AHC: Destroy the Electoral College!

There are a number of problems with the United States Electoral College, but it's proven resistant to change over the years. Your challenge, should you accept it, is to wholly remove it as a system for electing the President of the United States and replace it with another (hopefully better) system with a PoD of no earlier than 1st January 1900.

No invading, destroying or nuking the United States, or simply causing a breakdown in American society so severe that the Electoral College becomes irrelevant. Scandals in presidential elections are A-OK.

Gumbo

Have a scenario similar to that posited in Drew's excellent "Fear, Loathing, and Gumbo..." TL. A hung electoral college and a divided Congress lead to a questionable decision for President. Several Senators and Representatives, after getting angry letters from their constituents and mindful of growing anger in their home states and districts decide enough is enough and begin lobbying for an amendment that will abolish the Electoral College and instead create a system where each state has so many votes it can have for President (based on census). A majority vote means that states electoral votes go to the candidate that got the majority and only a majority of electoral votes is needed to elect.

Geon

Maybe Bush V. Gore leads to the abolishing of The Electoral College?

Have the 1968 election either result in a deadlocked Electoral College or the winner losing the popular vote.

With much more discontent over the EC,the Bayh-Celler Amendment gets more support and gets ratified.

woweed said:

Maybe Bush V. Gore leads to the abolishing of The Electoral College?

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You need multiple elections of this type, where the electoral vote goes to the popular loser. I think if Obama won this way, you would have interest.

If a political party had started changing the rules at the state level so that no matter the elections outcome the same party always gets the majority in the EC. More than one election where the "winning" candidate looses 60/40 in the actual vote count and the whole system is going to no longer be seen as legitimate.

I think it might be a two step process:
1) A series of elections (nearly sequential) where the winner loses the popular vote by a significant margin generates strong interest for change which leads to all states adopting somewhat similar forms of proportional allocation (i.e. a candidate gets roughly the same percentage of electoral votes as they get percentage of the vote in that state).

2) Then, due to rounding issues (relatively electoral votes in some states) in one or more contentious elections the outcome seems at odds with the political will, this generates the observation that the EC largely just echoes the voting in a state (making it largely irrelevant), but still has issues. This prompts a constitutional amendment and its abolition.

Under the usual two-party duopoly the problem is that you need a situation where both parties are getting screwed over by the electoral college so you get bipartisan support for abolishing it, and that's hard to envisage.

The most likely possibility is something like a successful, continuing breakaway Dixiecrat party that continues to control the electoral apparatus in the South as in the first half of the 20th century and is not undermined by a Voting Rights Act. The result is that they get all of the South's electoral votes every election and force a hung electoral college, then demand concessions and play kingmaker in a corrupt bargain to deliver either the Democratic or Republican candidate to office. After a while both parties will get fed up with this and someone will realise that, because of how restrictive voting was in the South (not solely against black people but also against poorer white people - Southern states sometimes had as little as ten percent of the turnout that equally populated northern states with the same number of electoral votes did), they can get rid of this Dixiecrat stranglehold by going over to a national popular vote system.

It's still an upward climb I think though, both parties have to see it as the only viable option considering the downsides for them.

Geon said:

Have a scenario similar to that posited in Drew's excellent "Fear, Loathing, and Gumbo..." TL. A hung electoral college and a divided Congress lead to a questionable decision for President. Several Senators and Representatives, after getting angry letters from their constituents and mindful of growing anger in their home states and districts decide enough is enough and begin lobbying for an amendment that will abolish the Electoral College and instead create a system where each state has so many votes it can have for President (based on census). A majority vote means that states electoral votes go to the candidate that got the majority and only a majority of electoral votes is needed to elect.

Geon

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Thande said:

Under the usual two-party duopoly the problem is that you need a situation where both parties are getting screwed over by the electoral college so you get bipartisan support for abolishing it, and that's hard to envisage.

The most likely possibility is something like a successful, continuing breakaway Dixiecrat party that continues to control the electoral apparatus in the South as in the first half of the 20th century and is not undermined by a Voting Rights Act. The result is that they get all of the South's electoral votes every election and force a hung electoral college, then demand concessions and play kingmaker in a corrupt bargain to deliver either the Democratic or Republican candidate to office. After a while both parties will get fed up with this and someone will realise that, because of how restrictive voting was in the South (not just against black people but also against poor whites - Southern states sometimes had as little as ten percent of the turnout that equally populated northern states with the same number of electoral votes did), they can get rid of this Dixiecrat stranglehold by going over to a national popular vote system.

