How the Electoral College Should Assign Electors

First let me say I like the Electoral College System. We are a Constitutional Federal Republic. We are NOT a Democracy. I don’t want to live in a Mob Rule Democracy.  Mob rule is exactly what the force of “evil” want when then call for either eliminating the Electoral College and going to a Nation-wide Popular vote scheme.

The Democrats keep saying that they want a nationwide “popular” vote election in place of the Electoral College. They say this would force Candidates to pay attention to the “smaller” states.  Well that is a lie.  It would just focus yet more attention on the bigger population centers in the bigger states. There would be no need to pay the slightest bit of attention to the smaller population centers and smaller states in “fly over country”  since their smaller voices would be inundated by the tsunamis from the coasts.

Want to really force the Parties and the Presidential campaigns to pay attention to the folks out in the hinterlands (and watch the Dems crap their pants?) express your support for assigning Electoral votes not on a winner take all solution like the Dems propose (which would mean that even if Candidate Y won your state that your state is still forced to give its vote to Candidate X simply because people in other states voted for X and not Y) but rather like how Electoral votes are assigned via the “Congressional District Method” like Maine and Nebraska do.

This type of system does not require a Constitutional Amendment either as each State can simply pass legislation deciding how to assign their own Electors per Article 2 Section 1 of the Constitution

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.

The Electoral College System assigns votes equal to the number of Congressional Districts plus two. The winner of the popular vote of the State is awarded the Electoral votes not assigned to the Congressional District.

So… The Popular vote winner of each District awards it Electoral vote to that winner.  The remaining two Electoral votes are then awarded to the winner of the Popular vote for the entire state.

Why would this cause the Dems to crap their pants you ask?  Consider California and it’s monster 55 electoral votes (it takes 270 votes to win the Presidency).  The winner of California has a HUGE advantage going into the contest and Candidates don’t even need to campaign there since the outcome is not in doubt.  In 2008 Obama won all 55 of those Delegates by winning the State.  However, McCain won 11 of the 20 “Republican” Districts.  This would have meant that California instead of awarding 55 Electoral Delegates to Obama that he would have won 42 for the Congressional Districts plus another 2 for the overall State win and McCain would have picked up another 11 votes for his tally.

Obama would still have won in 2008 with 303 Electors rather than the 365 he obtained via the Winner take all. McCain would have increased his tally from 173 to 237.

Battleground states like Pennsylvania (21 votes to Obama would have been split 11 to Obama and 10 to McCain) and Ohio (20 to Obama would have been split 10/10) and Florida (27 to Obama would have seen McCain take more Electors with just 12 going to Obama and McCain taking 15)

Finding results for 2000 has not been as clean.  Very odd considering the “controversy” of that Election.  Therefore the numbers int he following table are not exact. The data for 2000 that I did find was using the Congressional districts from 2006 and since districts changed following 2000…

It was interesting looking around for this data to discover that even the Mob rule advocates for the “National Popular Vote” deal with this. Quite dishonestly too I might add..

If the congressional-district approach were applied to the results of the 2000 presidential election, then Bush would have received 288 electoral votes (53.3% of the total number of electoral votes), and Gore would have received 250 electoral votes (46.5% of the total). That is, the congressional-district approach would have given Bush a 6.8% lead in electoral votes over Gore in 2000. Gore received 50,992,335 popular votes (50.2% of the two-party popular vote), whereas Bush received 50,455,156 (49.7% of the two-party popular vote). Under the existing system, Bush received 271 electoral votes in 2000 (50.4% of the total number of electoral votes)—a 0.8% lead in electoral votes over Gore. In summary, the congressional-district approach would have been even less accurate than the existing statewide winner-take-all system in terms of mirroring the nationwide popular vote in 2000.

The idea of a National Popular vote would mean that…

Popular vote seems like a logical way to determine who should be President of the United States. The New York Times has advocated such a system. Majority rule is a major problem for this system. Founded as a Constitutional Republic, the United States values a balance between those in the majority and those in the minority. Being such a vast, heavily populated landscape, we need to realize that a variety of viewpoints must be considered when we elect our President. Today, if we were in a popular vote system, whatever New York and California wanted, New York and California would get. All candidates would represent the same values because there do not exist enough votes in the rest of the country to override the shear numbers of people that are found in these states. Popular election for President would effectively eviscerate the minority voice in United States’ politics. In 2000, Vice-President Al Gore won the popular vote by 500,000 votes while winning both California and New York.

As this interesting site I stumbled over looking for data makes clear. Which he had published the Congressional District data for 2000