Elect the President by Sorting Electors from State Legislatures, and Convene the Electoral College in D.C. to make a Final Decision

Liberty Election Reform & Political Integrity
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Proposal: Presidential Electors should be chosen from among the membership of State Legislatures, by lottery, and convene at the U.S. capitol for a week to follow a deterministic process of selecting the president.

The Founders’ Intent for Presidential Electors

In Federalist 68, Alexander Hamilton expresses one of the Founders’ intents behind using the Electoral College to select the President (emphasis added):

It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice. A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.

From this passage, it is clear that the election of the president was not something the founders wanted the average citizen to be personally invested in. Their expectation was that the electors would debate and carefully analyze possible options for President before reaching a well-informed decision. They certainly were not supposed to enter their brief service pledged to a particular outcome, merely as vessels for partisan interests to leverage power.

Why State Legislators Should be Electors

Keep in mind, there are multiple goals we are trying to achieve here. On the one hand, the electors should be able to exercise their own judgement. But it is also important to maintain their connection and accountability to the people. Despite what I said above, about how the average citizen should not have such a personal stake in the outcome of the presidential election, that doesn’t mean we should just cut the voters completely out of the process.

State legislators possess many qualities that are desirable for electors:

  • They are directly elected by the people of their district.
  • They are familiar with the most important issues facing their state.
  • They have experience evaluating complex governing issues on their merits.
  • They are used to negotiation and deliberation.
  • The Founders trusted state legislatures enough to give them full power to decide how electors are selected.

A possible concern some people might have with connecting legislators to the presidential election is: Won’t this lead to the presidential election dominating campaigns for state legislators?

First, it should be noted that the chance of an individual legislator being selected as an elector is fairly low. Using my home state as an example: Our state House has 75 seats, and our Senate has 29 seats. But we are only apportioned 6 presidential electors. So the chance of any one of them is 6/(75+29)=5.77%; or about 1 in 17. This means the incentive for them to inject presidential issues into their campaign is fairly low.

Second, there is currently a large portion of voters who only pay attention to the presidential election. If a consequence of this is indeed that the presidential election becomes relevant in state legislative elections, that is balanced by more people turning their attention to state-level politics.

Overall, state legislators would make decent electors.

Why Choose Electors by Sortition/Lottery

The goal of random selection within state legislatures is two-fold:

  1. It limits corrupting influences.
  2. It actually makes all parts of the country relevant.

Since the detailed composition of the Electoral College can only be known after its members have been selected, parties and presidential hopefuls have little direct leverage. Sure, they can try and influence the outcome of every state legislative district in the country - but they already do that with standard campaigning.

The other consequence here is that presidential candidates have to treat all parts of the country as potential sources of electors: Take California, for example. Currently, there is no reason for a presidential candidate to care what happens in rural California. Conservative leaning voters in those areas can vote for Republican presidential candidates all they like, but they’ll have zero impact. However, with this system, it is a statistical certainty some of the Presidential Electors will be able to carry the interests of their constituents in these areas into the selection of the President, and thus these voters can matter.

Now, I understand concerns about randomness - why trust a BINGO tumbler? Well, because randomness is impartial - and it can be quite accurate, especially at the scale we’re talking about. If you flip 538 coins, there is a 99.9% chance the distribution of heads and tails will be within 35 of exactly half and half. That is, it is a near certainty the error will be less than 6.5% - and it will usually be even closer. In other words, this system would be highly accurate.

How the Electors should Vote

At this point, I’ve presented the meat of the proposal: Electors are to be selected at random from state legislatures. If you’re not concerned so much with how to get 538 people in a room to make a decision, you can skip this last bit. However, it is something worth discussing.

At this point, we have 538 electors, with no pledge to vote a certain way, gathered in the US Capitol building. They need to make a decision, and they’re all going to be very strategic about how they vote. Presumably, electors will be aware of the various hopefuls for president, and partisan endorsements of each. They won’t be going in blind, and they should have an idea who they would like to support.