It's still an upward climb I think though, both parties have to see it as the only viable option considering the downsides for them.

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I think these two are the easiest route to go. You either have a complete catastrafuck of a presidential election, that ends with some second-rate dupe in the White House while the Electoral College turns into trench warfare in the House, or you have the Dixiecrats (or another "kingmaker" party) get entrenched for more than a single election and both parties swallow their mutual dislike in order to defeat them.

As mentioned you need several dodgy elections in a row.

The simplest way is probably to have an issue that deeply splits both main parties, so that you have 4 (or more) serious candidates, strong enough that each could win at least a couple of states (more if they are small) and score double digits in several others.
With a little luck and the usual no-chancers to siphon off votes you should have several states won by 30% or less, and the EC results would be more or less random.

Think of it as The US Lectern Series

The trick is to come up with a sufficiently damaging splitting issue, no idea there.

If, say, the Southern Strategy fails and the American Independent Party manages to push the vote to the House in 1968, and manages an electoral presence in 1972 and maybe 1976, would that be enough to push for major change?

Tom Colton said:

If, say, the Southern Strategy fails and the American Independent Party manages to push the vote to the House, and manages an electoral presence in 1972 and maybe 1976, would that be enough to push for major change?

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I'd say '68 might be a better chance, Nixon's landslide was by no means assured, and given the right pokes and prods I can easily see an election that gets thrown to the House.

Whoops, sorry, bad formatting. I meant 1968, natch.

Does the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact count? It technically doesn't eliminate the electoral college, but does render it superfluous.

If so, have a series of elections where the popular vote loser wins (and critically, where different parties benefit). Kerry came surprisingly close to winning Ohio (and thus the electoral vote) while losing the popular vote. If the Republicans had been gored the same way as the Democrats had, it might have made them more willing to sign on (versus today, where the NPVIC is almost exclusively a blue state thing). At the same time, anti-Bush sentiment among Democrats probably keeps the Democrats onboard with the NPVIC. In these circumstances, I could see it having gone into effect by the present day.

I wonder if you could also have pulled this off as part of the general Progressive Era reforms - if you have direct election of Senators, it makes sense to have direct election of the Presidency.

Failing that, you would need the Democrats in the first half of the century to be screwed by the EC or the Republicans in the second half. Why? Because the place least likely to want to give up the EC is the South.

I agree with Thande that both parties would have to get screwed. Perhaps we have a series of screwy elections in 1-2 the Republican wins the EC, but loses the popular vote significantly, but then have 1-2 elections where the Democrat wins the EC, but significantly loses the popular vote.

The other thing that could create/increase angst with the EC would be if we had an election where multiple electors made a show of NOT voting for who their states expected (faithless electors not bound by their state's law), changing the results that the news had been touting for weeks. Perhaps these electors became pissed at the nominee they were notionally supposed to vote for or some might actually "sell" their votes for a promise of a plum assignment in the other administration.

What about good ground game by Kerry's campaign in Ohio, maybe also court decisons to make voting in urban areas

jahenders said:

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The other thing that could create/increase angst with the EC would be if we had an election where multiple electors made a show of NOT voting for who their states expected (faithless electors not bound by their state's law), changing the results that the news had been touting for weeks. Perhaps these electors became pissed at the nominee they were notionally supposed to vote for or some might actually "sell" their votes for a promise of a plum assignment in the other administration.

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Problem is there are easy fixes for that.
The simplest would be to automate the first ballot based on results reported from the states.
Electors only needed when no clear majority exists.

Also, I don't think there is anything preventing states from criminalizing Faithless Electors, possibly some variant of fraud under color of authority or breach of fiduciary trust ?
There just hasn't been any reason to bother so far...

jahenders said:

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The other thing that could create/increase angst with the EC would be if we had an election where multiple electors made a show of NOT voting for who their states expected (faithless electors not bound by their state's law), changing the results that the news had been touting for weeks. Perhaps these electors became pissed at the nominee they were notionally supposed to vote for or some might actually "sell" their votes for a promise of a plum assignment in the other administration.

Click to expand...

Problem is there are easy fixes for that.
The simplest would be to automate the first ballot based on results reported from the states.
Electors only needed when no clear majority exists.

Also, I don't think there is anything preventing states from criminalizing Faithless Electors, possibly some variant of fraud under color of authority or breach of fiduciary trust ?
There just hasn't been any reason to bother so far...