Historical Elections and the Electoral College
I'll start this topic with a general account of the controversial national elections in this country over the past two hundred years. Friday, I'll begin discussing what steps must be taken, why the financial cost, however damning, must be ignored, I'll summarize the topic with a simple list of changes, probably a week from now, and I will end with a proposal draft of Amendment XXVII to the constitution.
In the year 2000, we had a serious problem. Two white men with highly similar platforms and vastly different histories were in the race for President of the United States. One of them won by electoral votes, but lost the popular election by nearly 500 000 votes. We all know the details, and I'm not going to rant about who did what to whom or where the bodies are buried.
This was not the first time we've seen problems with the elections process we've been given.
In the year 1962, Richard Nixon and JFK went to battle, and the outcome was decided by 119 000 popular votes, though JFK won the electoral college by 84. While no one has ever looked into voter fraud in a national election, perhaps it would be a good idea to start a pilot test here, as we all know what Nixon was capable of, and we also know that JFK did have some mob connections, at least by proxy, and while I don't impugn JFK, I call into question those that thought they would have benefited by his election. My question: in this case, Did two simultaneous fixes cancel one another out? A better question: would that be Democracy, if it did?
In the year 1912, Theodore Roosevelt ran as a Bull Moose or Progressive, the only third-party candidate to ever come in second in a national presidential election, splitting the vote with the defeated Wm. H. Taft, almost in half; both were republicans, and combined, they took in nearly a million more votes than Woodrow Wilson.
In 1888, Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland went at it, along with four other recognized candidates. Cleveland, this being his second of three presidential campaigns, won the popular vote by a margin of almost 100 000, yet lost the electoral vote by a count of 65. The three other candidates together accounted for just about an additional 400 000 popular votes. Interestingly enough, Cleveland defeated Harrison by a margin of almost 360 000 popular votes in the 1892 election.
In 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes won the electoral vote by a count of 1, while losing the popular election by almost a 250 000 to Samuel J. Tilden. There were twenty electoral votes in dispute in this election, which later came to a 15 man panel vote, 5 from each the supreme court and both houses of Congress. The vote was split 8 to 7, along party lines, to give the disputed 20 electoral votes to Hayes. Another case of a president being installed.
In 1824, the popular vote was split four ways among John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, W. H. Crawford and Henry Clay. The election, without anyone receiving a majority of electoral votes, was referred to the House of Representatives, where Adams, with 84 electoral votes, was selected over Jackson, with 99.
Before this last one, and even with the 1824 election, the process does not resemble the way we do business today; people were allowed to vote for separate presidents and vice presidents, and before that, the electors of Congress had two votes each that they could cast.
Statistically, some of these elections would've been better decided by flipping a coin.
What does all this mean?
Well, firstly, if you do the math, you find that the electoral college does something very interesting; it turns the people of some states into Ubervoters.
If you win a state, you win all the electoral votes, you can effectively cancel out all the popular votes cast for the other guys. According to the laws we've made for elections, an elector is supposed to be appointed for each Representative and Senator that every state has in congress. What do you end up getting?
According to The 2000 Presidential Election Results, we clearly see the discrepancies.
There are 537 total electors, and in the last election, 105 405 100 popular votes were cast. That equals roughly 196 285 people represented by every elector, on average. This means that if your state also averages 196 285 people, each person is casting a vote that equals 1. It's a simple mathematical process: take the total number of votes cast (not the ones for a certain party, just all of them, even the ones that end up not counting at all) and divide by the number of electors. Take that result, and divide it against 196 285, so that the state's number is the denominator, and you get the adjusted value of each vote cast in the state.
New York state is pretty close to that average: with 6.82 million voters and 33 electors, each elector represents 206 727 voters, but, that's still .949 votes per person, only 19/20ths of a vote.
In New Mexico, you have 598 605 voters and 5 electors. The result, 119 721 votes per elector. That's 1.640 votes per person, folks.
Vermont has only 294 308 people, yet has three electors, giving 98 102 votes per elector. In Vermont, for a presidential election, each person has the strength of 2 votes.