A conclusive decision can be reached in five days, with five votes. Time not spent voting is for them to mingle, debate, negotiate, etc. Let’s say they start on Monday, and end on Friday:

On Monday, they hold the nominating vote. Every elector writes the name of a candidate for president on a piece of paper, and the votes are counted. The top five named individuals are now officially considered candidates.

Starting on Tuesday, the two candidates who received the fewest nominating votes go to a head-to-head vote. The loser is eliminated; the winner proceeds to the next day. This proceeds until Friday, when the two strongest candidates go to a final vote to decide who the president is. If you are familiar with electoral systems, you’ll likely recognize this is an implicitly Condorcet system. If there exists a candidate who can beat all others individually, that candidate will - at least in theory - be elected.

Secret ballots: Throughout this whole process, electors will cast their ballots secretly. That is, there will be no way to draw a connection between a particular vote and a particular elector. This is because, if the vote was public, parties and other influences could try to coerce a particular decision, via bribes or threats. As the security of the country is at stake, it is critical to ensure these influences carry no weight in the electors’ decisions.

Handling Ties: Ties will be broken by the sitting vice president. This is because if there’s any question about the direction to take the country, I would rather err on the side of stability.

Conclusion

I feel strongly that if we want more civil political discourse, we cannot be holding each others’ presidential vote over each other’s heads. While much of the division we see is out of genuine differences over issues, too much of it is specifically over a single office.

I also feel strongly that a process of presidential selection focused on values and practical realities instead of partisan interests will naturally produce respectable and unifying leaders.

If at all possible, our president should be a point of national unity.

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My leading thought is that when you implement any element of randomness into the process (in this case, picking the electors ‘by lottery’), you are creating a system where the President is elected by random chance.

No, it’s not completely random since the randomly selected people would then be making a conscience decision about who to vote for.

However, the Electors will still be determined by random chance, meaning you are leaving to chance who will be responsible for making the decision of voting for the US President, meaning that the political inclinations of those people will be randomly decided - the voting base, their opinions on who to vote for, what they think the right direction of the country should be - all of that will be decided randomly.

Based on recent history and the current state of the nation, I find the idea that this would somehow result in the US President being decided based on values and ‘practical realities’ - and ‘partisan interests’ being removed from the equation - to be wishful thinking at best.

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The key here is sortition - when done on a large scale, like I’m proposing - is actually quite representative. It’s just statistics. The points you raise would be valid for a very small group. However, there are 538 people in the Electoral College, which is enough to justify a high degree of confidence in the body.

Keep in mind, we routinely convene much smaller groups of people at random to decide guilt and innocence in the courtroom. Either juries are bad because they’re random, or randomness is not something to fear.

Part of what makes it not wishful thinking is that my proposal has the electors voting by secret ballot:

One of the major problems for the current concept of the Electoral College is electors are compelled to vote a certain way. “Faithless electors” are shamed, and very often subject to legal consequences. The parties have total control of the electors. They’ve removed all chance for thoughtful deliberation from the process.

A secret ballot makes it virtually impossible to coerce the electors to do anything; even by bribery. By comparison to the current system, they are indeed more likely to choose based on an honest evaluation of the candidates, rather than partisan interests. They have no personal stake in the outcome, other than how they believe the chosen candidate will run the country.

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And I don’t see the secret ballot fixing the core problem.

Let’s take California, for example - Do you really think that any Democrat legislators from California who are randomly selected to be an elector are going to make a ‘non-partisan’ decision simply because their ballot is secret, or are they more likely to just vote the ‘party line’ for whoever the ‘heir apparent’ Democrat nominee is?

You also have to consider that it will be impossible to make the vote entirely secret - there are a limited number of Electors, and everyone will know exactly who those electors will be. So there will still be the ability to pressure those electors with expectation that the vote go a certain way.

While I don’t disagree with the idea of giving electors the power to vote for who they see fit - it’s my understanding that the Founding Fathers wanted that to be the way the system works anyhow - it’s the idea of injecting any amount of randomness into the process of selecting the US President that I can not see any justification for.

