Massachusetts House considers bill to eliminate Electoral College

[Zenlitened]

Source: Boston Globe

House lawmakers will consider legislation today that could someday rid the state of the Electoral College system and put presidential elections more directly in the hands of voters.

Massachusetts would become the fifth state to join a movement toward switching to a popular vote, an initiative that would be implemented only if states representing a majority of the nation's 538 electoral votes approve similar legislation.

The plan would not affect the 2008 election and would not be put into place until 2012, at the earliest.

The House is planning to vote today, and the Senate will likely follow next week. Both House Speaker Salvatore F. DiMasi and Senate President Therese Murray support the idea, which makes its approval by the Legislature possible. Governor Deval Patrick has given it a tentative thumbs up, pending further study.

Read more: http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2008/07/09/house_to_consider_bill_to_eliminate_electoral_college/

[Oregone]

1. We should be moving to proportional electorate allocation based on state totals

Anything that considers the fictitious national popular vote is a bad idea, which is as imperfect as the current system.

[hedgehog]

3. Fictitous national popular vote? nt

[Oregone]

5. Being thats its meaningless, and subject to mass uncontrollable manipulation (natural and otherwise)

Wouldn't that be something for massive fires in California and Oregon, paired with organized voter roll purges in Washington, to completely redraw the national vote percentage and determine how electoral college votes were cast? Being that elections have become so close, natural disasters or man-made voter suppression techniques could easily sway the national popular vote winner. Suppression factors across the non-homogeneous regions are almost too much to count (from voting booth access to registration procedures to weather patterns)...the national popular vote does not account for a suppressed state's low turnout, but EVs equalize the discrepancies from state to state, from region to region.

Imagine a hypothetical scenario of two states with equal populations, but state A has 10X the money and a much wealthier group of inhabitants. Well, what if they invest heavily in their system, declare a state holiday, advertise, set up voting booths everywhere, have voting drives, offer voting tax incentives, etc. The other state B, dealing with poverty and all their issues, isn't able to do anything about their voting facilities or registered population. Come the election, what state will be having a much bigger turnout (thus effecting the national popular vote more)? Is the will of the people in state A equally being represented as the will of the people in state B? Wouldn't the wealthier state clearly be the one more apt at influencing the actual election result, despite having the same population? Does this espouse the ideals of democracy?

It makes more sense to assume the popular vote percentage per state (though potentially suppressed), is of the same proportional makeup if it were not suppressed, and hence, allocate electoral votes based on such proportions (though that is also an assumption in itself). For all I care, expand the number of electoral votes arbitrarily close to infinity (distributed per state based on census data), such that any rounding errors would have a negligent effect on the election (which currently isn't the case with so little EVs).

[Mnemosyne]

2. Run-off is my favorite alternate so far. knr n/t

[bemildred]

4. California passed this law, and Ahnuld vetoed it.

Just saying ...

[defendandprotect]

6. Prefer to get rid of it . . . but if that's not possible, then shift it to confirm popular vote . .

[struggle4progress]

7. It's a bad idea. First, if state electors are not allocated on the basis of the local vote,

even more people will say "What difference does it make? My vote won't count anyway." The result will be, not only less interest in voting, but also less interest in monitoring how local election boards function and how votes are counted. As a result, manipulation of elections in lower population areas will become more common

Second, "win-take-all" switches are unstable. A change of a dozen or so votes in every Ohio precinct, would have changed the outcome of the 2004 Presidential election: thus, Republicans had a real incentive manipulate Democratic turnout in Ohio, and (of course) they produced a strategy to do so. The incentive, however, largely depended on the "win-take-all" switch -- if electors had been allocated proportionately, their gains from their dirty tricks would have been slight and would scarcely have justified the effort. Since "Our electors go to the winner of the popular vote" is a "win-take-all" switch, it provides an incentive for dirty tricks, just as "win-take-all" did in Ohio

Third, after the criminal Supreme Court ruling in 2000, one should expect the court to be extremely partisan regarding recount issues. The court insisted Gore could not recount only a few problematic precincts but must recount the entire state. Facing a case that involved "the popular vote" in the entire United States, the court might be expected to behave similarly -- refusing to limit a case to questionable regions and insisting instead on a recount of the entire country, then sighing that there simply wasn't time. The effect would be that dirty tricks and election manipulation became more widespread, because no possibility for meaningful suit remained