Maryland Senate Advances Bill To Dodge Electoral College

[aiformula]

I always thought that instead of the electoral college votes all being cast for one candidate or the other, there should be a slightly different accounting for them. Each state has it's own rules/laws for the casting of electoral votes. I believe this should be homogenized at the very least, and I think I have a good idea for how to cast them to give a more accurate representation of the people's will.

Follow w/ me for a sec and see if you think this makes sense....

The number of electoral votes coincides directly w/ the number of congressional seats each state holds. Each seat has it's own district/region that it is responsible for. The exception to this being the 2 senate seats which are granted to every state. These districts are divided up by population. Now, to be fair to all, I believe that each House seat district's popular vote be tied to a vote in the electoral college. Then the votes tied to the senate seat go to the statewide popular vote winner.

So in the case of Ohio, we have 18 reps and 2 senators. If 11 districts voted the republican candidate, 6 voted the democratic candidate, and those crazy kids in SE ohio were able to get a libertarian to win the popular vote in their district, but there were enough votes in the 6 districts to overcome the narrow wins by republicans statewide, thus giving the dems the popular vote win, the votes would be cast as such...

11 republican
8 democrat
1 libertarian

I believe this would actually give a truer representation of the active voting public AND it would make people realize their vote DOES count.

But then, this was just the ramblings and ranting of a drunken philosophers' meeting in college but I always have liked the idea. Maybe there is some validity to it, but I'm an engineer not a poly sci guy so I wouldn't know a good political idea from a bad one in practice.

[Deacon51]

They (The Dems) have been trying to find a way to do this since 2000.

Here's the plain, they say if enough states will vote there electoral collage with the popular vote, nation wide, so will we.

This is only a state law, congress and the Constitution will have nothing to do with it. It's kind of a parallel national, behind the back door type government.
It does however go completely against the constitution.

[minutofgroundhog]

[quote=Deacon51]I hate this state (MD)... I can't wait to move back to Tennessee!

Why in the world would a State want to give up it's rights?

It's called Mary Land for a reason. Look it up. By the way Hello to every body this is my first post. I told my friend that I would post so thats what I am doing, posting.

[FrankRizzoXD40]

Originally Posted by aiformula

I always thought that instead of the electoral college votes all being cast for one candidate or the other, there should be a slightly different accounting for them. Each state has it's own rules/laws for the casting of electoral votes. I believe this should be homogenized at the very least, and I think I have a good idea for how to cast them to give a more accurate representation of the people's will.

Follow w/ me for a sec and see if you think this makes sense....

The number of electoral votes coincides directly w/ the number of congressional seats each state holds. Each seat has it's own district/region that it is responsible for. The exception to this being the 2 senate seats which are granted to every state. These districts are divided up by population. Now, to be fair to all, I believe that each House seat district's popular vote be tied to a vote in the electoral college. Then the votes tied to the senate seat go to the statewide popular vote winner.

So in the case of Ohio, we have 18 reps and 2 senators. If 11 districts voted the republican candidate, 6 voted the democratic candidate, and those crazy kids in SE ohio were able to get a libertarian to win the popular vote in their district, but there were enough votes in the 6 districts to overcome the narrow wins by republicans statewide, thus giving the dems the popular vote win, the votes would be cast as such...

11 republican
8 democrat
1 libertarian

I believe this would actually give a truer representation of the active voting public AND it would make people realize their vote DOES count.

But then, this was just the ramblings and ranting of a drunken philosophers' meeting in college but I always have liked the idea. Maybe there is some validity to it, but I'm an engineer not a poly sci guy so I wouldn't know a good political idea from a bad one in practice.

Currently, two states already have a system similar to the on you are proposing. The reason I am familiar with it is because one of those states is where I live--Maine!!

