Pretty much... certainly as regards political issues surrounding partisan topics like the Electoral College, where the issue is not so much which system works best, but which system will get the outcome I want on other issues such as Supreme Court nominations and therefore a woman's right to choose what happens to her body.
Yes. And that's half my point. The notion that the Electoral College is a "partisan issue" strikes me as crazy. And I've already said: "Who exactly decided that the overall national vote was so important? Most of the time in my experience it's whoever thinks that this figure says they deserved victory/more seats than they actually got."
People wanting to change a system based on the result of maybe one election just strike me as staggeringly short-sighted. Not least because when the NEW system doesn't give them the result they think they deserve somewhere down the track, they'll want to change it again.
How is that any different from gerrymandering? Is that not the very essence of gerrymandering, knowing the result you want to achieve and working backwards from there to set things up so that you achieve it?
I acknowledge some people have wanted to change the Electoral College system for considerably longer. Nevertheless, the amount of noise about the issue sharply increased after 2016. And that seems to me like a spectacularly bad starting point as an argument for change of a constitutional system.
Not least because it wrongly assumes that you can change one thing and then everything will be fine, ie you'll get the result you want. No. Because when the rules of the game change, the players will change how they play.
And my point is that your point is not likely to get much of a hearing in this environment, where the short term seems so vital.
That's a highly dubious argument, since it's making the case that a state shouldn't be allowed to have its say (via its state legislature) in deciding to back the national outcome. Either states get to have their say or they don't. You can't switch it up mid-argument.
The question is whether saying "I completely abdicate having an opinion of my own" counts as having your say.
No, the question is about the meaning of this clause from Article 2, Section 1:
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.
That's a highly dubious argument, since it's making the case that a state shouldn't be allowed to have its say (via its state legislature) in deciding to back the national outcome. Either states get to have their say or they don't. You can't switch it up mid-argument.
The question is whether saying "I completely abdicate having an opinion of my own" counts as having your say.
No, the question is about the meaning of this clause from Article 2, Section 1:
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.
The question is whether that clause has a context that means there is any limitation to the ways in which the Legislature thereof may direct. Can the legislature "direct" that it subdelegates outside of its own jurisdiction?
The notion that a constitution might, from its structure, contain such limitations is not entirely novel.
In any case I'm not sure you're even reading the right clause. That a clause about how electors appointed. Not a clause about how electors then vote. I realise the system actually used in the USA at the moment rather blurs these 2 questions together.
It's an after effect of the Civil War, people changed from "The United States are" to "The United States is". Is the US one nation first, orxa collection of states first? Much of the Constitution is set up for the latter, but history since the 1860's and especially the New Deal and after have pushed it to the former.
I always thought it was amusing to hear western separatists in Canada complain about being pushed around by Ottawa, and then saying that Alberta etc. should join the US.
ie. the country with a Bill Of Rights unencumbered by a Notwithstanding Clause, federal investigators claiming jurisdiction over post-office robberies in Wyoming(*), social programs(granted, sparser than what is available in Canada) administered entirely from DC, and a federal Department Of Education which, while not the main source of funding and curriculum, has more input over schooling than anyone in Ottawa does.
(*) True, the Mounties rule the roost in much of rural Canada, but they serve at the pleasure of provincial and local governments. American jurisdictions have no such right of refusal over FBI interventions.
That's a highly dubious argument, since it's making the case that a state shouldn't be allowed to have its say (via its state legislature) in deciding to back the national outcome. Either states get to have their say or they don't. You can't switch it up mid-argument.
The question is whether saying "I completely abdicate having an opinion of my own" counts as having your say.
No, the question is about the meaning of this clause from Article 2, Section 1:
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.
The question is whether that clause has a context that means there is any limitation to the ways in which the Legislature thereof may direct. Can the legislature "direct" that it subdelegates outside of its own jurisdiction?
That’s all it says about appointing electors - just the numbers and a few categories of people who can’t be electors. The next clause says Congress may determine the time of choosing them and the day they vote, but that’s it for Article 2.
The notion that a constitution might, from its structure, contain such limitations is not entirely novel.
But there aren’t any.
In any case I'm not sure you're even reading the right clause. That a clause about how electors appointed. Not a clause about how electors then vote. I realise the system actually used in the USA at the moment rather blurs these 2 questions together.
The manner of voting is now set by the 12th Amendment, but there’s nothing there requiring electors to pay any heed to popular opinion in their states.
One issue with the electoral college is that it makes it largely pointless voting Republican in California or Democratic in Indiana. In a national vote every vote is of equal worth. The votes of farmers in California's Central Valley become more important; so do the votes of the folk working three jobs in downtown Indianapolis. We talk about red states and blue states, but a county-level map presents a much more complex picture. As to federal vs national, it seems to me that a system where you elect a local representative to the House, a state representative to the Senate, and a national representative to the Presidency seems to provide a good balance.
One issue with the electoral college is that it makes it largely pointless voting Republican in California or Democratic in Indiana. In a national vote every vote is of equal worth. The votes of farmers in California's Central Valley become more important; so do the votes of the folk working three jobs in downtown Indianapolis. We talk about red states and blue states, but a county-level map presents a much more complex picture. As to federal vs national, it seems to me that a system where you elect a local representative to the House, a state representative to the Senate, and a national representative to the Presidency seems to provide a good balance.
But our voting for the Labor Party in our electorate is equally pointless. At times, the vote for Liberal (ie conservative) candidates has gone near to 70%. Where our votes do count is for the upper houses, both State and Federal, where the electorate is State wide and there is a number of new members to be determined.
I think the problem is that the Americans have an executive with a different source of authority from the legislature, and that real power is invested an elected person. If the head of state was purely ceremonial, and the executive sourced its legitimacy from the legislature, things would be hunky-dorey. They could go ahead an imbue their hereditary President with Kim-style prowess, have her sky diving out of airplanes and the like, and it wouldn't be a problem.
... I don't know how other people work these things, but I tend to argue from the result I want rather than working out what is the best position based upon the arguments I read. So, in deciding whether to put out the washing, foremost in my mind is not whether its going to rain, but whether I want to keep mucking around on the Ship of Fools.
Thank you for admitting that. I'm sure that approach is very widespread, but it's a position that is intellectually indefensible and renders anything that a person who adopts it may advocate valueless.
But there again he lost by a landslide in the last election.
No, he did not. Not unless you reinvent some contest other than the one he was participating in, with a different scoring system to the one everyone knew was going to be used.
Sorry? But yeah, he won in a gerrymandered, banana republic, rigged election.
And you explain your own process for selecting a Prime Minister, how exactly?
The US does indeed have a problem with gerrymandering, but not in the Presidential election. Not unless you completely redefine what gerrymandering actually is.
