Sooooooo, Should I Still Even Bother To Vote?

[badstar]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18053715/

The measure would award Maryland's 10 electoral votes to the national popular vote winner. The plan would only take effect if states representing a majority of the nation's 538 electoral votes decided to make the same change.

This really doesn't make sense to me.

Comments

[saratoga80.livejournal.com]

This is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. As the Supreme Court noted in its 2000 decision that granted the Presidency to George W. Bush, there is no way to ever guarantee, with certainty, that a popular majority exists under the circumstances of a close vote. It is impossible to compeltely remove the effect of voter fraud. For every time that we have accusations of fraud in Florida - and we'll never know the truth but we'll all ahve an opinion - we have accusations in Hawaii of by the GOP. So, imagine the turnaround if a Republican wins the clean popular majority in the nation - say 55-45 - but, in MD, a noted blue state, the Democrat squeaks by with 51-49. This means all 10 MD votes would be Republican, and would not reflect the majority will of the people. The idea of the electoral college, while flawed, was created to guarantee that representation of a state's will was accounted for. If they wanted to truly account for the people's will, they would have 10 Democrats and 10 Republicans, and a smattering from other parties at the ready, establish a threshold percentile for electoral college representation (10% of the people of a state must have voted for the party to be represented, at minimum, is one idea). Then if the election were 60-40 Democrat to Republican, 6 Dem delegates would go, 4 GOP would go, and then you'd actually represent the will of Maryland, instead of all-or-nothing.