Some questions for Americans Elect

Sandy Levinson

The LA Times has an intersting story about Americans Elect, Tom Friedman's new enthusiasm as the way to provide a third (or perhaps fourth, should the GOP nominate Mitt Romney) party. Its own web site is stunningly unilluminating. AE appears to speak in the language of hi-tech populism, whereby all of the self-apponted "delegates" will choose, on a one-person/one-vote basis, the party's nominee sometime in the spring or early summer of 2012. A remarkable number of questions are left hanging that need answering before others follow the effervescent Friedman into Americans Elect:

1) I will put to one side the question about who exactly is funding this operation and why. Will a third party appealing to "independents" be more likely to help or hurt Obama, for example, and, therefore, elect a Republican, inasmuch as it's wildly implausible to imagine the AE candidate winning an electoral college majority?

2) How, exactly, will the AE nominee be selected? Will it be first-past-the-post of votes received from the self-selected "delegates"? Will there be elaborate run-off schemes? Or will they adopt "approval voting" and run the person who is most widely "approved," even if that person comes in second or third in the horserace? There is, I think, much to be said for the use of "approval voting" in this context.

3) How will electors for the nominee be selected, since, as we all know, this great country of ours actually selects its presidents by using an indefensible originally pro-slavery scheme that rejects anything so simply as "direct election" of our Chief Executive? More to the point, will these electors be required to take a blood oath as to whom they will vote for if the AE candidate actually wins a state but not a majority. I have read that AE has said that if no candidate gets a majority (and, presumably, the AE candidate comes in third), then the AE electors will choose between one of the major party candidates in order to avoid the fiasco of having the rabid House of Representatives make the choice, on a one-state/one-vote basis. All fine and dandy, but

4 a) who will make the decision as to how the electors will vote, and if it's not the electors themselves (because, for example, there would be a new plebescite among AE "delegates") then b) what guarantees are there that the electors would "follow orders" if they believed that the "other" candidate should be elected instead of the one chosen by the self-appointed "delegates"?

5) And, of course, there is the ultimate problem that the AE seems concentrated entirely on the presidential election. So we would face the possibility, under the only half-way plausible "best case" for their venture, that their candidate would get the presidency by cobbling together a bare majority of the electoral college with, say, 36% of the overal popular vote and receiving a majority in no single state at all. Why would one regard that President as having any genuine political legitimacy, and why in the world would one expect a Congress that continues to be composed of political partisans to take that president seriously?

In any event, these are some immediate questions that occur to this "inquiring mind."
Posted 12:38 PM by Sandy Levinson [link]