[EL] National Popular Vote Passes Crucial Milestone

[Sean Parnell]

Fabulous. We'll let the people with the best memory and a fixation on the
Constitution select our president - basically constitutional attorneys and
history professors, along with a handful of random lay people who enjoy
reading about the Constitution. What, no room for people who instead chose
to focus their study on Bible verses, or Wealth of Nations, or the lyrics of
the Beatles?

 

I'm suddenly reminded of William F. Buckley's statement that he'd rather be
governed by the first 1,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than the
faculty of Harvard.

 

Sean Parnell

President

Center for Competitive Politics

http://www.campaignfreedom.org

http://www.twitter.com/seanparnellccp

124 S. West Street, #201

Alexandria, VA  22310

(703) 894-6800 phone

(703) 894-6813 direct

(703) 894-6811 fax

 

From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu
[mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] On Behalf Of Jon
Roland
Sent: Thursday, June 09, 2011 1:00 AM
To: law-election at department-lists.uci.edu
Subject: Re: [EL] National Popular Vote Passes Crucial Milestone

 

It is worth reviewing the original design objective for the Electoral
College. It was not to be composed of slates pledged to a candidate and
elected by popular vote. The Framers were quite aware of that option, or of
direct popular election, and rejected it out of hand. They wanted the
president to be elected by panels of wise men of each state who could
deliberate on the choice carefully, not unlike the way a kind of jury might
decide on a verdict. Of course, that design broke down as early as the
election of 1800, but it is timely to re-examine whether the president
should be chosen by any kind of election. I submit it is a very poor way to
choose the best person to play that critical role, and that the ones thus
elected have not been the best we could have gotten. The last kind of person
we should give that job is someone who wants it badly enough to go through
the presidential election process, a process that is all too likely to give
us narcissists and psychopaths.

A better way would be to select panels of uncommitted persons through a
sortition process that would involve a series of alternating steps of random
selection followed by winnowing for likely wisdom, until the final panel is
selected, uninfluenced by money, party, or any other factors except their
own independent judgment. They would then choose among a long list of
candidates, or perhaps even nominate some of their own.

An amendment <http://constitution.org/reform/us/con_amend.htm>  to do this
is:




Selecting electors for president and vice-president

The electors for president and vice-president shall be selected in each
state by the following procedure: 

1.     An initial panel of citizens qualified to vote in that state equal to
one hundred times the number of electors to be selected from that state
shall be selected at random, in a process that shall be supervised by a
randomly-selected grand jury specially empaneled for that task;

2.     Members of this initial panel shall take an examination in which each
shall recite from memory 20 randomly selected clauses of this Constitution,
and shall receive a score of one for each clause he or she is able to recite
without error;

3.     A second panel shall be selected from the first, consisting of ten
times the number of electors to be selected, with the odds of selecting each
weighted by the score he or she received in the examination, and with
exclusion of any who scored zero;

4.     Members of the second panel shall meet, and each shall rank all the
others in descending order of civic virtue, giving a score indicating the
rank consisting of the number of panelists for the highest down to one for
the lowest;

5.     The electors shall then be selected from this second panel at random,
but weighted by his or her average rank from the previous round of peer
assessments.






-- Jon
 
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Constitution Society               http://constitution.org
2900 W Anderson Ln C-200-322           twitter.com/lex_rex
Austin, TX 78757 512/299-5001  jon.roland at constitution.org
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