{"id":4597,"date":"2011-09-19T11:41:09","date_gmt":"2011-09-19T16:41:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stonescryout.org\/?p=4597"},"modified":"2011-09-19T11:41:09","modified_gmt":"2011-09-19T16:41:09","slug":"pennsylvania-flirts-with-irrelevancy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/?p=4597","title":{"rendered":"Pennsylvania Flirts With Irrelevancy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Republican legislators in the Pennsylvania state government are pushing a bill that would relatively proportion their presidential electoral votes based on the results of the individual congressional district presidential votes. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.philly.com\/philly\/news\/politics\/city\/129928053.html\" target=\"_blank\">The (Republican) governor says he would sign such a bill.<\/a> This is a <em>bad<\/em> idea.<\/p>\n<p>The suggestion came up in Colorado and California in years past, and failed in both cases. The Electoral College is actually a very good way of apportioning votes, ensuring that a President has both a <em>sufficient<\/em> number of votes and also a <em>diverse<\/em> support base; <em>broad<\/em> support favored over the <em>most<\/em> support in close races. I posted a number of reasons why the Electoral College is a good idea <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thepaytons.org\/essays\/considerettes\/?p=2570\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>, with a link to the history of the EC.<\/p>\n<p>As a side note, Markos Moulitsas, the &quot;Daily Kos&quot; himself, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thepaytons.org\/essays\/considerettes\/?p=2255\" target=\"_blank\">split his support over the Colorado and California efforts<\/a>. One of them he called a &quot;bad horror movie&quot; and an attempt to &quot;game the system&quot;. The other he called &quot;brilliant&quot; and suggested that &quot;every state should allocate EVs in this manner&quot;. Why the difference in tone? As you can probably guess, it&#8217;s all about politics over principle. When Colorado wanted to do it, it would benefit Democrats, so he was all-in. When California wanted to do it, he had nothing but disparaging comments for anyone who even considered it. This clearly points out a pundit who a) has no appreciation for, not just history, but the status quo, and b) makes every decision based, not on what&#8217;s best for everyone, but what&#8217;s best for his political kindred. <\/p>\n<p>Consider this when reading opinions. I will note that I&#8217;m always against this sort of thing, including <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thepaytons.org\/essays\/considerettes\/?p=2995\" target=\"_blank\">in the guise of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact<\/a>. Inform yourself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Republican legislators in the Pennsylvania state government are pushing a bill that would relatively proportion their presidential electoral votes based on the results of the individual congressional district presidential votes. The (Republican) governor says he would sign such a bill. This is a bad idea. The suggestion came up in Colorado and California in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,18,21,26,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-doug","category-government","category-liberal","category-politics","category-republicans"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4597"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4597\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}