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The petitions have yet to appear around here, but I have
read that an outfit called Make Your Vote for President
Count
is trying to collect signatures for an initiative
on the November ballot. If it passed, it would change the
way Colorado chooses presidential electors.
As it is, Colorado operates under a winner take
all
system. The presidential candidate who gains a
plurality of the popular vote gets all nine of our
electoral votes.
Under this initiative, electoral votes would be split in proportion to the popular vote, with some rounding because there aren't any fractional electoral votes. A candidate who got 30 percent of the popular vote would get about 30 percent of the electoral vote, or three electoral votes.
Colorado is among 48 states with winner-take-all; Maine and Nebraska are the exceptions.
It's safe to say that if you were designing a republic
today, you wouldn't have an electoral college. It might
have made sense in the 18th century, when transportation
and communication were limited to the speed of a horse. The
public could hardly be expected to be familiar with
potential presidents, but state legislatures could select
people to serve on a sort of executive hiring
committee.
The original federal constitution of 1787 is not
democratic. It established three branches of government;
only the House of Representatives, one half of one branch,
was directly elected. Senators were picked by legislatures.
The President was chosen by the electoral college, and
judges were appointed by the President with the advice
and consent
of the Senate.
Some provisions have changed; for example, senators are now directly elected.
But the electoral college remains, which means that a candidate can come out ahead in the popular vote, as Al Gore did in 2000, and still lose.
That should not blind us to certain virtues of the electoral college. One is that it allows states to set their own voting standards; no matter how they expand or contract the franchise, it won't affect their clout in the electoral college. A state gets as many electoral votes as it has representatives and senators, no matter how many people it allows to vote.
On that account, some progressive venues could allow women to vote, as Wyoming and Colorado and other Western states did in the 19th century. Georgia could allow 18-year-olds to vote long before the rest of the country did. Massachusetts can now allow felons to vote from prison, while some other states bar them from the polls for life.
Another virtue of the electoral college is that it limits the extent of fraud. Even if thousands of cadavers cast ballots in Cook County, Illinois still has the same number of electoral votes. If each of those graveyard votes counted directly for president, we'd have a carnival of challenges -- something like Florida in 2000, but much more widespread.
Since it would take a constitutional amendment to eliminate the electoral college, it's here to stay for a while.
But would Colorado benefit from splitting the electoral vote in proportion to the popular vote?
There are good arguments both ways. Under winner-take-all, our nine electoral votes are worth courting if the election looks close. Thus presidential candidates might address our concerns -- public land management, energy exploration, water development, etc.
But if the election doesn't look close, or Colorado doesn't look competitive, we're probably not worth the trouble under winner-take-all.
Under a proportional split, candidates of either party could reasonably hope to pick up a few electoral votes in Colorado, so both might have to pay more attention to us, especially if it were a close race.
Thus I don't see how a proportional electoral vote would
amount to unilateral disarmament
for Colorado. It
might even get us more attention.
But we should also keep in mind that only twice in its history has Colorado made a whit of difference in a presidential election. The last time was in 2000, when Colorado's eight Republican votes helped George W. Bush win 271-266 in the electoral college.
The first time was 1876, the first year Colorado was a state. Colorado's three Republican votes helped Rutherford B. Hayes win 185-184 in the electoral college. There was, however, no presidential election here; to save money, the legislature just named three Republican electors.
It appears that under the current system, Colorado matters about once a century. And so there might be some room for improvement.
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