Electoral votes

[mmcirvin]

That initiative to apportion California's presidential electoral votes by congressional district, thereby tipping the Electoral College greatly toward the Republicans in time for 2008? Not going to happen.

Maine and Nebraska already allocate their electoral votes this way (though it rarely if ever makes a difference there), and I even proposed doing it nationwide once as some sort of middle ground between the system we've got and direct popular election of the president. However, my proposal also involved eliminating the two votes per state corresponding to each state's Senators (since, I reasoned, in the system we've got today the enormous overweighting of small rural states' voters is partially compensated by the low political power of rural voters in big urban states, who have similar interests--if we're going to remove one effect we might as well do our best to mitigate the other); and, besides, doing it in just one big state isn't the right way. Of course, any such scheme would also make the presidential election sensitive to district gerrymandering, as sunburn pointed out.

These days, I'm a lot more sympathetic to just electing the president by direct popular vote (ideally with either a runoff system, or some sort of multiple-preference scheme to reduce spoiler effects) than I used to be. There's the potential for nationwide chaos in the event of a very close election--in 2000 I was very sensitive to that--but that's just because of problems that need to be fixed anyway. Reducing the power of an individual vote just in case there's something wrong with the voting process seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater; you should fix the process instead.

Also, as I said in that earlier LJ post, the major parties really, really need to get their act together and fix the primary system; it's broken and stupid.

Comments

[skapusniak.livejournal.com]

I remember once reading a .uk edition of some American political book which had a foreword that explained he wasn't going to go into differences in political mechanics between our two countries because, fundamentally it was all the same thing any way and '...you will obviously have something much like primaries, but called something different...'.

Uh, not so much.

Or in other words, no, actually we don't. Primaries and Caucases are amongst the most alien pieces of freakin' weirdness you guys have for an ignorant Britisher like me, right up there with the very concept of a 'voting machine'. Mere electoral colleges are positive masterpieces of sanity and comprehensibility by comparison.

Fortunately since it was supposed to be a *humourous* political book, I guess starting off the laughter at the funny american not understanding that his quaint and alien folkways, are indeed quaint and alien folkways, right from the foreword wasn't necessarily a detriment.

The real reason the author didn't need to explain Primaries for the .uk edition is because we out here in the Provinces tend to feel the need to keep up with whats going on in the Imperial Capital and the methods by which you will select our next Emperor. Y'all knowing how our local powers that be get us to select our piddling local Governors naturally doesn't have the same level of importance :)

...

Come to think of it does *any* country other than the USA have anything like Primaries or Caucuses for selecting candidates? I would have thought there must be some, but I confess I can't think of any.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

According to Wikipedia, some Italian leftist parties have just started using primary elections in the past couple of years, and there's a party in Korea that is going to have one too.

[skapusniak.livejournal.com]

Hmmmm, do these parties go the whole hog and have people register to vote as aligned to a particular party and hand their candidate selection machinery over to the local or national government?

Because that's what strikes me as non-American as the really really weird bit, political parties not being private membership organisations but stanage hybrid quasi-public bodies, over and above the simple fact of having massive campaigns to elect a new candidate for every election cycle, rather than only when they get fed up with them, which is I guess merely a superficial oddness.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Wikipedia implies that the primary system we have stems from the Progressive era of American politics, the early years of the 20th century. At the time, when all sorts of things were shifting over to popular election (Senators became popularly elected in 1913), having the governmental election mechanism also take care of party primaries probably seemed like a matter of procedural efficiency.