Fantasy constitutional amendment

[mmcirvin]

If I had the magical power to pass any constitutional amendment I wanted, I think I'd reform the way the president and vice-president are elected. I wouldn't go to a straight popular-vote count; that has the potential for chaos dwarfing the 2000 election circus, with disputed votes in every location in the country, in the event of a really close result. (The only reason nobody spent much time disputing the 2000 popular-vote result was that it didn't matter.)

Instead, I'd make the following changes:

1. Each state would have a number of votes for president (and also a number of votes for vice-president) equal to its representation in the House of Representatives (no extra votes for the senators). DC gets one each. Maybe Puerto Rico gets one each; that's negotiable.
2. These aren't votes for electors; they're just electoral votes for a presidential candidate and a vice-presidential candidate. Electors aren't theoretically free to vote however they want, and they probably don't exist.
3. The amendment would, unlike the Constitution today, specify how the votes are obtained. Each electoral vote for president (and for vice-president) would come from a single House of Representatives district, and would be chosen in the same manner as the corresponding representative, by popular vote. Winner takes all in the district, not in the state as a whole (much as in Maine and Nebraska today).
4. Just for grins, we'll require that the vote involve a durable record consisting of human-readable marks on a paper ballot or the functional equivalent, with a reasonable lack of ambiguity.

From a partisan perspective, everybody gives up something here. The Republicans give up the grotesque overrepresentation of the small states in the presidential vote (they'd still be overrepresented a little, but not by so much). The Democrats give up the amplification of small margins in the large states, and the ability of urban areas to completely negate the votes of rural areas in those states. I'm not actually sure who would benefit on the whole. The result would probably track the popular vote much more closely than it currently does.

The chance of a 2000-like debacle is reduced, because the number of electoral votes that can be swung by uncertainty in a close count in a few districts is vastly reduced. There isn't the question of needing a statewide recount because somebody screwed up in one spot. Going by history, most districts would have a pretty lopsided vote, so in the event of a close count only a few would be in question.

The reform would definitely intensify the debate over redistricting procedures, safe districts and gerrymandering, but that needs to be fixed anyway. Even with districting hanky-panky, it's hard to imagine the result being less fair than what we've got. If we wanted to get really fancy, we could add a few at-large electoral votes to be chosen by a proportional representation scheme, but I think this proposal has already gotten improbable enough.

Unfortunately, an amendment such as this would never be ratified, because the small states are grossly overrepresented in the ratification process as well. There would have to be an appeal to fairness, but I doubt it would work, since the small states feel put-upon already.

While we're at it, let's try to persuade the big parties to reform the primary/caucus system; it's pretty stupid.

Comments

[jwgh]

One aspect of the current system that I find interesting is that it discourages voter turnout. This would also be true of your system.

In a mayoral race, if I want city politicians to pay more attention to my neighborhood, I can try to get out the vote and if there's a higher turnout politicians will be more apt to pay attention to my neighborhood than to one where turnout is low, since it pays them to do so. So it's in the interest of my neighborhood and in my interest personally that as many people in my neighborhood vote as possible. This is true even if the particular party I choose to support in a particular race loses -- if my district can get the vote out, it's a power to be reckoned with and politicians will try to win it over.

On the other hand, with your system it doesn't matter how many people vote in my district: regardless, we get the same amount of influence on who gets elected -- one electoral vote.

In the last national election, my vote was worthless, because Rhode Island was clearly going to go for Gore (in the event he got 61% of the vote in Rhode Island), so even though nationally the election was very close it was clear in advance that my actions would have virtually no effect on the outcome of the election, whether I chose to stay home, to vote, or to go out and shuttle 10,000 of my theoretical carless Democratic friends [or Republican friends if I swung that way] to the polls.

It may be that voter apathy is one of the reasons that civil uprisings and rebellions are so uncommon here, only happening about once every hundred years or so. (Not that I am bitter or anything.)

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Maybe we just oughta ban polls altogether. "I don't know who's going to win; i better vote!"

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

One argument against that: it makes it easier to get away with blatantly rigging the election.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Whereas now we have people using spotty sampling techniques to tailor polls to teir bias.

Democracy is stupid because people are stupid. Bring back feudalism! We're almost there, anyway.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I envisioned something very similar to this soon after the 2000 racket, except i also added votes for each Senator. I think it could lead to even heavier gerrymandering, though.

Who counts the ballots?

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Isn't it likely that under this system, the presidential election will look almost exactly like the concurrent House elections? I credit that people don't necessarily don't vote along party lines, but I wonder if, District-wide, the party of the elected presidential candidate won't almost always be the party of the elected house candidate (minus a few close elections or other cases where voters are inclined to preserve the seat of a congressman they don't like, such as the prestige of a house leader or particularly senior Rep.).