Conservative – 13,941,086 votes
Labour – 10,292,354
Liberal Democrat – 3,675,342
Scottish National Party – 1,242,380
Share of 650 seats
Conservative 43.6%
Labour 32.2%
Liberal Democrat 11.5%
Scottish National Party 3.9%
I don't know if the winning party's seats have not represented the largest popular vote. My money says not.
Kim, what I call the leader of North Korea when I can't be bothered to check his real name. You know, how he is portrayed at being the best at everything...
... I don't know how other people work these things, but I tend to argue from the result I want rather than working out what is the best position based upon the arguments I read. So, in deciding whether to put out the washing, foremost in my mind is not whether its going to rain, but whether I want to keep mucking around on the Ship of Fools.
Thank you for admitting that. I'm sure that approach is very widespread, but it's a position that is intellectually indefensible and renders anything that a person who adopts it may advocate valueless.
But there again he lost by a landslide in the last election.
No, he did not. Not unless you reinvent some contest other than the one he was participating in, with a different scoring system to the one everyone knew was going to be used.
Sorry? But yeah, he won in a gerrymandered, banana republic, rigged election.
And you explain your own process for selecting a Prime Minister, how exactly?
The US does indeed have a problem with gerrymandering, but not in the Presidential election. Not unless you completely redefine what gerrymandering actually is.
Conservative – 13,941,086 votes
Labour – 10,292,354
Liberal Democrat – 3,675,342
Scottish National Party – 1,242,380
Share of 650 seats
Conservative 43.6%
Labour 32.2%
Liberal Democrat 11.5%
Scottish National Party 3.9%
I don't know if the winning party's seats have not represented the largest popular vote. My money says not.
Feb 1974: Labour under Wilson (11,646,616) turfed out the Conservatives under Heath (11,872,180)
True but it's a little more complex than that isn't it. Labour got to 301 seats compared to the Conservative 297 which wasn't an overall majority. Wilson did manage to call a 2nd election in October which he won outright. Strictly speaking, Heath could have continued as Prime Minister if he had managed to form a coalition and as sitting PM he had the right to first go at this.
1951 is a little more clear-cut, in my view:
Labour (under Atlee): 13,948,385 votes (48.8%) - 295 seats (47.2%)
Conservatives (under Churchill): 13,717,851 (48.0%) - 317 seats (50.7%)
I.e. Churchill got an overall majority with fewer votes.
But there again he lost by a landslide in the last election.
No, he did not. Not unless you reinvent some contest other than the one he was participating in, with a different scoring system to the one everyone knew was going to be used.
Sorry? But yeah, he won in a gerrymandered, banana republic, rigged election.
And you explain your own process for selecting a Prime Minister, how exactly?
The US does indeed have a problem with gerrymandering, but not in the Presidential election. Not unless you completely redefine what gerrymandering actually is.
Conservative – 13,941,086 votes
Labour – 10,292,354
Liberal Democrat – 3,675,342
Scottish National Party – 1,242,380
Share of 650 seats
Conservative 43.6%
Labour 32.2%
Liberal Democrat 11.5%
Scottish National Party 3.9%
I don't know if the winning party's seats have not represented the largest popular vote. My money says not.
Feb 1974: Labour under Wilson (11,646,616) turfed out the Conservatives under Heath (11,872,180)
True but it's a little more complex than that isn't it. Labour got to 301 seats compared to the Conservative 297 which wasn't an overall majority. Wilson did manage to call a 2nd election in October which he won outright. Strictly speaking, Heath could have continued as Prime Minister if he had managed to form a coalition and as sitting PM he had the right to first go at this.
1951 is a little more clear-cut, in my view:
Labour (under Atlee): 13,948,385 votes (48.8%) - 295 seats (47.2%)
Conservatives (under Churchill): 13,717,851 (48.0%) - 317 seats (50.7%)
I.e. Churchill got an overall majority with fewer votes.
AFZ
Granted, but it's still more recent than 1951 in a game of "most seats won by party with the largest vote", which was all I was showing.
Heath absolutely had first go at forming a coalition, but it's a *very* rare (UK) situation this where the sitting PM is trying to do that having lost their majority *and* not leading the largest party.
Pretty much... certainly as regards political issues surrounding partisan topics like the Electoral College, where the issue is not so much which system works best, but which system will get the outcome I want on other issues such as Supreme Court nominations and therefore a woman's right to choose what happens to her body.
Yes. And that's half my point. The notion that the Electoral College is a "partisan issue" strikes me as crazy. And I've already said: "Who exactly decided that the overall national vote was so important? Most of the time in my experience it's whoever thinks that this figure says they deserved victory/more seats than they actually got."
People wanting to change a system based on the result of maybe one election just strike me as staggeringly short-sighted. Not least because when the NEW system doesn't give them the result they think they deserve somewhere down the track, they'll want to change it again.
How is that any different from gerrymandering? Is that not the very essence of gerrymandering, knowing the result you want to achieve and working backwards from there to set things up so that you achieve it?
I acknowledge some people have wanted to change the Electoral College system for considerably longer. Nevertheless, the amount of noise about the issue sharply increased after 2016. And that seems to me like a spectacularly bad starting point as an argument for change of a constitutional system.
Not least because it wrongly assumes that you can change one thing and then everything will be fine, ie you'll get the result you want. No. Because when the rules of the game change, the players will change how they play.
I am gobsmacked that you can equate having a nation-wide election with gerrymandering. A breathtaking level of non-sequituriality. And no, the United States is no longer a federation at the federal level, as has been pointed out already.
It is not gerrymandering, unless you count the creation of new states after the 13 original colonies as drawing boundaries to somehow achieve a particular result; that's a possibility in the case of the 2 Dakotas but hard to see any others.
But there again he lost by a landslide in the last election.
No, he did not. Not unless you reinvent some contest other than the one he was participating in, with a different scoring system to the one everyone knew was going to be used.
Sorry? But yeah, he won in a gerrymandered, banana republic, rigged election.
And you explain your own process for selecting a Prime Minister, how exactly?
The US does indeed have a problem with gerrymandering, but not in the Presidential election. Not unless you completely redefine what gerrymandering actually is.
Conservative – 13,941,086 votes
Labour – 10,292,354
Liberal Democrat – 3,675,342
Scottish National Party – 1,242,380
Share of 650 seats
Conservative 43.6%
Labour 32.2%
Liberal Democrat 11.5%
Scottish National Party 3.9%
I don't know if the winning party's seats have not represented the largest popular vote. My money says not.
Feb 1974: Labour under Wilson (11,646,616) turfed out the Conservatives under Heath (11,872,180)
True but it's a little more complex than that isn't it. Labour got to 301 seats compared to the Conservative 297 which wasn't an overall majority. Wilson did manage to call a 2nd election in October which he won outright. Strictly speaking, Heath could have continued as Prime Minister if he had managed to form a coalition and as sitting PM he had the right to first go at this.
