Warren Wants to Eliminate the Electoral College, Which Would Cause Havoc in Our System
You hate third party candidates now? Try competing without the Electoral College.
I wouldn’t call our Founding Fathers perfect, but man did they leave us one of the greatest documents penned in the English language. Their brilliance provided America not only with the Bill of Rights, but with the Electoral College.
Grumbles about the Electoral College have existed for a long time, but after President Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, its elimination shot to the top of the Democrats list of issues in their campaigns.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren proclaimed her wish to abolish the Electoral College at a recent town hall, but I don’t think she’s given it much thought to the mess this would create.
Warren’s Remarks
Before I dive into the importance of the Electoral College, let’s look at Warren’s remarks. She told CNN’s Jake Tapper:
“I believe we need a constitutional amendment that protects the right to vote for every American citizen and makes sure that vote gets counted,” she told a CNN town hall in Jackson — noting presidential candidates didn’t tend to campaign in states like Mississippi, which are not Electoral College battlegrounds. “And the way we can make that happen is that we can have national voting and that means get rid of the Electoral College.”
Politico explained:
The pact would only go into effect if enough states sign on to pledge the 270 electoral votes necessary to win a presidential election. With the addition of Colorado last week, states with a combined total of 181 electoral votes have committed to the pact.
Critics of a national popular vote argue that the Electoral College ensures presidential candidates won’t focus on major population centers like the East and West coasts, where voters skew Democratic.
The criticism has some basis in the fact that the Democratic candidate for president has won the popular vote in four out of the last five general elections but has lost the presidency in two of those races.
Importance of the Electoral College
Did anyone pay attention to civics in school? This isn’t rocket science.
I hear that heavy populated states would choose the presidents as the main argument to keep the Electoral College, but another argument trumps (no pun intended) that one.
Without the Electoral College, we’d end up like Europe and other places with parliaments.
People already hate third party candidates, but the two major parties would hate them more without the Electoral College. You think those candidates cause spoilers now? They’ll face even more disappointment. Peter J. Wallison explained at RealClearPolitics:
In the election of 1992, Bill Clinton received a majority of electoral votes and was the duly elected president, despite the fact that he received only a plurality (43 percent) of the popular votes. A third party candidate, Ross Perot, received almost 19 percent. In fact, Bill Clinton did not win a majority of the popular vote in either of his elections, yet there was never any doubt—because he won an Electoral College majority—that he had the legitimacy to speak for the American people.
This points to the reason why the Electoral College should remain as an important element of our governmental structure. If we had a pure popular vote system, as many people who are disappointed with the 2016 outcome are now proposing, it would not be feasible—because of third party candidates—to ensure that any candidate would win a popular majority. Even in 2016, for example, although Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, she only received a plurality (48 percent)—not a majority; third party candidates took the rest.
If we abandoned the Electoral College, and adopted a system in which a person could win the presidency with only a plurality of the popular votes we would be swamped with candidates. Every group with an ideological or major policy interest would field a candidate, hoping that their candidate would win a plurality and become the president.
There would candidates of the pro-life and pro-choice parties; free trade and anti-trade parties; pro-immigration and anti-immigration parties; and parties favoring or opposing gun control—just to use the hot issues of today as examples.
People forget that Hillary only received 48% of the popular vote, not 50% and above. In other words, she did not receive the majority of the popular vote. In 2000, Al Gore received 48.38% of the popular vote.
Without the Electoral College, we could end up with a president who only had 25% of the vote. Wallison points out that the government could add a run-off amendment, which means the top two or three candidates would hold another election:
Of course, we could graft a run-off system onto our Constitution; the two top candidates in, say, a 10-person race, would then run against one another for the presidency. But that could easily mean that the American people would have a choice between a candidate of the pro-choice party and a candidate of the pro-gun party. If you thought the choice was bad this year, it could be far worse.
A mess. An absolute mess. These Democrats have to think long and hard before they shout from mountain tops stupid ideas just to appease the feels of some people.
Also, get over 2016.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
President Trump was all over it last night. Pretty much all of the Democrat nomination contenders are coalescing around abolishing the electoral college.
To see what the USA would be like without the Electoral College just look at NY and California. In both states citizens from sparsely-populated areas are run over by the dense cities, who can ignore the legitimate interests of some citizens.
The same would happen if the national popular vote determined who became president.
As a resident of rural NY, I can attest to the truth of this. And I’m not even from sparsely populated NY, just ruralville. NY is a lot more diverse than people realize.
