Chicken Little Thinking: How Much Farther Can The Sky Fall?
The division of our country into safe states and battlegrounds locks out more than two-thirds of voters, and the Electoral College is still an accident waiting to happen. It's no wonder more than 70% of Americans are calling for change.
Lublin's anti-NPV remarks have been thoroughly answered time and time again, like Richard Winger does here. I think we should focus on the bigger picture.
Common sense tells us that a popular vote should be a given. There is no reason why the candidate who wins the presidency has fewer votes than another candidate. It just shouldn"t happen.
The NPV bill is the most viable way to give the people what they've wanted for a long time, while keeping the Electoral College intact. It has the potential to succeed, as long as people don"t get caught up in hypothetical technicalities.
Perhaps some are worried because the NPV bill is new. They look to every possible worst-case scenario, most of which are ludicrous.
We have our own chicken little scenarios:
What if every state had a marginally close election, such that, despite a clear winner of the national popular vote by several million votes, every state had to do a recount to award its electoral votes to one candidate or another? Under the NPV bill, even if every state had a close election, the states" electoral votes would go to the NPV winner, thereby eliminating the need for any recounts. Isn"t this far more preferable to what happened in 2000? Or what nearly happened in 2004?
What if we had a national popular vote that had worked for every election in the last 200 years, consistently producing a president who wins the most votes nationwide, and a movement arose to replace it with the current Electoral College system? What if we tried to replace every election for state governor with a mini-Electoral College within each state?
It seems absurd to think that we would give up a popular vote for such an unusual alternative.
Comments currently closed for Chicken Little Thinking: How Much Farther Can The Sky Fall?
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Posted by Aaron Armitage, 2007-07-22 23:12:11 (6 years ago)
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Aaron Armitage: A more likely approach to an overall replacement for plurality is for a few states to switch to a better system and demonstrate it works. A much better way to demonstrate the value of IRV (and/or approval, and/or whatever) is to use it (them) for local offices, then state offices, then Congress. I still believe we???d see more third party candidates under the compact (or any other system -- as long as it???s not plurality or Borda it???s not a huge problem). If you're saying that NPV would increase the role of small party candidates, even slightly, then I don't understand the parenthetical statement. NPV would (as we said before) maintain plurality in the short run. NPV eliminates the possibility of throwing the election to the House, which has to be good for third parties. Historically, this possibility has been exactly what motivates one group of small party and independent candidates (e.g. Thurmond in 1948, Wallace in 1968). They hope to use their electoral votes as bargaining chips, combined with the threat of unit rule in the House, to get policy and/or cabinet concessions from one of the two duopoly candidates. This strategy generally depends on having regional appeal, making it feasible to get some electoral votes. Another group of non-duopoly candidates seeks to influence debate on issues and/or gain concessions by threatening to be a spoiler. The effect of NPV with plurality on this group is a lot less clear, but I continue to think it is either neutral or slightly negative. The primary issues for them are ballot access (made more, not less, complicated by NPV) and the cost of national as opposed to regional advertising. A third group is candidates who are actually running to win and have financial resources to back up that desire. If Bloomberg runs he might (or might not) be an example but there are very, very few such examples. On further consideration, it seems to me that these candidates (if there ever are any) might be helped a little by NPV with one nationwide plurality, vis-a-vis the EC with separate pluralities in each state.
Posted by Bob Richard, 2007-07-22 18:32:23 (6 years ago) -
A more likely approach to an overall replacement for plurality is for a few states to switch to a better system and demonstrate it works. Going at once with a Constitutional Amendment, whether starting from the current system or from the compact, is a bigger leap than most people are comfortable with. Of course, going state-by-state would probably give us different systems in different states, which would be a perfect natural experiment to watch the effects of different systems on candidate and voter behavior, but not really desirable on other grounds. (It would also let me see if an observation I've made is accurate: liberals like IRV, conservatives like Approval.) I still believe we'd see more third party candidates under the compact (or any other system -- as long as it's not plurality or Borda it's not a huge problem). The major problems for a third party candidate aren't in the electoral system (except insofar as it chooses one winner rather than multiple winners), it's the fact that 1) no one takes them seriously as candidates and 2) they have no political machine comparable to the major parties. The fact that people perceive NPV as friendlier to third parties will ease both of those. I don't know whether it's actually harder to get a national plurality or an series of state pluralities sufficient to in the EC; everyone who's ever done one as also done, or come very close to doing, the other. But the NPV eliminates the possibility of throwing the election to the House, which has to be good for third parties.
