hopefully legislation in these states will spell the beginning of the end for the electoral college. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060831/ap_on_el_pr/california_electoral_votes Popular vote gets thumbs up in Calif. By ROBIN HINDERY, Associated Press Writer SACRAMENTO, Calif. - The California Legislature passed a bill that would give California's 55 electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, rather than the candidate who captured the state — but for now, the measure stands a slim chance of becoming reality. That's because it could go into effect only if states with a combined total of 270 electoral votes — the number now required to win the presidency — agree to the same process. Similar legislation is pending in Colorado, Illinois, Louisiana and Missouri — which have a combined 50 electoral votes. With California's 55, the legislation would still be less than halfway there. The movement is a reaction to the 2000 presidential contest, when Democrat Al Gore won the nationwide popular vote but lost the presidency to George W. Bush, who won more Electoral College votes. Gore also won California that year. Democrats control the California Legislature. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, has yet to take a public position on the bill, passed Wednesday. Supporters said the move would boost California's relevance in national elections. California is a key fundraising state for presidential candidates but is often not visited in general campaigning because it is safely Democratic. "Candidates don't come to California," said Assemblyman Rick Keene of Chico, one of the few Republican supporters of the measure. "We are currently disenfranchised in the electoral process." But many Republicans criticized the bill. "This is a way of amending the Constitution through the backdoor," said Assemblyman Chuck DeVore, a Republican from Irvine. Critics also argued that campaigning would focus on heavily populated areas at the expense of other parts of the state.
We need to do something to insure fair elections. They are under threat. August 31, 2006 Ohio to Delay Destruction of Presidential Ballots By IAN URBINA With paper ballots from the 2004 presidential election in Ohio scheduled to be destroyed next week, the secretary of state in Columbus, under pressure from critics, said yesterday that he would move to delay the destruction at least for several months. Since the election, questions have been raised about how votes were tallied in Ohio, a battleground state that helped deliver the election to President Bush over Senator John Kerry. The critics, including an independent candidate for governor and a team of statisticians and lawyers, say preliminary results from their ballot inspections show signs of more widespread irregularities than previously known. The critics say the ballots should be saved pending an investigation. They also say the secretary of state’s proposal to delay the destruction does not go far enough, and they intend to sue to preserve the ballots. In Florida in 2003, historians and lawyers persuaded state officials not to destroy the ballots in the 2000 presidential election, and those ballots are stored at the state archive. Lawyers for J. Kenneth Blackwell, the Ohio secretary of state, said although he did not have the authority to preserve the ballots, Mr. Blackwell would issue an order in a day or two that delays the destruction and that reminds local elections officials that they have to consult the public records commissions in each county. Federal law permits, but does not require, destroying paper ballots from federal elections 22 months after Election Day. The critics say their sole interest in the question is to improve the voting system. “This is not about Mr. Kerry or Mr. Bush or who should be president,’’ said Bill Goodman, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York group that is part of the lawsuit. “This is about figuring out what is not working in our election system and ensuring that every cast vote counts. “There is a gap between the numbers provided in the local level records, which until recently no one has been allowed to see, and the official final tallies that were publicly released after this election, and we want to figure out why that gap is there.” The planned action of Mr. Blackwell, a Republican who is running for governor, and the threatened suit could draw attention to possible irregularities in the election that he supervised. The suit would follow what researchers call the first time anyone other than county and state officials in Ohio have been given such extensive access to the main material from the previous presidential election. After eight months inspecting 35,000 ballots from 75 rural and urban precincts, the critics say that they have found many with signs of tampering and that in some precincts the number of voters differs significantly from the certified results. In Miami County, in southwestern Ohio, official tallies in one precinct recorded about 550 votes. Ballots and signature books indicated that 450 people voted. The investigation has not inspected all 5.6 million ballots in the election because the critics were not given access to them until January. That followed an agreement by the League of Women Voters, a plaintiff in another election suit against the state, that it was not contesting the 2004 results, Mr. Goodman said. The new suit, to be filed in Federal District Court in Columbus, would be argued on civil rights grounds, saying the state deprived voters of equal treatment. Last week, lawyers sent a legal notice to Mr. Blackwell notifying him that suit was pending and asking him to issue an administrative order directing the 88 county election boards to retain the 2004 records. “The decision of who decides whether the records will be preserved is quite simply not the secretary’s to make,” said Robert A. Destro, a lawyer for the secretary of state’s office. Mr. Destro said preservation decisions belonged to the county public records commissions, the county boards of elections and the Ohio Historical Society. “But by issuing this order,” Mr. Destro added, “the secretary of state will prevent any records from being destroyed for at least several months while this matter is studied more closely.” Steven Rosenfeld, a freelance reporter formerly with National Public Radio, said the investigative team analyzed three types of sources. They are poll books used by officials to record the names of voters casting ballots, signature books signed by voters and used to verify that signatures match registration records, and optical scan and punch card ballots, used by 85 percent of the voters in the state. The rest used touch-screen machines. “We’re not claiming that what we found reveals a huge conspiracy,” Mr. Rosenfeld said. “What we’re claiming is that what we found at least reveals extremely shoddy handling of ballots, and there are some initial indications of local-level ballot stuffing.” In Miami County, Mr. Rosenfeld said, the team found discrepancies of 5 percent or more in some precincts between the people in the signature books and the certified results. In 10 southwestern counties, he said, the team found thousands of punch card ballots that lacked codes identifying the precinct where the ballot was cast. The codes are typically necessary for the machines processing the ballots to “know’’ to record which candidate receives the votes. Mr. Rosenfeld is a co-author of a book that The New Press is to publish next month, “What Happened in Ohio?: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election.” The other co-authors are Harvey Wasserman, an election rights advocate and an adjunct professor of history at Columbus State Community College, and Robert J. Fitrakis, a lawyer who is running for governor as an independent. Robert F. Bauer, a lawyer from Washington who represented Mr. Kerry and the Democratic National Committee on voting issues before the 2004 election, was skeptical about the critics’ case. “The major discrepancies that they are identifying are not materially different than what has already been highlighted,” Mr. Bauer said. On Tuesday, Mr. Kerry sent a fund-raising e-mail message calling for support for Representative Ted Strickland, the Democrat who is running for governor. Mr. Kerry wrote that Mr. Blackwell “used his office to abuse our democracy and threaten basic voting rights” in 2004. Multiple suits failed in challenging the 2004 election in Ohio, and most studies after the election concluded that irregularities existed, but that they would not have changed the outcome. In January 2005, the Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee issued a report finding “massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies” in the election. In March 2005, the Democratic National Committee issued a report that said 2 percent of the Ohio electorate, or “approximately 129,543 voters,” had intended to vote but did not do so because of long lines and other problems at polling stations. But the report said those and other frustrated voters “would not have erased Bush’s 118,000 vote margin in the state.” http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/31/washington/31ohio.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1 Keep D&D Civil.