1951 is a little more clear-cut, in my view:
Labour (under Atlee): 13,948,385 votes (48.8%) - 295 seats (47.2%)
Conservatives (under Churchill): 13,717,851 (48.0%) - 317 seats (50.7%)
I.e. Churchill got an overall majority with fewer votes.
AFZ
Granted, but it's still more recent than 1951 in a game of "most seats won by party with the largest vote", which was all I was showing.
Heath absolutely had first go at forming a coalition, but it's a *very* rare (UK) situation this where the sitting PM is trying to do that having lost their majority *and* not leading the largest party.
Agreed.
But the other half of my earlier post was that whatever you think about the EC system, the way some (many) states have undermined the election process is a far bigger problem.
It is not gerrymandering, unless you count the creation of new states after the 13 original colonies as drawing boundaries to somehow achieve a particular result; that's a possibility in the case of the 2 Dakotas but hard to see any others.
The FBI can only get involved in an investigation if 1) the alleged crime is a federal crime, 2) the crime is on federal or Native American Reservations though they tend to defer to the tribal police, or 3) if they are invited to join in the investigation by local authorities--it is usually because of their technical skills.
BTW, when states have been admitted into the United States, Congress prefers to balance a liberal state with a conservative state. And for the longest time both Dakotas leaned toward the Democratic Farmers and Laborers movement, now a part of the Democratic party.
Pretty much... certainly as regards political issues surrounding partisan topics like the Electoral College, where the issue is not so much which system works best, but which system will get the outcome I want on other issues such as Supreme Court nominations and therefore a woman's right to choose what happens to her body.
Yes. And that's half my point. The notion that the Electoral College is a "partisan issue" strikes me as crazy. And I've already said: "Who exactly decided that the overall national vote was so important? Most of the time in my experience it's whoever thinks that this figure says they deserved victory/more seats than they actually got."
People wanting to change a system based on the result of maybe one election just strike me as staggeringly short-sighted. Not least because when the NEW system doesn't give them the result they think they deserve somewhere down the track, they'll want to change it again.
How is that any different from gerrymandering? Is that not the very essence of gerrymandering, knowing the result you want to achieve and working backwards from there to set things up so that you achieve it?
I acknowledge some people have wanted to change the Electoral College system for considerably longer. Nevertheless, the amount of noise about the issue sharply increased after 2016. And that seems to me like a spectacularly bad starting point as an argument for change of a constitutional system.
Not least because it wrongly assumes that you can change one thing and then everything will be fine, ie you'll get the result you want. No. Because when the rules of the game change, the players will change how they play.
I am gobsmacked that you can equate having a nation-wide election with gerrymandering. A breathtaking level of non-sequituriality. And no, the United States is no longer a federation at the federal level, as has been pointed out already.
I don't equate having a nation-wide election with gerrymandering. I equate changing the rules with an eye to the result with gerrymandering, because that's why gerrymandering occurs. If people have a principled argument for a nation-wide vote, fine, but my point was that lots of people only argue for a nation-wide vote because of who won without a nation-wide vote.
As to the claim that "the United States is no longer a federation at the federal level", I don't have the faintest idea what that means. For one thing it seems to ignore the origin of the word 'federal'. You have a federal system. You have Trump ranting and raving at State Governors precisely because he can't just overrule them. The system is conceived to have subunits with a considerable degree of independence.
If all you're saying is that the Civil War established that a State can't unilaterally decide to leave, then okay fine. But so what? We never had a Civil War, and we'd seen yours, and yet we have a system with some aspects quite similar to yours, such as a constitutional amendment provision that requires not just a national majority but a majority of states. The idea that federal systems are supposed to involve support from across the subunits is not something that depends on whatever "fed-" label you want to apply.
The long-term results of the Civil War were more than simply just saying states can't leave. The 14th Amendment(think I got the number right) passed in the wake of the war was later interpreted by the courts as making the Bill Of Rights applicable at the state and local levels of government.
This is why, for example, the state of Texas couldn't keep its anti-flag burning statute on the books, and local school districts can't have school prayer, even though the original wording of the First Amendment only prohibits congress from passing such laws.
In Canada, generally regarded as more centralized than the USA, the courts never attained this kind of oversight until the 1980s, with the adoption of a Charter Of Rights, and even then, it was accompanied by a clause allowing legislatures to override court rulings(basically, Robert Bork's wet dream).
Coupled with an expansive interpretation of "interstate commerce" that has allowed Congress to exert a far more centralizing role in economic affairs than Canada's parliament has been able to. The American interpretation of Interstate Commerce is one that Canadian centralists gave always dreamed of.
It is not gerrymandering, unless you count the creation of new states after the 13 original colonies as drawing boundaries to somehow achieve a particular result; that's a possibility in the case of the 2 Dakotas but hard to see any others.
Then don't look at Nevada and West Virginia...
Nevada - perhaps. My understanding is that West Virginia in effect separated to remain in the Union when Virginia seceded to join the Confederacy.
Pretty much... certainly as regards political issues surrounding partisan topics like the Electoral College, where the issue is not so much which system works best, but which system will get the outcome I want on other issues such as Supreme Court nominations and therefore a woman's right to choose what happens to her body.
Yes. And that's half my point. The notion that the Electoral College is a "partisan issue" strikes me as crazy. And I've already said: "Who exactly decided that the overall national vote was so important? Most of the time in my experience it's whoever thinks that this figure says they deserved victory/more seats than they actually got."
People wanting to change a system based on the result of maybe one election just strike me as staggeringly short-sighted. Not least because when the NEW system doesn't give them the result they think they deserve somewhere down the track, they'll want to change it again.
How is that any different from gerrymandering? Is that not the very essence of gerrymandering, knowing the result you want to achieve and working backwards from there to set things up so that you achieve it?
I acknowledge some people have wanted to change the Electoral College system for considerably longer. Nevertheless, the amount of noise about the issue sharply increased after 2016. And that seems to me like a spectacularly bad starting point as an argument for change of a constitutional system.
Not least because it wrongly assumes that you can change one thing and then everything will be fine, ie you'll get the result you want. No. Because when the rules of the game change, the players will change how they play.
I am gobsmacked that you can equate having a nation-wide election with gerrymandering. A breathtaking level of non-sequituriality. And no, the United States is no longer a federation at the federal level, as has been pointed out already.
I don't equate having a nation-wide election with gerrymandering. I equate changing the rules with an eye to the result with gerrymandering, because that's why gerrymandering occurs. If people have a principled argument for a nation-wide vote, fine, but my point was that lots of people only argue for a nation-wide vote because of who won without a nation-wide vote.
