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Thread: Electoral College Under Fire Again

  1. #1

    Electoral College Under Fire Again

    Having failed to generate enough support to abolish the Electoral College through a constitutional amendment, the institution’s detractors are now looking to the courts to upend it.
    A new lawsuit, spearheaded by Harvard University law professor Lawrence Lessig and filed in four states, charges that the “winner-take-all” element of how states divvy up their Electoral College votes is unconstitutional.
    The District of Columbia and 48 states use this winner-take-all system.
    The only exceptions are Maine and Nebraska, which use a proportional allocation of votes.
    “Under the winner-take-all system, U.S. citizens have been denied their constitutional right to an equal vote in presidential elections,” said David Boies, an attorney who represented former Vice President Al Gore in the contested 2000 election and is leading the current litigation against the Electoral College. “This is a clear violation of the principle of one person, one vote.”
    A number of similar lawsuits have been filed in the past, but all have failed.
    According to Ballot Access News, the biggest impediment to overturning the winner-take-all system is Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, which says, “Each state shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress.”

    More at: https://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/j...der-fire-again
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment



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  3. #2
    A new lawsuit, spearheaded by Harvard University law professor Lawrence Lessig and filed in four states, charges that the “winner-take-all” element of how states divvy up their Electoral College votes is unconstitutional.
    I'm all for that.

    This would allow people that do not live in giant urban megalopolises to finally have a meaningful vote for president.

  4. #3
    $#@! got booted from DNC primaries by Hillary. Maybe he should start looking closer to home to uncover voting irregularities?

  5. #4
    A new lawsuit, spearheaded by Harvard University law professor Lawrence Lessig and filed in four states, charges that the “winner-take-all” element of how states divvy up their Electoral College votes is unconstitutional.
    I'm all for that.

    This would allow people that do not live in giant urban megalopolises to finally have a meaningful vote for president.

  6. #5
    Never done before: Getting in between AF double posts.

  7. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by Anti Federalist View Post
    I'm all for that.

    This would allow people that do not live in giant urban megalopolises to finally have a meaningful vote for president.
    I agree but it isn't the courts' place to impose it on the states, the constitution allows them to hand out electors in any manner they choose.
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment

  8. #7
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    I agree but it isn't the courts' place to impose it on the states, the constitution allows them to hand out electors in any manner they choose.
    Something a law professor should know.

  9. #8
    Quote Originally Posted by timosman View Post
    Something a law professor should know.
    I'm sure he knows but he thinks the Constitution doesn't matter, rule by judicial fiat is what the left believes in, one of these days they will riot to demand aristocracy.
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment



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  11. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by timosman View Post
    Never done before: Getting in between AF double posts.
    Follow the white rabbit.

    He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

  12. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by Anti Federalist View Post
    I'm all for that.

    This would allow people that do not live in giant urban megalopolises to finally have a meaningful vote for president.
    I would have given Her a win this last time based on some rough math I did. I took the % of votes received by each candidate and then applied that ratio to the EC votes. Careful what you wish for....

  13. #11
    Quote Originally Posted by Anti Federalist View Post
    I'm all for that.

    This would allow people that do not live in giant urban megalopolises to finally have a meaningful vote for president.
    What they want is the opposite.
    All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.
    -Albert Camus

  14. #12
    xxxxx
    Last edited by Voluntarist; 07-28-2018 at 01:32 PM.
    You have the right to remain silent. Anything you post to the internet can and will be used to humiliate you.

  15. #13
    Quote Originally Posted by timosman View Post
    Never done before: Getting in between AF double posts.
    I think I have, it isn't that hard.
    "He's talkin' to his gut like it's a person!!" -me
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  16. #14
    Quote Originally Posted by dannno View Post
    I think I have, it isn't that hard.
    We should chip in and buy a dial up account for AF.

