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Winner Take All Electoral College

Obscurity said:
The US constitution does not designate how states assign their electoral votes.

Without a constitutional convention, how can we amend our electoral process so 14 states (The battleground states) do not control the entire election for president?

Would declaring "Winner Take All" elector states an unconstitutional practice help?

I am of the opinion that eliminating winner take all would automatically ensure all states matter in the presidential election. The EC is fine; the way electoral votes are awarded is the problem. Democrats in Texas may as well not vote. Republicans in California may as well not vote.

Why is it OK for fourteen states to dictate the outcome of the presidential election despite who votes for who?
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States can also require their electors to cast their votes for the national popular vote winner. That is the fix that we need. We don't need any more minority elected Presidents.
 
iguanaman said:
States can also require their electors to cast their votes for the national popular vote winner. That is the fix that we need. We don't need any more minority elected Presidents.
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Nope. A State cannot compel a vote by an individual. Back in the day, when States simply chose their own Senators via their legislatures, they could not compel them to vote a certain way either. They could encourage, and replace them in six years, but during their term they were free to vote as they wished.

A President is always elected by a majority vote of the electors. No one else votes for President.
 
Into the Night said:
Nope. A State cannot compel a vote by an individual. Back in the day, when States simply chose their own Senators via their legislatures, they could not compel them to vote a certain way either. They could encourage, and replace them in six years, but during their term they were free to vote as they wished.

A President is always elected by a majority vote of the electors. No one else votes for President.
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Sorry to inform you but 10 States have already passed the laws needed.

The Constitution gives states full control over how they allocate their electoral votes. The current winner-take-all method, in which the winner of the statewide popular vote wins all of that state's electoral votes, is a choice—and states can choose differently. Under the National Popular Vote interstate compact, states choose to allocate their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the most popular votes in all 50 states and DC. This compact takes effect only when enough states sign on to guarantee that the national popular vote winner wins the presidency. That means states with a combined total of 270 electoral votes—a majority of the Electoral College—must join the compact for it to take effect.

The National Popular Vote plan has bipartisan support and has been introduced in all 50 state legislatures. To date, 10 states and DC have passed legislation to enter the compact for a combined total of 165 electoral votes, meaning the compact is over 60% of the way to activation.
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A National Popular Vote for President - FairVote
 
Athanasius68 said:
What would the Democrats have said had their candidate won the most popular vote, but still lost the election?
Maybe they would have claimed Trump conspired with the Russians to steal the election? Nah! They would never stoop so low.
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Whataboutism works only when there's a similar precedent. It is safe to say that a sitting president (or even a presidential candidate) has never been suspected of colluding with a foreign power to influence the election before. At least not to the extent that intelligence agencies and law enforcement had to seriously investigate it.
 
Obscurity said:
The US constitution does not designate how states assign their electoral votes.

Without a constitutional convention, how can we amend our electoral process so 14 states (The battleground states) do not control the entire election for president?

Would declaring "Winner Take All" elector states an unconstitutional practice help?

I am of the opinion that eliminating winner take all would automatically ensure all states matter in the presidential election. The EC is fine; the way electoral votes are awarded is the problem. Democrats in Texas may as well not vote. Republicans in California may as well not vote.

Why is it OK for fourteen states to dictate the outcome of the presidential election despite who votes for who?
Click to expand...

Instead, you want two states - California and New York - to decide every election.

Or we could just let everyone in Mexico, Central America and South America vote for president. Basically that is the same as your proposal of wanting illegal immigrants in California and elsewhere to decide the presidency.
 
The OP's proposal also would mean that election fraud in just one state only could decide the presidency. Now it generally can't. No matter how many illegal votes are cast in California it can not determine the outcome of the election. The OP's plan is an open invitation for massive voter fraud as then it would only take ONE state to alter a presidential election - but that is exactly what the Democratic Party wants.
 
joko104 said:
Instead, you want two states - California and New York - to decide every election.

Or we could just let everyone in Mexico, Central America and South America vote for president. Basically that is the same as your proposal of wanting illegal immigrants in California and elsewhere to decide the presidency.
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Illegals do not vote. Citizens vote. You could look it up under "did illegal aliens vote in 2016". You might find one or two but nothing more.
 
joko104 said:
Instead, you want two states - California and New York - to decide every election.

Or we could just let everyone in Mexico, Central America and South America vote for president. Basically that is the same as your proposal of wanting illegal immigrants in California and elsewhere to decide the presidency.
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Why do you want the votes of people who are conservative in states like California to continue not to matter?
 
joko104 said:
Instead, you want two states - California and New York - to decide every election.
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There simply are not enough votes in both those states to win an election.
 
joko104 said:
The OP's proposal also would mean that election fraud in just one state only could decide the presidency. Now it generally can't. No matter how many illegal votes are cast in California it can not determine the outcome of the election. The OP's plan is an open invitation for massive voter fraud as then it would only take ONE state to alter a presidential election - but that is exactly what the Democratic Party wants.
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Except the most recent identifiable voter fraud we know about happened with Republicans in North Carolina.
 
prometeus said:
Can you even fathom how stupid that assertion is? How do 84 votes decide an election?
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Did you even read the OP? The OPer wants national popular vote, for which individual states become irrelevant for the most part - other than the mere presence of illegal migrants counted in a state constitutes voting without casting a single vote by being counted in the census to count all adults - citizens or not - as a Democrat appointed Federal judge ordered.
 
With the "winner take all" system really goes against what the founders had in mind when setting up the EC. As Alexander Hamilton writes in “The Federalist Papers,” the Constitution is designed to ensure “that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.” The point of the Electoral College is to preserve “the sense of the people,” while at the same time ensuring that a president is chosen “by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice.” So when we vote for for POTUS we are voting for electors, however, the system today is a far cry than what was envisioned. Today we vote for parties and not the person, if the electors were cast as in the above bold print in stead of winner take all, the out come of the 2016 election may have been far different.
 
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