Sadly, I lack the faith that such re-examination of our country will happen anytime soon. The inmates are in charge of the asylum and replacing them is going to take decades.
The only way the people take this country back is to start a third party. A REAL third party, somewhere between the moderate liberals and the libertarians.
Without any outside competition, it's just recycling the same type of candidates, with the same policies and with the same disregard for basic civil liberties.
> The only way the people take this country back is to start a third party.
If a party was started, it wouldn't be a third party, it'd be something like a fortieth party, excluding strictly regional parties.
The reason additional parties aren't competitive is structural in the electoral systems used in federal and state elections, and adding more parties isn't going to change that.
Exactly. So you have to go back yet another step and look at who has power to change the electoral system.
You might think the only answer is a constitutional amendment, which requires a supermajority of Congress, but in fact there's a backdoor: if you have the cooperation of a majority of state governments then you can certify any electors you like. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstat... for an attempt to change the U.S. electoral system in this way.
I think that Wikipedia article is far too sanguine about the likelihood that NPVIC would pass Constitutional muster.
First, it's not likely that the wording of Article II truly grants state legislatures unlimited discretion in the selection of electors. A state law that required electors to be men or Methodists would surely be unconstitutional today. And as a result, there's almost certainly an equal protection argument to be made against NPVIC: Sure, each individual voter is participating equally in a larger process to choose the President, but that's not the process prescribed by the Constitution. The process demanded by the Constitution is a state-by-state selection of electors, and if a state legislature wants to have an election, it better be an election in which every voter of that state is participating equally. A thought experiment: Could the state of California pass a law that counted every vote for the electoral slate of the Democratic party twice? Surely not. So how can they pass a law which discounts the vote of every voter except those that voted for the nationwide popular winner?
Second, if this agreement doesn't trigger the Congressional approval requirement of the Compact clause of Article I, I can't imagine what would.
Yes, something like that note is more or less exactly what I'd expect SCOTUS' position to be. And I don't think it would be a close decision.
Then the question becomes, if Congress endorses the pact, could it go into effect? The success of an equal protection claim against the agreement is a little trickier to forecast, since the justices who typically support a broad reading of equal protection are likely to be the most sympathetic to arguments for eliminating the disparity between the popular vote and the EC. But I think the Court would see NPVIC, rightly, as an "end run" around the amendment process, and require that state elections remain state elections: States do not have the power to facilitate national or interstate plebiscites outside the usual Constitutional order.
> Exactly. So you have to go back yet another step and look at who has power to change the electoral system.
For most elections (including most changes to election rules for federal offices), the correct answer is "the legislature (and sometimes the people directly, by initiative, to the extent that they have reserved legislative power) of the state in which the election occurs." This includes, incidentally, most of the procedures surrounding elections for the state's slate of Presidential electors in Presidential elections, as well as most of the rules for elections for most other offices.
There are some mandated aspects of the setup of elections for federal office (e.g., single member districts for Congress) that are set through federal law and require Congressional action to permit changes.
There are a few non-mandated-guidelines aspects of the setup of some elections for federal office (e.g., the safe harbor rules for the conduct of Presidential elections) that likewise involve Congressional action, but, as these are not mandates, states can change them without federal action, but there might be greater risk of Congress disqualifying the electoral votes of those states (but since the safe harbor rules are rules governing purely discretionary Congressional acts, its not clear that Congress would actually be barred from discounting electoral votes based on elections which complied with the safe harbor rules, and in any case its not clear that they actually would bar votes based on elections which didn't.)
There are very few aspects of federal elections that are governed by the Federal Constitution (e.g., that elections to the Presidency are by way of the electoral college and how electors are apportioned among the states, etc.)
> You might think the only answer is a constitutional amendment, which requires a supermajority of Congress
You might, if you have absolutely no idea about election law in the US, and have compounded that ignorance by only paying attention to one of the two methods of amending the Constitution specified in Article V, and, on top of all that, only considered Presidential elections.
> but in fact there's a backdoor
Or, rather, a whole lot of obvious, clearly marked, wide-open front, back, and side doors, windows, cat-and-dog doors, etc., as described above.
For that to work, we need a new voting system, such as Instant Run-Off, or Approval Voting. Luckily, that can be implemented on a per-state basis, as every state determines its own voting procedures.