  17. #15
    Quote Originally Posted by otherone View Post
    What they want is the opposite.
    Right, but then states like California with 155 state electoral votes wont have all 155 going to the left.
    THE SQUAD of RPF
    1. enhanced_deficit - Paid Troll / John Bolton book promoter
    2. Devil21 - LARPing Wizard, fake magical script reader
    3. Firestarter - Tax Troll; anti-tax = "criminal behavior"
    4. TheCount - Comet Pizza Pedo Denier <-- sick

    @Ehanced_Deficit's real agenda on RPF =troll:

    Who spends this much time copy/pasting the same recycled links, photos/talking points.

    7 yrs/25k posts later RPF'ers still respond to this troll

  18. #16

    The Electoral College is a civic abomination

    http://theweek.com/articles/796519/e...ic-abomination

    September 19, 2018


    The Electoral College is an abomination. It's long past time we abolished it.

    The Electoral College was a dumb idea when it was first proposed. Today, it's the Constitution's most egregious affront to elementary fairness. In a just and properly functioning political system, it would be eliminated without delay or regret.

    Why do we have the Electoral College in the first place? If we begin at the beginning and look for guidance to Alexander Hamilton — the presumed author of Federalist Paper No. 68, which discusses and defends the Electoral College — we discover what sounds like the musings of a dorm room full of mildly drunken undergraduates seeking to apply to the world the overly pious lessons of an "Intro to Political Theory" course.

    Wouldn't it be nice if voters didn't cast ballots in favor of the president directly but instead voted for a group of people of "information and discernment" who would themselves make the final choice of who will stand at the head of the executive branch of government and serve as the commander in chief of the armed forces? The idea, apparently, was that there should be an extra layer of distance between the people and the choice of president — and that this layer should consist of a group of citizens (electors) who freely deliberate about the choice, like a temporary Congress filled with people who don't serve in other elective offices, with the outcome of those deliberations treated as legitimate by the people even when it countermands the result of the popular vote.

    How Hamilton or anyone else with a knowledge of political history could have considered this a workable idea is beyond me.

    But don't take my word for it. We know the idea is ridiculous because the institution has never functioned in any way like this. Yes, there have been a handful of elections, including two within the last two decades, in which the winner of the electoral vote has won the presidency despite losing the popular vote. But that isn't because the electors pondered the results of the popular vote, deliberated about it, and then overruled it.

    In fact, during the Trump transition of 2016-2017 a small number of anti-Trump scholars and citizens tried and failed to persuade electors to act this way, switching their votes away from the electoral vote winner (Trump) to some other person, either the winner of the popular vote (Hillary Clinton — who just argued in The Atlantic that it's time to kill the Electoral College) or a different Republican — really to anyone other than the singularly unfit man at the head of the GOP ticket.

    That didn't happen, or come remotely close to happening, because it's a recipe for an outcome that would understandably be viewed as democratically illegitimate, with ordinary citizens wondering just who the hell these electors think they are to meddle with and overturn the outcome of an election.

    In practical terms, then, the actual people who serve as electors are irrelevant, as is their capacity for deliberation. The electors nearly always vote the way their state voted in the popular election. The process is automatic, rendering the formality of an actual meeting to cast ballots beside the point. Which means that what matters is not who votes but how many electoral votes a state is allocated. That is determined by adding together a state's congressional and senatorial delegations.

    And that's where the problem lies — because there is a significant representational imbalance between heavily and sparsely populated states.

    At this point, we run into a classic debate in American politics — about federalism, population density, large states versus small states, and the cultural character of rural versus urban and suburban areas of the country.

    Is the U.S. a single nation with a single population of citizens? Or is it a conglomeration of 50 mini-nations with 50 distinct bodies of citizens bound together into a unit that is and should remain less than the sum of its roughly equal parts? The Articles of Confederation that preceded the federal Constitution sided strongly with the latter. The U.S. Constitution written in 1787 attempted to strike a balance between the two extremes, with the Federalist faction (led by Hamilton and James Madison) leaning in the direction a single nation and the anti-Federalists favoring a more state-centered arrangement. (Progressives have tended to lean much less unambivalently in the direction of viewing the country as a single nation in which the power and distinctiveness of individual states is minimized.)

