[EL] Or we might try something completely different ...

Thu Sep 15 09:20:25 PDT 2011

Jon,

Before we try that out for electing the most powerful democratically elected
office in the world, here's a thought: how about seeing if you can persuade
a single city to adopt it for picking its mayor or a single state legislator
to suggest adopting it for choosing that state's governor?

I feel reassured by similar"experiments" in popular vote elections, as
Americans use the popular vote system to elect every U.S. Member of
Congress, every governor and every state legislator. Rent-seeking or not,
I'm not ready to abandon such elections.

Indeed I have a challenge to Tara Ross and other defenders of the status
quo: try to win an Electoral College-type system for electing the governor
of a state. Most of the arguments against a national popular vote for
president also apply against a statewide popular vote for governor....
"Winners with 15%!".... "Rampant fraud from urban machines!..... "Small
states (counties) ignored!"...."Recount horror in close elections!".... And
so on.

In fact Texas governor Rick Perry, an opponent of the National Popular Vote
plan for such reasons, might see that having a statewide popular vote in a
big, diverse state like Texas is an accident waiting to happen. To head off
that accident, he could support a system where each county had a certain
number of electoral votes tied to its population, and the winner of each
county would get all of those electoral votes. That way future candidates
for governor of Texas could ignore cities, ignore rural areas, and focus on
a few suburban swing counties. Who knows, maybe Gov. Perry would even jump
on the congressional district allocation system bandwagon, charitably urging
Texas to enact the change right now to establish a precedent for other
states to follow.

- Rob Richie

On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 12:04 PM, Jon Roland <jon.roland at constitution.org>wrote:

> **
> There is a fundamental flaw in selecting presidents by any kind of popular
> vote, whether nationally, by state, or by congressional district. All these
> methods make the election an exercise in rent-seeking, with those most
> affected by public decisions investing the most in influencing outcomes, and
> having those investments pay off in benefits at the expense of the rest of
> us.
>
> We should return to the original design of an electoral college of
> statesmen who exercise independent judgment to elect a president based on
> merit rather than on campaign effectiveness. I have an amendment for that:
>
> *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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