They used to have this thing called the Electoral College...

The National Popular Vote bill...[ ]... has passed 31 state legislative chambers, in 21 small, medium-small, medium, and large states, including one house in AR, CT, DE, DC, ME, MI, NV, NM, NY, NC, and OR, and both houses in CA, CO, HI, IL, NJ, MD, MA ,RI, VT, and WA . ...

How soon and how many of these legislative chambers will reintroduce and pass this legislation again (as the legislation passed by those 31 chambers "died" with the end of that individual state's legislative session)?
 
January First-Of-May, one problem with that scenario would be that Tilden lost the popular vote so he would have absolutely no incentive to support such a proposal.


Tilden did not lose the popular vote. Iirc he got around 4.3 million to a little under 4.1 million for hayes.
 
January First-Of-May, one problem with that scenario would be that Tilden lost the popular vote so he would have absolutely no incentive to support such a proposal.

Tilden did not lose the popular vote. Iirc he got around 4.3 million to a little under 4.1 million for hayes.

Exactly. Hayes lost the popular vote so he would have absolutely no incentive to support such a proposal. Hence, Tilden has to win.
A funny way I just thought of: the Electoral Commission awards all the electors to Hayes - except the one who was in Oregon (IIRC) and was chosen against the will of the people. Tilden wins 185-184, and at that point an amendment to abolish the electors entirely and just go with nationwide popular vote might well be favored by both parties. Just what we need. :D
(Or maybe not, I'm not sure. Or maybe the setup above is ASB in the first place - I don't know much about 1876 political issues...)
 
The balance between 'turn out the base' and 'appeal the middle' shifts a little bit in the 'turn out the base' direction. In OTL, the only point to getting the Texans really, really excited about the presidential race is fundraising, since the state's electoral votes are in the bag for the GOP anyway. Ditto several liberal states for the Dems.

But in TTL, Republicans have more incentive to rack up the paranoia and the sense of crisis in the Deep South, Texas, Utah, etc., while Democrats have the same incentive on the coasts and in urban centers. Presidential races will be more vitriolic and partisan than in OTL, though only comparatively.
 
The possibility of recounts should not even be a consideration in debating the merits of a national popular vote. No one has ever suggested that the possibility of a recount constitutes a valid reason why state governors or U.S. Senators, for example, should not be elected by a popular vote.

If everything went as intended, we'd be living in a vastly different world, but with a popular vote system, the number of jurisdictions in which competition occurs is reduced from 51 to one. With the electoral college, one or two states may make or break a presidential candidacy, so tthe need or desire to recount is confined as a result. If you have a popularly elected president, and the division in votes is, say, exactly 10,000 between the top two contenders, then it's not unreasonable for one or both candidates to seek a recount. But, by virtue of the fact that the election was nationalized, such a recount would be likely to occur nationwide and/or in every large state.
 
I sense a great repetition in this thread...

Personally, I think things might work out better if the EC was abolished. It might, as someone mentioned, (or in my thoughts, hopefully) weaken the power of the two major political parties and make elections more about the canidate themselves and their position then which party they belong to. (becaue there are plenty of people out there who, unless hit over the hit by outside factors, will only vote by party lines. Period)
 
If anyone is genuinely concerned about minimizing the possibility of recounts, then a single national pool of votes provides the way to drastically reduce the likelihood of recounts and eliminate the artificial crises that are regularly produced by the current state-level winner-take-all system.

[FONT=&quot]No recount would have been warranted in any of the nation’s 56 previous presidential elections if the outcome had been based on the nationwide count. [/FONT]

Recounts in presidential elections would be far less likely to occur under a national popular vote system than under the current state-by-state winner-take-all system (i.e., awarding all of a state's electoral votes to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in each separate state).

The current system does not act as a firewall that helpfully isolates recounts to particular states but, instead, is the repeated cause of unnecessary fires.
● The current system repeatedly creates artificial crises because every presidential election generates 51 separate opportunities for a dispute.
● There have been five litigated state counts in the nation’s 56 presidential elections under the current state-by-state winner-take-all system. This rate is dramatically higher than the historical 1-in-160 rate for elections in which there is a single pool of votes and in which the winner is the candidate who receives the most popular votes.

Based on a recent study of 7,645 statewide elections in the 26-year period from 1980 through 2006 by FairVote:
*The average change in the margin of victory as a result of a statewide recount was a mere 274 votes.
*The original outcome remained unchanged in over 90% of the recounts.
*The probability of a recount is 1 in 332 elections (23 recounts in 7,645 elections), or once in 1,328 years.

If you're going to ignore my points and just repeat yours, then why do I bother?
 
To get back to the discussion at hand, this really just leads to a "Gore wins" timeline. Otherwise, every election would likely have gone as it did in real-life.

I highly doubt a popular-vote system would have broken down the two-party system substantially. Most advanced democracies have two major parties and/or two major blocs, and that's especially true in countries that use FPTP for their legislative elections. And abolishing the EC would actually make regional third-party bids like Wallace in '68 or Thurmond in '48 less likely.

At best, national third party bids might become *slightly* more viable. If the 40% runoff proposal were enacted, then maybe Perot does better in 1992 (but still falling short), and maybe Nader in 2000 gets a higher percentage in a (vain) hope of forcing a runoff, but he likely still falls short of 10% and possibly just throws the election to Bush (as in OTL).
 
