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Connecticut OKs Bill Pledging Electoral Votes To National Popular-Vote Winner

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Jhhnn said:
It would be one thing if a majority of Americans had been sufficiently gullible to elect Trump. Thanks to the EC, he didn't need a majority. Imagine how nuts his devotees would be had he lost the way he won.

The EC followed the popular vote in every election between 1888 & 2000 so it wasn't an issue until GWB won. Even that wasn't too horrendous because he was within .5% of Gore. Trump lost the popular vote by 2.1% but it's full speed ahead with a radical & divisive agenda. A decent person wouldn't act that way under the circumstances but nobody makes that attribution to Trump, do they?

The GOP hasn't cared about anything but the lootocracy since Reagan & their voters are mostly in it for the Liberal tears at this point. I mean, they're sure as Hell not getting anything else out of it other than screwed.
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Funny thing is no candidate had a majority of votes in the 2016 election, and Trump won more votes in 30 states. Hillary's vote margin in California more than accounted for her popular vote "win". I guess some people want to give direct democracy a go.
 
While I agree the EC needs to be abolished and I’ve held that opinion for decades, I feel this is just going to lead to fewer people voting which is another enormous problem.
Why would someone who consistently votes 3rd party even show up? There is no chance they’ll ever even get 1 EC vote under this proposed system.

I do like how a bunch of less important places are effectively pooling their votes to make them more relevant.
I do feel the EC leads to extreme candidates that is a “both sides do it” thing.
 
Vic said:
A "small government conservative" living high on the hog on a bloated government pension. Typical.
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E-7 retirement from the military isn't putting you in the top 2%. Depending on how many years served, I would guess it's about 30k - 40k per year so someone has a very nice post retirement gig.
 
soulcougher73 said:
Why would we care about that? That is the whole point is to win the popular vote.
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Because historically Democrats are happy to throw away inconvenient rules and laws when actual political loss is at stake. Witness a few years ago when New Jersey Dems removed Torricelli from the ballot and substituted Lautenberg instead when it was obvious the former was going to lose despite it being completely illegal for them to do so. If they were willing to break the laws they passed to keep a Senate seat do you honestly think you'd suddenly develop principles where none existed before and obey the laws you passed? Especially when the outcome would be unfavorable to you given the much higher stakes of the Presidency vs. a Senate seat?

http://edition.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/10/04/elec02.nj.s.torricelli.scotus/index.html
 
IJTSSG said:
So if you and the majority of Connecticutans voted for candidate X but the majority of the rest of the country voted for candidate Y, your states EC votes would go to Y. You're OK with this? Your vote at that point would mean nothing.
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Yes because my vote would actually mean something which it doesn't now. It doesn't matter who my "state" voted for, it matters who I vote for. I'm voting for the President of the United States not my governor or state rep.
 
brandonbull said:
Funny thing is no candidate had a majority of votes in the 2016 election, and Trump won more votes in 30 states. Hillary's vote margin in California more than accounted for her popular vote "win". I guess some people want to give direct democracy a go.
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What do you mean by "no candidate had a majority of votes" then go onto say "Hillary won the popular vote"?
 
Fanatical Meat said:
While I agree the EC needs to be abolished and I’ve held that opinion for decades, I feel this is just going to lead to fewer people voting which is another enormous problem.
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I think it will be the opposite. I mean if you want to vote for the Republican candidate in MA, why bother. Or vote for the Democratic candidate in Alabama, pfft, waste of my time. And if I'm on the fence in either of those states, well lo and behold, maybe now both of those candidates will actually come to my state and not just one of the precious "swing" states.
 
Fanatical Meat said:
While I agree the EC needs to be abolished and I’ve held that opinion for decades, I feel this is just going to lead to fewer people voting which is another enormous problem.
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It will likely do the opposite as currently the large majority of states are not competitive so your vote means nothing. In a popular vote system it still means extremely little but it will mean more than it does now for most Americans.

In fact this increased turnout is one of the big reasons Republicans are so against this. While their loss of electoral welfare is the biggest reason the odds of a Republican winning almost any given election is inversely related to turnout.

Why would someone who consistently votes 3rd party even show up? There is no chance they’ll ever even get 1 EC vote under this proposed system.
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Getting an electoral college vote does nothing so third party voters would be getting exactly the same result as they do currently.

Also, voting third party in a competitive election is generally a stupid idea anyway. Unless this third party is some sort of anarchist party everyone has a preference. Voting third party just hurts that preference. Third party voters would be better off sponsoring ballot initiatives for ranked choice voting than lodging pointless and counterproductive protest votes in the hopes of getting one measly electoral vote.

