AHC: Make all states vote like Maine and Nebraska

You need to get rid of gerrymandering first, otherwise awarding electoral votes by CD is going to open up the system to gerrymandering the Presidency, which is not something I can see being universal across 50 states.
 
You need to get rid of gerrymandering first, otherwise awarding electoral votes by CD is going to open up the system to gerrymandering the Presidency, which is not something I can see being universal across 50 states.
So would you need an amendment to end gerrymandering and one to split states electoral votes?
 
The biggest difficulty is that all the big states have to adopt the method at once. If California is splitting its vote, but Texas is still winner-take-all, Texas has more clout than California.
 
So would you need an amendment to end gerrymandering and one to split states electoral votes?
Or a Supreme Court decision.

The biggest difficulty is that all the big states have to adopt the method at once. If California is splitting its vote, but Texas is still winner-take-all, Texas has more clout than California.
It's more than that. Gerrymandered to hell Texas awards almost all its EVs to the GOP while California has its CDs drawn by an independent commission. Apply this across the country and you see that awarding EVs by congressional district encourages blatant gerrymandering and heavily warps the results of Presidential elections making them far less democratic. You could end up with a candidate losing the popular vote by 6% and still winning the Presidency, just like it can potentially happen in the House. One party is going to always be at the disadvantage because of this, creating a huge barrier for this to happen universally.
 
The best chance of this is actually pre-1900. In 1820 an amendment to this effect came within six votes of passage in the House, at atime when the Senate had several tmes ok'd similar ones.

Iirc, in 1950 and Amendment was introduced to split a State's electoral vote in proportion to its popular one, but died in the Senate.
 
I read the thread and thought 'Somewhat Right' and 'Hard enough Right to make Rick Santorum look like Diane Feinstein'.
 
If done by congressional district, the results would favor the GOP in elections of the past few decades, as I explain at https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...tes-yet-other-states-do.433955/#post-16312984 So it's really hard to see the Democrats agreeing to this.


It certainly is now. OTOH between c1930 and 1960 it probably wouldn't have harmed them much, as the South was then still reasonably solid (though flaking a bit at the edges toward the end) while the North and West would have been divided.
 
This is one of the things Republicans propose in their constitutional convention idea- gives you an idea of how bad it is.
 
Or a Supreme Court decision.

The Supreme court has been very reluctent to interfere with how states run their elections. Other than a minimal amount of oversight in order to ensure that individual voters are not disenfranchised there is an agreement that the constitution leaves it up to the states as to how their elections are administered.
 
The republicans wouldn’t win a single house majority between 1952 and 1994 so it really depends on when

You're confusing "how many members of the House do the Republicans elect?" with "how many congressional districts do they carry for their presidential candidate"? A great many southern congressional districts elected (generally conservative) Democrats to the House before 1994 but rarely if ever voted for the national Democratic ticket. For example, in 1960 Nixon carried 228 congressional districts and would easily have won under the system currently used in Maine and Nebraska--even though the Democrats easily retained control of the House. http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...1-879-29204-1371748+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
 
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