That is the key problem here - the idea of randomness in electing the President.

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Randomness is not a problem. Again, juries are selected at random, and in groups of far smaller people.

The point of selecting them at random is it again limits the influence of outside forces. Before the selection is made, it is impossible to target anyone to try and influence their vote. The only opportunity to make an attempt is in the brief period between the selection process and the electors actually assembling.

I’m sure most Democrats would just vote for whoever the party tells them to. However, the process of voting I’ve designed for electors creates strategic incentives not to just follow along. There are five nominees, and they’re voted on successively in pairwise matches. It would be very easy to pick an alternative some Democrats would like better than the DNC endorsement.

In fact, let’s consider a scenario where a majority of electors were Democrats. How do Republican electors respond? Well, the rational response is to recognize the winner will be a Democrat, and so strategically nominate moderate Democrats who are willing to talk with Republicans. While this might not appeal to most Democrats, it will appeal to some. And Republicans will certainly prefer such a result over the alternative.

And I’d stress that the moderate Democrats who accept the Republican compromise have really good plausible deniability: In the final head-to-head vote between two Democrats, how do you distinguish which Democrats didn’t cooperate? The answer is you can’t. They’re all Democrats, and they’re all voting on Democrat candidates. If the DNC wants to start a witch hunt on their own membership, they are bound to make lots of false positives. That simply isn’t worth the effort with 270+ people.

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I can’t see any reasonable comparison between a jury that is selected for the simple matter of deciding a binary choice between ‘guilty’ and ‘not guilty’ (and recent history has shown that even then juries can face genuine pressure to rule the ‘right’ way ‘or else’) and electors being selected for the monumental, world- and potentially history-changing task of deciding who will be the US President for four years.

The two aren’t even close to being on the same level at all.

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My point is simply that this discomfort with randomness is unjustified, if you have no problem with randomly appointed juries. You would have to make an argument from some other angle.

Now, if you do have a problem with randomly appointed juries, that’s a separate discussion. But at least that would be a consistent position to hold.

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And I think the point you are trying to make is absurd.

No, it is not unjustified to be OK with random jury selection but not be OK with randomness being part of the process for deciding the ‘Leader of the Free World’.

Your attempted comparison doesn’t even hold up to begin with since juries aren’t just randomly selected - even when pools of potential jurors are selected randomly, there is still a selection process that is anything but random.

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The same thing applies here: State legislators are not themselves randomly selected. They have to be elected first. I’m not saying to pick random citizens off the street to be electors. I am saying to pick from among a body of elected officials who already have an enormous amount of public trust.

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None of what you’re saying addresses the key problem of the monumental, incomparable difference of a jury deciding the fate of a single individual in a single circumstance, and electors deciding who will be President of the United States for a 4-year term - which, quite frankly, affects the life of everyone in the United States and quite possibly everyone on Earth to some degree.

Imagine the difference between a light rain ruining a ball game in a small midwestern town and a category 5 hurricane ruining millions of people’s lives across the entire eastern seaboard.

Juries are randomly selected, but then filtered. There is a difference.

I’m sorry, I’m having a hard time not laughing at the idea of combining ‘elected officials’ with ‘enormous amount of public trust’, at least in this current political environment.

If I’m not mistaken, one of the key appeals of Trump is that he’s not a traditional politician the likes of which you think we should randomly select from to decide who should be president.

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I don’t see why the scale matters. The principle at play should govern the debate.

The only difference is the order of operations.

The whole idea of a republic is we entrust the people we’ve elected to represent us. If they don’t represent us, we can debate if our election methods ought to be changed. However, under the premise of a republic, we should defer to the states, and assume state legislators are accurate representations of the people of said state.

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The scale is an essential part of the principal.

Order of operations can make a world of a difference.

The problem is that the world doesn’t work on ‘ideas’ or ‘ideals’ or ‘premises’, it works under practical application.