As to the claim that "the United States is no longer a federation at the federal level", I don't have the faintest idea what that means. For one thing it seems to ignore the origin of the word 'federal'. You have a federal system. You have Trump ranting and raving at State Governors precisely because he can't just overrule them. The system is conceived to have subunits with a considerable degree of independence.
If all you're saying is that the Civil War established that a State can't unilaterally decide to leave, then okay fine. But so what? We never had a Civil War, and we'd seen yours, and yet we have a system with some aspects quite similar to yours, such as a constitutional amendment provision that requires not just a national majority but a majority of states. The idea that federal systems are supposed to involve support from across the subunits is not something that depends on whatever "fed-" label you want to apply.
It seems to me you are arguing in a circle. The US must be considered on a federal model because the Electoral College is a vestiges of a federal model. Therefore there is no good reason to change the Electoral College because the US is a federal system. QED.
In Canada, generally regarded as more centralized than the USA, the courts never attained this kind of oversight until the 1980s, with the adoption of a Charter Of Rights, and even then, it was accompanied by a clause allowing legislatures to override court rulings(basically, Robert Bork's wet dream).
Bork's slightly moist dream, I should think. Section 33 of the the Charter, "the notwithstanding clause", and with grim humour sometimes called "the nuclear option", does allow for legislative override of the courts, but outside Québec has been invoked only four times provincially by my count, and never federally. The legislatures have - again, outside Québec - displayed appropriate restraint. Considering this thread topic, I'll leave discussion of Québec for another time.
The long-term results of the Civil War were more than simply just saying states can't leave. The 14th Amendment(think I got the number right) passed in the wake of the war was later interpreted by the courts as making the Bill Of Rights applicable at the state and local levels of government.
There is no question that the relative power of the federal government increased after the Civil War, and has continued to increase in some respects, and that post-Civil War constitutional amendments limited the ability of states to infringe on various individual rights.
But there is also no question that the US remains a federal republic, with states having a great deal of authority on their own, or that the federal government derives its authority from the states and not the other way around. The Constitution is, at least when it comes to the nature of the federal government, a grant of power from the states to the federal government. The federal nature of the US is exemplified (among other ways) by the fact that the Constitution can only be amended with the approval of a supermajority of the states.
Constitutionally, the United States is a federation. While the nature of that federation has changed over the last 231 years, the fact that the US is, according to its foundational law, a federation of states has not changed.
Pretty much... certainly as regards political issues surrounding partisan topics like the Electoral College, where the issue is not so much which system works best, but which system will get the outcome I want on other issues such as Supreme Court nominations and therefore a woman's right to choose what happens to her body.
Yes. And that's half my point. The notion that the Electoral College is a "partisan issue" strikes me as crazy. And I've already said: "Who exactly decided that the overall national vote was so important? Most of the time in my experience it's whoever thinks that this figure says they deserved victory/more seats than they actually got."
People wanting to change a system based on the result of maybe one election just strike me as staggeringly short-sighted. Not least because when the NEW system doesn't give them the result they think they deserve somewhere down the track, they'll want to change it again.
How is that any different from gerrymandering? Is that not the very essence of gerrymandering, knowing the result you want to achieve and working backwards from there to set things up so that you achieve it?
I acknowledge some people have wanted to change the Electoral College system for considerably longer. Nevertheless, the amount of noise about the issue sharply increased after 2016. And that seems to me like a spectacularly bad starting point as an argument for change of a constitutional system.
Not least because it wrongly assumes that you can change one thing and then everything will be fine, ie you'll get the result you want. No. Because when the rules of the game change, the players will change how they play.
I am gobsmacked that you can equate having a nation-wide election with gerrymandering. A breathtaking level of non-sequituriality. And no, the United States is no longer a federation at the federal level, as has been pointed out already.
I don't equate having a nation-wide election with gerrymandering. I equate changing the rules with an eye to the result with gerrymandering, because that's why gerrymandering occurs. If people have a principled argument for a nation-wide vote, fine, but my point was that lots of people only argue for a nation-wide vote because of who won without a nation-wide vote.
As to the claim that "the United States is no longer a federation at the federal level", I don't have the faintest idea what that means. For one thing it seems to ignore the origin of the word 'federal'. You have a federal system. You have Trump ranting and raving at State Governors precisely because he can't just overrule them. The system is conceived to have subunits with a considerable degree of independence.
If all you're saying is that the Civil War established that a State can't unilaterally decide to leave, then okay fine. But so what? We never had a Civil War, and we'd seen yours, and yet we have a system with some aspects quite similar to yours, such as a constitutional amendment provision that requires not just a national majority but a majority of states. The idea that federal systems are supposed to involve support from across the subunits is not something that depends on whatever "fed-" label you want to apply.
It seems to me you are arguing in a circle. The US must be considered on a federal model because the Electoral College is a vestiges of a federal model. Therefore there is no good reason to change the Electoral College because the US is a federal system. QED.
@orfeo can certainly answer for himself, but that’s not really what I’ve understood him to be saying. I’ve understood him to say
—the Electoral College, by which the president is in essence elected by the states rather than by popular national vote, was intended to reflect and in fact reflects the federal nature of the US as set forth in the Constitution;
—there may be principled reasons to abandon the Electoral College for some other method of electing the president, including by national popular vote; but
—simply switching to a national popular vote for the sole reason that people don’t like how the last election or two turned out isn’t principled change, but rather is political result-driven change that risks trading one problem for others.
Pretty much... certainly as regards political issues surrounding partisan topics like the Electoral College, where the issue is not so much which system works best, but which system will get the outcome I want on other issues such as Supreme Court nominations and therefore a woman's right to choose what happens to her body.
Yes. And that's half my point. The notion that the Electoral College is a "partisan issue" strikes me as crazy. And I've already said: "Who exactly decided that the overall national vote was so important? Most of the time in my experience it's whoever thinks that this figure says they deserved victory/more seats than they actually got."
People wanting to change a system based on the result of maybe one election just strike me as staggeringly short-sighted. Not least because when the NEW system doesn't give them the result they think they deserve somewhere down the track, they'll want to change it again.
How is that any different from gerrymandering? Is that not the very essence of gerrymandering, knowing the result you want to achieve and working backwards from there to set things up so that you achieve it?
I acknowledge some people have wanted to change the Electoral College system for considerably longer. Nevertheless, the amount of noise about the issue sharply increased after 2016. And that seems to me like a spectacularly bad starting point as an argument for change of a constitutional system.
Not least because it wrongly assumes that you can change one thing and then everything will be fine, ie you'll get the result you want. No. Because when the rules of the game change, the players will change how they play.
I am gobsmacked that you can equate having a nation-wide election with gerrymandering. A breathtaking level of non-sequituriality. And no, the United States is no longer a federation at the federal level, as has been pointed out already.
