unpopular method of selecting the president<\/a>, just from the point of view of legitimacy. It’s also plausible that the system depresses turnout in non-battleground states, although I’m not convinced that a national popular vote would really encourage participation. And there are the nightmare scenarios, the 1876 sort of thing. So, yeah, there are problems.\nOn the other hand, there are reasons to stick with it. For one thing, the act of changing the election system is always fraught. The first cycle or two would be unpredictable, in a lot of ways, and I feel pretty strongly at the moment that unpredictability is a Bad Thing when it comes to selecting Presidents. The first Party that figured out how to manage a national popular election would be at a tremendous advantage, and I have no idea how that would work. Now, it’s also true that aversion to change is a problem and that we oughtn’t to live with problems just because we don’t want to change. The cost of change is one thing that has to be taken into account, though, and when it comes to something like this, I’d want to make pretty damn’ sure that the new system would be better than the old one.\n
Would it be? I have logistical qualms—it’s bad enough when one state has a too-close-to-call outcome and requires a recount; I can’t imagine a national popular-vote recount. I mean, let’s start with the beginning of the logistics: since our States run their own elections, the popular vote in each State would presumably be certified by that State, and the Popular Vote would be some sort of simple addition of those numbers. Frankly, that concerns me. Who would have the authority to institute a recount? Who would have standing to challenge a State’s certified count? What about standards for ballot certifications? Could one State challenge another’s standards? None of these are insuperable, but they aren’t entirely nugatory, either. In our current set-up, it’s unlikely that more than a few states would be close enough to require recounts, and unless the electoral college were close, those recounts would be relatively low-stakes. Yes, we’ve had an example in our lifetimes of a high-stakes recount, but (a) can you imagine recounting a hundred million votes across the country instead of just Florida, and (2) we probably tend to overemphasize the fact that we were alive for the 2000 election, and underweight the fact that there have been only three or four out of fifty-six presidential elections that were seriously hinky.\n
Alternately, we could jettison the state elections and have federal elections come under federal control. This is as feasible as getting rid of the Electoral College; it could presumably be included in a Constitutional Amendment that explicitly enshrines the right to vote. This is very appealing to me—we could have automatic national registration (or, more accurately, just voting without having to register) and a national registry that would reduce duplication and the potential for fraud. We could have national standards for ballot access and for (f’r’ex) absentee or mail-in ballots. We could institute a Federal Holiday, and lower the voting age, and possibly institute fees for non-voting like they have in Australia.\n
Of course, we could do all of that stuff while retaining the Electoral College, too. I mean, getting rid of the Electoral College is popular, so maybe that’s the way to get the other, less popular stuff done. But the actual Electoral College part seems like one of the lower priorities, to me.\n
And of course there are non-logistical drawbacks to a national popular vote election, too. Our newly national political Parties are not, so far, tremendously beneficial to governance, and I fear that a national popular vote Presidency would exacerbate that. While there are problems with the outsized influence of battleground states on policy promises, it’s not clear how a popular election would actually work—would the retail politics of town meetings and handshaking be an insupportably inefficient use of time? That wouldn’t be an improvement. Would the candidates pander purely demographically rather than geographically? Would the demands of a nationwide GotV increase the marginal utility of More Money?\n
There are possible positives and negatives; I’m inclined, by instinct, to think that the improvements are outweighed by the cost of change. I can’t really get worked up about it either way, though. Essentially, if it’s not a close election then the Electoral College and the popular vote will go the same way. If it is a close election, then the Electoral College and the popular vote would be fucked up in different ways.\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Which Your Humble Blogger suspects y’all have opinions about this and can tell me how very wrong I am.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15403"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15403\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16362,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15403\/revisions\/16362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}