This is why ‘premises’ like Rent Control don’t work - because the real world doesn’t function the way the ‘idea’ of Rent Control is based on.

Similarly, human beings do not operate in the manner on which your premise works.

And, on top of everything else, the method you’re proposing for the Electoral College is effectively a variant on the method the Founding Fathers intended to be used for picking Senators. So by using ‘random selection’ from state legislators, the US President would no longer be chosen by the people, he would be chosen as a representative of the individual States.

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If the scale is important, that is accounted for by the fact that the smaller group of 12 people works at the smaller scale, and the larger group of 538 people works at the larger scale.

Describe that world of difference in detail. Simply asserting it makes a world of difference doesn’t make it so.

So we should just abandon the republic? That’s the implication of what you’re saying. “Oh, it’s all pointless, it will never work”. Except republican principles have worked so far in practical application, so they are demonstrably a good basis to work from.

The founders didn’t intend for us to be voting on the president in the first place. Their expectation was indeed that a process similar to that of senators would be followed. My proposal is more in line with their original intent than how we currently operate.

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No, not really.

You’re either completely overlooking or ignoring the number of people affected by the decision made by the randomly elected group of people.

You’re scaling up from 1 person affected (maybe a handful of people affected if you include people indirectly affected) to hundred of millions if not billions of people affected.

You can’t simply handwave away the difference.

Describe that world of difference in detail. Simply asserting it makes a world of difference doesn’t make it so.

Consider programming.

What order you program for events to happen can mean the difference between a successful operation and a spectacular failure.

You’re the one who’s advocating for throwing away our Republican principals.

I’m advocating for the current system as is being preferable to your idea of doing away with Presidential Elections entirely to determine the US President by what is effectively random chance.

The Founding Fathers did intend for US Citizens to have a vote to determine who would be President. You’re throwing out Presidential Elections entirely in order to give the responsibility to people who are elected for an entirely different job but then randomly selected.

The system we have now is closer to the Founding Father’s intentions than to randomly pick state legislators.

I can’t possibly fathom the idea that the Founding Fathers would somehow be happy with the idea of random chance being a major component for how the US President is chosen.

I can’t fathom any nation on Earth using random chance as major part of the process of deciding who is going to be in charge.

The closest you might have is the Coptic Christians, who narrow the selection for who their Pope is down to three people and then have a small child randomly draw a ball representing one of those three candidates. But they’re certainly operating on the expectation that God has a direct hand in ensuring the right one of those three candidates winds up with the job.

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I don’t see how. One group is 12 people, the other group is 538 people.

That is not describing the difference. I’ve heard plenty of metaphors already. I need you to specifically explain why, in this case, performing the random selection phase after a deliberative selection phase is worse than the other way around. Take as much space as is necessary to do this; I understand it might be technical.

You are acting as if the effect of my system is to put a bunch of names in the a hat and the one that pops out becomes president. That is a gross mischaracterization; the random selection is bookended on one end by elections, and on the other by a deterministic deliberative process.

They absolutely did not. Here’s what the Constitution says about the selection of Presidential Electors:

“Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors…”

There was no assumption that the manner of choosing electors would involve you and I looking at a ballot with the names of presidential hopefuls, and committing electors to vote according to our choice. It was their belief - and this is the fundamental idea of republicanism, by the way - that elected representatives possessed the proper mix of accountability and the ability to reason, to more accurately represent the will of the people than a direct democratic vote.

And that’s what we do at the state level, by the way - a direct democratic vote. That is not in line with republican principles. That is in opposition to republican principles.

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One group of 12 affecting 1 vs one group of 538 affecting between hundreds of millions to every human life on Earth.

You’re looking at cause, I’m looking at effect.

You’re continuing to argue that something that affects the life of one person is equal to something that affects the life of every citizen of the United States.

Explain how the two are remotely comparable.

Frankly, Sir, you’ve done no better explaining how randomly selecting a jury of 12 to decide whether someone is Guilty or not is equal to 538 People deciding the future of an entire nation.