I don't equate having a nation-wide election with gerrymandering. I equate changing the rules with an eye to the result with gerrymandering, because that's why gerrymandering occurs. If people have a principled argument for a nation-wide vote, fine, but my point was that lots of people only argue for a nation-wide vote because of who won without a nation-wide vote.
As to the claim that "the United States is no longer a federation at the federal level", I don't have the faintest idea what that means. For one thing it seems to ignore the origin of the word 'federal'. You have a federal system. You have Trump ranting and raving at State Governors precisely because he can't just overrule them. The system is conceived to have subunits with a considerable degree of independence.
If all you're saying is that the Civil War established that a State can't unilaterally decide to leave, then okay fine. But so what? We never had a Civil War, and we'd seen yours, and yet we have a system with some aspects quite similar to yours, such as a constitutional amendment provision that requires not just a national majority but a majority of states. The idea that federal systems are supposed to involve support from across the subunits is not something that depends on whatever "fed-" label you want to apply.
It seems to me you are arguing in a circle. The US must be considered on a federal model because the Electoral College is a vestiges of a federal model. Therefore there is no good reason to change the Electoral College because the US is a federal system. QED.
No. How can you believe the Electoral College is the only indication of a federal model? Not once have I suggested that the reason for considering the US to be federal is because of the Electoral College. As @Nick Tamen has recognised, the argument is that the Electoral College was intended to reflect the federal structure that was set up in the whole constitution.
You have the Senate. You have State legislatures, and State executives, which don't depend on the federal government for their existence. Same with State courts and State judges. You have whole areas of law that are decided on a State-by-State basis - again, not because the federal authority allows it, but because the federal authority has no power to override it or get involved.
You live in a federal country. I challenge you to find any credible source anywhere that says otherwise. You don't live in a country where States are just administrative subdivisions that were created by the national government and can be remade or unmade on a whim.
No. How can you believe the Electoral College is the only indication of a federal model? Not once have I suggested that the reason for considering the US to be federal is because of the Electoral College. As @Nick Tamen has recognised, the argument is that the Electoral College was intended to reflect the federal structure that was set up in the whole constitution.
Bullshit. The electoral college was a kludge put together by the Committee of Eleven on Postponed Matters at the Constitutional Convention. (The name says it all.) It wasn't the product of some grand, over-arching philosophy of governance, it was put together because no one could agree on any other method of electing the president. James Madison advocated the direct national election of the president, others that the president be chosen by Congress, and another group that the president be selected by the state governments (begging the question of how that was to be done). Being otherwise deadlocked, they simply agreed to this ad hoc system that (like much else in the early republic) boosted the influence of slaveholders. There's no deep philosophical underpinnings there, despite future generations wanting to read them backwards into history.
No. How can you believe the Electoral College is the only indication of a federal model? Not once have I suggested that the reason for considering the US to be federal is because of the Electoral College. As @Nick Tamen has recognised, the argument is that the Electoral College was intended to reflect the federal structure that was set up in the whole constitution.
Bullshit. The electoral college was a kludge put together by the Committee of Eleven on Postponed Matters at the Constitutional Convention. (The name says it all.) It wasn't the product of some grand, over-arching philosophy of governance, it was put together because no one could agree on any other method of electing the president. James Madison advocated the direct national election of the president, others that the president be chosen by Congress, and another group that the president be selected by the state governments (begging the question of how that was to be done). Being otherwise deadlocked, they simply agreed to this ad hoc system that (like much else in the early republic) boosted the influence of slaveholders. There's no deep philosophical underpinnings there, despite future generations wanting to read them backwards into history.
Oh FFS. I'm not claiming the specifics of the Electoral College are some perfectly designed system. I'm simply pointing out that the fact that it works on a state-by-state basis is entirely consistent with the federal structure that the United States incontrovertibly has.
I frankly don't give a fuck if the Electoral College is replaced by some system that just directly counts votes in a State. Let's face it, almost every State has effectively fused the process of picking electors with the process of telling those electors how to vote, if they're not going to be "faithless". I'd have zero problem with doing away with the electors.
My entire issue is with doing away with the federalism, not with the Electoral College, and quite frankly I'm getting to the point where I wonder whether the mischaracterisation of what I'm saying is wilful.
In Canada, generally regarded as more centralized than the USA, the courts never attained this kind of oversight until the 1980s, with the adoption of a Charter Of Rights, and even then, it was accompanied by a clause allowing legislatures to override court rulings(basically, Robert Bork's wet dream).
Bork's slightly moist dream, I should think. Section 33 of the the Charter, "the notwithstanding clause", and with grim humour sometimes called "the nuclear option", does allow for legislative override of the courts, but outside Québec has been invoked only four times provincially by my count, and never federally. The legislatures have - again, outside Québec - displayed appropriate restraint. Considering this thread topic, I'll leave discussion of Québec for another time.
Granted, in its application, it hasn't led to a wholesale rollback of Charter rulings on anything approaching a regular basis.
Still, it does bestow upon the provinces full rights that American legislature-supremacists could only dream of.
Yeah, I know the US is still a federation, and at least on paper, a pretty extreme one in some regards(criminal law written by the states would seem utterly bizarre to many Canadians, even if the courts ultimately retain the right to declare them unconstitutional).
My point was mainly in reply to Orfeo, who seemed to suggest that the only thing that had changed as a result of the ACW was states losing the right to secede.
^ And FWIW, I don't think a prohibition on states seceding was ever formally enshrined, was it? More like "Oh, you feel like leaving? Perhaps this lovely slide-show of photos from Richmond in the spring of 1865 would be of interest to you."
Yeah, I know the US is still a federation, and at least on paper, a pretty extreme one in some regards(criminal law written by the states would seem utterly bizarre to many Canadians, even if the courts ultimately retain the right to declare them unconstitutional).
The US (and here for that matter) is a federal system, while Canada is a confederation.
Yeah, I know the US is still a federation, and at least on paper, a pretty extreme one in some regards(criminal law written by the states would seem utterly bizarre to many Canadians, even if the courts ultimately retain the right to declare them unconstitutional).
The US (and here for that matter) is a federal system, while Canada is a confederation.
No it is not. Just because they called the process of federating "confederation" does not mean that Canada is a confederation in the sense of classifying countries.
But there again he lost by a landslide in the last election.
No, he did not. Not unless you reinvent some contest other than the one he was participating in, with a different scoring system to the one everyone knew was going to be used.
Sorry? But yeah, he won in a gerrymandered, banana republic, rigged election.
And you explain your own process for selecting a Prime Minister, how exactly?
The US does indeed have a problem with gerrymandering, but not in the Presidential election. Not unless you completely redefine what gerrymandering actually is.