The people the Founders warned us about and worried about have arrived. They are here in force.
Yep.
Tyranny from within.
I’m amazed that so many seem to be ignoring the biggest safeguard that the Electoral College provides – without an Electoral College, California can play whatever games it wants and turn in 6 million extra Democrat votes, skewing the entire popular vote nationwide. There’s no mechanisms in place for any other state to police California’s voting systems. In a winner takes all Electoral College vote, it doesn’t matter what kind of margin they win by in-state, so there’s no incentive to maximize the fraud.
These candidates are not ignoring, they want the heavily democrat populated states determining the presidential election
Six million extra votes? You think too small. Picture the following sequence of events:
-President Warren enacts this in whatever way she manages.
-California, New York, and Illinois announce they will be going to paper ballots to prevent voter fraud, and mail-in ballots to prevent any voter disenfranchisement.
-Post-election ‘harvesting’ by DNC volunteers bring the ‘leftover’ ballots into the polling places by the truckload. By amazing coincidence, 98.5% of all of these ballots are marked straight D all the way down.
Your scenario is already in place in CA.
Here, illegal aliens get driver’s licenses & voter registration, everybody gets mail-in ballots (motor voter,) votes are “harvested” by anyone so there’s no accountability, the harvesters can toss any votes if they think the voter cast a ballot for the “wrong” candidate, and we have a “cannibal” primary where only the top two candidates go to the general election.
Add in gerrymandering & you’ll never ever see another Republican elected here, even if they didn’t also have fraudulent counting, which the Dems see as a feature, not a bug!
You’d see the same thing in Florida, where they’re making more than a million felons eligible to vote. I’d bet they have an amazingly high voting percentage (straight D naturally) in the next election, because while it won’t matter for the national election maximizing vote fraud in the state elections will be very important to them. Just look at the stunts the Democrats pulled in Broward and Palm Beach counties this last election.
TACO BELL was recently voted BEST MEXICAN RESTAURANT IN AMERICA.
And, that is why we have an electorial college.
I upvoted, but remember, best Mexican restaurant assumes there’s such a thing as good Mexican food. IMHO, there is not.
They’ve always been here. But Americans in the past have not allowed the freaks now running our schools to be anywhere near them. So now we have a generation or two of deranged young adults working to perpetuate their sickness.
The Founding Fathers would be most angry at modern Americans over the mccain, boehner, mittens romney, paul ryan and the rest of the GOP rats we have elected and re-elected ad nauseum, until they gave the country away to the freaks now running our schools.
Imagine a nationwide recount too in case of <0.5% difference.
On the other hand, this would likely eliminate the fawning over New Hampshire and Iowa in early primaries.
Eliminating the electoral college wouldn’t affect the primaries. The only way to stop candidates stop fawning over Iowa and New Hampshire would for them not to be the first primaries.
Primaries would be inconsequential to third party and regional candidates. Ballot access laws would be the gateway.
California moved their primary up to give them more importance and influence in picking the dem candidate.
And Mary – the pretendian has given it all the thought losers give when they want to change the rules to give themselves an overwhelming advantage. She doesn’t care about voters, she cares about power.
Watch and see how Michigan goes downhill rapidly with the new crap from the last election we had.
Democrats never, ever, think about long term consequences, or about the possibility that people will adjust to new conditions.
The simplest scenario is that people in solid color states who have no chance of winning their state, will now vote, because their vote will count.
This will radically change voting patterns and projections.
I don’t suppose that entire democrat platform, since November 2016, has been entirely about how to guarantee they will win all future elections.
All successful fishermen know that the secret to catching anything is to fish where the fish are. Fauxcahontas–a Cherokee wannabe on the warpath, wants us to decide by popular vote counts.
That means that future Presidential candidates would send all their time in California, New York, Texas and Florida, with maybe a side trip to Illinois. Their campaign managers would and could say, “It’s the big states stupid!”. Idaho, Wyoming and the Dakotas would never see a Presidential candidate–not that they see all that much of them now.
My Irish-Czech daughter is far more Native American than Warren – graduated from Central Michigan University (Chippewas), worked at an Indian casino when she was in college and drives a Jeep Cherokee.
Aside from the question whether this Popular Vote compact is at all allowable in the first place (since fedgov is bound by Article IV to maintain a republican form of government), wouldn’t an amendment to abolish the EC also involve an amendment to Article V which provides “that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.”
Those states NOT participating in the Popular Vote compact would, I think, have standing to complain that their interests are harmed by seeing their Senate influence diminished.
