Vote For Me And I'll Vote For You

California is looking into changing how their electoral votes are cast when voting for President. From SignOnSandiego.Com there are no less than three proposals to move from the current winner-takes-all approach.
Plan 1:

A Republican plan would allocate California's 55 electoral votes by congressional district

Plan 2:

A Democratic option would give all of the electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote regardless of how California voted. It only would become effective if enough states whose electoral votes added up to at least 270 – the number needed to win – joined in

Plan 3:

A surprise third initiative filed last week by a small, relatively unknown group would allocate electoral votes in proportion to the popular vote in California once a majority of states adopt a similar system

And it gets worse:

Maryland this year became the first state to pass a law designed to circumvent the Electoral College in this [Plan 2] fashion. A similar law has passed in Illinois and is expected to be signed. Bills are pending in a number of state legislatures.

Each of these proposals are bad ideas, one can assume that they are probably bad ideas without diving in too deeply because each one is proposed to support the political aspirations of the party proposing it. For example Plan 1 would almost certainly guarantee a Republican President because as it stands, all California's electoral votes go to the Democrat; with Plan 1 you would swap no less than 20 votes to the republican, and there is little to know way that in our current political landscape a Democrat can win in those circumstances. Unfortunately the article never even hints as to why we have the Electoral System to elect Presidents, in fact the only defendant of the current Electoral system in the article had this to say:

“It serves a purpose, namely that it confines ballot challenges to individual states...”

Sure that's true and it is a pleasant side effect of the Electoral System, but it doesn't actually address the arguments for the why we elect the President in the way that we do.

One should at least understand why we have the current system before we toss the whole thing aside as dated and obsolete. Unfortunately our uneducated culture rarely knows how to think much less what to think about if they did. To explore why we have the Electoral System a brief civics lesson is needed.

For those who do not already know; the United States has three "separate but equal" branches of government: Judicial, Legislative and Executive. These three branches were intended to keep a "balance of power" so that one branch would not be able to usurp all the power and so prevent our Government from devolving into a Tyranny. In order to keep the power separate, the means from which people were selected for each branch, and their length of stay varied.

For example: Judges were appointed for life. Their power was to judge things against the law as it is written, not to write or change it, they were to be above politics and thus, life appointments (in theory) completely insulated them from the political winds, and they were therefore accountable only to the Law itself. The Legislator's power is to actually make the laws and as it is the people's right to have a stake in the laws they are accountable to, the Legislative branch is therefore answerable to the people. However, during the creation of the Constitution there was tension between the more populace states and the less populace states. The latter were afraid that their concerns would be ignored in the future congress and they would be railroaded by the Tyranny of the Majority. The former felt that every person should be represented equally in Congress and it would not be fair for their populations if each state had the same number of votes in Congress. The compromising result was a bicameral Congress consisting of a House and Senate. Each state would have two members of the Senate regardless of their population and a proportional number of members in the House as corresponds to their population.

The House: the States were divided into districts with equally distributed population (and re-assessed every 10 years) and congressmen are elected by popular vote of the district. Their term was a mere 2 years which forces them to be in constant contact with their electorate. This is the Voice of the People

The Senate: As each state had the same number of Senators, they were understood to represent the State, not the people. Therefore Senators were elected by the legislature of their respective state. Their term was 6 years to provide stability and because State's interests do not change quickly.

While the Legislative branch makes the laws they have no means to enforce them, that is where the Executive branch comes in. Most of the Executive branch is selected via appointment, but the Head of the Executive branch (i.e. The President and Vice-President) was understood to be the executor of the laws for all the States. Thus Each State was to receive the same number of votes as they have representative in Congress (Number of house members + 2 Senators). This way the Presidential vote was weighted by population but still retained a healthy State balance. Each state Legislature has the prerogative to determine how their votes are allocated and it did not take long until the Electors were decided by the popular vote of each state in a winner-takes-all fashion (the current exceptions being Maine and Nebraska)

In practice this has worked quite well. Presidents are forced to campaign and respond to the needs of a much larger majority of the States than a raw popular vote would require. It also helps insulate the President from the political winds (which is a good thing, we already have a Congressional House for that). While I would not be vehemently opposed to Plan 1 (and not just because it helps republicans) The current winner-takes-all system provides better State integrity in our country which is becoming less and less Federal and more National all the time. In my state of Minnesota, I would be vehemently opposed to Plan 1 as it would relegate our state to complete fly over land and no president would care about the possibility of picking up one, or at the most two Electoral Votes.

Plans 2 ad 3 are right out. The LAST thing we need is to popularize the entire government. Ever since it's founding the Government of the United States has been traveling in a line from a Federal Constitutional Republic to Pure Democracy, and this is something we should be fighting against. A Federal Government would (among other things) allow more power to be focused locally, rather than nationally and it helps prevent the Tyranny of the Majority.

Finally something I found quite disturbing about the article was the the line of argument used by a Plan 1 supporter: "There's something to be said for letting voters in northern and eastern San Diego County feel like their votes actually matter in a presidential election" Ah, yes, because how they 'feel', is much more important than how it actually is.

God Save our Country.