Conservative – 13,941,086 votes
Labour – 10,292,354
Liberal Democrat – 3,675,342
Scottish National Party – 1,242,380
Share of 650 seats
Conservative 43.6%
Labour 32.2%
Liberal Democrat 11.5%
Scottish National Party 3.9%
I don't know if the winning party's seats have not represented the largest popular vote. My money says not.
Do you not understand how your own system works? The total figures you cited are completely irrelevant to the results. There is simply no way in which the total popular vote across the UK leads to the selection of the Prime Minister, and doing things like comparing the SNP vote in Scotland to the Conservative vote across the whole of the UK is a nonsense.
You're hardly the first person to engage in such nonsense, but that doesn't make it any less nonsensical. The national vote in the UK is no more a meaningful statistic than it is in the US.
Next you'll be telling me the results of tennis matches by telling me how many points each player won. It's a fundamental problem of confusing a particular statistic that doesn't determine a result with the rules of how the contest is actually determined.
I confuse nothing at all. I merely note that there is a positive correlation between the popular vote and the seats in our FPTP system, whereas there is not in the US', where the gerrymandering and voter suppression is greater.
27 amendments have been approved by Congress, sent out to the states, and successfully ratified. And
Six amendments adopted by Congress and sent to the states have not been ratified by the required number of states. Four of these amendments are still pending, one is closed and has failed by its own terms, and one is closed and has failed by the terms of the resolution proposing it.
If you go to the "Unratified amendments" section, the first one has been pending since 1789!
Would strictly regulate the size of congressional districts for representation in the House of Representatives.
From the details in the article, ISTM such an amendment could be used for at least a cousin of gerrymandering.
But there again he lost by a landslide in the last election.
No, he did not. Not unless you reinvent some contest other than the one he was participating in, with a different scoring system to the one everyone knew was going to be used.
Sorry? But yeah, he won in a gerrymandered, banana republic, rigged election.
And you explain your own process for selecting a Prime Minister, how exactly?
The US does indeed have a problem with gerrymandering, but not in the Presidential election. Not unless you completely redefine what gerrymandering actually is.
Conservative – 13,941,086 votes
Labour – 10,292,354
Liberal Democrat – 3,675,342
Scottish National Party – 1,242,380
Share of 650 seats
Conservative 43.6%
Labour 32.2%
Liberal Democrat 11.5%
Scottish National Party 3.9%
I don't know if the winning party's seats have not represented the largest popular vote. My money says not.
Do you not understand how your own system works? The total figures you cited are completely irrelevant to the results. There is simply no way in which the total popular vote across the UK leads to the selection of the Prime Minister, and doing things like comparing the SNP vote in Scotland to the Conservative vote across the whole of the UK is a nonsense.
You're hardly the first person to engage in such nonsense, but that doesn't make it any less nonsensical. The national vote in the UK is no more a meaningful statistic than it is in the US.
Next you'll be telling me the results of tennis matches by telling me how many points each player won. It's a fundamental problem of confusing a particular statistic that doesn't determine a result with the rules of how the contest is actually determined.
I confuse nothing at all. I merely note that there is a positive correlation between the popular vote and the seats in our FPTP system, whereas there is not in the US', where the gerrymandering and voter suppression is greater.
For the larger parties there's an approximate correlation between the total vote share and the number of seats - it's not a perfect correlation by a long shot, but a party would need about 40% of the vote to form a government which at least satisfies the requirement that the government had received votes from a large portion of the population. It's theoretically possible for a party to secure more seats than another party which received a larger number of votes, but I can't think of any examples of that happening. The issues with FPTP are not as simple as how the system divies up seats between the major parties - to me the two big issues are that it puts most constituencies into the category of "safe seat" which means that the people living there have an effectively reduced 'bang for buck' with their vote, and that FPTP is particularly hard on smaller parties who can achieve several percent of the total vote but struggle to get even a single MP.
I'd also add that the issue with voter suppression is that it means that a large number of people don't get a vote to be counted in the first place. That means that not only can there be a discrepancy between the popular vote and the result there can be a difference between the popular vote and the level of support among all those who should have been able to vote (of course, that could also be true of those who could vote but didn't ... but, there's a functional difference between the choice to not vote and being denied that choice). Voter suppression is a serious problem, and far more important to be addressed than any discussion over compulsory voting for those registered.
It's theoretically possible for a party to secure more seats than another party which received a larger number of votes, but I can't think of any examples of that happening.
From earlier in this very thread, Churchill in 1951 and Wilson in (February) 1974.
additionally Corbyn in 2017, was 2,227 votes in total from a majority (across the right seats) in 2017, despite being 3,758,224 behind the Conservatives nationally.
(for the Tories to have achieved a majority in that election would I think have required 400 more votes in total across the right seats nationwide).
As an advocate of STV+ this small point (on either side) gives me no pleasure to record...
But there again he lost by a landslide in the last election.
No, he did not. Not unless you reinvent some contest other than the one he was participating in, with a different scoring system to the one everyone knew was going to be used.
Sorry? But yeah, he won in a gerrymandered, banana republic, rigged election.
And you explain your own process for selecting a Prime Minister, how exactly?
The US does indeed have a problem with gerrymandering, but not in the Presidential election. Not unless you completely redefine what gerrymandering actually is.
Conservative – 13,941,086 votes
Labour – 10,292,354
Liberal Democrat – 3,675,342
Scottish National Party – 1,242,380
Share of 650 seats
Conservative 43.6%
Labour 32.2%
Liberal Democrat 11.5%
Scottish National Party 3.9%
I don't know if the winning party's seats have not represented the largest popular vote. My money says not.
Do you not understand how your own system works? The total figures you cited are completely irrelevant to the results. There is simply no way in which the total popular vote across the UK leads to the selection of the Prime Minister, and doing things like comparing the SNP vote in Scotland to the Conservative vote across the whole of the UK is a nonsense.
You're hardly the first person to engage in such nonsense, but that doesn't make it any less nonsensical. The national vote in the UK is no more a meaningful statistic than it is in the US.
Next you'll be telling me the results of tennis matches by telling me how many points each player won. It's a fundamental problem of confusing a particular statistic that doesn't determine a result with the rules of how the contest is actually determined.
I confuse nothing at all. I merely note that there is a positive correlation between the popular vote and the seats in our FPTP system, whereas there is not in the US', where the gerrymandering and voter suppression is greater.
But the claim is nonsensical when you compare the number of votes for the Conservative party, which stood in 635 seats, and Labour, which stood in 631, with the number of votes for the Scottish National Party which stood in 59.
They are quite literally not engaged in the same contest. And you are pretending that they are. Why on earth would you try to assess the SNP vote by combining 59 contests where they did rather well with hundreds of contests where they got zero votes because they didn't even enter?
Yeah, I know the US is still a federation, and at least on paper, a pretty extreme one in some regards(criminal law written by the states would seem utterly bizarre to many Canadians, even if the courts ultimately retain the right to declare them unconstitutional).
