. . . that this post would have attracted a pro-NPV troll. Nor do I find it at all surprising that said troll would mask himself as an alleged conservative in order to steal some credibility for his comments. I mean, when Dan over at Republican Michigander posted on this topic about a month ago, the first six comments were a troll copying-and-pasting already-debunked pro-NPV arguments. You don't seem to be much different, and quite frankly, since even Satan masquerades as an angel of light, you'll understand if I don't take your nom de plume at face value.
If we are going to reform the College, it should simply be eliminated. It has lost most of its purpose.
Based on the rest of that paragraph, I'll guess that you also agree with Stanley Chang ("Updating the Electoral College: The National Popular Vote Legislation") that the Electoral College was designed to fail, thus relying heavily on the Contingent Election mechanism. I'm not sure whether that makes you ignorant or stupid, but for now I'll assume the former . . . just because I'm feeling charitable.
The Constitution of the United States was designed to allow a national government that would be strong enough to accomplish its designed purpose, without being so strong that it would overwhelm the sovereignty of the individual states. It has nothing to do with an agrarian society, the absence of political parties, or a lack of a national public education system . . . rather, it has everything to do with a fundamental first-hand understanding of the grave dangers associated with both a too-weak and a too-strong central government.
As I said at the beginning of the article, the entire purpose of the Electoral College is to balance the voice of the people with the voice of the states. The way our republic was designed, both of those voices are important, which is why the Senate was intended to represent the state legislatures. The Founding Fathers deliberately constructed a sophisticated system of integrated checks-and-balances when they designed the federal republic; undermining any of them ultimately undermines the whole. (And if you want to get an idea of what a direct democracy looks like, then take the time to honestly examine either Greece or California.) We already have way too many instances of federal overreach onto state sovereignty, arguably beginning with the ratification of the 17th Amendment, triggering the NPVIC would probably be the final nail in the federal coffin.
Uninformed voters aren't a phenomenon restricted to any particular era of American History. As I pointed out a couple of years ago, even today about 68.26% of the voting age population is either clueless or disengaged politically, and this in spite of having access to more information - literally at our fingertips - than the Founding Fathers could have ever envisioned.
No, the people's voice did not necessarily support Obama's reelection. As I said in the article, those who cite the electoral vote margin (126 votes), either ignore or disregard that the electoral map all the way back "above the fold" has a pretty balanced occurrence of red and blue, because Obama won only three more jurisdictions than Romney did. Those who insist on citing the popular vote margin (4,970,508 votes), either ignore or disregard the reality that this is only a ∆PV% ≈ 3.91%; if this were a poll instead of an election, that would be considered a "margin of error" difference.
Illinois isn't the only state where the democrats gerrymandered the hell out of the districts to keep the republican representation minimized; you really should take a look at what they did in Maryland and New Jersey. Yes, both parties do it, and yes, it's wrong regardless of who's doing it; that's why several states have enacted or have in the pipeline legislation intended to minimize such activity going forward. But gerrymandering can't save your ass in statewide races, which is why Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin went for Obama even though the Republican Party controls the levers of power in Columbus, Harrisburg, Madison, Lansing, Richmond, and Tallahassee. All that proves is that the major metropolitan areas of each state are capable of overriding the vote of the rest of the state; using Michigan as an example, Genesee, Macomb, Oakland, and Wayne Counties have sufficient clout that they can silence the voices of Western, Central, Northern, and Upper Michigan, and often do.
In those six states, that fact by itself speaks volumes as to why the NPVIC is a bad idea.
The "winner take all by state" method of allocating electoral votes currently used by every jurisdiction except Maine and Nebraska, that the NPV movement loves to criticize, is a "democratic reform" that Andrew Jackson and his political allies used as a vehicle for Old Hickory to exact his political revenge on John Quincy Adams. While President Jackson is accurately remembered as a chief executive who actually reduced the size of the federal government and the chief executive who presided over the only time in history that the United States retired its debt, he also gravely eroded the House of Representatives' constitutional role as the voice of the people in the national government. Further, Jackson's political allies are the reason that we have the modern two-party system in the first place.
So yeah, not a small irony that the reasons that the NPV advocates cite as "fundamental problems" with the Electoral College are actually changes that the first-ever democrat president leveraged.
Of course political victories play a role in tweaking the Electoral College. The Michigan Democrat Party gained control of Lansing in the 1890 mid-terms and implemented the Electoral District Method so as to ensure that Grover Cleveland would get some of Michigan's votes in the 1892 election. (And when the Michigan Republican Party regained control in the 1894 mid-terms, undoing that change was a priority item on their agenda.) More recently, the California Legislature took advantage of the flip in the Governor's Mansion to get their NPV enabling legislation enacted (without a single republican vote). Recall that they didn't have the votes to override Governor Schwarzenegger's veto (twice), and probably wouldn't have been able to override a Governor Whitman veto had the 2010 election turned out differently.
In the same manner, the 2006 mid-terms swept the democrats into power in both chambers of Congress, and the party of the jackass got its way for four years, until the 2010 mid-terms reasserted the people's voice in the Lower House. And if the people really wanted the Obama Agenda, then that 2013 Congressional Map would have a whole lot more blue in it, gerrymandering or not.
