A comment I heard in the last couple of months is that something the Electoral College does as a side effect is limit fraud. The way it does that is to “top out” any state’s contribution to the Presidential vote totals. Thus California has 55 votes, and no matter how many extra votes they manufacture in L.A. it won’t go over 55 e.c. votes.
That works fine across the states, but what about within the states? As we saw in this election mischief was done by tipping the balance in key states by engineering the popular vote of the state.
So, what if you pushed the Electoral College down to to the state level?
For example, say a state has 10 electoral votes. And it has 100 counties. The Electoral votes of the state go to the candidate that carries 51 counties. If the 52nd county is a big city controlled by Democrats and they manufacture an extra 500,000 votes — it does not matter, the county still just gets 1 vote to influence the state’s Electoral College vote count. This would totally obviate the fraud that happened in November.
The beauty of this idea is that each state can adopt this right away, since state legislatures control (or should control) the determination of the Electoral votes.
What do you say?
7 replies on “Electoral College Idea”
I like the Maine/Nebraska system. Each congressional district gets one electoral vote based on the majority for that district. The 2 ‘extra’ electors are determined based on the statewide popular vote total. What I like is that this system makes every congressional district valuable and prevents the total concentration of power into big cities.
I love this idea. Only a few states might do it. Texas, Idaho, South Dakota I sure wish we could do it in Washington State. Four counties dictate all the state’s policies but it would never fly here.
I’m not a fan of the winner-takes-all system the electoral college has become, but the devil is in the details. I don’t think the states are going to go back to directly selecting electors (as some did, to my understanding), and if some sort of representative model is used, I doubt they would go with an elector per county model. I am in favor of that sort of idea for my native state of California, though, for the senate (1 or 2 per county) and assembly (based on population) as a mechanism against gerrymandering, among other things.
So, consider me interested in discussions like this.
The Electoral College votes could be divided proportially.
The “by counties” aspect is just an example. District divisions could be done as it makes sense for a state.
Aye, since each state’s electoral vote number is equal to their house and senate seats, you could apportion the electoral college by district. If you wanted to. Why the state governments would want to give up the ability to decide how to apportion their electoral college votes remains to be seen.
Not sure how you could do it by county.
The electoral college did not become a winner-take-all system, it was designed that way. Or, more accurately, it was designed to allow the various states to set it up that way. And it makes more sense for it to be a winner-take-all set up, if you consider the original Federalism based idea on the way the government was designed. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. That damned Civil War. made the concept of State’s Rights fall from favor, and the idea of federalism essentially with it, done in by the Seventeenth Amendment
It didn’t prevent it, that is for sure. My admittedly not constitutional scholar level of understanding was that many of the electors were selected directly by the legislators of the states, and it was meant to work more like a caucus. We are sending wise electors to represent us, not to elect a specific candidate(and they could and did vote for different candidates). There was no running for president in those days. The states rights component of it still remains, though you are correct that there has been a full court press by the aristocratic left(shall we say) to diminish the idea of Federalism including the electoral college. I’m one of those crazy folks that wants to repeal the 17th amendment; one of the hidden virtues of it is that if you want to affect federal politics, you *have to* work through local politics. Now the local gets lost as we all fight about big things on the national level that were never supposed to be in the Federal purview.