[FONT=&quot]No recount would have been warranted in any of the nation’s 56 previous presidential elections if the outcome had been based on the nationwide count. [/FONT]

1880, anyone? The margin in the popular vote was less than two thousand, out of nearly nine million votes cast. That'll be only twice OTL 2000 Florida, and would certainly need a recount. (I don't know the actual recount rules, but 1960 might also count under some.)
Notably, the electoral vote wasn't all that close - to the point that Sheppard's site on election closeness list five states as needed to swing to change 1880 (not really all too much, but still a lot - funnily, 1960 also needed five, but 1976 only two and 2004 three).
 
1880, anyone? The margin in the popular vote was less than two thousand, out of nearly nine million votes cast. That'll be only twice OTL 2000 Florida, and would certainly need a recount. (I don't know the actual recount rules, but 1960 might also count under some.)
Notably, the electoral vote wasn't all that close - to the point that Sheppard's site on election closeness list five states as needed to swing to change 1880 (not really all too much, but still a lot - funnily, 1960 also needed five, but 1976 only two and 2004 three).

Ohio going the other way would have been enough for Kerry to win in 2004.
 
Ohio going the other way would have been enough for Kerry to win in 2004.

I know.
That's just not how Sheppard's counting works: he minimizes votes, not states or - even better IMHO - percent, so his method as it is overestimates the importance of small states and often seems to have hilarious results like Nevada or Wyoming or whatever was the least populated state at the year discussed swinging 20% or even more, which looks much less plausible to me than a bigger state swinging a little even if it takes more actual people.
(Not that any of his alternate elections are plausible, of course. Still, any state, however small, swinging most of the way is just too hilarious (if possible in some rare circumstances - think 1860 Oregon, and even there it wasn't enough).)

BTW, Wendell, what do you think about 1880, and my idea for a timeline? ;)


...So what, how? :)
January First-of-May
 
I agree that 1880 is hard to do because, even if Tilden gets in in 1877 as a POD, he likely still will have lost the popular vote. Now, maybe if Hayes is in, the proppsed six year term idea takes off and some of the same people get behind abolishing the EC as got behind that idea. Consider, for example, the crosspolination between the 1860's civil rights movement and the slightly concurrent suffrage movement for women, both of which had some crossover with prohibition.
 
I think that the idea of endless recounts seems a bit of a nonstarter. Since even with the electoral college abolished, the polling is still conducted by each individual state government.

If candidate B lost the popular vote to candidate A by say 500,000 votes, while on the national level it would be a small margin, on a state level that's pretty massive. As such the recount would have to be conducted across multiple states, and each recount would have to be requested seperately. What's more is that the recounts would have to be conducted in states where the election was particularly close, which is technically possible to be in no states, since multiple states with wide margins going both ways can cancel each other out.

Even if you had a good number of states where the vote was close enough to warrant a recount, their total would have to amount to more than the difference in the national vote which it may not be. If it wasn't then there would be no point in having any of the recounts, and SCOTUS precident already falls on the side of ending recounts where it drags out the process too long.

Simply put, dragging out the election by calling for multiple recounts is made less likely in the absence of the electoral college, not more.
 
I think that the idea of endless recounts seems a bit of a nonstarter. Since even with the electoral college abolished, the polling is still conducted by each individual state government.

If candidate B lost the popular vote to candidate A by say 500,000 votes, while on the national level it would be a small margin, on a state level that's pretty massive. As such the recount would have to be conducted across multiple states, and each recount would have to be requested seperately. What's more is that the recounts would have to be conducted in states where the election was particularly close, which is technically possible to be in no states, since multiple states with wide margins going both ways can cancel each other out.

Even if you had a good number of states where the vote was close enough to warrant a recount, their total would have to amount to more than the difference in the national vote which it may not be. If it wasn't then there would be no point in having any of the recounts, and SCOTUS precident already falls on the side of ending recounts where it drags out the process too long.

Simply put, dragging out the election by calling for multiple recounts is made less likely in the absence of the electoral college, not more.
But if the election is decided by the national vote, why does it matter the decision of any individual state?
 
each state handles its own polling even without an electoral college. You would have to challenge it on a state by state level.
But you mentioned that it only could be challenged in close states. If a state goes for candidate A 4,000,000 to 3,000,000, candidate B (looking for as many national votes as possible) might want to challenge that in hopes of getting a 3,999,000 to 3,001,000 result.
 
I think it's worth pointing out that basic statistics would indicate that recounts would be less likely in a national pool. The sample error decreases the larger the sample, so a pool of 100 million votes is extremely unlikely to be overturned by a recount, even if it's within 1%. That isn't true at a state level contest.

In any event, the threat of a recount seems silly to me, considering that countries like Brazil and Mexico that have large electorates, tens of millions strong, manage fine in these circumstances. (Yes, you had AMLO grandstand in Mexico in '06, but the process itself went perfectly well.)
 
What I feel people here are missing is that the states conduct the elections. There is federal oversight and some national standards in place, but the time, place, and manner of elections remain the province of state governments. In some such state, ballots aren't even tallied until two weeks after the polls close because people vote by mail.
 
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