Recently I posted about my support for the Electoral College (EC). While it may be an old-fashioned way of apportioning votes in a Republic, it actually still works. But that doesn't mean that it couldn't stand a little tweaking here and there.
Most Electoral College reform centers around some form of direct popular election:
- Straight popular vote (abolish the EC).
- A variation of straight popular vote would be a popular vote with instant run-off, which would mean that you would rank the candidates, rather than voting for only one. Then a computer system somewhere would decide who finished last, and go to those voters' second choice, etc. This would encourage a lot of non-major party candidates, who could wield some significant influence.
- Apportionment of electoral votes. The would allocate EC votes on a congressional district-by-congressional district basis, with the overall state popular votes getting the two senate-apportioned electoral votes. Two states already do this (Maine and Nebraska).
Here is a more radical suggestion: more states!
I think that it is horrible that one state out of fifty should wield up to 10% of the power to elect the President of all of the country. When one state becomes so large that it passes the 10% threshold, it should be required, according to Constitutional Amendment, to divide itself into two (or more, again at its discretion) smaller states under the 10% electoral vote threshold. Each of these new states would get two additional US Senators, so the size of the Senate (and thus the Electoral College itself) would increase.
With 270 electoral votes needed to win, the following four states would need to be split:
- California: 55 electoral votes, or 20.4% of the vote needed to be elected! California would have to be split into three new states (Northern, Central, and Southern).
- Texas, 38 or 14.1%. Most likely separation would be East and West Texas.
- New York, 29 or 10.7%. Most likely separation would be Great New York City (call it the state of Manhattan), and Upstate New York.
- Florida, 29 or 10.7%. In Florida the division lines are not clear. It really should be Miami and then everything else, but having the peninsula and the panhandle makes sense too.
I believe that somewhere along the way we became enamored with the number "50" for our states; the "fifty nifty United States" and all that. But we added states through the early part of the 20th century, and then just stopped. If we were to divide the four states that I suggest, it has the added benefit of being generally equal (two Democratic and two Republican states) so no party overwhelming wins. We would now have 55 states, and the Senate would thus expand to 110 members.
Radical? Yes, and it has essentially zero chance of ever happening. But it would be cool...
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