Posted by Aaron Armitage, 2007-07-22 09:38:36 (6 years ago) -
The compact would indeed "lock us in" to plurality in the short run. But, if implemented, it would also unlock the door to further reform by constitutional amendment, by making the EC effectively a dead letter. This might be the only way we ever get to a constitutional amendment from where we are now. The compact might partially unlock the door even if it's not implemented. Suppose it's adopted by enough states to go into effect, then thrown out by the Supreme Court. I believe the fallout from this would include a serious --if not actually successful -- effort to get an amendment through Congress and to the states. The risk is obvious. Successful implementation might reduce the pressure to replace plurality and allow reformers to think they're done, at least for a while. Aaron Armitage's last point, that implementation of the compact would increase the number of elections with more than two candidates, has appeared in a number of editorials and op-eds as an argument against NPV. I disagree. I think that, in the short run, a single nationwide plurality vote would make life even harder than it is now for small party and independent candidates. For the long run effect, see above.
Posted by Bob Richard, 2007-07-21 19:54:27 (6 years ago) -
Even if Bob Richard's retort is correct, that itself is a serious objection. Plurality is a very poor way of deciding an election and the compact would lock us in to it. The fact that we've always done it that way doesn't make it any better; after all, we've always had the electoral college, too. I would argue that the EC, bad as it is (and I'm not defending it in itself), is better than plurality. The chief flaw of the EC is that it sometimes produces couter-majoritarian results. So does plurality; multi-candidate races are apt to produce non-Condorcet winners. In practice the EC has only produced counter-majoritarian results in very close elections, but plurality might elect a candidate who would lose to any of the others by a clear margin. Plurality is worse even on majoritarian grounds unless we assume every election will only have two candidates, which is less likely to be true after we replace the EC.
Posted by Aaron Armitage, 2007-07-21 10:31:10 (6 years ago) -
I think it's important to ask whether -- and if so how -- implementation of the NPV compact would alter the motivations non-member states might have to adopt voting methods other than plurality. The most obvious, and possibly the most powerful, incentive would be to use a method that guarantees inclusion in the nationwide totals. (Otherwise, your state's choice of electors is pointless.) Sticking with plurality would accomplish that. Anything else would be risky until some other state had already served as the guinea pig. Another potentially plausible incentive is one hinted at by Greg, in which politicians in a non-compact state ram through some non-plurality method with the intention of giving the courts an opportunity to declare the compact either moot or invalid. Problems with this scenario include (1) if the courts are going to void the compact at all, they will have already done so on other grounds, and (2) it's a very high risk strategy for the politicians in question. The other incentives that I can think of all involve attempting to manipulate the outcome in some way for purely partisan reasons. This is a complicated subject, and I'm not through thinking about it. Suffice to say for now that I haven't come up with anything that I think anybody would actually try.
Posted by Bob Richard, 2007-07-18 18:25:13 (6 years ago) -
I'll happily agree that NPV is a good idea. But is the interstate compact approach viable? As I understand it the inter-state compact approach impose demands on how ther staes THAT ARE NOT IN THE COMPACT conduct their presidential vote. Specificially, if a state that is not in the compact decides how to allocate their votes for president via a non-plurality method such as IRV or (very much better in my opinion) approval voting then that state may simply NOT HAVE OR BE ABLE TO PROVIDE PLURALITY-STYLE VOTE TALLY NUMBERS that would be needed for states in the compact to decide how to allocate their electorial college votes. Is there already such a mandate on states or does this kill the NPV compact approach? Someone named Jack posted a comment to an earlier post: >NPV and IRV can be compatible. If a state were to >use an IRV election to decide its electors, states >within the compact could just use voters??? first >choices when calculating the national popular vote Sure. Does the NPV compact language specifically recognize IRV and describe how to do this? Also consider that the strategy by which one votes in IRV is different when the votes are to be counted by other states in this way. Ranking a third-party candidate first could cause a spoiler situation to happen in all of the states in the compact. An interstate-compact-based NPV reform is incompactable with IRV and many other single winner voting systems.
Posted by Greg, 2007-07-17 17:40:27 (6 years ago)
I don't disagree about starting with local offices, but even then switching the presidential race all at once will be considered a big step and get a lot of pushback. To clarify the parenthetical statement, I should have said "any other new system"; multi-candidate races under plurality and Borda are/would be huge problems. But other systems handle them better. I was aware of the various Dixiecrat runs. I don't consider them relevant because I don't see a region currently that distinctive. Perhaps the red/blue division could turn ugly, but then each side is about half the country; there would be no other two candidates to cut deals with and both sides would see themselves in a position to win outright. Meaning the only groups active now are the ones trying to get their positions more exposure, and the ones trying to win. The first we can also ignore, because picking an electoral system means picking how we choose the winner, and winning isn't even their goal. For the last group, the House vote is simply the last hurdle: if it goes to the House, the House will choose a major party candidate. So in a multi-candidate race, the Republican and Democrat can afford to win fewer EC votes.