I was in high school in MD when MD became the first state to pass this. I respect Bob Cesca's opinion, since I very much used to hold it. Ironically enough, I think we've both made complimentary shifts on how we've seen this topic, albeit in opposite directions. And I agree with Cesca that the current Electoral College is a time bomb. But I think there's a better way to fix it:
The greatest benefit of the Electoral College (which Cesca mentions) is that is does semi-lock America into a two-party system. And a two-party system is the second best way to keep the Iron Law of Oligarchy in check. The NPVIC would potentially elect a president who has barely a slim plurality, at best. And sadly, multi-party presidential systems have a terrible record of failure. Case in point: See Latin America! Presidents get elected with only a plurality, never have a congressional majority, and almost immediately get their agenda blocked/impeached (presidential systems, after all, still keep checks & balances/separation of powers). Strongmen like Bolsonaro, Fujimori, or a military junta still exist, playing on people's frustrations with a dysfunctional government. And they still try to overturn checks and balances, and sometimes even succeed. Heck, this outcome could have even happened to us as early as 1800 if we hadn't adopted the electoral college and the two-party system it created.
Multi-party proportional representation parliamentary systems meanwhile have the opposite problem: So many political parties balkanize the electorate, that governments are unstable, until along comes a Berlusconi or a Netanyahu who promises to cut the clamor and "get things done." People like them don't survive because they're good at winning elections; they survive because they're good at negotiating parliamentary majorities, and playing off popular discontent about governmental instability. (Netanyahu is literally using this "argument for stability" right now.)
Westminster style systems - parliaments without proportional representation - have their own sets of problems. The % of the vote and the % of the parliamentary seats you win can differ greatly, especially if there are more than two parties. The lack of a checks and balances means that whoever gets elected has borderline unlimited power. And unless your country/province has VERY strong two-party competition, you might end up with awful people (like Modi, the Alberta Socreds, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, the last 5 UK Conservative PM's) getting elected and staying in power for decades. Worse, this exact same problem can happen on a national level, which is how Orban created his dictatorship: He rewrote the electoral rules to make the seat-vote disparity even larger, (reducing proportional representation), and thus in a multi-party Westminster system he could thus get supermajorities so long as his opposition stayed divided.
Regardless of the flaws of our system, if nothing else at least it's minimized the chances of an Orban through strong two-party competition that the electoral college creates. The flipside though is this: While American presidential elections tend to be very predictable most of the time (president does a good job, their party wins reelection, and vice versa), it does have one obvious issue: During Ambivalent Elections - which is an incumbent party screwing up as much as possible without crossing the threshold into an outright loss - the incumbent party still wins the popular vote, but the electoral college goes to the better campaigner. This didn't used to be an issue, since Ambivalent elections used to be really rare (there were only three between 1848 and 1988). But for reasons I can go into in another post, Ambivalent Elections have become worryingly common: Three of the eight presidential elections since/including 1992 have been ambivalent. And another four presidential elections would have been, had it not been for a black-swan event.
Again, there are larger reasons why this shift has happened. But given everything I've written so far, here's the design challenge I put to everyone: Can you create a way of electing a president that:
a. Keeps the Iron-Law-Fighting benefits of the current Electoral College and two-party system?
b. Leads to both parties paying attention to every state, and not just swing states?
c. Prevents the tendency in our current system for national two-party competition to degenerate into one-party sectionalism?
d. Prevents the loser of the popular vote from winning the Electoral College?
e. Makes it easier for 3rd parties to replace an incompetent first or second party?
f. Gets rid of 12 Amendment contingency elections (hasn't happened in a while, but would still be a problem)
There actually is. In fact there are at least two: One I call PRATT (Proportional Representation Amongst Top Two), the other PRATT-RV (Proportional Representation Amongst Top Two with Range Vote):
PRATT would divvy up a state's electoral college votes proportionally by the statewide vote total amongst the top two winners. If we divved up EC votes to the nearest whole number, the number of swing states would go from 5-10 up to 40. And if we divvied each state's EC votes to the nearest quarter of an electoral college vote (i.e., you'd need 269.25 electoral college votes to win, rather than 270), literally every state would become a swing state. Even Democrats would win a quarter of an EC vote in Wyoming, and even the GOP would win a quarter of an EC vote in DC.
