In a series of no-drama votes yesterday, the nation’s 538 electors were expected to cast their ballots precisely as expected: 365 for Barack Obama, 173 for John McCain (the results will not be officially tallied until January, but I have seen no reports of surprises). As a result, Barack Obama will be sworn in as the nation’s 44th president on January 20, 2009.
And in other news, the Supreme Court has again refused (without comment or recorded dissent) to get involved in a challenge to Obama’s eligibility to serve as president. Last week Leo Donofrio’s “natural born citizen” case went up in flames; this week, the Court similarly denied an application by one Cort Wrotnowski that asked the Court to prevent Obama from taking office on similar grounds.
It’s well past time for that silly canard to die. Let’s hope that the Court’s persistent refusal to get involved will help.
The electors, decked out in their tuxedos and gowns, chose our president for us yesterday. Although it’s a bit of a formality nowadays, I find comfort in the fact that the electors can, if they wish, disrespect the will of us generally stupid voters. In our history, we have been graced by 157 courageously faithless electors. Some might call it an elitist construction, but I see the Electoral College as a necessary check on that dangerous thing called democracy.
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of the 157 faithless electors [I think actually 158]…
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p>71 of them were when their pledged candidate had died — 63 in 1872 for POTUS candidate Horace Greely, who lost in a landslide anyway. As a side note: there were 3 faithful electors for Greely, and their three EVs were disallowed by Congress. Another 8 were for VPOTUS candidate James Sherman, running mate of Taft. Given the 1872 precedence set by Congress and the blowout suffered at the hands of Woody Wilson, I wouldn’t worry so much.
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p>1 of them was a misspelling of John Ewards for POTUS, presumably by accident.
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p>1 of them was to maintain GWashington’s status as the only unanimous EV winner. This has been disputed by historians though.
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p>76 [including 8 of the above] were faithful for POTUS but faithless exclusively for VPOTUS. Many of these go to civil war or prior, and are North-South compromise candidate protests.
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p>24 states have laws which punish faithless electors.
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p>1952 SCOTUS determined that a state could require the elector to pledge and remove those electors who don’t. Michigan and Minnesota go further — faithless votes are rendered invalid.
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p>0 elections for POTUS or VPOTUS have ever been flipped because of one or more faithless electors.
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p>As a side note, if the NPV works out by way of states deciding how their EVs will be allocated based on national popular vote, won’t faithless electors become more commonplace? I suppose not as long as the state allows the party which won the popular vote to choose the electors. Still, there’ll be plenty of pressure, and I would hope that the NPV states follow the methods of Michigan and Minnesota and do everything to (a) ensure attempts of faithlessness meet jail time, and (b) ensure that attempts of faithlessness are rendered void, with a new elector taking the place, so that the correct number of EVs are allocated to the correct candidate.
Typically, one DC elector spoils their ballot as a protest against the lack of Congressional representation. That didn’t happen this year?
That happened only in 2000.
The point of my comment wasn’t that faithless electors are a problem in practice. They’re not. My point was to throw some water on the idea, held by some, that the EC was a brilliant idea crafted by perfectly wise individuals. It wasn’t. The EC was born from the same mindset that decided only white, male property-owners could vote, and even they were deemed too stupid to directly elect their own Senators. It is the belief that the founders were somehow perfect, or shades of this belief, that have motivated some to cling to poor arguments for the continued existence of the Electoral College.
Nobody ever thought that the people were “too stupid to directly elect their own Senators”. This overlooks the intended function of the Senate and of Congress as a whole.
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p>The House membership was always intended to be chosen by “the people” (initially, as you say, white male property owners, and these days by all citizens). The Senate was not.
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p>And that’s not because the people were too stupid. It’s because the Senate wasn’t supposed to represent the people. In the early days of the Republic, the nation was much more of a federation than it is now. The individual states were more autonomous than they are now, and the Senate was supposed to be their representation in Congress.
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p>One branch for the people, one branch for the states of which the country was comprised.
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p>After the Civil War, though, the country became much less federated as it became clear that, no, states aren’t actually all that autonomous. With that view in mind, having the legislatures of the states choose their Senators made less and less sense, leading to the passage of the 17th Amendment less than 50 years later.
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p>So that’s the Senate. The Electoral College should be viewed similarly. The President was not, originally, supposed to be the leader of the people but rather the leader of a federation of loosely bound states. As such, the Electoral College was implemented to be a mechanism whereby the states, not the people, chose their leader. Originally many states’ legislatures chose the electors, but over time that swung towards the people choosing the electors.
