Sunday, December 9, 2007

How 538 Individuals Can Steal Your Vote

"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."

There are 535 members of Congress, and the District of Columbia is allowed 3 votes for a total of 538 "electors" chosen by popular vote, as directed by each state; states have the same number of electors as they have members of congress.

When US citizens cast their ballots on election day, they are actually voting for electors, chosen by the political parties, who have previously pledged (to the state legislature) to vote for a particular candidate.

But what if the electors break their pledge and vote for someone else?

This could never happen, right? Wrong. It has happened 158 times! That is 158 instances in which a few individuals have invalidated the vote of hundreds of thousands of US citizens! Granted, 71 of those were changed because the original candidate died, however, this still leaves 87 inexcusable occasions.

What recourse do US citizens have? None.

Only twenty-four states have laws to punish faithless electors, as they are called, but this is only after they have cast their votes; this after-the-fact punishment does nothing for the problem. Furthermore, despite such laws, no faithless elector has ever been punished!

The pros and cons of popular election versus the electoral college are numerous, and I am not arguing one way or the other. I merely wish to point out what I see as a major flaw in the electoral process - faithless electors.

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Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_elector
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_College
http://www.fairvote.org/e_college/
http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/presidents_and_first_ladies/49451/1

Posted by Publius @ 12:27 PM

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4 comments:

  1. It was a faithless elector in 1972 that gave the first ever electoral vote to a female candidate for Vice-President: Toni Nathan of the Libertarian Party.
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  2. Am I supposed to feel better about the tens of thousands of votes that were invalidated by this faithless elector of 1972? It's great that someone voted for a woman in 1972; and it's great that someone was voting Libertarian. But that does not make it any better at all.
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  3. You're assuming that direct voting for the President is a good thing. I'm not saying it is or it isn't, but leaving that assumption implicit makes your argument weaker than it should be.

    Remember that the Constitution was meant to create a federal government, not a national government. The "several States" were meant to be the primary government for the people and the federal government was to exist solely to coordinate and protect the "several States". The current idea of nationalism didn't arise until FDR and the New Deal. Whether you agree with it or not, we had a non-national government for 140 years and we did just fine. In fact, it's arguable that the citizens were better off with a federal government than a national government.

    So, maybe direct election of the President is a flying car - a good idea on the face, but the implementation ends up leaving something to be desired.
    ReplyDelete
  4. I edited to make myself clear.
    ReplyDelete

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