The US (and here for that matter) is a federal system, while Canada is a confederation.
No it is not. Just because they called the process of federating "confederation" does not mean that Canada is a confederation in the sense of classifying countries.
I don't accept the Wiki definition as the only proper usage of the term confederation. That given seems to me to be apply to a very limited set of circumstances. Canada is a confederation because the provinces are very much subordinate to the nation. That's not the position in the the US or Aust.
Yeah, I know the US is still a federation, and at least on paper, a pretty extreme one in some regards(criminal law written by the states would seem utterly bizarre to many Canadians, even if the courts ultimately retain the right to declare them unconstitutional).
The US (and here for that matter) is a federal system, while Canada is a confederation.
No it is not. Just because they called the process of federating "confederation" does not mean that Canada is a confederation in the sense of classifying countries.
I don't accept the Wiki definition as the only proper usage of the term confederation. That given seems to me to be apply to a very limited set of circumstances. Canada is a confederation because the provinces are very much subordinate to the nation. That's not the position in the the US or Aust.
Sigh. Do you believe the Canadian government then? Or are you going to maintain you understand their system of governance better than they do?
And the provinces are given exclusive powers on various matters. There's a whole wealth of linked pages in the federation section, if you can be bothered looking.
Sigh indeed. None of that was addressing what we are talking about here.
Excuse me? Can you not see all of the times that the Canadian government calls Canada a federation?
Enjoy your Lewis Carroll universe where you can redefine words to your heart's content, but I'll happily stick with the Canadian government's definition of Canada, which just so happens to align with all the cited material in Wikipedia, over your decision to strike out on your own.
In fact, my further participation in this thread is officially pointless. You can all damn well go ahead believing whatever you WANT to believe about the constitutional system of any country from America to Burkina Faso, and return to the question of what's going to happen when a narcissist who doesn't believe in the rule of law in the first place is told he isn't beloved.
He's unlikely to give a fuck about the constitution, so why should I.
Comments
And my point is that your point is not likely to get much of a hearing in this environment, where the short term seems so vital.
The question is whether that clause has a context that means there is any limitation to the ways in which the Legislature thereof may direct. Can the legislature "direct" that it subdelegates outside of its own jurisdiction?
The notion that a constitution might, from its structure, contain such limitations is not entirely novel.
In any case I'm not sure you're even reading the right clause. That a clause about how electors appointed. Not a clause about how electors then vote. I realise the system actually used in the USA at the moment rather blurs these 2 questions together.
I always thought it was amusing to hear western separatists in Canada complain about being pushed around by Ottawa, and then saying that Alberta etc. should join the US.
ie. the country with a Bill Of Rights unencumbered by a Notwithstanding Clause, federal investigators claiming jurisdiction over post-office robberies in Wyoming(*), social programs(granted, sparser than what is available in Canada) administered entirely from DC, and a federal Department Of Education which, while not the main source of funding and curriculum, has more input over schooling than anyone in Ottawa does.
(*) True, the Mounties rule the roost in much of rural Canada, but they serve at the pleasure of provincial and local governments. American jurisdictions have no such right of refusal over FBI interventions.
But our voting for the Labor Party in our electorate is equally pointless. At times, the vote for Liberal (ie conservative) candidates has gone near to 70%. Where our votes do count is for the upper houses, both State and Federal, where the electorate is State wide and there is a number of new members to be determined.
Fixed it!!
you don't even need to go back that far actually.
Feb 1974: Labour under Wilson (11,646,616) turfed out the Conservatives under Heath (11,872,180)
Kim, what I call the leader of North Korea when I can't be bothered to check his real name. You know, how he is portrayed at being the best at everything...
It's the mindset of a lawyer, I expect.
True but it's a little more complex than that isn't it. Labour got to 301 seats compared to the Conservative 297 which wasn't an overall majority. Wilson did manage to call a 2nd election in October which he won outright. Strictly speaking, Heath could have continued as Prime Minister if he had managed to form a coalition and as sitting PM he had the right to first go at this.
1951 is a little more clear-cut, in my view:
Labour (under Atlee): 13,948,385 votes (48.8%) - 295 seats (47.2%)
Conservatives (under Churchill): 13,717,851 (48.0%) - 317 seats (50.7%)
I.e. Churchill got an overall majority with fewer votes.
AFZ
Granted, but it's still more recent than 1951 in a game of "most seats won by party with the largest vote", which was all I was showing.
Heath absolutely had first go at forming a coalition, but it's a *very* rare (UK) situation this where the sitting PM is trying to do that having lost their majority *and* not leading the largest party.
I am gobsmacked that you can equate having a nation-wide election with gerrymandering. A breathtaking level of non-sequituriality. And no, the United States is no longer a federation at the federal level, as has been pointed out already.
Agreed.
But the other half of my earlier post was that whatever you think about the EC system, the way some (many) states have undermined the election process is a far bigger problem.
AFZ
Then don't look at Nevada and West Virginia...
BTW, when states have been admitted into the United States, Congress prefers to balance a liberal state with a conservative state. And for the longest time both Dakotas leaned toward the Democratic Farmers and Laborers movement, now a part of the Democratic party.
The real reason why there are two Dakotas
I don't equate having a nation-wide election with gerrymandering. I equate changing the rules with an eye to the result with gerrymandering, because that's why gerrymandering occurs. If people have a principled argument for a nation-wide vote, fine, but my point was that lots of people only argue for a nation-wide vote because of who won without a nation-wide vote.
As to the claim that "the United States is no longer a federation at the federal level", I don't have the faintest idea what that means. For one thing it seems to ignore the origin of the word 'federal'. You have a federal system. You have Trump ranting and raving at State Governors precisely because he can't just overrule them. The system is conceived to have subunits with a considerable degree of independence.
If all you're saying is that the Civil War established that a State can't unilaterally decide to leave, then okay fine. But so what? We never had a Civil War, and we'd seen yours, and yet we have a system with some aspects quite similar to yours, such as a constitutional amendment provision that requires not just a national majority but a majority of states. The idea that federal systems are supposed to involve support from across the subunits is not something that depends on whatever "fed-" label you want to apply.
The long-term results of the Civil War were more than simply just saying states can't leave. The 14th Amendment(think I got the number right) passed in the wake of the war was later interpreted by the courts as making the Bill Of Rights applicable at the state and local levels of government.
This is why, for example, the state of Texas couldn't keep its anti-flag burning statute on the books, and local school districts can't have school prayer, even though the original wording of the First Amendment only prohibits congress from passing such laws.
In Canada, generally regarded as more centralized than the USA, the courts never attained this kind of oversight until the 1980s, with the adoption of a Charter Of Rights, and even then, it was accompanied by a clause allowing legislatures to override court rulings(basically, Robert Bork's wet dream).