The Top-Two aspect keeps the Iron-Law in check. The requirement that both Dems and Reps actually compete in literally every single state minimizes the degeneration of two-party competition into one-party sectionalism. And the PR aspect means the electoral college tracks the popular vote. (Even loosing Florida, Gore under PRATT would still have been elected with 269.5 electoral college votes). And in the highly unlikely even of a contingency election, individual states could just re-assign their electoral college votes based on the first and second place winners nationally rather than statewide.
Now PRATT would work by itself. But it becomes even better if you throw in Range Voting. Range Voting is something we actually have all seen before, but might not have known the name of. When you rank an amazon purchase from 0 to 5 stars, that's Range Voting. And fun fact: Humans are not only species who practice it. Bee dancing, when a honeybee swarm is decide where to set up their new nest is actually Range Voting (the "direction" the bee dances is a candidate for a new nest; the intensity/number of times they keep repeating the dance is the equivalent of giving a candidate a certain number of stars).
So with Range Voting, every voter would be able to give every candidate a rating of between zero and five stars. If you want to give both candidates 5 stars, give both zero stars, of give one candidate zero stars and another a single star (because they both suck but one is just slightly less terrible) - you can do that! And at the end of the election, all the stars are counted and then the state's EC votes divvied up proportionally amongst the top two.
Under the current system, third parties have to win or they are essentially useless. Under PRATT-RV, third parties coming in second, or even demonstrating widespread popularity just underneath the threshold, would have an effect. We'd still have all the benefits of two-party competition preventing a dictatorship, but the two main parties would have to be more on their toes, as it would be easier to replace one them. The PR aspect still ensures that the electoral college tracks the popular vote. And I think most voters would appreciate the flexibility Range Voting creates.
Sincere question from someone who hopes this doesn’t happen: The current system allows states to stop counting once one person gets more than half the total votes cast in that state — and not count mail in votes at all if it rejects make a difference. All states would have to commit to count every vote … god forbid … or the results would be skewed.
I wish this was a viable solution but the SCOTUS Originalist/Federalist operatives would blow this out of the water in two-seconds flat, not to mention Congress can't be circumvented. About the best I can see coming out of this compact is that it publicizes the desperate need to fix and make the electoral college a more accurate measure of the popular vote, and a movement comes out of it that possibly attracts enough independents and Dems to pressure Congress to do something.
But the paralysis, polarization, but the lack of thinking power there makes the sophisticated solutions that are desperately needed to solve so many complex problems (becoming more complex by the day), impossible to implement.
My hope is that the GOP just implodes and dies, which is just may do and the Dems and independents can reconstitute themselves into an intelligent, non-insane two party system.
Seems obvious that a "National Popular Vote Interstate Compact" is subject to the Constitution's Article I Section 10 ("No State shall, without the Consent of Congress...enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State...").
Would a future Congress vote to approve of this compact, who knows; the backers of the Compact simply say that they will seek Congressional approval. Note that Congress wouldn't have to explicitly vote it down in order to deny it constitutionality, they could just ignore it like a "pocket veto".
And if this compact reaches its 270 threshold and signatory states do actually start assigning their Electoral College votes per the compact, _without_ Congress having voted to approve it, the federal lawsuits would fly. Presumably the question would then, eventually, end up at the SCOTUS.
Whatever the partisan makeup of the Supreme Court is by that point in time, whoa....what's the argument that the Court should invalidate part of the clear written text of the Constitution? This wouldn't be like the Court interpreting what a clause implies or covers (e.g. "Roe") or later reversing that interpretation ("Dobbs"). This would be bluntly taking a red pen to the plain text of the Constitution. Would even the most-partisan Supreme Court do _that_?
And would we really want it established that the Supreme Court can or should do _that_?
I’m confused. How does someone win if they got only 20% of the vote?
Does the Compact say the state awards all of its votes to whoever got the most votes or whoever got the majority of votes? Because if it’s the former, it’s not really an improvement over the Electoral College.
I did my Masters Thesis on the Electoral College. It was titled "Will the National Popular Vote really be so national, or so popular." My argument is that states will be replaced by an even more artificial boundary -- the boundary of media markets. Most Democrats and Democrat leaners live in the top 25 media markets -- most Republicans and Republican leaners live outside the top 25 media markets. The point is that replacing the Electoral College with a national popular vote will drive Dems further towards urban America and Reps further towards rural and suburban America -- deepening the partisan divide. Just food for thought...
If there were no Electoral Collage, Al Gore and Hillary Clinton would've been president, by the popular vote.
