At 03:00 PM 8/19/2005, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
No. There are no second votes by the electoral college, nor
does it meet as a national body.
Oops! Well, I'm only about 200 years out of date.... How embarassing!
I've been affected by the original vision of the Electoral College, which
was a great idea, and gradually that erased my knowledge about what had
subsequently happened to it.... living in a dream, I am....
The bias in favor of Republicans today
in a House vote for president would be even greater. It's one
of many reasons that I argue that the U.S is really not a
democracy, despite all the patriotic rhetoric to to the
contrary.
We agree on that, at least partially. It is a democracy, but with a host of
rules which make it difficult for real democracy to function. It is still a
democracy because if the people were to actually act coherently, they could
manage it. It is only the failure of the people to organize independently
of the defective structures of our electoral democracy that makes the flaws
in that democracy result in such obvious inequities.
As for how electors are chosen, states can do it any way
they want. All but two states now do it with winner-take-all
plurality, but they could use any voting method they chose
and could also delegate electors according to vote percentages
of candidates in each state. They could also allow candidates
and their electors to negotiate prior to the electoral college
votes in each state, though about half the states now require
that electors vote for the candidate they are committed to.
Many constitutional scholars don't think such restrictions
are constitutional, but it's never had to be tested.
Yes. The electoral college could indeed be reformed without federal
constitutional amendments, it is a state-by-state issue. However, as I've
noted before, the change is not likely to happen in any state except at
points where major party power is more or less balanced, perhaps at a point
where the majority party (in the state legislature) fears that it will be
the minority party in the next presidential election.
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