2. Kyle’s point about trade-offs is important: there is no “solution” for the present system; there are only trade-offs. Tinkering with the Constitution so as to achieve a “fairer” result will fail because of this alone. What’s “fair” for someone will be “unfair” for someone else, depending on the trade-off in question. People will never get the result they desire by tinkering with the law. The only way for that to happen is under a dictatorship, where the dictator gets what he wants, all the time, but nobody else does. A good example is the recent election of Scott Brown. Mass democrats tinkered with the law to get a democrat in the Senate if Kerry had won; they tinkered with it again to preserve their super majority when Kennedy died. The result favored Brown, which Democrats obviously hadn’t considered before hand. If they had left the law as it was, Brown wouldn’t be in the Senate today and some hack beholden to the governor would be. The rest is history.

I’m convinced (it’s why I started a project to counter NPV, actually) that 1) NPV is a particularly risky way to shift to direct election of the President because it simply manipulates the E.C. apparatus to do something it was never intended to do and 2) direct election of the President would remove several important unifying/moderating incentives that exist in our current (and certainly imperfect) system. To the latter point, we should really wonder that we have very little geographic regionalism in our politics. Both political parties exist in all 50 states (the Democrats are in Utah, the G.O.P. is in Massachusetts). And our political incentives favor two large coalitions rather than a fractured field of single-issue parties in ever-shifting alliances. While some idealogues would prefer the latter, there’s no question that the way things are now is more stable. And stability is an essential prerequisite for both liberty and prosperity.

I’ve said enough. Hope you’ll check out my website, SaveOurStates.com, and consider the outcomes of the presidential election process before you decide whether or not to reject our current system.

-Trent

This is still true today, and is the downside of calls to reform the electoral college. You can’t have one without the other. So as we tinker with the Constitution, we should remember the law of unintended consequences and go very slowly. “Don’t fix it if it isn’t broken” should be the guide. The electoral college system returns results that are valid for the public ninety-five percent of the time. It ain’t broken, so let’s not fix it.

Moreover, I don’t see the fact that a voter in California has more impact than one in Nevada as being anti democratic at all. People vote by states because of the federal system. States have more or less weight in the federation according to population. More weight equals more votes. That seems fair enough to me. It’s analogous to voting in corporations: the more stake one has in the business, the more votes one has. It doesn’t make any sense at all for those whose stake is negligible to have equal votes with those who have a lot of money invested.

Of course, all elections are one-person, one-vote, the problem articulated is that not all votes are equally important and some “don’t count.” Just because a majority popular vote would determine the Presidency doesn’t make each vote equally important, it exchanges one geographical preference for another. Just as importantly, it exchanges one set of gatekeepers for another.

That could be totally fine, in fact one could argue that we should make those tradeoffs. I’m arguing first that the tradeoffs exist and second that the tradeoffs instead of being an improvement might actually be a step backwards (kind of like directly electing senators). We can disagree just fine on the latter question. However, on the first point, I push back quite strongly against the idea that somehow this would be a cost-free switch. Or that a system that totally privileges metro areas doesn’t disadvantage anyone. You literally cannot build a system that doesn’t disadvantage someone, so the real question is what balance of advantages/disadvantages works the best for whatever goals we can agree upon.

LA County went Obama to McCain, 69/29. He didn’t spend too much time campaigning there, but still netted 956,000 votes nearly twice the total number of people who voted in Montana, which went McCain by a 10,000 vote margin with 243,000 votes.

The NPV system says McCain’s voters in California basically didn’t exist and in this system, he’d pick up an extra 956,000 votes rather than 0 electors from LA County. It also, says Montana isn’t really a swing state (though it nearly was) and their votes aren’t equal but here, Mac & Obama would each pick up another quarter million votes, which is about the same amount Mac picked up from Nassau County, NY.

So it’s hard to see why candidates would spend any time in smaller states with a less concentrated population, when a single suburb or metro area is so much more valuable. The opportunity cost in time of canvassing not-Vegas, Nevada or most of Indiana or New Hampshire would be huge.

To the argument that it wouldn’t be worse, I disagree because swing states change. Montana is one now, Nevada and Colorado as well. Florida is becoming less of a swing state. As states become battlegrounds, they get more attention, and vice-versa. On the other hand, cities don’t change. Year in and year out, candidates will be heading to the same cities and suburbs, shaking hands with the same mayors, talking about the same issues. I don’t see that as an improvement and arguably it privileges metro areas at the cost of battleground states.

However, as I understand it previous law can’t bind the legal options of subsequent laws. Otherwise the current Texas legislature could simply include in all of their laws, a clause stipulating that it couldn’t be repealed before 2100. A law is a law and the only things greater than than law are constitutional requirements.

Therefore, if the Texan constitution had a clause requiring it to fulfill the obligations of interstate compacts or specifically to abide by the legal requirements of the NPV, then yes, there would be no problem. However if those are absent from the state constitution, it’d be no different from normal state law passage and repeal.