a full popular vote were not the ideal solution
A vote compact is likely unConstitutional as well....
Article I, Section Ten
Certainly, possible if you got Congress aboard, but in this case, an attempt to circumvent the Constitution appears to be a violation of the Constitution itself. .....
It is all in the language
If the states simply have laws that only go into effect when similar laws are passed elsewhere, I don't see how it would apply.
All that means is that a state wouldn't have a cause of action if one of the states changed their law in between the election and the 'sending forth of the electoral college'.
The compact is really between the organizations in those states pushing forth identical laws.
It isn't a stable situation for that reason, but would provide leverage to write a constitutional amendment.
You definitely get into practicalities and technicalities....
still, I view it as a circumvention. If there's popular support to change the Constitution, let's just do that instead of manufacturing popular support.
Liveblogging the chat debate
It's stinerman versus Tlaloc in a cage match. And only one will come out alive.
Stay tuned!
woah, woah!
John and independentminded jump in with good points...the question of the minute is,
"Given that even the 2000 debacle didn't result in altering the EC, what are the realistic prospects for change? How would you get sufficient support for an amendment?"
I'm abandoning
the liveblogging because I can't keep up with the two things at once. But now we're talking about states splitting their votes.
List of questions from the live debate:
If you missed out on the brilliant answers given you'll just have to provide your own below =)
__________________________Come, my friends. 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world -- Tennyson
Sorry I missed the live chat
Work is pretty busy before the end of the year shutdown.
The underlying question should be "who elects the President?" Right now, under the Electoral College, it is the states and not individual voters. Is this the right answer? Should the states elect the president or should it be the people?
I know everyone is sorely disappointed.......;)
that I did not participate in this debate......... I am sure you missed my pithy comments!
The electoral college is not a subject I find terribly interesting, although I know it is important.
I would have been much more interested in discussing how and IF a State AG has the capacity to influence an election.
Or if voter referendums, that circumvent the legislative process are constitutional. One person can start a petition, get enough signatures and change a state constitution.(Isn't that what they are doing in Calif with the electoral process?) Often these drives are sponsored by highly specializied private interest groups backed by lots of cash, trying to influence local politics when the groups are national with a highly extreme and partisan agenda. (Club for Growth).
__________________________It is the economy, stupid.
We will have different topics
and will expect to see you at one of the next debates!
Your questions are definitely important and seem ideally suited to a diary ;-)
__________________________Come, my friends. 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world -- Tennyson