I was in high school in MD when MD became the first state to pass this. I respect Bob Cesca's opinion, since I very much used to hold it. Ironically enough, I think we've both made complimentary shifts on how we've seen this topic, albeit in opposite directions. And I agree with Cesca that the current Electoral College is a time bomb. But I think there's a better way to fix it:
The greatest benefit of the Electoral College (which Cesca mentions) is that is does semi-lock America into a two-party system. And a two-party system is the second best way to keep the Iron Law of Oligarchy in check. The NPVIC would potentially elect a president who has barely a slim plurality, at best. And sadly, multi-party presidential systems have a terrible record of failure. Case in point: See Latin America! Presidents get elected with only a plurality, never have a congressional majority, and almost immediately get their agenda blocked/impeached (presidential systems, after all, still keep checks & balances/separation of powers). Strongmen like Bolsonaro, Fujimori, or a military junta still exist, playing on people's frustrations with a dysfunctional government. And they still try to overturn checks and balances, and sometimes even succeed. Heck, this outcome could have even happened to us as early as 1800 if we hadn't adopted the electoral college and the two-party system it created.
Multi-party proportional representation parliamentary systems meanwhile have the opposite problem: So many political parties balkanize the electorate, that governments are unstable, until along comes a Berlusconi or a Netanyahu who promises to cut the clamor and "get things done." People like them don't survive because they're good at winning elections; they survive because they're good at negotiating parliamentary majorities, and playing off popular discontent about governmental instability. (Netanyahu is literally using this "argument for stability" right now.)
Westminster style systems - parliaments without proportional representation - have their own sets of problems. The % of the vote and the % of the parliamentary seats you win can differ greatly, especially if there are more than two parties. The lack of a checks and balances means that whoever gets elected has borderline unlimited power. And unless your country/province has VERY strong two-party competition, you might end up with awful people (like Modi, the Alberta Socreds, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, the last 5 UK Conservative PM's) getting elected and staying in power for decades. Worse, this exact same problem can happen on a national level, which is how Orban created his dictatorship: He rewrote the electoral rules to make the seat-vote disparity even larger, (reducing proportional representation), and thus in a multi-party Westminster system he could thus get supermajorities so long as his opposition stayed divided.
Regardless of the flaws of our system, if nothing else at least it's minimized the chances of an Orban through strong two-party competition that the electoral college creates. The flipside though is this: While American presidential elections tend to be very predictable most of the time (president does a good job, their party wins reelection, and vice versa), it does have one obvious issue: During Ambivalent Elections - which is an incumbent party screwing up as much as possible without crossing the threshold into an outright loss - the incumbent party still wins the popular vote, but the electoral college goes to the better campaigner. This didn't used to be an issue, since Ambivalent elections used to be really rare (there were only three between 1848 and 1988). But for reasons I can go into in another post, Ambivalent Elections have become worryingly common: Three of the eight presidential elections since/including 1992 have been ambivalent. And another four presidential elections would have been, had it not been for a black-swan event.
Again, there are larger reasons why this shift has happened. But given everything I've written so far, here's the design challenge I put to everyone: Can you create a way of electing a president that:
a. Keeps the Iron-Law-Fighting benefits of the current Electoral College and two-party system?
b. Leads to both parties paying attention to every state, and not just swing states?
c. Prevents the tendency in our current system for national two-party competition to degenerate into one-party sectionalism?
d. Prevents the loser of the popular vote from winning the Electoral College?
e. Makes it easier for 3rd parties to replace an incompetent first or second party?
f. Gets rid of 12 Amendment contingency elections (hasn't happened in a while, but would still be a problem)
There actually is. In fact there are at least two: One I call PRATT (Proportional Representation Amongst Top Two), the other PRATT-RV (Proportional Representation Amongst Top Two with Range Vote):
PRATT would divvy up a state's electoral college votes proportionally by the statewide vote total amongst the top two winners. If we divved up EC votes to the nearest whole number, the number of swing states would go from 5-10 up to 40. And if we divvied each state's EC votes to the nearest quarter of an electoral college vote (i.e., you'd need 269.25 electoral college votes to win, rather than 270), literally every state would become a swing state. Even Democrats would win a quarter of an EC vote in Wyoming, and even the GOP would win a quarter of an EC vote in DC.
