Enzo wrote:The states are constitutionally bound to send electors, but within each state are the rules by which they do so. In many if not most states the legislature cannot just up and send whoever they want. But what is going on is in states they can get away with it, they have taken responsibility from an election board or other supervisors and giving it to the legislature itself. Thus no longer bound by laws and rules that prevented electors by fiat in the past.
Well yes, each state has its own rules, but those rules are set by the state itself, not the federal government.
But what I am wondering is - why does a state legislature ignore or override the rules, if they have the authority to change the rules? They are the state legislature after all, and having the state choose its electors legislatively rather than by popular election is perfectly permissible under the US constitution (and was even done a lot, in the first half of the 1800s).
The two main possibilities that occur to me are,
a) The state constitution specifies some of the election rules, so the state legislature actually
doesn't have the authority to change them, unless they can change the state constitution. (And the procedure for that is probably different in every state - maybe it is difficult or impossible in some states.)
b) They already had the election, didn't like the outcome, and decided to change the rules retroactively. As I understand it, this is not permitted under federal law, but perhaps relies on this new innovative legal theory that the feds have empowered the "legislature" to choose the elector, so the state courts have no authority to interfere, even if the state legislature fails to follow its own laws and perhaps constitutional provisions.
So is one of these two situations, what is happening?
Because if not, then I'm not sure why, under the US system, any state that wanted to, could not simply choose presidential electors by the legislature instead of by election. The people of the state can turn the legislators out if they don't like this change, but I'm not sure what legal bar there would be. So why ignore the rules, when you can make the rules?
Enzo wrote:I forget now, but I think in Nevada, one of their reps has proposed an end to the one man one vote rule. He has some rationale for rural voters having more count than urban voters. "Why should all those people in the cities get to outvote us in the rural areas?"
I'm not sure the US ever really had a one-man one-vote rule. There is something close to that for the House of Representatives, but even there, in the early history of the country, states excluded women from voting, slaves, non-property holders, etc. - all perfectly legally. Not a lawyer here, but it is my understanding that subsequent constitutional amendment (direct election of senators, women get the vote, former slaves get citizenship, etc.), and in particular, the interpretation of the fourteenth amendment to apply to the states as well, that turned the US into something more resembling what we would call a "democracy" today - it was very far from being democratic in the early days, some states had property qualifications to vote, etc.
So on ending the one-man one-vote rule in Nevada, the question that occurs to me is, do the states actually have such a rule? Is there any requirement that representation in the state legislature be approximately proportional?
If not, maybe they need to start a one-man one-vote rule, before they can end it.