I would agree with the first part of your statement if just slightly differently worded:

“NPV may resolve some problems, but may also cause others.”

I don’t concede that more problems will result. I do agree, however that it might (but not necessarily) usher in problems more difficult to solve than the ones we’ve already dealt with under the current EC system. That said, I believe that any other problems which might result from implementing NPV are worth the price of coming closer to the goal of ensuring that every person’s vote counts as much as every other person’s vote for president. I’d also posit that it will make localized electoral fraud, which has been rife in many of our elections, more difficult to achieve. That is also a worthy goal worth the costs of implementing the NPV, and one which will NEVER be achieved under the current EC system.

Say Jim…since you’re running up hash totals and searching for “reasonableness,” let me ask you this:

Is it “reasonable” to say that the 2,576,630 voters (36.7%) in NY who voted for McCain would have used their time more productively by cleaning their bathrooms than going to vote for a candidate whom everyone on the planet knew had no chance of scoring NY’s electoral votes in the precious EC system?

Or how about the 3,521,164 (43.8%) who voted in Texas for Obama? Wouldn’t they have been better off washing their car that Tuesday?

Or, turning to the small states which are supposedly “protected” by the EC, how about the 157,317 (35.3%) in RI who voted for McCain? Or the 122,485 (38.0%) who voted in Alaska for Obama? What were THEY thinking?

This may be why the NPV schemers don’t promote 1960 as an instance where the popular vote and electoral vote results were contrary to each other. If the Kennedy-Johnson presidential slate lose “their” 82,000 vote plurality in Alabama, then it calls in question some of the popular vote that the Democratic machines ginned up in Illinois and Texas.

Look at Florida in 2000, where the Gore people concentrated their efforts on counties he had won. If 60% of the vote has clearly punched-out chads for candidate A, then probably 60% of the hanging chads will go the same way.

The lawyers who originally promoted the NPV scheme claimed that the electoral college was sexist, because had the popular vote been used, then the States would have rapidly expanded/debauched the franchise to include non-property owners, women, illiterates, imbeciles, felons, minors, illegal aliens, the deceased, and others to increase the influence of their State.

The popular vote in Colorado doubled between 1892 and 1896 (Colorado extended suffrage to included women in 1893). If we assume that half the votes were cast by women, and that they were in similar proportions to men, then they alone reduced the national plurality by over 10%, in a not very close election, and a not too populous state.

So presumably, Peterson gives individual electoral totals for California (where one Garfield elector and 4 Hancock electors were appointed). Which did he (or you) use in producing your totals of 4,454,433 and 4,444,976? In California, the top Hancock elector receive 0.6985% more popular votes than the elector who finished 6th.

Even if Peterson was careful, he could not account for situations like California in 1912 where it was claimed during the recount that some election judges when counting votes had simply made a tick mark for the head of the elector slate under a presumption that most voters had voted for all Republican or all Democratic electors.

Ooops! Bad on me. Never type on just one cup of coffee, I guess. (But I’ll bet Garfield would have gladly changed places, considering what happened later).

Jim, I’ve always been amused by the western Florida fantasy. I try to imagine the sound of screeching tires of thousands of pickup trucks as Republican voters in western Florida (most of whom evidently wait until the last hour of polling to vote) tuned in their radios, heard that Gore had “won,” and simultaneously returned home without voting. In the compressed time span of a just few minutes, it must have made an ungodly racket, and one doozey of a traffic jam. And it would have been even worse since Gore voters would have gone home too and…oh wait! Of course all the Gore voters would have continued on to the polls, wouldn’t they, even though they “knew” their candidate had already “won?”

It’s a fanciful but dubious story.

As for Nader – hasn’t he always told us over and over again that he took as many votes away from Bush as he did Gore? For my own part I wonder how many Nader voters would have voted for either major party candidate then, or in future elections, but Jim – if you think there were potentially 500,000 Nader voters in Georgia and North Carolina, well then maybe I might even convince you after all that Hayes was the incumbent in 1880!

Now….enough talk of popular votes! I’m surprised that a stout defender of the winner-take-all application of the Electoral College system (“WTAEC”) would even stoop to such talk. Let’s get back to the topic YOU introduced…post-election headaches in close elections.

How did the marvelous, ingenious WTAEC fail to prevent what happened in 1876, in 2000, and the other electoral abuses which we’ve experienced in presidential elections in our history? Since you oppose the NPV scheme because of what “might” happen in close elections it’s a fair question to ask you. How did we end up with these problems under the WTAEC?

Why have not recounts, protracted litigation and fraud been prevented by the (“WTAEC”)?

Why do you countenance a system which actively encourages fraud (Ohio, 2004, for example)?

And what about the little detail of the millions of “minority” voters in solid blue and solid red states? What about the Republican in Massachusetts who has, effectively, never been able to vote for his or her presidential candidate? Or the Democrat in Idaho? Why don’t those votes matter to you?

Another question to consider…If you truly believe that voters don’t bother to vote at all because they know their candidate “can’t win,” then it logically follows that the WTAEC systematically suppresses the vote in dozens of solid blue and solid red states. Furthermore, if it is true, as you believe, that the proportion of voters dissuaded from voting is greater among the party that is likely to lose, then the WTAEC has the effect of disproportionately suppressing votes (and probably voter registration) among members of, or sympathizers with, minority parties in those states where the statewide presidential winner can be predicted with certainty months in advance. This would consequently put that minority party’s candidates for state and local office at a perpetual disadvantage, making it more likely that the party of majority in the presidential race will also prevail in lower offices, and that the state itself will remain red or blue for the succeeding presidential cycle.

All because of the WTAEC.

And that’s a system you like.

Incredible.

17 –

Precisely. What happened in Ohio in 2004 prior to and on Election Day would not have been worth the effort had the NPV been in effect. With the entire election likely turning on the outcome in that state, the White House was the prize, and every conceivable fraud was indeed perpetrated by a Republican Governor and a Republican Sec’y of State to put that state into the “R” column.

Tables turned, Dems would probably have done the same thing.

A CD (Congressional District) basis of allocating electors would be even worse. Fraud would be even easier and cheaper to perpetrate with even more accurate effect.

The WTAEC system is a quaint but musty, rotted piece of antiquity. It stinks. The one defense you’ll never hear made for it is the only one which makes any sense. It is this:

“Hey…my party has this system racked up right now, so I don’t want to mess with it, OK?”

The 1880 national vote totals were Garfield 4,454,433, Hancock 4,444,976, according to Svend Petersen’s A Statistical History of the American Presidential Elections, the most accurate source for presidential election returns 1824-1960. Petersen collected the vote for each candidate for presidential elector. I don’t believe anyone else ever did that. He was a master.