At 06:36 PM 4/25/2006, Dave Ketchum wrote: >BUT, such a state cannot afford to go proportional by itself - that >would be a gift to >the losing candidate who presently gets no electoral votes from that state. >A constitutional amendment that made all states proportional would >be a possibility.
At any given time the electoral college and the all-or-nothing system standard in nearly all states gives the party with a distributed majority an advantage. This party will resist reform of the system, and, since it is the party with a power edge, and since voting on amendments to the constitution is similar: voting is state-by-state, with each state all or nothing, and requires a three-fourths majority of states for the amendment to pass, it is unlikely that such an amendment, just like that, will succeed. This is a variation of the general Persistence of Power Inequities Effect that I've described many times: power inequities tend to be preserved, because removing them removes power from those who enjoy an edge due to the inequity. However, there is a point of vulnerability. In some states at some times, the prevailing party actually does not have a majority, it only has a plurality. It is possible that a coalition of the other parties, independents, and some within the plurality party interested in long-term equity, could outvote even a determined effort on the part of the plurality party to block a reform. What could this reform look like? I was gratified to see, recently, proposals in the news that somewhat resemble what I had earlier proposed: state-by-state action to reform the College, in a way that does not disadvantage the state passing the reform. It is clear that reforming simply one state, by itself, simply to produce proportionality in that state's electors, would not be fair: it could easily award the next election, unfairly, to the minority party in that state, because the proportional electors would no longer balance out non-proportional electors from other states. To some extent, the present inequities, state by state, balance each other out. However, a reform could be much more sophisticated. As one example: A state could select electors pledged to vote in such a way as to balance out the *national* Electoral College vote toward proportionality. This could mean awarding all the electors, in fact, to a side which did not win in the state, but this would only happen if other states were disproportional in the opposite direction. It appears that the Constitution allows just about any method of choosing electors that a state wishes to follow: this, indeed, is the source of the problem, for it led inevitably to all-or-nothing, since that benefited the majority party in each state. If a Uniform Elector Pledge Code were written, it could provide effective coordination of state-chosen electors in such a way that, if adopted by all states, the result would be an Electoral College vote proportional, quite closely, to the popular vote. Personally, though, I would do something entirely different. I would suggest that electors run for office. Personally. I would take the Presidential candidates off the ballot entirely. I would use the College much more closely to how it was originally intended! What would be on the ballot would be the names of the electors. Not the names of those whom they have pledged to support. And then I would use something like Asset Voting to actually choose the final electors, so that they would be, effectively, proxies for the voters of the state. Asset Voting, ultimately, could sidestep the party system, independents would have a real chance of being elected as electors. This would make the vote in the Electoral College something that could not be predicted until it actually voted.... which, again, is how it was designed! ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info