It's Time to Award Electoral College Votes by Congressional District

[JakeStarkey]

And the electoral college will remain for all of your life times.

The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the majority of Electoral College votes, and thus the presidency, to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in the country, by replacing state winner-take-all laws for awarding electoral votes in the enacting states.

Won't be enforced.

 

[candycorn]

When that system was established voting was not a protected right and could only be exercised by a select few.

Not only that but it took weeks to gather all the votes from the rural areas. Today the vote totals are nearly instant.
Using the popular vote to elect the President is still part of a Republic frame. It's not like we're asking for National Referendum votes or anything.

There would be no need to collect the votes from the rural areas. All campaigning would be done in the top 20-30 population centers. There would be zero need to waste time and money in the flyover states.

Now 38 states and their voters are "flown over" because they are politically irrelevant by voting predictably in presidential elections.

With National Popular Vote, big cities would not get all of candidates’ attention, much less control the outcome.

The biggest cities are almost exactly balanced out by rural areas in terms of population and partisan composition.

You do understand there is this thing called television right? Ask a friend about it. What this device does is allow someone like a politician to pay for air time, and send messages into people’s houses. Now, the way it works with most local affiliates is that the station has a geographic reach of X number of miles from this thing they call a transmitter (TRANS-MIT-EAR). Now, in those number of miles from the transmitter (picture me using finger quotes now), you can have all sorts of earth forms and structures. As an advertiser/politician, you hope that in those radii miles are these people called voters because that is who you are trying to reach. When you are in larger metropolitan areas, your chance of reaching more voters (again with the finger quotes) increases a whole lot when you buy air time there. It is further theorized by political advisers, scientists, and oh pretty much anyone with two working god damned brain cells that when you have an event, the more voters that are located closer to your event drives up the number of people who attend. These same experts think that the idea of buying airtime on channel 87 in Morningwood, Wyoming to where the number of livestock outnumber voters 80 to 1 is batshit crazy.

 

[mvymvy]

When that system was established voting was not a protected right and could only be exercised by a select few.

Not only that but it took weeks to gather all the votes from the rural areas. Today the vote totals are nearly instant.
Using the popular vote to elect the President is still part of a Republic frame. It's not like we're asking for National Referendum votes or anything.

There would be no need to collect the votes from the rural areas. All campaigning would be done in the top 20-30 population centers. There would be zero need to waste time and money in the flyover states.

Now 38 states and their voters are "flown over" because they are politically irrelevant by voting predictably in presidential elections.

With National Popular Vote, big cities would not get all of candidates’ attention, much less control the outcome.

The biggest cities are almost exactly balanced out by rural areas in terms of population and partisan composition.

You do understand there is this thing called television right? Ask a friend about it. What this device does is allow someone like a politician to pay for air time, and send messages into people’s houses. Now, the way it works with most local affiliates is that the station has a geographic reach of X number of miles from this thing they call a transmitter (TRANS-MIT-EAR). Now, in those number of miles from the transmitter (picture me using finger quotes now), you can have all sorts of earth forms and structures. As an advertiser/politician, you hope that in those radii miles are these people called voters because that is who you are trying to reach. When you are in larger metropolitan areas, your chance of reaching more voters (again with the finger quotes) increases a whole lot when you buy air time there. It is further theorized by political advisers, scientists, and oh pretty much anyone with two working god damned brain cells that when you have an event, the more voters that are located closer to your event drives up the number of people who attend. These same experts think that the idea of buying airtime on channel 87 in Morningwood, Wyoming to where the number of livestock outnumber voters 80 to 1 is batshit crazy.

The main media at the moment, TV, costs much more per impression in big cities than in smaller towns and rural area. Candidates get more bang for the buck in smaller towns and rural areas.

“The presidential campaigns and their allies [zeroed] in mainly on nine swing states, bombarding them with commercials in the earliest concentration of advertising in modern politics. “

“no recent general election advertising strategy has covered so little ground so early. In the spring of 2000, George W. Bush and Al Gore fought an air war in close to 20 states. In early 2004, there were the “Swing Seventeen.” And in 2008, the Obama campaign included 18 states in its June advertising offensive, its first of the general election.”

“The fall [brought] wall-to-wall advertising” in the handful of swing states remaining.

“With so many resources focused on persuading an ever-shrinking pool of swing voters . . the 2012 election is [going] down in history as the one in which the most money was spent reaching the fewest people.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/08/u...in-focus-of-ad-blitz.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all


In the 2012 campaign, “Much of the heaviest spending has not been in big cities with large and expensive media markets, but in small and medium-size metropolitan areas in states with little individual weight in the Electoral College: Cedar Rapids and Des Moines in Iowa (6 votes); Colorado Springs and Grand Junction in Colorado (9 votes); Norfolk and Richmond in Virginia (13 votes). Since the beginning of April, four-fifths of the ads that favored or opposed a presidential candidate have been in television markets of modest size.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/08/u...in-focus-of-ad-blitz.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

 

[mvymvy]

And the electoral college will remain for all of your life times.

