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October 25, 2012 By News Staff
The upcoming presidential election is expected to be close, and it's possible that the winner of the popular vote will lose the electoral vote and therefore the election.
It's for this reason that not everyone likes the Electoral College system, and some of these folks spoke at an event at MIT on Oct. 19. About 20 speakers shared ideas for alternative voting systems at the event, called “Does the Current Presidential Election System Serve America Well?”
A win by popular vote is the system many would like for the presidential election, including John Koza, a Stanford University computer scientist who also is a leader of the National Popular Vote group. “One person, one vote should be the norm of a modern democracy,” Koza said. “... We have a system that’s ignoring four out of five voters in the country.” Many historians believe the Electoral College was instated as a safeguard to shield the ruling class against the true will of the masses, and the system has increasingly been called into question in recent years, especially during election season.
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is an agreement between eight states -- California, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Vermont and Washington -- and the District of Columbia to award all of their Electoral College votes to the winner of the national popular vote. While some dispute the legality of such a pact, its existence is proof of the dissatisfaction many have with the Electoral College system.
Another speaker at the event talked about a candidate ranking system wherein voters do not chose a single person to vote for, but rather rank each candidate. Eric Maskin, a Nobel Prize-winning economist from Harvard, discussed the idea, which goes back to French Enlightenment thinker Condorcet. Such a system would reveal a winner based on which candidate was ranked highest compared to all the others by a plurality. “Voters under the current system are really not providing enough information about what they really want,” Maskin said.
Another speaker suggested an adjustment of the Electoral College system that would award votes by multiplying each state's popular vote percentage by its number of electoral votes. Such a system, said Arnold Barnett, the George Eastman Professor of Management Science at the MIT Sloan School of Management, would give candidates an incentive to campaign nationally, rather than just in key locations.
For the full story, visit web.MIT.edu.
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The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in the country. Every vote, everywhere, would be politically relevant and equal in presidential elections. There would no longer be a handful of 'battleground' states where voters and policies are more important than those of the voters in 80% of the states that now are just 'spectators' and ignored after the conventions. When the bill is enacted by states possessing a majority of the electoral votes– enough electoral votes to elect a President (270 of 538), all the electoral votes from the enacting states would be awarded to the presidential candidate who receives the most popular votes in the country The bill uses the power given to each state in the Constitution to change how they award their electoral votes. Historically, virtually all of the major changes in the method of electing the President have come about by state legislative action. In Gallup polls since 1944, only about 20% of the public has supported the current system of awarding all of a state's electoral votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most votes in each separate state. Support for a national popular vote is strong among Republicans, Democrats, and Independent The bill has passed 31 state legislative chambers in 21 states, and been enacted by 9 jurisdictions possessing 132 electoral votes - 49% of the 270 needed NationalPopularVote on Facebook via NationalPopularVoteInc
Using the popular vote to pick the President? A repeat of the Florida recount from 2000 in EVERY precinct in EVERY county in EVERY state throughout the union each and every election? Ick. No thank You. If the underlying argument is, "Under the electoral college, the votes of Many do not count because states are Winner-take-all," neither would the votes of the overwhelming majority of Voters in a popular vote election because votes cast for different Candidates would cancel each other out. While the electoral college has selected Presidents with positions often unpopular with Voters, Nobody has yet shown it results in Presidents Who necessarily make worse decisions than a popular-vote elected President would make.
>>"Many historians believe the Electoral College was instated as a safeguard to shield the ruling class against the true will of the masses" That may be true, and I would not be the least bit surprised if it is. The idea of going by popular vote seems to have intuitive appeal, and seems as if it may really be the most fair, "equal," and just method - one man, one vote - almost as if it even rises to the level of axiomatic common sense. It's very tempting to believe that. But what if it's really more rhetoric than reality? It seems to me that there may really be a significant flaw in such a seemingly intuitively compelling system. It seems to me that what can possibly happen in a one man, one vote system is that the particular regional interests of individual states can exert undue influence on an election outcome, merely because they happen to have a larger population than other regions, even regardless of which candidate gleans the most actual votes within the individual state. Therefore, while a one man, one vote popular vote system seems so appealing on the surface, I am not yet convinced at all that it is really equal, just, and best as some believe. But that by no means indicates support for a winner take all electoral college system, either. Perhaps where electoral college votes are divided up within a state can there be a more genuinely fair, just and "equal" outcome, though at this point I simply don't know and am not yet prepared to venture a strong opinion either way.