In New York, your vote for president is worth less than half as much as a vote in Vermont.
In other states, where one party is dominant, the other party effectively never gets proper presidential representation, because of the 'winner-take-all' rule.
The Constitution may not guarantee the people the direct right to cast their personal vote for President, but because of the system of electors we have today, we do have people electing the Commander In Chief, indirectly.
It seems obvious to me that in the rush to guarantee something better than the Articles of Confederation, the framers totally neglected perfecting the electoral process: there have been no less than three (3) separate amendments relating to II:1 of the Constitution alone.
I mean, they started the whole thing with the idea that the Vice President would be the guy who got second place in the election, and that he was elected by Congress alone. It's further obvious that, in the wake of serving a sitting monarch, they were thinking too much about the exciting idea of Congress itself, and not enough about the how much power the President would have.
These were men, not angels or gods; they couldn't have foreseen what this country would eventually become, how many millions of people we have now. To them, just having some representative form of government was enough, and likely, they couldn't have believed that we'd survive long enough and expand far enough that we'd eventually be in conflicts with what was known to them as Far East, or stand up to colonial Spain or Germany on two separate occasions.
The framers weren't wrong; they were just doing what was right for their thirteen federated little republics at the time; they didn't have any form of fast communication, so they invented the idea that representative electors would be the ones to decide on a President and Vice President, after all, it was they who would be dealing with him directly.
Times, however, have changed.
We now communicate literally at the speed of light; people on the West coast, an unimagined and completely unexplored place in the 1790's, can see preliminary election results calling for a candidate in Eastern jurisdictions, effecting the elections in the west because they think their candidate has won, so they stay home. We're too big and too fast to be operating under the election conditions in which we do, and before we can reform anything else, from education to medicine to social reforms, we must revamp the process of choosing our leaders.
It should be clear that whole paragraphs in Article II, Section 1 ought not to be amended, but struck and replaced with a streamlined, brand new and all-encompassing amendment concerning a new election process.
The following is admittedly Orwellian, but, as I've proven, and as the system now stands, it is absolutely factual:
"All Americans are equal, but some Americans are more equal than others."
We do not live on Animal Farm…
In the year 2000, we had a serious problem. Two white men with highly similar platforms and vastly different histories were in the race for President of the United States. One of them won by electoral votes, but lost the popular election by nearly 500 000 votes. We all know the details, and I'm not going to rant about who did what to whom or where the bodies are buried.
This was not the first time we've seen problems with the elections process we've been given.
In the year 1962, Richard Nixon and JFK went to battle, and the outcome was decided by 119 000 popular votes, though JFK won the electoral college by 84. While no one has ever looked into voter fraud in a national election, perhaps it would be a good idea to start a pilot test here, as we all know what Nixon was capable of, and we also know that JFK did have some mob connections, at least by proxy, and while I don't impugn JFK, I call into question those that thought they would have benefited by his election. My question: in this case, Did two simultaneous fixes cancel one another out? A better question: would that be Democracy, if it did?
In the year 1912, Theodore Roosevelt ran as a Bull Moose or Progressive, the only third-party candidate to ever come in second in a national presidential election, splitting the vote with the defeated Wm. H. Taft, almost in half; both were republicans, and combined, they took in nearly a million more votes than Woodrow Wilson.
In 1888, Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland went at it, along with four other recognized candidates. Cleveland, this being his second of three presidential campaigns, won the popular vote by a margin of almost 100 000, yet lost the electoral vote by a count of 65. The three other candidates together accounted for just about an additional 400 000 popular votes. Interestingly enough, Cleveland defeated Harrison by a margin of almost 360 000 popular votes in the 1892 election.
In 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes won the electoral vote by a count of 1, while losing the popular election by almost a 250 000 to Samuel J. Tilden. There were twenty electoral votes in dispute in this election, which later came to a 15 man panel vote, 5 from each the supreme court and both houses of Congress. The vote was split 8 to 7, along party lines, to give the disputed 20 electoral votes to Hayes. Another case of a president being installed.