PVC violates the Constitutional rule forbidding inter-state agreements without the consent of Congress. We are therefore but one election away from PVC being ratified by a Democrat Senate.
No, it doesn’t. That clause only applies to compacts that encroach on Congress’s authority. States don’t need anyone’s permission to enter into compacts that only affect them. The Supreme Court decided that 125 years ago. And since each state is entitled to allocate its electors as it chooses, it’s none of any other state’s business, or Congress’s, how they go about it.
There would be no constitutional barrier to a state legislature openly deciding to award that state’s electors to the Democratic Party in perpetuity (or rather until a future state legislature changes its mind). So if they want to award them instead to whoever wins the national popular vote, or to whoever wins the Kentucky Derby, that’s their privilege.
Ah, Virginia v. Tennessee, wherein SCOTUS invents out of whole cloth the “doesn’t increase the power of the states” exception to Article 1 Section 10.
So you seriously think the compact clause was understood in 1788 to give Congress a veto on an agreement for NJ to purchase a Manhattan office building from NY, or for MA to use roads belonging to CT?! As the Supreme Court said in that case, it’s absurd and can’t be what was understood.
Not relevant. A republican form of government does not require an electoral college. The constitution requires the states to have republican forms of government, but none of them have electoral colleges.
No, abolishing the electoral college would not affect the senate.
First, no they wouldn’t. But in any case, if the electoral college were actually abolished rather than merely bypassed by the PVC, then there would be no such thing as “states not participating”.
Question. Since states that choose to award all of their electoral college delegates to the candidate who wins the national popular vote are obviously doing it to subvert the constitutional purpose of the electoral college, couldn’t it be challenged on the basis that it is effectively an attempt to amend the constitution without due process and so, unconstitutional?
The Colorado situation seems to be ripe for a challenge since their electoral votes would go to the winner of the popular vote instead of the candidate their state selected. That negates the will of the voters in their state as well as the need for an election to be held in their state at all.
Rush went into this a few minutes ago expressing the same point of view, it’s unconstitutional because it disenfranchises the great majority of voters who don’t live in the biggest cities.
That’s nonsense. It can’t be unconstitutional because nobody has a constitutional right to a vote on their state’s electors. It’s entirely up to their state legislature.
I’m looking forward to when Trump wins the popular vote and 80% of CO votes for the Dem and its delegates are required to support the candidate this ruse was designed to thwart!
I assume that Colorado’s (and California’s, New York’s, etc) electors would suddenly decide that it violates their conscience to vote as PVC requires. The actual operative rule for their electors would be “vote for the Democrat”. Some states have ratified rules requiring electors to split their votes according to the national vote. That violates the Constitution as well in my opinion.
In what way do you think it violates the constitution? By telling electors how to vote? In that case I agree, but the same goes for all state laws that purport to bind electors. But does it actually tell the electors how to vote, or does it simply award electors to the two slates in proportion to the national vote and then let them vote as they choose? I see no constitutional objection to that.
The Constitution allows states to appoint Elector College electors in any manner that they choose. And, currently different states legislatively direct their electors to vote in a certain manner. So, it is unlikely that the SCOTUS would rule that directing electors to vote in unison with the national popular vote unconstitutional.
Our system of national government was designed to be controlled by the electorate through their state governments. So, if the people of Colorado really want to have their Electoral College votes represent the will of Colorado voters, rather than California or New York voters, then they have to direct their Legislature to make it so.
Well, yes and no. Article 2 Section 1 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.
But then we get to Amendment 14 Section 2, often overlooked: But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, [being twenty-one years of age,]* and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State. That recognizes the right of the people to vote for electors, and takes away the right of the legislature to choose. That kind of leaves 3 choices open to the legislature. Two are currently in use. All the electors go to the winner of the state popular vote. Or, as in ME and NE, the winner in each congressional district gets an elector, and the overall state winner gets the extra 2. IMHO, all states should do it the ME and NE way. Conceivably, the state could divvy up by popular vote percentage. But that falls afoul of the right to vote for AN elector. Current system you know, if you care to look it up, which elector represents your CD and therefore, you, and which 2 represent the state. Under a divvied up system- Which elector did you vote for? Also means at some percentage you have to give 3rd party candidates an elector.
The Compact Between the State violates the right of a voter to choose electors under the 14th amendment. It’s a very clear violation of the 14th amendment.
