Posted by
NOTLEGALROADKILLYET on Tuesday, February 06, 2007 1:45:41 PM
This past weekend the Rocky Mountain News published a Point-Counterpoint set of articles by State Senator
Ken Gordon and State Senator
Shawn Mitchell on Gordon's proposal to emasculate the electoral college via Senate Bill 46.
It is clear that I have not recruited Senator Mitchell as a reader of this blog. If I had, or if he had simply googled the subject, he might have discovered and used two arguments that I have used.
The first is that in many states, not all votes are counted unless the race is close enough to be affected by them. For example, in the 2000 California presidential race, 500,000 absentee ballots were not counted because even if every one had gone to Bush, it would not changed the outcome of the electors.
State Senator Gordon is fully aware that absentee ballots traditionally go Republican and he is hoping that Republican votes are not counted so that his party can steal an election with the mechanism he proposes.
Colorado and other states that sign onto this scheme have no capability of forcing every state to count their absentee ballots, so this issue cannot be fixed.
Second, while the legislatures have some power under the Constitution to set the method of elector selection, it is not at all clear that it can cause electors to be chosen as directed by events outside the State. This law assigns Californians and New Yorkers more rights to select Colorado presidential electors than it assigns to the citizens of Colorado. Is that what we want? Is that something that the US Supreme Court would even allow given that these electors are Federal Office holders, even if only for a few minutes.
There are other arguments that I haven't made.
One is that the electoral college is the mechanism that dictates that we have a two party, rather than a multi-party system. Do we really want to make it possible for there to be four, or even six parties, all contending to win the popular vote without regard to state boundaries? This bill makes it possible for any minor party with a well known candidate or well funded candidate to become President without requiring that he/she has a national base.
Conversely, this bill also has the potential to disenfranchise voters who might like to vote for a candidate but whose state won't put him/her on the ballot. Thus, it would advantage the major parties to encourage and even fund minor party candidates who appeal to the other party's voters.
Like so many of Senator Gordon's other hair brained schemes, this bill has so much potential for mischief and is so poorly thought out that it should quickly be abandoned.
That's what Senator Shawn Mitchell could have, and should have said.