{"id":256,"date":"2008-06-12T06:30:00","date_gmt":"2008-06-12T14:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/?p=256"},"modified":"2008-06-12T06:30:00","modified_gmt":"2008-06-12T14:30:00","slug":"does-the-electoral-college-need-fixing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/does-the-electoral-college-need-fixing\/","title":{"rendered":"Does the electoral college need fixing?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here<\/a> is an interesting idea<\/a>: After a presidential election, each state gives its electoral votes to the person with the largest number of popular votes.<\/p>\n

Several states have apparently already passed measures that would do this. These measures would kick in when a collection of states totaling over 270 electoral votes–the number needed to elect the president–have approved them.<\/p>\n

The intended effect is to get candidates to campaign beyond the “swing” or “battleground” states. Today, candidates nearly completely avoid those states where polling shows a foregone conclusion. There is no point for Obama or McCain to spend much time in Illinois or Arizona before the general election. By promising to award one’s electoral votes based on national results, the states would be encouraging the candidates to spend time in more states, which might also have the benefit of attracting more voters to the polls, for those who get a swell<\/a> out of that sort of thing.<\/p>\n

Every proposal draws its critics:<\/p>\n

Gary Gregg II, director of the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville in Kentucky and a fan of the Electoral College, agrees that the National Popular Vote would change the way candidates campaign, but not in a good way. Candidates would go where most of the votes are, namely cities. \u201cRural areas would never see a presidential candidate. Small states would never see a presidential candidate,\u201d he said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As if candidates today spend any time in rural New York or rural Alabama. Rural Florida, maybe.<\/p>\n

Gregg also predicted chaos if there were a close election and candidates challenged the vote count. \u201cYou would have the [2000] Florida recount replayed across the country \u2026 It would be a very ugly situation.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Easy. Each state can simply say that if the two highest candidates get within a single percentage of each other, the state’s electoral votes would revert to the candidate who won that state. That would contain any problem to whatever Florida might crop up again. See? Mechanism design isn’t always that hard.<\/p>\n

A critic from the Cato<\/a> institute asks:<\/p>\n

Do people in Maryland know under the National Popular Voter system, that their vote may go to someone who didn\u2019t win their state?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I can assure you from extensive personal experience<\/a> that voters in Maryland don’t have a clue. And they still won’t even when this circumstance comes up, because they will be watching the popular vote on TV with the rest of us, knowing that this mechanical fact would make no difference to the outcome, except for a few newspapers looking for a story.<\/p>\n

Predictably, where many people stand on this proposal depends on where they sit. Republicans are against this if they believe that it will benefit Democrats, and vice versa. Some people,<\/a> I am shocked to learn, care more about outcome than process.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here is an interesting idea: After a presidential election, each state gives its electoral votes to the person with the largest number of popular votes. Several states have apparently already passed measures that would do this. These measures would kick in when a collection of states totaling over 270 electoral votes–the number needed to elect […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-unintended-consequences"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}