In 1824, the popular vote was split four ways among John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, W. H. Crawford and Henry Clay. The election, without anyone receiving a majority of electoral votes, was referred to the House of Representatives, where Adams, with 84 electoral votes, was selected over Jackson, with 99.
Before this last one, and even with the 1824 election, the process does not resemble the way we do business today; people were allowed to vote for separate presidents and vice presidents, and before that, the electors of Congress had two votes each that they could cast.
Statistically, some of these elections would've been better decided by flipping a coin.
What does all this mean?
Well, firstly, if you do the math, you find that the electoral college does something very interesting; it turns the people of some states into Ubervoters.
If you win a state, you win all the electoral votes, you can effectively cancel out all the popular votes cast for the other guys. According to the laws we've made for elections, an elector is supposed to be appointed for each Representative and Senator that every state has in congress. What do you end up getting?
According to The 2000 Presidential Election Results, we clearly see the discrepancies.
There are 537 total electors, and in the last election, 105 405 100 popular votes were cast. That equals roughly 196 285 people represented by every elector, on average. This means that if your state also averages 196 285 people, each person is casting a vote that equals 1. It's a simple mathematical process: take the total number of votes cast (not the ones for a certain party, just all of them, even the ones that end up not counting at all) and divide by the number of electors. Take that result, and divide it against 196 285, so that the state's number is the denominator, and you get the adjusted value of each vote cast in the state.
New York state is pretty close to that average: with 6.82 million voters and 33 electors, each elector represents 206 727 voters, but, that's still .949 votes per person, only 19/20ths of a vote.
In New Mexico, you have 598 605 voters and 5 electors. The result, 119 721 votes per elector. That's 1.640 votes per person, folks.
Vermont has only 294 308 people, yet has three electors, giving 98 102 votes per elector. In Vermont, for a presidential election, each person has the strength of 2 votes.
In New York, your vote for president is worth less than half as much as a vote in Vermont.
In other states, where one party is dominant, the other party effectively never gets proper presidential representation, because of the 'winner-take-all' rule.
The Constitution may not guarantee the people the direct right to cast their personal vote for President, but because of the system of electors we have today, we do have people electing the Commander In Chief, indirectly.
It seems obvious to me that in the rush to guarantee something better than the Articles of Confederation, the framers totally neglected perfecting the electoral process: there have been no less than three (3) separate amendments relating to II:1 of the Constitution alone.
I mean, they started the whole thing with the idea that the Vice President would be the guy who got second place in the election, and that he was elected by Congress alone. It's further obvious that, in the wake of serving a sitting monarch, they were thinking too much about the exciting idea of Congress itself, and not enough about the how much power the President would have.
These were men, not angels or gods; they couldn't have foreseen what this country would eventually become, how many millions of people we have now. To them, just having some representative form of government was enough, and likely, they couldn't have believed that we'd survive long enough and expand far enough that we'd eventually be in conflicts with what was known to them as Far East, or stand up to colonial Spain or Germany on two separate occasions.
The framers weren't wrong; they were just doing what was right for their thirteen federated little republics at the time; they didn't have any form of fast communication, so they invented the idea that representative electors would be the ones to decide on a President and Vice President, after all, it was they who would be dealing with him directly.
Times, however, have changed.
We now communicate literally at the speed of light; people on the West coast, an unimagined and completely unexplored place in the 1790's, can see preliminary election results calling for a candidate in Eastern jurisdictions, effecting the elections in the west because they think their candidate has won, so they stay home. We're too big and too fast to be operating under the election conditions in which we do, and before we can reform anything else, from education to medicine to social reforms, we must revamp the process of choosing our leaders.
It should be clear that whole paragraphs in Article II, Section 1 ought not to be amended, but struck and replaced with a streamlined, brand new and all-encompassing amendment concerning a new election process.
The following is admittedly Orwellian, but, as I've proven, and as the system now stands, it is absolutely factual:
"All Americans are equal, but some Americans are more equal than others."
We do not live on Animal Farm…
posted by J. E Jansen at 3.8.04
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