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p>Furthermore, the Electoral College was not intended to be the primary mechanism for electing a president. It was expected that there would always be 4 or 5 or 6 or more major candidates, and that is why Congress is the fall-back mechanism if no candidate gets a majority of the College. It was supposed to be more parliamentary than it is today, and the College was in place merely to prevent Congress from subverting a landslide election and putting somebody else in place.
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p>As James Madison concluded in Federalist Paper 39, “The proposed Constitution, therefore, is, in strictness, neither a national nor a federal Constitution, but a composition of both.” (By “national” he meant decided by the people and by “federal” decided by the states.) We would do well to remember the intended hybrid nature of our Constitution when making arguments about flaws in it. Some flaws truly are flaws, but many more are because today’s government is not what the framers had in mind. This doesn’t make it right or wrong, but just different, and makes some aspects of the Constitution seem outmoded (as, arguably, they are).
that a bad idea producing a good result doesn’t argue for ceasing the activity producing the good result.
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p>If the EC is a bad idea today, it’s a bad idea regardless of the good or bad, fair or foul reasons for forming it over 200 years ago. Likewise, if the EC is a good idea today, it’s a good idea regardless of the good or bad, fair or foul reasons for forming it over 200 years ago.
You make some good points. I’ll follow-up on a few of them . . .
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p>Perhaps not “stupid,” per se, but definitely not worthy of voting on them. Madison declared that the Constitution needed to protect the “minority of the opulent from the majority.” “The senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability,” he concluded. That was why Senators were appointed: to protect the wealthy from the masses. As Madison said, political power should rest in the hands of those who “represent the wealth of the nation,” and feared that those who “labor under all hardships of life” might demand a “more equal distribution of its blessings.” It was therefore necessary to find ways to curb democratic power. Personally, I see the Constitution as a great, democratic experiment, but still very much tied to the aristocratic tendencies of the time.
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p>Yes, I know the Senate wasn’t suppose to represent the people. That was exactly my point. In what way does appointing Senators make them more representative of “the state” than does a direct election of them by people who live in the state? Only in the sense that the true interests of “the state” are the interests of those who do the appointing . . . the “more capable set of men” as Madison called them.
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p>That is a good point. The President has, over time, come to be seen as the President of the people rather than the President of a federation of states.
In what way does appointing Senators make them more representative of “the state” than does a direct election of them by people who live in the state?
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p>By the same logic that has our ambassadors appointed by the President (and confirmed by the Senate, of course) instead of directly elected. Ambassadors represent the US government, not the people of the US, except insofar as the federal government represents the people.
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p>The Senate was intended to be semi-ambassadorial in this respect. They represented the state governments, not the people of the state. In a looser federation, this sort of setup makes sense. In the post-Civil War, it did not. So it was changed.
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p>Like I said, the original setup wasn’t right or wrong, necessarily. You seem to think it was just plain wrong – which it is for today’s sensibilities. But not for the thinking of the 1780s, when it was thought that the United States would be more like Europe is today (a loose confederation of states), than how it actually turned out (a very tight confederation – but still, I’d argue, a confederation).
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p>It’s a good thing we have an amendment process in place, eh?
…that maybe the SCOTUS should take up the birth-citizenship issue, decisively and unanimously rule in Obama’s favor, and make clear they will never address it again. One of these “birthers” as they’re called has threatened a lawsuit for every action Obama takes, on the grounds that illegitimate President means invalid action.
They should do exactly what they’re doing — ignore these cases. If they were to take the case, it would be a circus to end all circuses.
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p>Let these dipshits file all the frivolous lawsuits they want — thousands of frivolous lawsuits get filed every year, and they are quickly disposed of. No reason these suits can’t suffer the same fate.
…ignoring it doesn’t solve anything. I know we all think this is ludricous, but in this case I favor of the decisive blow of course. I say let’s have the full circus and get it over with or risk watching the sideshows for the next 4 or 8 years.
the media will certainly move on. There’s nothing to see, and that won’t change.
then there would be incessant cries of “activist court!”. nothing will shut these people up. the only thing to do is give them less attention, not more, so that, as stomv says, the media can move on.
is a signal that there is an important issue worthy of the Court’s attention. That would send absolutely the wrong signal — the Court’s taking the case would, in fact, provoke something close to a constitutional crisis. The “sideshows” you speak of are put on by a tiny bunch of loons. Pretty soon no one at all will be paying any attention to them — it’ll go the way of “Vince Foster was murdered by Bill/Hillary Clinton,” as it should.
And after that, they can move on to the challenges to the validity of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. Heck, I am sure there are plenty of lunatics who want to challenge the right of women’s suffrage and everything else.