All you have done is insist that ‘it’s the same process, it just scales up’. But haven’t even attempted to explain how.

A “deliberative process” that is determined by random chance.

The people making the “deliberative process” are determined by random chance.

Given that the political climate is divided primarily between Democrats and Republicans, you will in effect be randomly determining if the President will be a Republican or Democrat.

That Republican or Democrat President will be a party insider.

Under the system you propose, the idea of someone like Trump being elected President would be next to impossible.

Given that people will know how the process will work, that the electors are decided randomly would probably hardly even matter. It would be trivial for the state legislators to work out who they’d be voting for ahead of time, so that by the time the Electoral College vote happened the actual vote would be all but done already.

When has randomness ever been a legitimate part of selecting the leadership of any form of Republican government?

When has randomness ever been a legitimate part of selecting the leadership of any form of government?

What basis do you have to claim that the Founding Fathers would have ever approved of any form of randomness being acceptable as part of the process of selecting the US President?

Can you clarify what you’re talking about here with state elections?

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I’m confused. Here it sounds to me like your issue is the number of people, but elsewhere you also keep taking issue with sortition. Which is it? I’m not going to take this part of the conversation further until you’ve committed to one or the other.

This suggests to me you haven’t properly considered the implications of the voting system the electors would be using.

On the first day, they cast a nominating vote, and the 5 people receiving the most votes become presidential candidates. I suppose in theory all 538 of them could just cast a partisan vote; but considering the process that will take place over the next four days, why would they?

I raised this example earlier, but I’ll raise it again because it was ignored. And I’ll use concrete numbers:

Suppose 278 Democrats and 260 Republicans are chosen as electors. The Democrats have a clean win, right? Well, yes, and no. Practically speaking, the winner will be a Democrat. What is not so certain is whether it will be the Democrat the DNC chose, or another Democrat.

This is because the Republicans have a chance to be strategic to get a better outcome. They just have to find a more moderate Democrat that at least 10 of the Democrat electors would prefer over the official DNC-endorsed hopeful. And by the way, it would only take a single Republican delegate to think to do this to make it happen.

In fact, let’s suppose that’s exactly what happens. On Day 1, here is the nominating tally:

  1. DNC Pick - 278 votes
  2. RNC Pick - 259 votes
  3. Moderate Democrat - 1 vote

So this means on Day 2, the Electors will meet again to vote between the RNC Endorsed Candidate and the Moderate Democrat Candidate, and whichever candidate wins will proceed to Day 3 for a one-on-one against the DNC Endorsed Candidate for the Presidency.

This is where things get very strategic:

If everyone votes honestly on Day 2, these will be the results:

  • Moderate Democrat - 278 votes (proceeds)
  • RNC Pick - 260 votes (eliminated)

Then on Day 3, the vote will be between the DNC Pick and the Moderate Democrat. If we suppose 10 Democrats honestly prefer the Moderate over the DNC option, the Moderate will win with these results:

  • Moderate Democrat - 270 votes (elected president)
  • DNC Pick - 268 votes

Clearly the DNC Loyalists don’t like this outcome. They consider this possibility beforehand, and so on Day 2, they all vote for the RNC candidate, with the intention of eliminating the Moderate. Here are the results of what would happen in this case:

  • RNC Pick - 528 (proceeds)
  • Moderate Democrat - 10 (eliminated)

But hang on… this leads to an outcome the RNC doesn’t like! They already know the Democrats outnumber them 278 to 260, so they don’t actually want their candidate to proceed. So on Day 2, they also vote strategically, and these are the ACTUAL results of Day 2:

  • Moderate Democrat - 270 (proceeds)
  • RNC Pick - 268 (eliminated)

So the Moderate Democrat nominated by one strategic Republican goes on to Day 3 and wins.

Of course, in reality, the strategy on Day 1 would be much more complicated, and naturally involve more than just 3 candidates. In fact, I suspect this system would actually split the RNC and DNC into six different endorsing conventions (three each), to account for the strategic pressures of the system. And some conventions might even have contingent nominees. So the stable equilibrium might be close to 10 presidential hopefuls per cycle.

