So that’d be my bad. And that makes the proposal sound like a much better idea — except for the logistical aspect of getting so many states to vote in favor of the same legislation.

Also, I imagine that the states who don’t participate would mount a Constitutional challenge, and I’m not nearly up to speed enough on Constitutional law to know whether they would win or lose.

Top 11 states total over 270 electoral votes. Theoretically, the law would only have to pass in those 11 states, for instance, in order to change the voting system to a popular vote, instead of trying to convince Senators and Representatives from across all 50 states to push a popular voting measure through Congress. People have a maniacal fixation on the sanctity of the Founding Fathers. While that may be for good reason, I think the idea of abolishing the electoral college rubs many people the wrong way. This method ensures that the national popular vote getter receives the presidency without doing away with the electoral college.

On a side note, what’s even dumber about the GOP’s whiny rationale about fairness in Cali. is that they have taken that state 9 out of the last 14 elections! Still, the Democrats have tried the same tactic too, like in Colorado during the last election (failed miserably). The whole thing just points to the stupidity of the current system.

The way that a pure popular vote would really cut down on voting fraud is that it would stop being worth the risk. I believe that the maximum amount of votes that were stolen in Ohio was something like 16,000. If we were working off of a popular vote system, a specific set of 16,000 votes would not mean very much. In order to commit effective fraud with a popular vote system in America, you would need to rig millions, or at the very least, hundreds of thousands of votes. And that’s obviously a lot more difficult to pull off and increases the possibility of being caught.

Of course, fraud is not my only concern. But I have to say that I’m pretty bored with all of this fucking swing state business, period.

i just don’t know who the hell to trust anymore this year…and this election is turning into a nightmare. ugh!

One solution that pops into my head is going by popular vote in the states, tallying up the percentages of how many votes went to each candidate, and then giving the candidates the same percentage of the state’s electoral votes. But then you have the issue that you can’t give a candidate 4/10ths of an electoral college vote, and eventually all of that rounding is going to add up, and you just might run into “swing counties” or “swing regions” instead of swing states, etc.

Not only is the popular vote idea the most obvious solution, it’s also by far the easiest. Isn’t there some saying about how the most simple solution is usually also the best solution?

The only reason that the electoral college was invented is because the founding fathers thought that Americans would be too stupid to handle voting on their own. And clearly, they had a point. But as is usually the case, in trying to protect people from themselves (coughsupremecourtcough), we’ve only seen more damage done.

I wonder if these people ever looked at a map of congressional districts. If it wasn’t an option of getting rid of the electoral college, I would support the whole split the electoral votes thing IF a. the whole nation did it at the same time, and b. congressional districts were not arbitrarily drawn based on party lines the way they are now.

I’m hoping that this is just some rich assholes wasting their time; California voters do tend to be smarter than swallowing that kind of crap. But still, you never know. I’m losing all faith in the intelligence of the American public.