Nevada - perhaps. My understanding is that West Virginia in effect separated to remain in the Union when Virginia seceded to join the Confederacy.
It seems to me you are arguing in a circle. The US must be considered on a federal model because the Electoral College is a vestiges of a federal model. Therefore there is no good reason to change the Electoral College because the US is a federal system. QED.
Bork's slightly moist dream, I should think. Section 33 of the the Charter, "the notwithstanding clause", and with grim humour sometimes called "the nuclear option", does allow for legislative override of the courts, but outside Québec has been invoked only four times provincially by my count, and never federally. The legislatures have - again, outside Québec - displayed appropriate restraint. Considering this thread topic, I'll leave discussion of Québec for another time.
But there is also no question that the US remains a federal republic, with states having a great deal of authority on their own, or that the federal government derives its authority from the states and not the other way around. The Constitution is, at least when it comes to the nature of the federal government, a grant of power from the states to the federal government. The federal nature of the US is exemplified (among other ways) by the fact that the Constitution can only be amended with the approval of a supermajority of the states.
Constitutionally, the United States is a federation. While the nature of that federation has changed over the last 231 years, the fact that the US is, according to its foundational law, a federation of states has not changed.
—the Electoral College, by which the president is in essence elected by the states rather than by popular national vote, was intended to reflect and in fact reflects the federal nature of the US as set forth in the Constitution;
—there may be principled reasons to abandon the Electoral College for some other method of electing the president, including by national popular vote; but
—simply switching to a national popular vote for the sole reason that people don’t like how the last election or two turned out isn’t principled change, but rather is political result-driven change that risks trading one problem for others.
No. How can you believe the Electoral College is the only indication of a federal model? Not once have I suggested that the reason for considering the US to be federal is because of the Electoral College. As @Nick Tamen has recognised, the argument is that the Electoral College was intended to reflect the federal structure that was set up in the whole constitution.
You have the Senate. You have State legislatures, and State executives, which don't depend on the federal government for their existence. Same with State courts and State judges. You have whole areas of law that are decided on a State-by-State basis - again, not because the federal authority allows it, but because the federal authority has no power to override it or get involved.
You live in a federal country. I challenge you to find any credible source anywhere that says otherwise. You don't live in a country where States are just administrative subdivisions that were created by the national government and can be remade or unmade on a whim.
Bullshit. The electoral college was a kludge put together by the Committee of Eleven on Postponed Matters at the Constitutional Convention. (The name says it all.) It wasn't the product of some grand, over-arching philosophy of governance, it was put together because no one could agree on any other method of electing the president. James Madison advocated the direct national election of the president, others that the president be chosen by Congress, and another group that the president be selected by the state governments (begging the question of how that was to be done). Being otherwise deadlocked, they simply agreed to this ad hoc system that (like much else in the early republic) boosted the influence of slaveholders. There's no deep philosophical underpinnings there, despite future generations wanting to read them backwards into history.
Oh FFS. I'm not claiming the specifics of the Electoral College are some perfectly designed system. I'm simply pointing out that the fact that it works on a state-by-state basis is entirely consistent with the federal structure that the United States incontrovertibly has.
I frankly don't give a fuck if the Electoral College is replaced by some system that just directly counts votes in a State. Let's face it, almost every State has effectively fused the process of picking electors with the process of telling those electors how to vote, if they're not going to be "faithless". I'd have zero problem with doing away with the electors.
My entire issue is with doing away with the federalism, not with the Electoral College, and quite frankly I'm getting to the point where I wonder whether the mischaracterisation of what I'm saying is wilful.
Granted, in its application, it hasn't led to a wholesale rollback of Charter rulings on anything approaching a regular basis.
Still, it does bestow upon the provinces full rights that American legislature-supremacists could only dream of.
Yeah, I know the US is still a federation, and at least on paper, a pretty extreme one in some regards(criminal law written by the states would seem utterly bizarre to many Canadians, even if the courts ultimately retain the right to declare them unconstitutional).
My point was mainly in reply to Orfeo, who seemed to suggest that the only thing that had changed as a result of the ACW was states losing the right to secede.
The US (and here for that matter) is a federal system, while Canada is a confederation.
No it is not. Just because they called the process of federating "confederation" does not mean that Canada is a confederation in the sense of classifying countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederation
I confuse nothing at all. I merely note that there is a positive correlation between the popular vote and the seats in our FPTP system, whereas there is not in the US', where the gerrymandering and voter suppression is greater.
"List of amendments to the United States Constitution" (Wikipedia).
27 amendments have been approved by Congress, sent out to the states, and successfully ratified. And
If you go to the "Unratified amendments" section, the first one has been pending since 1789!
From the details in the article, ISTM such an amendment could be used for at least a cousin of gerrymandering.
YMMV.
I'd also add that the issue with voter suppression is that it means that a large number of people don't get a vote to be counted in the first place. That means that not only can there be a discrepancy between the popular vote and the result there can be a difference between the popular vote and the level of support among all those who should have been able to vote (of course, that could also be true of those who could vote but didn't ... but, there's a functional difference between the choice to not vote and being denied that choice). Voter suppression is a serious problem, and far more important to be addressed than any discussion over compulsory voting for those registered.
From earlier in this very thread, Churchill in 1951 and Wilson in (February) 1974.
(for the Tories to have achieved a majority in that election would I think have required 400 more votes in total across the right seats nationwide).
As an advocate of STV+ this small point (on either side) gives me no pleasure to record...
But the claim is nonsensical when you compare the number of votes for the Conservative party, which stood in 635 seats, and Labour, which stood in 631, with the number of votes for the Scottish National Party which stood in 59.
They are quite literally not engaged in the same contest. And you are pretending that they are. Why on earth would you try to assess the SNP vote by combining 59 contests where they did rather well with hundreds of contests where they got zero votes because they didn't even enter?
I don't accept the Wiki definition as the only proper usage of the term confederation. That given seems to me to be apply to a very limited set of circumstances. Canada is a confederation because the provinces are very much subordinate to the nation. That's not the position in the the US or Aust.
Sigh. Do you believe the Canadian government then? Or are you going to maintain you understand their system of governance better than they do?
https://www.canada.ca/en/intergovernmental-affairs/services/federation/federalism-canada.html
And the provinces are given exclusive powers on various matters. There's a whole wealth of linked pages in the federation section, if you can be bothered looking.
Excuse me? Can you not see all of the times that the Canadian government calls Canada a federation?
Enjoy your Lewis Carroll universe where you can redefine words to your heart's content, but I'll happily stick with the Canadian government's definition of Canada, which just so happens to align with all the cited material in Wikipedia, over your decision to strike out on your own.
He's unlikely to give a fuck about the constitution, so why should I.