07-26-2021, 08:48 AM
(07-26-2021, 07:16 AM)Anthony Wrote: Congratulations, Maine and Nebraska. You were right all along.
The entire country needs to follow the example of these two states when it comes to allocating their electoral votes - and that involves giving the candidate that wins a given congressional district one electoral vote for doing so, with the candidate winning the state as a whole receiving the state's other two electoral votes.
This would render the conservative argument that reforming the Electoral College would amount to "mob rule" totally inoperative - because rural congressional districts would then be placed on an equal footing with urban ones.
For proof, look at what would have happened as regards California, New York, and Illinois.
In California, instead of Joe Biden winning all of the state's 55 electoral votes (it will be 54 starting in 2024, because the Golden State lost one House seat pursuant to the results of the 2020 Census), he would have won only 44 electoral votes, to Donald Trump's 11, presuming that Trump would have won the 11 House elections that the Republicans won in 2020.
In New York State, this would have meant that instead of Biden winning all of the Empire State's 29 electoral votes, he would have won only 21 of them, while Donald Trump would have won eight - and in Illinois, instead of Biden capturing all 20 of that state's electoral votes, he would have won only 15 of them to Trump's five.
These changes of results alone would have narrowed Biden's 306 to 232 margin in the Electoral College to 282 to 256, essentially analogous to his margin of victory in the national popular vote - and that does not even include Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Had the electoral votes of these states been allocated by congressional district instead of winner-take-all, it would have resulted in a further narrowing of Biden's margin of victory, tempered by Democratic congressional-district victories in such states as Florida and Texas.
The final tally would have been 275 electoral votes for Biden to 263 for Trump - and better yet, that polarizing map of blue states vs. red states, reminiscent of the map of free states vs. slave states in the run-up to the Civil War, would be a thing of the past..
The proverbial bottom line is that so long as essentially any members of the "Cold War Bloody Shirt Generation" - those born in 1945 or earlier - are still alive (and their power is greatly magnified by such things as Citizens United, lifetime felony disenfranchisement of almost exclusively poor men of color, the holding of elections on a workday, gerrymandering, which will once again come into play as redistricting is proceeded with over the next month, and the increasingly-popular "voter ID" laws, which are poll taxes in everything but name), the Electoral College will never be abolished altogether.
But this safe and sane compromise - proposed by a member of a generation that is more inclined to deal than to argue - does have a chance of becoming the law of the land.
As long as we count Senators in the Electroral Vote count, the system will alwasy be rigged against the larger states. Since the low-population states tend to be conservative (Vermont and Delaware being the outliers here), your accommodation won't fix anything. It may actually make it a lot worse.
The right path: enough states agreeing by law to assign their electors to the popular winner of the election.
Intelligence is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom, but they all play well together.