    The need to get anti-Federalist (and Southern slaveholding) buy-in for ratification of the Constitution led to a number of the founding document's most distinctive features. One was the Bill of Rights. Another was the upper chamber of Congress, which gives two senators to every state, regardless of population. This meant that the least heavily populated state at the time of ratification (Delaware, with 59,000 people) had the same representation in the Senate as the most heavily populated state (Virginia, with 747,000 people), despite the latter having nearly 13 times the population as the former.

    That's a lot of extra power for small states. But it's nowhere near the boost they enjoy today, when the most populated state (very Democratic California) is 68 times as heavily populated as the least populated state (very Republican Wyoming). It's this dynamic that is producing a situation in which, just over two decades from now, one-third of Americans could be represented by 70 percent of the Senate.

    Let's assume this makes sense — because states should be considered roughly equal political entities regardless of population, and because the more rural, low-density populations of small states possess certain qualities (like civic virtue?) that deserve to receive outsized influence on our political system. I don't buy either claim and rather doubt that most people who live in larger states would either. But let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that it's persuasive — that for the good of the country small states should be vastly overrepresented in the upper chamber of Congress.

    But then how do we explain the Electoral College, which builds off of this imbalance and applies it to how we choose the head of the executive branch — and through the president's appointment powers the judicial branch as well?

    Consider the difference between voting for president in California and Wyoming.

    In 2016, roughly 14 million people voted for president in California compared to 255,000 people in Wyoming. Clinton's California win gave her 55 electoral votes, while Trump walked away from Wyoming with three. That might sound like a big advantage for the Democrat, but when the electoral result is compared to the relative size of each state's population it's the opposite. In fact, an individual voting for president in Wyoming in 2016 had three times the influence on the Electoral College as an individual voting in California.

    So let's summarize: The Senate hugely amplifies the power of small states. (This comes on top of Republican gerrymandering of House districts, which does the same for rural areas within Republican-controlled states.) The Electoral College then does the same thing when it comes to choosing the presidency, and with incredibly significant consequences — giving us George W. Bush instead of Al Gore and Donald Trump instead of Hillary Clinton, not to mention Neil Gorsuch instead of Merrick Garland.

    That's all three branches of the federal government operating to systematically hand more political power to fewer people. If this happened in one branch of the federal government, perhaps it could be justified. But across them all? That's grossly unfair, as growing numbers of Americans are coming to recognize.

    Too bad the system is also designed to stymie efforts to change it, with the process of amending the Constitution, which is what would be required to adopt direct nationwide election of the president, depending on support from at least some of the very low-population states that benefit so disproportionately from the current arrangement. The result is an extremely low probability of ever reforming the system.

    The only question remaining is how long people will continue to revere and abide by the nation's fundamental law when they've rightly come to the conclusion that it's increasingly a force for injustice.




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  20. #17
    “Under the winner-take-all system, U.S. citizens have been denied their constitutional right to an equal vote in presidential elections,” said David Boies, an attorney"
    I wonder what he considers an equal vote or a constitutional right? Right or wrong where you live makes a difference on how much weight your vote is worth. That said I support ranked choice voting over winner takes all.

    Presidential Election - States with the Most & Least Powerful Voters (No. 1 = Most Powerful)

