Edi, while I am quite sure this is just an honest slip of the tongue calling the state legislatures parliaments could seem ignorant and may make some people not want to listen whether you are making a good point or not.
'State Legislature'/'National Assembly'/'parliament' I'm pretty sure all trace their political-linguistic origins to the french 'parlement' and is
frequently I've seen and heard the term used by Europeans for the American legislatures. It isn't what its called sure but its not exactly without reasoning. I'm vaguely certain Churchill also called it a parliament as well.
That isn't necessarily true at all, Ed. Candidates who focus advertising time on say, California, Texas, New York, Florida, and Ohio and a few others could be viable contenders in a third party role with the Electoral College. You would just have to split up your vote by region, since any one region doesn't carry the decisive EV margin.
Nope, because they'll split the EC vote and then Congress will pick the President denying the third party. That and is it really democratic for a third party to win because they magicked up 270 electoral votes but only had 20% of the vote? I like third parties, I like Canada's parliamentary system and parliamentary systems in general. I like my politics and options to be diverse, however this isn't possible under the EC and FPTP voting systems.
There are better systems than the Electoral College if we want third parties, such as instant runoff and mixed member proportional for the popular vote. That way you don't get people voting third party meaning the party they disliked the most would win.
I'm not convinced there's harm from having the electoral college elect the chief executive. Have you demonstrated this? The biggest consequences are:
Yes. We have as historical fact a 5% failure rate in which the EC vote did not reflect the will of the people.
The way I think about this, every person should have one vote and every vote should matter, meaning every election should be close elections where the candidates have to work hard to earn every vote. Right now we see this only happens with key swing states.
1) Sometimes the electoral college winner wins with 1% or so less of the popular vote than their rival.
2) Certain states are disproportionately important because their population is nearly split 50/50, and winning a thousand voters in a state where you're leading 55/45 matters less than winning them in a state where you're 50/50.
Context is everything, voter turnout is something around 50%; anectdotally I consistently and constantly see and hear Americans complain how "their vote doesn't matter." The EC passively suppresses the votes of undecideds in decided states; so who knows what that 1% gap could've been if 80% voted.
But again, if 51% vote for Rick Berman and 49% voted Brannan Braga and its BB who wins, that's not democracy. Even if the difference is a minuscule 1%; why should the votes of the 2% for RB not matter? Bah! A pox on their houses.
Additionally and specifically for (2), if
everyone voted and only the PV mattered then it
doesn't matter if you carry a state only by 50% or 65% or lost it by that margin, those votes still matter; they don't under the EC.
(1) isn't inherently wrong unless we can prove that all positions in a democracy should be handled by strict popular vote- in other words, more Athenian-style and less Roman Republic-style. That is at best hard to prove.
This doesn't follow; America's representative democracy is handled through Congress, that's whats makes it republic. The Electoral College is a historical anachronism due to logistical limitations and nothing to do with the US being a republic.
(2) is going to happen anyway. Right now, the candidates pay the most attention to places where there is a real struggle, and a nearly tied one, over what kind of policies and people we should have in charge. They know they stand to gain a huge amount by convincing people in those areas- look at how much Obama has gained by being able to convince, say, Virginians (or some of them) that he's the right man for the job.
I'm not sure I see, if every vote matters then the electoral strategy changes to focusing on populated areas, which means New York may now matter to a republican when it didn't before, or Texas to a Democrat. Which doesn't seem like much of a change at first
beyond the fact that now the votes in otherwise uncontested states now matter when they didn't before. The politicians will strategically decided where to focus isn't the issue, its that 80% of the country doesn't matter regardless of who visits them is the issue.
Go to national popular vote, and they will pay the most attention to places with a large population density, and ignore places where it takes more dollars per person to win hearts and minds.
Its true they'll favor places with population, but I think its facetious to suggest they would entirely ignore rural America. That's still roughly 60 million people that could tip an election either which way in a close elections, so I would expect stop overs and town halls in a bunch of choice small towns all over the midwest; also for the trickle down effect for downticket races.
That and who the candidates happen to see or visit isn't really the issue, its that democratic votes in missouri might as well not be counted under the current system. Missouri might not still be visited often without the EC but at least their vote small as it may be, matters to the overall tally.
The result is that (for example) New York City and its metropolitan area gets a lot more attention than a swath of rural America with a similar-sized population, because you get more bang for your buck by visiting New York 30 times than you do by visiting 30 rural cities of 40000 people each and trying to appeal to all the people who live scattered around them.
Which is true, but I find this preferable to the exact same but less democratic situation of where they only focus on 5-8 swing states.
Oh- one side effect: suppressing voter turnout becomes more important. Suppose you're worried about the Orange Party suppressing voter turnout to favor itself over the Lemon Party by passing discriminatory laws. Now they have more incentive to do that in states where the Oranges already have a huge advantage, and can pass whatever laws they please. Because getting ten thousand Lemonists not to show up on election day could win the election regardless of what state you do it in...
As pointed out above this isn't true, if anything a PV election would be less likely to be tampered with as its more difficult to make enough people to not vote to upset an election than it is to get 1000 people to not show up in a key riding in a swing state. The resources are easier to focus on state contests than nationally, a difference of even 1% is around over a million people; it would take unprecedented even for this election nationwide fraud and suppression to accomplish it.
We can solve that with mandatory voting and a sane, centralized set of rules for who is allowed to vote and so on. But that's a big enough change that it might fix our problems in its own right. Better to implement that first and worry about the electoral college later.
We don't need to, sane voting system like Mixed Member proportional and/or instant runoff along with abolishing the EC would make third parties viable and people's choices matter; meaning more people will get out to vote because now their vote actually matters regardless if they live in DC, Utah or New York.