I do like how a bunch of less important places are effectively pooling their votes to make them more relevant.
I do feel the EC leads to extreme candidates that is a “both sides do it” thing.
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I don’t see why the electoral college would lead to extreme candidates and it’s DEFINITELY not a ‘both sides’ thing. Clinton was a very centrist candidate, perhaps to her detriment. Trump ran on a ban Muslims, kill terrorist families, multiple sexual assault, raise taxes on the poor to give ludicrous tax breaks to the rich platform.

I’ve noticed recently that the ‘both sides do it’ argument is deployed almost exclusively to defend Republican behavior. If both sides are the same why don’t we see an equal amount of #bothsides applied to Democrats?
 
brandonbull said:
Funny thing is no candidate had a majority of votes in the 2016 election, and Trump won more votes in 30 states. Hillary's vote margin in California more than accounted for her popular vote "win". I guess some people want to give direct democracy a go.
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I should have said "plurality of votes". We're all US citizens & each of us should have an equal say in who becomes President. It doesn't require convoluted thinking to see the righteousness of that.
 
glenn1 said:
Because historically Democrats are happy to throw away inconvenient rules and laws when actual political loss is at stake. Witness a few years ago when New Jersey Dems removed Torricelli from the ballot and substituted Lautenberg instead when it was obvious the former was going to lose despite it being completely illegal for them to do so. If they were willing to break the laws they passed to keep a Senate seat do you honestly think you'd suddenly develop principles where none existed before and obey the laws you passed? Especially when the outcome would be unfavorable to you given the much higher stakes of the Presidency vs. a Senate seat?

http://edition.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/10/04/elec02.nj.s.torricelli.scotus/index.html
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If that’s the case then why don’t Democratic states simply award their electors to the Democratic nominee every time? The exact same (nonexistent) problem you describe here is present in every election. It’s funny you mention the history of this when the history unanimously shows the opposite of your claim.

Regardless if you genuinely (and irrationally) think that’s the case it’s all the more reason for red states to get on board with the national popular vote. If you’re worried an unprincipled state or two will tip an election then best to have all states award based on the popular vote to make that much harder. Glad you’re a supporter now!

Look, we all know why you’re so angry about this. It’s because you think if we elected the president based on who got the most votes Democrats would win more. That’s your only concern.
 
Jhhnn said:
I should have said "plurality of votes". We're all US citizens & each of us should have an equal say in who becomes President. It doesn't require convoluted thinking to see the righteousness of that.
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Surely then you'd be OK with enshrining in your state constitution the pledge of EC electors to the popular vote winner then? Not like principled people like you would actually need to be compelled in a completely unavoidable way to do what you said you were going to do in case a Republican wins the popular vote. But then again given your high level of principles you certainly should have no principles with updating your state constitutions to ensure "no backsies."
 
glenn1 said:
Surely then you'd be OK with enshrining in your state constitution the pledge of EC electors to the popular vote winner then? Not like principled people like you would actually need to be compelled in a completely unavoidable way to do what you said you were going to do in case a Republican wins the popular vote. But then again given your high level of principles you certainly should have no principles with updating your state constitutions to ensure "no backsies."
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Why would it matter if it was a law as opposed to the constitution? Both can be changed. More importantly there’s no way the federal courts would allow an ex post facto change in how electors were awarded to retroactively change the result of an election. That would violate the constitution.

As I’ve mentioned previously I don’t know why you hold such strong opinions about this considering you’ve already proven repeatedly that you have absolutely no fucking idea how the electoral college works. Remember all that nonsense with your claims about the electors?
 
uallas5 said:
Yes because my vote would actually mean something which it doesn't now. It doesn't matter who my "state" voted for, it matters who I vote for. I'm voting for the President of the United States not my governor or state rep.
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You obviously don't understand what's just been passed.
 
fskimospy said:
Why would it matter if it was a law as opposed to the constitution? Both can be changed. More importantly there’s no way the federal courts would allow an ex post facto change in how electors were awarded to retroactively change the result of an election. That would violate the constitution.

As I’ve mentioned previously I don’t know why you hold such strong opinions about this considering you’ve already proven repeatedly that you have absolutely no fucking idea how the electoral college works. Remember all that nonsense with your claims about the electors?
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Here we go again with this bullshit about you being wrong about the EC. States have the absolute right under Article 2, Section 1, Clause 2 to determine how to appoint their electors and electors cannot be bound to vote for a particular candidate, so you saying that states could absolutely control how their electors vote is facially incorrect. You saying "well they can choose party hacks as the electors" is meaningless and unenforceable. Hell, the state could go around its own compact pledge and outright call for electors to be "faithless" and vote for the Democratic candidate who won the state but lost the popular vote; there would be no recourse for courts or anyone else. We already saw in the NJ example I showed before where the law was completely disregarded when Democrats saw fit and federal courts stood idly by while it happened. Do you think blue states won't happily cause a Constitutional crisis if it suits their purposes? Hell, there was an entire movement to get electors to vote against Trump this time around on the basis he was a racist, etc.