Also, not only does this give one more reason to gerrymander along party lines, which is still perfectly legal at least as long as you have quorum in your state's legislative apparatus, but the fact is that the Representative District is not a legal entity like a state is, and I think that this amendment would be a subversion of states' rights that I would loath. (Being an Amendment, the states are stuck with it, of course.) I personally still believe that states are sovereign and should exist more or less between the individual and the Federal government, and hence the States should vote for president, not the people directly.

Further, there's no District-level of government (yet) which means that it's up to the states to mete out the ballots and count them back up again, and there's no reason a biased governor (be he Bush or Davis) couldn't mess with the districts even more than they can mess with the counties/parishes, the nominal level, I think, on which ballots are handled. A governor can certainly unfairly push over a county executive without too much legal recourse, but at least you have an elected executive under that thumb-- the governor could do even more to a representative district where there's nobody in charge and he, the governor, hands out the ballots and counts them up again.

Perhaps you could insister that Districts have to be drawn along county lines, say, at which point it would be practical to let the counties do as they will do and count their whole effort towards District n, but it's possible that drawing fair districts along county lines might actually be difficult. (It's possible there's a fair manner of splitting a county's vote, but one would have to trot out an army of mathematicians to explain how fair it is.)

Re: Who counts the ballots?

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

One more thing: Screw DC. There's no reason at all that DC should have a resident population, at all. Even if people live in the district and are subject to its local "city" laws, and indeed it should have a city government (but they should not call it that), their mayor should be required to live in VA or MD. It's stupid that people live in DC; the population should belong to one of those two states. I'd rather Puerto Rico get its own senators before DC gets so much as an electoral vote.

[pootrootbeer.livejournal.com]

I always thought that instead of the entirety of a state's electoral votes going to whomever gets the most popular votes, the electoral votes ought to be divided somewhat proportionally among all candidates who got enough votes to matter.

So in a state with 7 electoral votes (2 Senate and 5 House), if Candidate A got 55% percent of the vote and Candidate B got 40% of the vote and the independents got a combined 5%, then A would get both Senate votes (for getting the simple majority), plus 3 of the other votes (55% rounds to up to 60% or 3/5), while B would get 2 votes.

It would be interesting to take the popular vote result data from past elections and apply different electoral representation methods to them and see when and how the outcomes would have been different.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

That's a good one, too. The DemoPublicans will never go for it because both would perceive that as a weakening of their position in each state.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

So I have a criticism more or less from the left based on individual political participation, and a criticism more or less from the right based on the principle of states' rights. By the Letters to the Editor Column Principle of Ideological Balance, this proves incontrovertibly that I am right.

[jwgh]

Actually, I'm not convinced that you can have a workable national voting system in a nation as big, diverse, and wacky as ours that doesn't discourage voting to some extent. I admit to curiousity about a mandatory voting system like Australia's, though apparently not enough curiousity to impel me to go out and try to actually find out something about it.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

All I know about it is, as with many national political idiosyncracies, non-Australians find it creepy and totalitarian, and Australians are baffled by this and seem proud of it. Don't know if it actually helps make the political system more responsive.

[jvandenberg.livejournal.com]

As an australian, the mandatory voting thing makes for a bit more responsive government, but not by much, and it doesn't help when the Loyal Opposition is lead by a doofus.

There's also no fuss about low voter turnout, and instead of parties encouraging their supporters to bother voting, they instead try to persuade the 'swinging' voters, who have no party loyalty. As such, marginal seats get a lot of attention come election time.

Also, mandatory voting encourages two things. Donkey voting, where you number the boxes from top to bottom, and scribbling, where you write "Hello my name is bob" or something similar to invalidate the voting paper.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I've heard about donkey voting/scribbling. But at least it takes some sort of affirmative effort to not vote.

Here, get-out-the-vote campaigns and swing-vote efforts both happen at the same time, and they're sort of opposing forces in deciding how candidates campaign.

Also, proportional voting systems are almost never used in the US; most elections are check-one, first-past-the-post deals. So an individual voter has less ability to describe Nth choice candidates, and individuals end up thinking a lot about strategic voting and spoiler effects. That means that, famously, the system favors the existence of two big, somewhat centrist parties, with more extreme or unusual positions expressed as factions within them.

This baffles people outside the US; they look at the system and think "Why have you got two center-right parties?" The way I see it, though, American political parties are more like the multiparty coalitions that end up running the legislature in many other countries; the role of parties is played more by subparty factions (DLC, antiwar Deanites, labor, evangelicals, neoconservatives...) That's why it's moderately common in the US to see politicians voting across party lines or even switching.

The big-tent nature of the parties plus courting the swing vote tends to pull everyone toward the center on contentious issues, but the need to get out the vote creates a contrary pull to the extremes.