The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the majority of Electoral College votes, and thus the presidency, to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in the country, by replacing state winner-take-all laws for awarding electoral votes in the enacting states.

Won't be enforced.

The National Popular Vote bill says: "Any member state may withdraw from this agreement, except that a withdrawal occurring six months or less before the end of a President’s term shall not become effective until a President or Vice President shall have been qualified to serve the next term."

This six-month “blackout” period includes six important events relating to presidential elections, namely the
● national nominating conventions,
● fall general election campaign period,
● Election Day on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November,
● meeting of the Electoral College on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December,
● counting of the electoral votes by Congress on January 6, and
● scheduled inauguration of the President and Vice President for the new term on January 20.

Any attempt by a state to pull out of the compact in violation of its terms would violate the Impairments Clause of the U.S. Constitution and would be void. Such an attempt would also violate existing federal law. Compliance would be enforced by Federal court action

The National Popular Vote compact is, first of all, a state law. It is a state law that would govern the manner of choosing presidential electors. A Secretary of State may not ignore or override the National Popular Vote law any more than he or she may ignore or override the winner-take-all method that is currently the law in 48 states.

There has never been a court decision allowing a state to withdraw from an interstate compact without following the procedure for withdrawal specified by the compact. Indeed, courts have consistently rebuffed the occasional (sometimes creative) attempts by states to evade their obligations under interstate compacts.

In 1976, the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland stated in Hellmuth and Associates v. Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority:
“When enacted, a compact constitutes not only law, but a contract which may not be amended, modified, or otherwise altered without the consent of all parties.”

In 1999, the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania stated in Aveline v. Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole:
“A compact takes precedence over the subsequent statutes of signatory states and, as such, a state may not unilaterally nullify, revoke, or amend one of its compacts if the compact does not so provide.”

In 1952, the U.S. Supreme Court very succinctly addressed the issue in Petty v. Tennessee-Missouri Bridge Commission:
“A compact is, after all, a contract.”

The important point is that an interstate compact is not a mere “handshake” agreement. If a state wants to rely on the goodwill and graciousness of other states to follow certain policies, it can simply enact its own state law and hope that other states decide to act in an identical manner. If a state wants a legally binding and enforceable mechanism by which it agrees to undertake certain specified actions only if other states agree to take other specified actions, it enters into an interstate compact.

Interstate compacts are supported by over two centuries of settled law guaranteeing enforceability. Interstate compacts exist because the states are sovereign. If there were no Compacts Clause in the U.S. Constitution, a state would have no way to enter into a legally binding contract with another state. The Compacts Clause, supported by the Impairments Clause, provides a way for a state to enter into a contract with other states and be assured of the enforceability of the obligations undertaken by its sister states. The enforceability of interstate compacts under the Impairments Clause is precisely the reason why sovereign states enter into interstate compacts. Without the Compacts Clause and the Impairments Clause, any contractual agreement among the states would be, in fact, no more than a handshake.

 

[candycorn]

The other day, we were discussing the zombie apocalypse and who would in the office would taste better if it came down to either being eaten by a zombie

When that system was established voting was not a protected right and could only be exercised by a select few.

Not only that but it took weeks to gather all the votes from the rural areas. Today the vote totals are nearly instant.
Using the popular vote to elect the President is still part of a Republic frame. It's not like we're asking for National Referendum votes or anything.

There would be no need to collect the votes from the rural areas. All campaigning would be done in the top 20-30 population centers. There would be zero need to waste time and money in the flyover states.

Even in rural areas the population is split pretty evenly.

There still isn’t enough of them to make it worth the time to land your plane in Casper, WY and then drive up to C

When that system was established voting was not a protected right and could only be exercised by a select few.

Not only that but it took weeks to gather all the votes from the rural areas. Today the vote totals are nearly instant.
Using the popular vote to elect the President is still part of a Republic frame. It's not like we're asking for National Referendum votes or anything.

There would be no need to collect the votes from the rural areas. All campaigning would be done in the top 20-30 population centers. There would be zero need to waste time and money in the flyover states.

I disagree

Most elections are decided by +/- 3%

Running on an urban agenda will cost you votes. A candidate who appeals to rural voters can easily offset a close election.

Well, okay. I don’t expect a professional politician running for President to come out and be openly hostile to rural America.
But lets look at mathematics. Three percent is your barometer, right? According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, in 2012, the turnout was 126,000,0000 voters. So you either need to change 3% of that to your side or get an extra 3% to come out for you or 3,780,000 more voters.

