Just saying I'm a fan of the electoral college

[ebartley]

Romney's ahead in the popular vote totals, and has been for a while. I don't know if the west coast is finished coming in yet, but I'm just while he is that I want the election decided on the basis of the electoral college, not the popular vote

Comments

[crash_mccormick]

One of the (Evil Liberal ie Middle of the Road) NPR shows I watched in the run up was an remarkably unbiased documentary about the electoral college system. It mentioned an active movement by a group to moot the electoral college system in fact by passing laws in various state legislatures that:

1) take effect when 270 lectros worth of states have passed the same law
2) allocates all the states electrocal votes to the winner of the popular vote

[ebartley]

I really hope we never open that can of worms.

Constitution:

Article 1 Section 10 second paragraph

No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.

Article 2 Section 1 second paragraph

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.

So ... are those laws an agreement with another state? They're set not to go off until other states act, but not specific other states. And if they are an agreement, which takes precedence, the legislature directing the appointment of electors or the

[lhn]

I'm also concerned about the constitutionality of the implementation. Electors are federal officials, so states (probably) can't impose binding voting requirements on them, any more than they can require that all representatives from the state vote with the party that controls the legislature

[agrumer]

I suspect it only becomes a problem if one of the signatory states decides to default.

Congress can't prohibit a bunch of states from all deciding to change their laws in the same way; that's how the Uniform Commercial Code works. But treating that group decision as a contract, enforceable in court, now that probably takes the agreement of Congress, like founding the Port Authority did.

[ebartley]

My concerns with the constitutionality of the law wrt the compact prohibition are because the laws are triggered by the laws of other states. If state governments passed laws immediately after each presidential election making their electoral votes depend on the popular vote -- and then repealed them immediately before every presidential election if there weren't enough other states doing the same -- I think that would successfully detour around the interstate compact prohibition. Having it written into the laws that the implementation depends on a sufficiency of other states doing the same smells like an interstate compact to me.