A state could conceivably take candidates off the ballot entirely, and let people run as electors, on a party ticket or as independents, and let them vote their conscience on election day. Real election day, when the electors meet. That would be interesting. Because you really don’t have the right to vote for POTUS- you have the clearly defined right to vote for electors to represent you.
But, telling an elector how he has to vote, is not the same as denying a voter the right to vote for an elector. See, in most states, individual voters do not get to vote for individual electors. They vote a preference, which most states then require individual electors [often provided by political parties and who support the candidate in question] to vote in accordance with. As you note, some states require all electors to cast their vote for the candidate which wins the popular vote in that state. Some divide it between the candidates depending upon their percentage of the popular vote. And, now, some are requiring their electors to cast their vote for whichever candidate gets the most votes nationwide, regardless of how the voters of the state voted.
Your argument is that following the last procedure will disenfranchise a portion if the electorate. However, the most prevalent procedure, assigning all votes to the candidate winning the most votes in the state, does the same thing and is apparently constitutional.
In my state electors come from CDs. But still, you’re voting for a slate of electors- statewide. So- you know which slate you’re voting for, and which elector is yours. If you care to find out. By casting a vote for a candidate, you’re voting for a slate, and your elector. If your slate loses, so does your elector. In ME and NE- you’re voting for an individual elector and a slate of two. Either way satisfies that you got to vote for an elector, and the voters of the state selected their electors.
If your slate wins the statewide vote, but loses the nationwide vote, and your state assigns the winner to the national popular vote winner- the voters of the state have lost their collective right to select the state’s electors. There is a difference.
The electors name may not be on the ballot- but they are pre-selected, not selected after the vote. And that’s who you’re voting for.
I don’t think that’s how it works. Each party nominates a slate of candidates for elector, and the voters choose between these slates; the slate that gets the most votes is elected. As far as the constitution is concerned a state could do the same with its congressional delegation; nothing in the constitution requires a state to divide itself into districts, and a state could decide to have its people elect its entire delegation as a slate, winner takes all. (Federal statute does currently require single-member districts.)
No, it doesn’t. In fact that clause in the 14th explicitly recognized that there is no right to vote, and state legislatures had the right to restrict the franchise in any way they liked. All it says is that if a state chooses to let some people vote and not others then it will lose some electors. If it chooses instead to let nobody vote, that would be fine.
(The 15th amendment then came along a few years later to limit the ways in which states can restrict the franchise; but it still doesn’t require a state to have a franchise in the first place. A state can no longer say white people get to vote on presidential electors but black people don’t. But it can still say nobody gets to vote on them.)
You voted for your candidate’s slate; the slate got 30% of the state vote for ten electors, so the first 3 names on the slate got in.
No. There is no such thing as “subverting the purpose”. There is no such thing as a “constitutional purpose” which can be subverted. So long as electors are still chosen, and meet and cast their ballots, the constitution’s demands are being fulfilled. Otherwise you would have to challenge the entire system of electors pledging to vote a certain way, and being chosen on the basis of those pledges, which has been going since the 1796 election, since that certainly subverts the way the electoral college was intended to work.
Roughly 80% of the US population lives in urban areas leaving 20% in rural areas. Warren (and her ilk) want to disenfranchise roughly 40% of urban voters and 100% of rural voters.
If Warren gets her way, half of America’s voters will have no say in electing the President.
That is the goal, of course.
That effectively disenfranchising millions of American won’t end well for anyone doesn’t occur to this dimwitted wanna-be tyrants.
Which is about how the county-by-county went down in 2016
Out of 3100+ counties in the country, Hillary only won 489 of them
So , roughly 15-16% of the counties in the US would elect the President every. damned. time
If we’re going to give 3rd party candidates a serious look in a post-electoral college system; then I’m voting for Vermin Supreme. Mandatory tooth brushing, zombie-powered generators and free ponies for everybody sound great to me!
I have gotten into debates over the Electoral College a couple of times. I use Bush v Gore and Trump v Clinton as excellent reasons in keeping the Electoral College. Not because of who won, but why they won.
In Bush v Gore, Gore won the popular vote by less than 1/2 of 1% of the vote total. If the popular vote mattered, then that election would have required a recount of the whole country instead of Florida.
In Trump v Clinton, Trump won Wisconsin. Clinton never bothered to even visit Wisconsin. If she had, she might have made a difference and flipped Wisconsin’s electoral votes and perhaps flipped the whole election. The Electoral College encourages candidates to take smaller states seriously. Trump also won a coalition of diverse states. Florida and Alaska are very different states with very different needs and priorities. But Trump was able to appeal to both states enough to vote for him.