Well, the nation is so divided that getting 3% to change their minds is theoretically possible but realistic? I doubt it. Could you get 3 out of 10 Trump supporters to switch to HRC? Could you convince 3 out of 10 HRC supporters to urinate on Trump if he were on fire? No. So your easiest path to that 3% is to get out more voters. So the goal is 3.78 million. Population being what it is…. the 20 least populous states have less than that….

And even if you somehow were able to reach every voter in Nebraska and all 1.896 million of their people, not all are registered voters and not all are going to vote for you. Even if they did, you’d still be 2 million voters short.

Meanwhile, the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles is home to the same sized…. San Fernando Valley - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. KABC reaches them all. Or would you rather buy air time on Nebraska’s 30 TV stations. Or would you rather go with billboards on the 405 that sees 3-6 million cars a week or along Route 18 outside of Lincoln that may see 3-6 million people this year?
Now imagine the same scenario on Long Island or off of the Garden State Parkway up by Secaucus and the Meadowlands; on the I-4 corridor between Tampa and Orlando; between Austin and San Antonio in Texas on I-35 or blanketing the Metroplex in north Texas.

 

[candycorn]

When that system was established voting was not a protected right and could only be exercised by a select few.

Not only that but it took weeks to gather all the votes from the rural areas. Today the vote totals are nearly instant.
Using the popular vote to elect the President is still part of a Republic frame. It's not like we're asking for National Referendum votes or anything.

There would be no need to collect the votes from the rural areas. All campaigning would be done in the top 20-30 population centers. There would be zero need to waste time and money in the flyover states.

Now 38 states and their voters are "flown over" because they are politically irrelevant by voting predictably in presidential elections.

With National Popular Vote, big cities would not get all of candidates’ attention, much less control the outcome.

The biggest cities are almost exactly balanced out by rural areas in terms of population and partisan composition.

You do understand there is this thing called television right? Ask a friend about it. What this device does is allow someone like a politician to pay for air time, and send messages into people’s houses. Now, the way it works with most local affiliates is that the station has a geographic reach of X number of miles from this thing they call a transmitter (TRANS-MIT-EAR). Now, in those number of miles from the transmitter (picture me using finger quotes now), you can have all sorts of earth forms and structures. As an advertiser/politician, you hope that in those radii miles are these people called voters because that is who you are trying to reach. When you are in larger metropolitan areas, your chance of reaching more voters (again with the finger quotes) increases a whole lot when you buy air time there. It is further theorized by political advisers, scientists, and oh pretty much anyone with two working god damned brain cells that when you have an event, the more voters that are located closer to your event drives up the number of people who attend. These same experts think that the idea of buying airtime on channel 87 in Morningwood, Wyoming to where the number of livestock outnumber voters 80 to 1 is batshit crazy.

The main media at the moment, TV, costs much more per impression in big cities than in smaller towns and rural area. Candidates get more bang for the buck in smaller towns and rural areas.

“The presidential campaigns and their allies [zeroed] in mainly on nine swing states, bombarding them with commercials in the earliest concentration of advertising in modern politics. “

“no recent general election advertising strategy has covered so little ground so early. In the spring of 2000, George W. Bush and Al Gore fought an air war in close to 20 states. In early 2004, there were the “Swing Seventeen.” And in 2008, the Obama campaign included 18 states in its June advertising offensive, its first of the general election.”

“The fall [brought] wall-to-wall advertising” in the handful of swing states remaining.

“With so many resources focused on persuading an ever-shrinking pool of swing voters . . the 2012 election is [going] down in history as the one in which the most money was spent reaching the fewest people.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/08/u...in-focus-of-ad-blitz.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all


In the 2012 campaign, “Much of the heaviest spending has not been in big cities with large and expensive media markets, but in small and medium-size metropolitan areas in states with little individual weight in the Electoral College: Cedar Rapids and Des Moines in Iowa (6 votes); Colorado Springs and Grand Junction in Colorado (9 votes); Norfolk and Richmond in Virginia (13 votes). Since the beginning of April, four-fifths of the ads that favored or opposed a presidential candidate have been in television markets of modest size.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/08/u...in-focus-of-ad-blitz.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Demographics…give it some thought.

 

[Maryland Patriot]

This is from 2015 but it's a great article. Under our present winner-take-all system, lots of voters know their vote doesn't matter.

It's Time to Award Electoral College Votes by Congressional District

feb 3 2015 The custom in the United States today is for Electoral College (EC) votes to be awarded state-by-state on a winner-take-all basis. A candidate who wins the popular vote in an individual state gets every one of its electoral votes.

Although we are accustomed to thinking this is the only way it can be done, the method of awarding electoral votes is a matter for each state to decide. For example, two states (Nebraska and Maine) award electoral college votes by congressional district rather than by statewide popular vote. There is no reason for every other state in the nation not to follow suit.