    1 Arizona 207.05 27 Mississippi 31.27
    2 Iowa 189.88 28 Virginia 29.94
    3 Alaska 188.03 29 Wyoming 28.21
    4 South Dakota 172.94 30 Rhode Island 27.47
    5 Ohio 141.06 31 Utah 26.49
    6 Nevada 138.24 32 Vermont 24.91
    7 New Hampshire 122.18 33 Kentucky 20.62
    8 North Carolina 119.15 34 Tennessee 18.09
    9 Georgia 109.12 35 Louisiana 17.10
    10 Florida 105.82 36 Oregon 15.47
    11 Missouri 94.65 37 Arkansas 11.09
    12 Montana 92.97 38 New Jersey 10.86
    13 Maine 87.19 39 Idaho 10.47
    14 North Dakota 82.99 40 Washington 10.36
    15 South Carolina 78.02 41 West Virginia 8.88
    16 Kansas 69.00 42 Connecticut 8.42
    17 Indiana 60.24 43 Oklahoma 5.22
    18 Minnesota 53.72 44 Illinois 3.64
    19 Colorado 53.15 45 Alabama 2.88
    20 Texas 52.14 46 Hawaii 2.86
    21 Wisconsin 48.67 47 Massachusetts 1.22
    22 Pennsylvania 43.52 48 New York 1.12
    23 New Mexico 40.99 49 District of Columbia 1.08
    24 Delaware 37.21 50 Maryland 0.43
    25 Nebraska 32.27 51 California 0.37
    26 Michigan 31.94

    Note: Maine and Nebraska are the only two states that allocate votes proportionally (based on the congressional district allocation approach), but the outcome of the last elections has been similar to the one of a winner-take-all state.

  21. #18
    ^ This doesn't consider the primaries, where the first states to vote carry a lot of weight in eliminating certain candidates.

    Ultimately, if the Federal government was not so overly powerful, far beyond what was intended, it wouldn't matter so much who was president

  22. #19
    Quote Originally Posted by amartin315 View Post
    Ultimately, if the Federal government was not so overly powerful, far beyond what was intended, it wouldn't matter so much who was president
    Both Obama and Trump were sworn on the Constitution (Obama twice every time) and yet the policies they implemented were quite different. How is that possible?

  23. #20
    The EC has never served its intended function; there have never been enough unfaithful electors to serve as a bulwark against populism.

    From political philosophical perspective, the EC is simply irrelevant.

    The fight over the EC, at this point, is purely partisan, like the fight over redistricting.

    The GOP only wants to preserve the EC, and the Dems only want to abolish it, because of the demographics of the moment.

    If the demographics were different, the parties would swap positions.

    Dems with a principled belief in 'pure' democracy, and GOPers with a principled belief in the Constitution, are not driving this fight.
    Last edited by r3volution 3.0; 09-20-2018 at 10:14 AM.

  24. #21
    Is the U.S. a single nation with a single population of citizens? Or is it a conglomeration of 50 mini-nations with 50 distinct bodies of citizens bound together into a unit that is and should remain less than the sum of its roughly equal parts? The Articles of Confederation that preceded the federal Constitution sided strongly with the latter. The U.S. Constitution written in 1787 attempted to strike a balance between the two extremes, with the Federalist faction (led by Hamilton and James Madison) leaning in the direction a single nation and the anti-Federalists favoring a more state-centered arrangement. (Progressives have tended to lean much less unambivalently in the direction of viewing the country as a single nation in which the power and distinctiveness of individual states is minimized.)
    The latter.

    Which is why the Bolsheviks and progs love political and regulatory power so much.

    And why they cannot understand "we" oppose them.

    I have no common bond with these people at all.

  25. #22
    Quote Originally Posted by r3volution 3.0 View Post
    The EC has never served its intended function; there have never been enough unfaithful electors to serve as a bulwark against populism.

    From political philosophical perspective, the EC is simply irrelevant.

    The fight over the EC, at this point, is purely partisan, like the fight over redistricting.

    The GOP only wants to preserve the EC, and the Dems only want to abolish it, because of the demographics of the moment.

    If the demographics were different, the parties would swap positions.

    Dems with a principled belief in 'pure' democracy, and GOPers with a principled belief in the Constitution, are not driving this fight.
    One of its intended functions was to ensure that the rights and wishes of differing regions were considered rather than allowing the most populous regions to decide everything their way in order to get the less populous regions to join and stay in the union, that function is still served to some degree.
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment



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