I doubt this will ever happen, but then again, I thought
idiots on the left would realize how stupid political correctness was when they arrived at microaggression.
I was wrong.
If Dems did manage over time to kill the electoral college there would also be unintended consequences, e.g., why would those states suddenly, and permanently, deprived of presidential representation, want to remain in the union?
I wouldn’t. Cold dead fingers and all.
Here’s my proposal to fix an obvious flaw in the Constitution.
Modify the First Amendment in one particular way:
Any politician who says that the country is a “democracy” is to be executed. And no years and decades of appeals: the sentence should be carried out within a reasonable time frame, “reasonable” being about two hours.
Newspapers, activists, sitcoms, TV documentaries, revolutionary pamphlets, etc, could still say it with impunity. But politicians saying it are like corrupt policemen or teachers who rape students. They have violated a “position of trust” and only a nation of savages would tolerate it.
A Republic the country is, and a Republic it will stay. Mob rule hands it all over to the Democrats. The hell with that.
Without the electoral college, huge states with massive voter fraud (California) would decide national elections.
Now you know why Dems challenge voter ID laws
Some of the original reasons for the Electorial College are moot, but others remain intact.
The Biggies for me are (1) so national candidates have to appeal to the nation as a whole, rather than six out of fifty states. And (2) as a firebreak on electorial fraud. It doesn’t matter how many extra zombie/dead voters the Illinois Machine can get to rise out of their graves to vote (D), they can only steal that states choice. In a popular vote scenario, it actually pays for them to generate another 500,000 or 5,000,000 votes, making the obviousness of the fraud less a disinclination to go whole hog.
I’m reminded of JFK,s press conference where he responded to a reporters earlier implication that his rich daddie was buying him the election. It’s election night, he’s doing well, and he pretends to read aloud a telegram from his dad. “Son, congratulation. Stop. Please stop spending money. Stop. I only wanted to buy a victory, not a landslide. Stop.”
(1) Lincoln got 39% of the popular vote runing against three other candidates (two sectional) and saved the nation. Progressives never talk about him except when they’re overworked and say, “Didn’t you hear? Lincoln freed the slaves.” (2. The Pirates/Yankees matchup in 1960 should be called the Bush/Gore World Series. The Yankees outscored the Bucs in runs 55-27 in seven games, but won only three of them, all blowouts. The Bucs took the Series 4-3, winning by one run in the final, high-scoring game, 10-9. Conclusion: The Yanks won the popular vote, but the Bucs won the series in the electoral college.
One of the really interesting things about Lincoln’s election is this: He received NO votes in 8 states, and SC didn’t hold a popular vote. Still was the winner of the popular vote by a plurality, and the EV with a clear majority. Steven Douglas, finishing 2nd in popular vote, finished 4th in EV with 12. John Bell, with half the votes of Douglas received 39 EVs.
Everyone thinks of the race being between Lincoln and Douglas, but John Breckenridge, who is almost a footnote to history, won most of the southern states.
“…and saved the nation.”
Now that is downright funny. 600+ thousand dead. That’s a hell of a save.
Two possibilities here for Lie-a-watha: She’s totally disingenuous, or she’s a complete moron. Not that those are mutually exclusive.
They want this so they can ‘harvest’ millions of illegal votes in California.
Millions more in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Don’t forget Chicago, one of the largest concentrations of illegal aliens in the US.
I wish that Trump was the sharp wit he fancies himself to be. The Dem candidates are harping about increasing the headcount for justices on SCOTUS, and he should jam it up their rectums. He should announce that what the heck, he’ll go along with them, and he is nominating two new justices within the next 30 days with the advice of the Federalist Society. In addition, he will be submitting a revised budget for the judiciary to include the cost of two additional justices, their clerks, staffs, etc.
Instead, the most supercalifragilisticexpialidotius President and dealmaker in history stated that he was not interested in increasing the headcount.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/03/19/trump-expanding-supreme-court-1227844
The silly fool thinks we don’t know that what we really need to protect our voting rights are clean rolls limited to eligible citizens and secure means of producing an auditable vote count.
These are not fit subjects for Constitutional Amendments, but Congressional legislation, or possibly State legislation.
I thought she was a lawyer and a US Senator?
The ‘dicussion’ is kind of over, isn’t it?
Democrat view: fascism.
Republican view; fascism is okay – if we get to keep our positions.
Conservative view: Traditional American values forever.
How many of us would like to have a Kartrashian for President?