The Top-Two aspect keeps the Iron-Law in check. The requirement that both Dems and Reps actually compete in literally every single state minimizes the degeneration of two-party competition into one-party sectionalism. And the PR aspect means the electoral college tracks the popular vote. (Even loosing Florida, Gore under PRATT would still have been elected with 269.5 electoral college votes). And in the highly unlikely even of a contingency election, individual states could just re-assign their electoral college votes based on the first and second place winners nationally rather than statewide.
Now PRATT would work by itself. But it becomes even better if you throw in Range Voting. Range Voting is something we actually have all seen before, but might not have known the name of. When you rank an amazon purchase from 0 to 5 stars, that's Range Voting. And fun fact: Humans are not only species who practice it. Bee dancing, when a honeybee swarm is decide where to set up their new nest is actually Range Voting (the "direction" the bee dances is a candidate for a new nest; the intensity/number of times they keep repeating the dance is the equivalent of giving a candidate a certain number of stars).
So with Range Voting, every voter would be able to give every candidate a rating of between zero and five stars. If you want to give both candidates 5 stars, give both zero stars, of give one candidate zero stars and another a single star (because they both suck but one is just slightly less terrible) - you can do that! And at the end of the election, all the stars are counted and then the state's EC votes divvied up proportionally amongst the top two.
Under the current system, third parties have to win or they are essentially useless. Under PRATT-RV, third parties coming in second, or even demonstrating widespread popularity just underneath the threshold, would have an effect. We'd still have all the benefits of two-party competition preventing a dictatorship, but the two main parties would have to be more on their toes, as it would be easier to replace one them. The PR aspect still ensures that the electoral college tracks the popular vote. And I think most voters would appreciate the flexibility Range Voting creates.
“The Electoral College is an endangered species.”
Well, it’s about damn time!
Sincere question from someone who hopes this doesn’t happen: The current system allows states to stop counting once one person gets more than half the total votes cast in that state — and not count mail in votes at all if it rejects make a difference. All states would have to commit to count every vote … god forbid … or the results would be skewed.
It’s past time
I wish this was a viable solution but the SCOTUS Originalist/Federalist operatives would blow this out of the water in two-seconds flat, not to mention Congress can't be circumvented. About the best I can see coming out of this compact is that it publicizes the desperate need to fix and make the electoral college a more accurate measure of the popular vote, and a movement comes out of it that possibly attracts enough independents and Dems to pressure Congress to do something.
But the paralysis, polarization, but the lack of thinking power there makes the sophisticated solutions that are desperately needed to solve so many complex problems (becoming more complex by the day), impossible to implement.
My hope is that the GOP just implodes and dies, which is just may do and the Dems and independents can reconstitute themselves into an intelligent, non-insane two party system.
Seems obvious that a "National Popular Vote Interstate Compact" is subject to the Constitution's Article I Section 10 ("No State shall, without the Consent of Congress...enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State...").
Would a future Congress vote to approve of this compact, who knows; the backers of the Compact simply say that they will seek Congressional approval. Note that Congress wouldn't have to explicitly vote it down in order to deny it constitutionality, they could just ignore it like a "pocket veto".
And if this compact reaches its 270 threshold and signatory states do actually start assigning their Electoral College votes per the compact, _without_ Congress having voted to approve it, the federal lawsuits would fly. Presumably the question would then, eventually, end up at the SCOTUS.
Whatever the partisan makeup of the Supreme Court is by that point in time, whoa....what's the argument that the Court should invalidate part of the clear written text of the Constitution? This wouldn't be like the Court interpreting what a clause implies or covers (e.g. "Roe") or later reversing that interpretation ("Dobbs"). This would be bluntly taking a red pen to the plain text of the Constitution. Would even the most-partisan Supreme Court do _that_?
And would we really want it established that the Supreme Court can or should do _that_?
I’m confused. How does someone win if they got only 20% of the vote?
Does the Compact say the state awards all of its votes to whoever got the most votes or whoever got the majority of votes? Because if it’s the former, it’s not really an improvement over the Electoral College.
I did my Masters Thesis on the Electoral College. It was titled "Will the National Popular Vote really be so national, or so popular." My argument is that states will be replaced by an even more artificial boundary -- the boundary of media markets. Most Democrats and Democrat leaners live in the top 25 media markets -- most Republicans and Republican leaners live outside the top 25 media markets. The point is that replacing the Electoral College with a national popular vote will drive Dems further towards urban America and Reps further towards rural and suburban America -- deepening the partisan divide. Just food for thought...
Anyone that thinks that elimination of the Electoral College is a good thing is a completely ignorant fucking moron.
About time. That was always a diseased idea.