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In the American election system, consider the following proposal:

The ballots for the Presidential elections remain very much the same, but the names of the Electors selected on the ballot would be selected directly by the candidate they share a space with.

The President is elected by a direct popular vote of all of the citizens of the United States, including any regions without electors.

The Electors on the ballot are allocated proportionally to their respective candidates' vote total in each state, to form a legislative house, which replaces the House of Representatives.

This has a number of desirable effects:

- The President is finally selected by a popular vote, instead of by Ohio.

- The lesser political parties of the United States can gain representation in the legislature.

-The lesser political parties of the United States can therefore field candidates with the necessary experience and exposure to the press to run an effective campaign and to be legitimate contenders to run the United States and to be elected to the Senate. Gary Johnson is by far the most experienced third party candidate since 1980, and that's a problem.

- Gerrymandering is eliminated.

- The ballot does not require the direct institutionalization of political parties in the electoral system, and is thus not a serious change to the Constitution, and should not overly increase the power of political parties, as though that were possible.

- The balance of power between different states is not affected to an unfair extent. Campaigning remains important in the small states to ensure a favorable legislature.

- Discouraged voters in highly partisan states can now support a dissenting ticket and win something.

- The system of voting remains simple and transparent.

- Career politicians, a problem in proportional-representation countries, are limited by the short lists of candidates in each state. In a state with only five electors, it is difficult for a party to justify prioritizing a Congressman who is unpopular with voters.

- Minor candidates for President may be less perceived as "wasted votes", especially in large states like Texas and California.

An additional provision might be:

- If no candidate receives a simple majority of the popular vote, a run-off election between the top two candidates is performed. This eliminates the possibility of "splitting" the left or right. Of course, this alone removes the "spoiler" effect, but does little in practice for the balance of power.

The obvious problems:

- Abolishing the House is likely to be unpopular among members of the House.

- Off-year elections become significantly less important. Alternatively, we could elect a new President every two years. Unfortunately, this may affect our foreign policy negatively, as developing personal relationships with the leaders of 200 other countries takes a lot of time for the President.

- In the simple view, the Electors attached to a particular candidate are selected by the candidate, but in practice would likely be "suggested" by the party endorsing the candidate. This works fine. Unfortunately, it may have the effect of quelling dissent within political parties cf. Ron Paul, who, despite his wacky views, is the most obvious example of American party-deviance. For his part, Dr. Paul could probably get elected running as a Libertarian in Texas. But this may have chilling effects on the Senate.

-The process for selecting among the Electors who are to be apportioned to the new House remains undetermined.

If we elect a new President every two years, we might consider the following:

-The Vice President is elected separately, changes only every four or even six years, and is given de facto influence primarily over foreign policy and interactions with other countries. This may ease the foreign policy "burden" of a changing President, as well as making the lesser office meaningful, and allowing a national referendum on foreign policy (Ron Paul for Vice President!).

-The Vice President remains a primarily diplomatic position; the President is still Commander in Chief of the military. This should hopefully promote a "commerce first, war second" foreign policy, but that's probably wishful thinking.

Good luck.

After voting for a Presidential candidate/the electors they've chosen, a second, closed election could be held a month later in which voters could pick from all the party elector nominees however many electors they end up being allocated proportionately.
The problem arises with voters not being able to know all their elector nominees. In a state like California, with 55 electors, this would be an insurmountable obstacle; there's no way the majority of people could make an informed decision.
How this would be solved would be by maintaining the district system instead of replacing it with a state system, but the districts would be enlarged significantly. California could be broken into bigger districts with 4 or 5 electors each. In this way, it would be easily viable for voters to know their district's elector nominees they would be voting on.
This system would maintain local representation in the New House, which is important to a lot of people. It would also give voters more say over who makes up their legislative body. And most importantly, it picks which of the electors from each candidate fill spots in the New House.

I think that if you're going to throw out the House, you might as well throw out the College too and implement a system that isn't fundamentally flawed.

scythe wrote:The President is elected by a direct popular vote of all of the citizens of the United States, including any regions without electors.

Preventing this from being the case is exactly why America has an electoral college and senators used to be elected by state legislatures: the electorate as a whole can't be trusted to make an informed decision on who to vote for. The electoral college isn't great, but it offers at least some degree of influence to less populous states as the Senate also does. It's interesting you call for the dissolution of the House when the Senate is the lesser democratic body.

In addition, think to 2000. Recounting the state of Florida was hellish enough to decide who got its electors, mired in legal disputes and a failure to observe established standards. Imagine trying to recount the entire country in the case of a very small popular vote difference - Kennedy won the popular vote in 1960 by less than 0.2%. Now expand the Florida situation to the entire country. Whether Nixon could find a couple hundred thousand votes in Manhattan or Wyoming, any reasonable doubt as to election validity could raise a dispute and result in manual recounts anywhere in the country. The Supreme Court could decide another election.

scythe wrote:- Abolishing the House is likely to be unpopular among members of the House.

Well, just work it into the Budget Control Act of 2013 and we'll either get a new budget or a unicameral legislature!

1) Democracy is inherently flawed. Anyone that thinks a direct democracy is a good idea has no idea what they are talking about. The Bolshevik Revolution, Quaker witch trials, Hugo Chavez's re-election, and the recent Californian proposition to make condoms mandatory in pornography are all examples of "democracy" or the majority instituting its blind will upon a minority.

2) Abolishing the House would ignite a civil war overnight.

McP3000 v2.0 wrote:1) Democracy is inherently flawed. Anyone that thinks a direct democracy is a good idea has no idea what they are talking about. The Bolshevik Revolution, Quaker witch trials, Hugo Chavez's re-election, and the recent Californian proposition to make condoms mandatory in pornography are all examples of "democracy" or the majority instituting its blind will upon a minority.

2) Abolishing the House would ignite a civil war overnight.

While I would agree that direct democracy is neither perfect nor necessarily desirable, your first three are certainly not examples of it.

sxmt wrote:While I would agree that direct democracy is neither perfect nor necessarily desirable, your first three are certainly not examples of it.

They're examples of majority rule over minority rights, a symptom of direct democracy. Two of them resulted in authoritarian government, supposedly representing the majority's best interests. Direct democracy destroys libertarianism.

Pikman wrote:

sxmt wrote:While I would agree that direct democracy is neither perfect nor necessarily desirable, your first three are certainly not examples of it.

They're examples of majority rule over minority rights, a symptom of direct democracy. Two of them resulted in authoritarian government, supposedly representing the majority's best interests. Direct democracy destroys libertarianism.

To be clear, direct democracy is where people vote directly on policy rather than just voting for representatives. Electing the US President through a simple popular vote would not be direct democracy, just a simpler form of representative democracy. Chavez's elections were also everyday representative democracy. The Bolshevik Revolution was a revolution that resulted in something entirely undemocratic. And the witch trials were... witch trials. I understand the connection being made with the tyranny of the majority, but the connection between that and direct democracy is very tenuous--and you could make much the same arguments against democracy in general, which I guess McP kind of did when he mentioned Chavez's re-elections.

If we're going to link this back to the original point of this topic, I fail to see how electing the US president through the Electoral College rather than a simple national popular vote does anything to check the worst, basest effects of populism. All the current system does is make the presidential candidates spend a bit more time in smaller states rather than focusing just on the most populous--though consider that with the current system, the candidates already devote a disproportionate amount of attention to a very small selection of states. It has no effect whatsoever on the problem that "the electorate as a whole can't be trusted to make an informed decision on who to vote for".

And as far as (fairly-)direct democracy goes, Switzerland seems to have done pretty well for the last 700 years.