Voters outside major population centers today are virtually disenfranchised by the current arrangement. Voters in eastern Washington, for instance, know full well that the outcome of the electoral college vote will be determined by the vote in the major population centers of Seattle and King County. They know their vote, while it will be counted, is largely symbolic.

But if EC votes are awarded by congressional district, suddenly voters in eastern Washington, whose districts lie wholly outside the state’s urban centers, have a voice and a vote that counts.

In California, Romney would have won 13 of the state’s 55 electoral votes, which is certainly better than a shutout and has the additional and more important advantage of letting voters in those 13 congressional districts know that their vote matters as much as the vote of folks in San Francisco and L.A. Romney would have won three of New York’s 29 electoral votes, six out of Illinois’ 20, and 13 out of Florida’s 29.

Its true, In Maryland for example, if you are not voting democrat, there is little reason to head to the polls.
We dont even have to wait for the election to tell you that Baltimor city and Prince Georges county will decide the results, and that will be for the whore hillary.
If you dont live in one of those two areas, your vote only counts on those things specific to your location.
Maryland will go to the whore with the free shit.

 

[Kondor3]

...A national popular vote guarantees that candidates would only campaign in the most populous states and ignore the rest.

Correct.

But, in the final analysis, who cares?

In this day-and-age of instantaneous real-time communications and real-time nationwide broadcasts and streaming of Campaign Town Halls, everybody see what they need to.

And, the fewer road-trips costing donated dollars, the smaller the campaign war-chest - the fewer candidates who are in the back pockets of the wealthy.

Works for me.

 

[TooTall]

...A national popular vote guarantees that candidates would only campaign in the most populous states and ignore the rest.

Correct.

But, in the final analysis, who cares?

In this day-and-age of instantaneous real-time communications and real-time nationwide broadcasts and streaming of Campaign Town Halls, everybody see what they need to.

And, the fewer road-trips costing donated dollars, the smaller the campaign war-chest - the fewer candidates who are in the back pockets of the wealthy.

Works for me.

It ain't gonna happen!

 

[Kondor3]

...A national popular vote guarantees that candidates would only campaign in the most populous states and ignore the rest.

Correct.

But, in the final analysis, who cares?

In this day-and-age of instantaneous real-time communications and real-time nationwide broadcasts and streaming of Campaign Town Halls, everybody see what they need to.

And, the fewer road-trips costing donated dollars, the smaller the campaign war-chest - the fewer candidates who are in the back pockets of the wealthy.

Works for me.

It ain't gonna happen!

Not this year...

 

[TooTall]

...A national popular vote guarantees that candidates would only campaign in the most populous states and ignore the rest.

Correct.

But, in the final analysis, who cares?

In this day-and-age of instantaneous real-time communications and real-time nationwide broadcasts and streaming of Campaign Town Halls, everybody see what they need to.

And, the fewer road-trips costing donated dollars, the smaller the campaign war-chest - the fewer candidates who are in the back pockets of the wealthy.

Works for me.

It ain't gonna happen!

Not this year...

I never say never, but it will be a cold day in hell before that happens.

 

[Kondor3]

...A national popular vote guarantees that candidates would only campaign in the most populous states and ignore the rest.

Correct.

But, in the final analysis, who cares?

In this day-and-age of instantaneous real-time communications and real-time nationwide broadcasts and streaming of Campaign Town Halls, everybody see what they need to.

And, the fewer road-trips costing donated dollars, the smaller the campaign war-chest - the fewer candidates who are in the back pockets of the wealthy.

Works for me.

It ain't gonna happen!

Not this year...

I never say never, but it will be a cold day in hell before that happens.

Never is a long time.

Who knows how an ever-accelerating and ever more ubiquitous technology is going to reshape the political landscape over the next decade or two?

 

[mvymvy]

Further evidence of the way a nationwide presidential campaign would be run comes from national advertisers who seek out customers in small, medium, and large towns of every small, medium, and large state. A national advertiser does not write off Indiana or Illinois merely because a competitor makes more sales in those particular states. Moreover, a national advertiser enjoying an edge over its competitors in Indiana or Illinois does not stop trying to make additional sales in those states. National advertisers go after every single possible customer, regardless of where the customer is located.

 

[M14 Shooter]

There is nothing fair about the current state-by-state winner-take-all EC system , not mentioned, much less endorsed, in the Constitution.
There is nothing good about it.

Sounds like you need to talk to your state legislature.

 

[ShootSpeeders]

Its true, In Maryland for example, if you are not voting democrat, there is little reason to head to the polls.
We dont even have to wait for the election to tell you that Baltimor city and Prince Georges county will decide the results, and that will be for the whore hillary.
If you dont live in one of those two areas, your vote only counts on those things specific to your location.
Maryland will go to the whore with the free shit.

Yes indeed. Democrats have got a lock on the welfare vote and that is like 45% of the voters right there. The welfare trash will always vote for the welfare party. It's that or starve.