Let's play this out and see how it works. Presume for sake of argument that in 2016, Trump won the popular vote by a single vote nationwide while Clinton won MI, WV, and PA thus giving her what would be an EC vote victory. Later news stories show voting irregularities that *might* have given more votes to Trump but the state(s) in question (run by Republicans) certifies the vote tallies anyway and squashes any recounts or other investigations. Do you honestly think states like CA, MA, and DC are going to stand by and still support the award of their EC electors to Trump regardless of the stated popular vote?
 
Already explained it. If you're OK with your state ignoring the popular vote outcome in your state and voting with the herd, so be it. Your vote was rendered meaningless.
 
glenn1 said:
Here we go again with this bullshit about you being wrong about the EC. States have the absolute right under Article 2, Section 1, Clause 2 to determine how to appoint their electors and electors cannot be bound to vote for a particular candidate, so you saying that states could absolutely control how their electors vote is facially incorrect. You saying "well they can choose party hacks as the electors" is meaningless and unenforceable. Hell, the state could go around its own compact pledge and outright call for electors to be "faithless" and vote for the Democratic candidate who won the state but lost the popular vote; there would be no recourse for courts or anyone else. We already saw in the NJ example I showed before where the law was completely disregarded when Democrats saw fit and federal courts stood idly by while it happened. Do you think blue states won't happily cause a Constitutional crisis if it suits their purposes? Hell, there was an entire movement to get electors to vote against Trump this time around on the basis he was a racist, etc.
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Again, you have absolutely no idea how the electoral college works. Do you really want me to go dig up your previous posts that were near-totally ignorant about basic facts of how the EC works?

Literally every objection you're bringing up about the national popular vote compact exists in the current system as well, yet that doesn't happen. You said Democrats were historically shown to be untrustworthy in this regard when literally 100% of the historical evidence shows the exact opposite. One. Hundred. Percent. If you're going to object to shifting to a popular vote you need to come up with problems that don't already exist in our system.

Let's play this out and see how it works. Presume for sake of argument that in 2016, Trump won the popular vote by a single vote nationwide while Clinton won MI, WV, and PA thus giving her what would be an EC vote victory. Later news stories show voting irregularities that *might* have given more votes to Trump but the state(s) in question (run by Republicans) certifies the vote tallies anyway and squashes any recounts or other investigations. Do you honestly think states like CA, MA, and DC are going to stand by and still support the award of their EC electors to Trump regardless of the stated popular vote?
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Again literally every objection you are giving here exists in the current system as well, yet that doesn't happen. I'm not sure how you aren't understanding this.
 
IJTSSG said:
Already explained it. If you're OK with your state ignoring the popular vote outcome in your state and voting with the herd, so be it. Your vote was rendered meaningless.
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No it wasn't, your state's votes were allocated in accordance with the wishes of the electorate as expressed through their representatives. This is a basic principle of governance that I don't think you understand.
 
IJTSSG said:
Already explained it. If you're OK with your state ignoring the popular vote outcome in your state and voting with the herd, so be it. Your vote was rendered meaningless.
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How about we just take the states out if it in regards to the President of the UNITED States? Just a national popular vote. What states the votes came from dont matter.
 
soulcougher73 said:
How about we just take the states out if it in regards to the President of the UNITED States? Just a national popular vote. What states the votes came from dont matter.
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I just think it's funny that he thinks your vote is rendered meaningless if it's counted on a national level as opposed to a state level. I think it's some sort of state sovereignty argument, which shows he doesn't understand what state sovereignty means. It also appears to show that he doesn't understand that states don't vote for the president as is and never have.
 
fskimospy said:
Look, we all know why you’re so angry about this. It’s because you think if we elected the president based on who got the most votes Democrats would win more. That’s your only concern.
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I think this pretty much nails it on the head why republicans dont back a fair system, as evident by the idiocy in this thread of their comments with complete lack of understanding the EC or how government actually works.
 
Once more:

Current policy in CT is that the majority winner of the popular vote gets all the EC votes.

Proposed policy - CT is joining a cartel of other states who are going to use the combined popular votes to determine where all of their EC votes go.

Scenario - Candidates x and y. You vote for x. x wins the popular vote in CT however y wins the popular vote nationwide. Under the current system CT would cast their EC votes for candidate x which is how it should be. Under the new system they would cast their EC votes for y, completely ignoring the majority of voters in CT. That's bullshit.

I'm aware the duly elected reps passed this. I don't know about you but I occasionally disagree with passed legislation.

Full disclosure - I'm on the fence about eliminating the EC.
 
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