I’m referring to how we currently choose electors: a popular democratic vote in each state. But the implication of the Constitution is each state legislature chooses (which is how a republic operates).

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Trying to get through this whole thread, but, wanted to drop in and say the idea of randomness just doesnt sit well with me. Our state legistlature in Michigan is split between Replublicans and Democrats. Random selection of electors from those legislators would randomly result in more democrats than replublicans or vice versa being selected as electors. And I just dont see a way around those electors voting down partison lines every year. That means president being DNC or RNC backed would be random.

I can see the value of having Electors do the selecting of the president rather than random joe citizen, but, as was originally intended or written, maybe each state finds their own way to select their electors that is fair in the eyes of their constituents.

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One of my first iterations of this idea used a proportional system to choose electors, to ensure the partisan makeup closely matched that of the legislature. For example, I live in Utah. We get 6 electoral votes, and our legislature is about 80% Republican. So 5 electors would be Republican and 1 would be a Democrat.

What I disliked about this is the electors would still be chosen for their loyalty to the partisan choice, because coalitions of legislators going against it would have their names on record and would be punished for not cooperating. Your assumptions about electors sticking only to the DNC or RNC options would tend to be accurate here.

The benefit of choosing them at random instead is some state legislators are not committed to their party’s presidential nominee. And since the first day of the Electoral College can nominate up to 5 presidential candidates, this provides an opportunity and incentive for these legislators to nominate someone else.

What this means is Democrats who (for example) are disgusted by the way their party arrived at Harris could promote an alternative nominee, in an environment where Republicans would have something to gain by cooperating with them. And on the flip-side, if Republicans have the majority of electors, there is a chance for Never Trump Republicans to pick a nominee Democrats hate less.

So, even if the partisan affiliation of the president ends up being essentially random, the drive to select someone able to unite the country will be very consistent. Plus I think state legislators have a much better pulse on the American people than either the RNC or DNC. A random state legislator is going to be way more open to nominate someone like RFK than a hand-picked loyalist. Plus if RFK was nominated, he would actually be more viable than Trump or Harris.

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First off, I realized that you made an argument earlier that I initially overlooked that basically renders this entire discussion mostly irrelevant.

[quote=“Tyler McGettigan, post:15, topic:4853, username:tylerammon”]They absolutely did not. Here’s what the Constitution says about the selection of Presidential Electors:

“Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors…”[/quote]

By your own argument, the only way your proposal could possibly happen would be through one of two methods:

  1. You would have to go state-by-state and convince each state legislature to agree to your idea.
  2. You would have to get a majority of the states to agree to a constitutional amendment.

Either method requires that you somehow convince a majority of state legislators in a majority of states to effectively surrender their state’s electoral votes to random chance.

So big question: How, exactly, do you intend to convince a majority of state legislators across the nation to say “Yeah, we’d rather surrender our ability to decide for ourselves who our Electors will be and let random chance decide which of us are going to vote for President”?

Both. I have an issue with both. It’s not I have an issue with one or the other, I have an issue with both.

There is no reason I can’t take issue with both.

All you’ve done is explain why your proposed random system doesn’t work.

It doesn’t matter that a ‘moderate Democrat’ was chosen over an ‘extreme Democrat’. At the end of the day, the fact remains that a Democrat was chosen to be President because of random chance.

Random chance decided that a Democrat would be president for the next four years.

All you have done is explain my own point about why your proposed system is a terrible idea.

By that argument, we don’t live in a Republic, we live in a Democracy, because our Governors are chosen by popular democratic vote, our state governments are chosen by popular democratic vote, and our federal legislators are chosen by popular democratic vote.

If the way we currently choose our Electors isn’t in line with republican principals, then our entire system of government from top to bottom is out of line with republican principals.

This quote feels very telling, like you’ve given away what your proposal is really about.