I don't understand why they'd want to do this. If, say, the next Democratic candidate for president gets 70% of California, but the Republican gets 51% of the country, California will give its 55 EC votes to the Republican even though he's very unpopular in the state? Don't they essentially give away their electoral power by doing this? There must be something I'm not understanding. They say that would make Cali a bigger player, but it seems like it would make it a smaller player. You don't have to worry about what Cali wants as long as you can offset their votes in the rest of the country. It also seems bizarre that Democrats would support this and Republicans would oppose it, if I'm understanding this right. The Dems can count on the 55 EC votes going to a Dem presidential candidate right now. So, they want to make it so that California could go Republican if the rest of the country goes that way? Maybe it jells better with the parties' respective political philosophies, but it doesn't seem like that is where their self-interests lie. Unless California is hoping to negate the voting power of a bunch of Republican states by sacrificing their own. In any case, it's dumb. This seems like a recipe for unintended consequences. If you don't like the EC, change the Constitution.
I agree, JV. I don't see how this would hold up in court, anyway. I'm far more worried about elections being stolen using paperless Diebold voting machines, and other methods used in the last election to depress Democratic voting, or prevent it altogether. Keep D&D Civil.
We'll never be able to get rid of the electoral college. The electoral college was the whole reason the country was formed...the original states insisted on it to ensure they would have representation and not be washed away by the larger states. Thus the Utahs, North Dakota's and what not would never agree to get rid of it....
I agree and seems like a Logistic nightmare We will wait until EVERYONE has voted to cast our 55 votes. Splitting your state votes by percentages [instead of the massive block of 55 . . 35 to one candidae and 20 to the other Makes more sense Why not dismanle the whole MASS BLOCK VOTE System? I think that is part of the problem then again . .this would give third party candidates a little power Rocket River
I think their rationale is strengthen the urban base and its numbers, which predominantly votes democrat. It's only contingent if enough states that totals 270 votes goes along with the plan. I agree. It's a messy plan, and it could wipe away the influence of states who don't sign up or alienate their people. This is like implementing a hackneyed system that determines the national champion of say, college football, instead of an obvious system of head to head matches that leads to an eventual winner............
No, because it assumes at least half the country adopts it. In that scenario, the popular national vote winner wins no matter what. So it essentially guarantees that the election is national and that state EC votes have no effect whatsoever.
There is never going to be a perfect election. There is going to be some amount of voter fraud whenever they are having votes with millions of voters. If the irregularities do not change the outcome though, it is best to just move on.
Can you imagine the recount nightmares in a close election? You wouldn't be able to compartmentalize it to a state; you'd have to recount everyone in the country.
The California Legislature passed a bill that would give California's 55 electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, rather than the candidate who captured the state Holy sh*t what a good idea.
Shining a huge annoying light on the problem is often the best way to get things fixed for the future, though. The problems in Florida would have been ignored and continued on and on if people just moved on in 2000.
Why should any Californian Vote? With this in place. My vote would count as much toward their EC votes as theirs did Rocket River
Its perfectly legal the state legislatures decide how their electoral votes are used. Most use the block vote - where the winner of the popular vote gets all the EC votes. Some divide up the EC votes by percentage of the popular vote. The states do not even have to have a popular vote. In the past some state legislatures used the EC vote directly without a popular vote.
Because they have the most populous state. Therefore they would have the most influence over the election if other states pass the same law.
Republicans should support that, a vote in California means exact the same thing for them as a vote in a red state. Democrates should support that, they can actually receive some votes from the South. Independants can be happy, because their voice can be heard, and they can actually show the country, how many supports they get. Meanwhile, it enables the possibility for coalition between parties and independants etc. Anyways, this electoral college thing is crap. Nobody questions it before, why CA has 55 of them, not 54, nor 56? A vote is a vote, no matter where it's from.
I think it is the same as the number of congressmen (house and senate), 53 representatives and 2 senators from California. The point of the electoral college is to give some measure of representation to smaller states. It is the same reason we have the senate. This presupposes that different states have different interests, but that is not an unreasonable assumption.
