Instead of the electors representing and voting the will of the majority of Tennesseans, they would vote for that Presidential candidate who got the most votes on a national basis. The presidential preference votes of Tennesseans would become subservient to those of the rest of the nation.Sean asserts that Gore in 2000 actually won the popular AND the Electoral College (because Bush "stole" Florida). But then he offers general arguments that the Electoral College is antiquated (like, for example, slavery and landowners-only enfranchisement).
I was going to deposit a comment on Sean's blog, but there's something wrong with his "visual verification" feature, so I will have to post my comment here.
First of all, the Democrat who designed the butterfly ballot and the Democrats at the County party that approved the butterfly ballot screwed up; sorry. Just as someone screwed up by allowing thousands of imprisoned felons to vote absentee. Noone "stole" the election in Florida2000, but the Democrats sure came close to snatching it after the fact.
But to the real meat (the soft center of of Sean's post: if you don't like the Electoral College, it seems proper to change the Constitutional requirement for it, not try to do it on the sly.
And I vividly remember watching a CNN program on Halloween 2000 in a Baptist Hospital MRI waiting room (they feared I had appendicitis) as Democrat pundits--fearing that Gore might lose the popular vote while winning the electoral college, argued vociferously for the Electoral College. Likewise, I think Dems want to change it now because they perceive that it would benefit them to be able to crank up the political machines in Blue counties and states on behalf of the Dem candidate.
There is a value to Federalist principles . . . even if its sophistication is ripe for demagoguery and even if a change could have short-term benefit for one of the political parties. Don't you think?
2 comments:
I can't speak to the comments of Democrats on Halloween weekend in 2000, but as for me arguing that Bush stole the election, I did nothing of the sort. I realize fully that he wasn't in charge of the creating of the faulty butterfly ballots. Now, I do think that the Supreme Court wrongly decided Bush v. Gore and that a manual hand recount was in order, but that is neither here nor there.
My assertion that Bush won the election in Florida, and thus the electoral college, because of "voter irregularities and errors" stands.
I think I misread your post . . . and while I agree that "voter irregularities and errors" caused that election to be suspect, those irregs and errors help(ed) Democrat candidates, too, and--above all, were not the result of a conspiracy.
If anything, there is a conspiracy of sloppiness in our system and--frankly, I'd say responsibility for that rests with Democrats' efforts more than Republicans.' John Fund has written a good book on the subject.
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