We are in a moment of reckoning over racism, not only taking down Confederate statues to eradicate these lingering odes to white supremacy but also examining how deeply our society has been shaped by slavery and its aftermath. Last year, the New York Times’ 1619 Project traced the influence of slavery on everything from American capitalism to the American diet. Today, individuals, brands, and lawmakers are taking stock. In this reappraisal, the Electoral College is likewise due for a second look.

In the last five elections, the Electoral College has handed the presidency to two Republicans who lost the popular vote: George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016. Looking ahead to the election this November, Democrats harbor a very realistic fear that Trump will again prevail without winning the popular vote. The political divisions and demographics of the 21st century have highlighted the undemocratic Electoral College system. But the fact that we have an election system that privileges a minority white party over a diverse majority is not a quirk of the system. That has been its purpose all along.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/20 ... l-college/

I like many others have said we need to get rid of the Electoral College and just have voting based on popular voting for the President. Let the will of the majority of people voting be the deciding factor.

I learned something today!…

Unless Democrats can convince half maybe over half of the US population, to get rid of the Electoral College then we're stuck with it. It's part of the US Constitution so it's not something that states or the federal government can toss without amending the US Constitution. No state courts or federal courts including SCOTUS, can get rid of the Electoral College. 3/4ths of the states are not going to agree to trash the Electoral College, we have to live in reality not fantasy. Democrats and Republicans strongly believe that their agenda must become law, compromise is dead at least for now on this topic. I live in reality not fantasy.

The quickest way to end the EC is to turn Texas blue.

highdesert wrote: Sun Nov 03, 2024 1:19 pm Unless Democrats can convince half maybe over half of the US population, to get rid of the Electoral College then we're stuck with it. It's part of the US Constitution so it's not something that states or the federal government can toss without amending the US Constitution. No state courts or federal courts including SCOTUS, can get rid of the Electoral College. 3/4ths of the states are not going to agree to trash the Electoral College, we have to live in reality not fantasy. Democrats and Republicans strongly believe that their agenda must become law, compromise is dead at least for now on this topic. I live in reality not fantasy.

I agree. This is one of the reasons I personally believe this Republic is toast. Not tomorrow or even in the next 4-8 years. But we have things in our Constitution (and other issues like a bought and paid for SCOTUS, Citizens United, etc) that will not allow the US go forward much longer.

VooDoo

This is ridiculous, folks. I'm the Black man here, and even I can see that the provisioning of an Electoral College wasn't a racist act, especially given that when the Constitution was written and ratified, only Whites could vote! So, Black people voting wasn't even in the discussion in those days (unfortunately). The racist act was the racial restriction on voting. It was not the designation of an Electoral College. The EC might have been *classist*, which is not good...but it was not *racist*.

With that being said, I think we're long past the days when an Electoral College is needed. We have long had the technology to count millions of individual votes for a given candidate. I personally would prefer a popular-vote election.

How many of the states that decide each of our presidential elections will, does any rational person think, ratify the amendment eliminating the electoral college?

Ain't. Gonna. Happen.

Out here in blissful hipsterville (Portland Oregon) we saw none of the candidates. I think someone who once shook either Harris' or Waltz's hand a couple years ago came out to say nice things. And granted, Oregon is going to vote blue regardless so there isn't any reason to spend the money...

Another way of saying that it's a foregone conclusion and my vote doesn't mean shit.

How do you spell apathy?

It is even more difficult to undo a constitutional provision than it is to enact one. Maybe we need more states.

CDF

Yup, the same problem the anti-gunners have in repealing the 2nd Amendment. And anti-abortionists have in getting a constitutional amendment to ban abortion. States can amend their constitutions much easier than the US Constitution can be amended, but the supreme law of the land should be
and is much more difficult to amend. We've made mistakes in the past, think of the 18th Amendment that made alcoholic beverages illegal and fueled organized crime, states had to ratify the 21st Amendment to repeal it. Alcoholic beverages again became legal, but we spent decades fighting organized crime. Extremists can't dictated our public policies.

It's a toss up election, there is no guarantee that Harris will the popular vote and the Electoral College, Trump could win the Electoral College AND the popular vote.

There is a solution without requiring a change to the Constitution. States would just need to agree to proportional assignment of their electoral votes, and not winner-take-all.

Three are several ways to do this. Since the delegate count is based on the total number of House and Senate seats, one way is to assign the votes per-congressional district, and leave the 2 senate seats as winner-take all. This is known as the District Method and is used in Nebraska and Maine. Another option would be a pure allocation, where you would just do a statewide count and then split the votes based on that, rather than counting the votes district by district.

There is the "National Popular Vote Interstate Compact", which already exists, that awards all of a states Electoral votes to the majority popular vote candidate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_ ... te_Compact. Not enough states have signed onto that for it to be a defacto popular vote, but it could become that if they can break the 270 vote barrier. Since it has never been triggered, it has not yet been subject to the rigors of court hearings, and of course whichever party loses as a result would go apeshit and sue everybody.

Neither of those methods require a change in the US Constitution or the removal of the Electoral College. Just that all (or enough) individual states change their own laws or state constitutions to make it a more fair distribution.

Though without an "Interstate Compact", which is the same kind of thing that lets you drive in Kentucky with a Wyoming driver's license, it is unlikely to come to pass. For example, California is not going to independently enact District Method voting because they would be giving power to the Republicans (based on current trends) without some equally large state or combination of states also agreeing to switch methods.

People and parties will always do the math and try to game the system for their benefit, so this would truly require some kind of massive mandate from the people to change it. And as we are currently seeing, the big money has the capability to fool, cajole, bribe, and terrify enough of the people to where there will never be such a mandate enacted.

It wouldn't affect the POTUS, but one change that would be highly pro-democratic and not require an Amendment (I thiink...) would be to have Congress pass a law specifying a maximal ratio of perimeter to area standard for all states for Congressional districts to limit gerrymandering. I'm pretty sure that if they convened a commission of six PhD students from university Geography departments and gave them a budget sufficient to work for a few months with some computing support and a big wad of census data for precinct maps, they could come up with the minimum numerical value that would be needed to allow every state to comply.

This would make it WAY more difficult for redistricting plans to create tons of safe seats and over-allocate seats to the party controlling the state's districting process. Fewer safe seats would dry up the wellspring of the lunatic fringe.