Maine has four electoral votes and two districts. If Bush won one district and Kerry won the other, Maine would cast one vote for Bush and one for Kerry. Then, the remaining two votes would go to whoever won the statewide popular vote. I actually drew up a scenario in '04 where the electoral college was tied 269-269 and Maine could have cast the tiebreaking vote if one of it's districts went for Bush or Kerry!

Here is a summary of how Maine does things--Nebraska is the other state that can split its electoral votes.

Maine method

The "Maine Method" is a mixture of the district and statewide / short ballot modes of selection. It has this name because it was adopted by Maine for the 1972 presidential election and remains in place. Nebraska has used the Maine Method for presidential elections beginning in 1996.

In the Maine Method, the votes for president are summed for each congressional district. The party winning each district elects one Presidential Elector. Then the vote is summed for the entire state. The party winning the statewide vote elects two Presidential Electors.

The Maine Method was first used by Massachusetts in the elections of 1804, 1812, and 1820. After Maine split off from Massachusetts in 1820, it continued to use this method through the election of 1828, then abandoned it for 144 years before returning to it for the election of 1972.

In the 18 state contests in which this method has been used, only once has it achieved a result different from winner-take-all: in Maine, in 1828, 1 of Maine's 9 electoral votes went to Andrew Jackson.

Maine–Nebraska method

Other observers argue that the current electoral rules of Maine and Nebraska should be extended nationwide. As previously noted, the winner in each of those two states is only guaranteed two of Maine's four and Nebraska's five electoral votes, with the winner of each Congressional district in those states receiving one electoral vote. Using the California example again, Gore won 33 of the state's Congressional districts and the state overall, while Bush won 19 Congressional districts. The state's electoral votes would then have gone 35–19 for Gore.

However, this kind of allocation would still make it possible for the loser of the popular vote to become president. If every state used the Maine–Nebraska system, George W. Bush would have won in 2000 by an even larger Electoral College majority than he did with winner-take-all.[citation needed] Also, dividing electoral votes by House district winners would create yet another incentive for partisan gerrymandering. If a district system had been used in 1960, Richard Nixon would have been elected, despite losing the popular vote.

Another perceived problem with this suggestion is that it would actually further increase the advantage of small states. In winner-take-all, the small states' disproportionately high number of electors is partially offset by the fact that large states with their big electoral blocks are such a highly desirable boon to a candidate that large swing states actually receive much more attention during the campaign than smaller states. In proportional representation or Maine–Nebraska, this advantage of the large states would be gone.

Yet another argument with both Maine–Nebraska and proportional representation is that even if it is considered superior as a nationwide system, winner-take-all generally maximizes the power of an individual state and thus while it might be in the interest of the nation, it is not in the interest of the state to adopt any other system. Since the United States constitution gives the states the power to choose their method of appointing the electors, nationwide Maine–Nebraska without a constitutional amendment mandating it seems unlikely, and the passage of such an amendment seems equally unlikely since the House delegations of the largest states (against whose interests such a system would be), taken together, easily surpass the one third of the House size that is needed to block a constitutional amendment.

I'm not really sure that I agree with this method, because it would give more weight to the heavily populated areas, which is something that the founders were trying to avoid when they adopted the electoral college.

Frank

[NMCB3]

Other observers argue that the current electoral rules of Maine and Nebraska should be extended nationwide.

These "observers" should mind their own business. The intricacy's and application of the electoral college system are for each state to decide. Every state has it`s own unique circumstances. Uniformity as usual is not the answer.

[wolfsburg_de]

If there were no Electoral College, then guess how many counties would decide who was President:

[FrankRizzoXD40]

Originally Posted by NMCB3

These "observers" should mind their own business. The intricacy's and application of the electoral college system are for each state to decide. Every state has it`s own unique circumstances. Uniformity as usual is not the answer.

Absolutely! I was just posting some commentary about the system.

Frank

[FrankRizzoXD40]

Originally Posted by wolfsburg_de

If there were no Electoral College, then guess how many counties would decide who was President:

That is precisely what the founders were trying to avoid--a few places deciding the election for everyone else.