FOUR REASONS ELECTORAL VOTES FOR PRESIDENT ARE A BAD IDEA
---------------------Warren D. Smith 2003----------------
JUST ADOPT STRAIGHT POPULAR VOTE INSTEAD!

1. Under the present electoral vote system, the presidential candidates have no incentive whatever to make promises that 
do good for either heavily "Republican" or "Democrat" states. 
They are solely interested in influencing the small subset 
of "swing" states.  That's bad for the country as a whole.

If we elected presidents with a straight popular vote, then the
candidates would be interested simply in helping people. 
All the people, in all of the states, equally, per person.

(Examples in recent politics:  
President Bush is said by many political commentators
not to care about what happens to non-swing states
New York and California...
Bush claimed to support "free trade" but went against that
by imposing a blatantly WTO-illegal steel tariff designed
to help him get votes in steel states, all of which happened to be 
"swing states."  Later, after the WTO ruled this tariff illegal
and allowed billions in retaliatory tariffs, and it became
clear that the tariff was hurting steel-consumer (also swing)
states, Bush abruptly removed the tariff, although his spokesman 
claimed neither the WTO decision nor the steel-consumer 
states had influenced this decision in the slightest.)


2. The electoral vote system makes cliffhanger close elections
(like Bush-Gore 2000) more likely.  You can easily see it 
was mathematically impossible to choose the correct winner
of that election, since the number of known-to-be-illegal votes
in Florida (e.g. cast by long-dead corpses) and also the number 
of people wrongly forbidden from voting by a too-inclusive 
anti-felon campaign, both swamped the official margin of victory.
Note: if popular voting had been used in Bush-Gore 2000, the election would NOT have been too-close-to-call cliffhanger - and the victor would have been different.  The same thing appears 
to have happened in the Hayes-Tilden 1876 election.


3. The electoral vote system does NOT somehow restore the balance of power between big and small states, allowing the small 
states to have more say.  (That goal IS accomplished by 
giving each state 2 senators, regardless of its size.) 
That is because the number of electoral votes 
a state has, which is the same as the number of seats it 
has in the House, is  (up to roundoff) proportional to its population.  Thus this system simply introduces more noise 
and more risk of unjudgeable cliffhanger elections, with no compensating benefit.


4. The electoral vote system allows illogical paradoxes to happen.
Consider the "Alabama paradox." 
After the 1880 census, C.W. Seaton (chief clerk of U. S. Census Office) pointed out that if the house had 299 representatives, Alabama would get 8 seats, but if the house had 300 representatives (1 more), Alabama would get only 7 seats!  Thus increases in the total number of representatives can cause a state to LOSE seats.
(This has happened.) Also, increases in a state's population can 
cause it to lose seats (which has also happened).
These paradoxes arise because of the rather peculiar rounding-to-integer rules that are mandated to calculate 
the states' electoral votes.


CONCLUSION: the electoral vote system is illogical, undemocratic,
and complicated.  It has twice caused too-close-to-call presidential elections.  Popular voting is logical, 
democratic, and simple.
Electoral voting has no compensating advantages.