15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
However, there's a more important issue: that's not really what the electoral college does. It gives a small edge to small states[0]. The much bigger effect is that in every given election, it favors a handful of battleground states over all the rest.
If you live in Wyoming, the electoral college does not help you, because your vote is secure. Ditto for Vermont. But if you live in Ohio or Florida, presidential candidates will spend all their time in your state, trying to get your vote.
While you can concoct a semi-coherent case for rural voters needing special protection, no one can explain why Ohio is more or less important than North Carolina, or Florida than Texas.
[0] Which, if you're paying attention, is at least correlated with being rural, but only partially--another lazy generalization that surrounds this subject.
A NPV would go some way to spread the federal spending around a little more fairly
California
Texas
Florida
New York
Pennsylvania
Ohio
Illinois
Georgia
North Carolina
Michigan
It's also worth noting the math really doesn't work out, the electoral college makes it easier to win the whole thing while carrying less states/votes (Which really shouldn't be surprising). With both the popular vote and the electoral college, you only have to take the 10 most populous states to win the whole thing. But the difference is that, with the current electoral college you generally only need to get 51% of the vote to win the whole state, which is significantly easier and turns states like California from a 60% to a 100%. With the popular vote, to actually win in that fashion you would have to take almost every vote in those states, which is practically impossible considering the diversity.
Totally different dynamic than general elections, which happen all at once rather than different dates in different states.
The other thing I came away with from the whole process is a newfound appreciation for the “who would I like to have a beer with” factor. The issues and policy proposals you read on the Internet don’t really matter—none of that stuff will ever get through Congress. Being able to look the person in the eye, and see how they carry themselves while shleping to half a dozen events every day—that really makes an impression.
[1] In the Iowa Democratic caucuses, registered party members in a precinct get together, discuss the candidates, take a first round vote where some candidates are cut, discuss the candidates some more, and then take a final vote.
I have a different opinion. Sanders and to a lesser extent Warren have created massive volunteer networks that do have a pretty big impact, like everywhere. Obama had that too, but it was dismantled when he took office (insanity). There's a good argument to say Obama would have been far more impactful had he kept it going.
Sanders has no intention of shutting down his "revolution" (not my words) whether he does or doesn't get the nomination. There's going to be some serious pressure (like there already has) on congress in the years to come. I don't think the same ol' same ol' will continue much longer.
I don't mean to be a fan boy, but it's pretty phenomenal what he / they have done since 2016, and it resonates with a lot of people. CNN and MSNBC don't talk about it too often, but it's very real.
Don't take my word for it though. Easily researched.
They pounded it with demagoguery to get elected but they didn't have anything behind the policy and knew it. They also knew that going forward with their disasters would hurt them even more.
The US media coverage of Trump’s corporate tax cuts really misrepresented how completely mainstream it was: https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/wp-content/uplo.... While the US nominal rate of almost 40% total was around the OECD average in 1990, the rest of the OECD dropped to just over 20% by 2017. Meanwhile, the US nominal rate didn’t drop at all.
As of August 14, 2019, the United States Senate has confirmed 146 Article III judges nominated by President Trump, including 2 Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, 43 judges for the United States Courts of Appeals, 99 judges for the United States District Courts, and 2 judges for the United States Court of International Trade.
If you look into many of the "unprecedented events" you'll see that most of them aren't new and some of them are decades old.
Though if the events really are bad and were ignored before, it's worth asking "why?"
Maybe but aren't you in danger of missing the big changes coming precisely because you are inside the bubble?
A political equivalent to "let them eat cake".
As an outside observer to the US it does seem like the pressure has to give somewhere soon at some point (and in a few other western democracies including my own though I think the US is further down the pipe on this one).
I think you're 100% right that there's building pressure and something will give but that's precisely because things haven't changed much. If the general populace decides "no matter how I vote, things don't change" some will lose hope and give up.. while others will look to other approaches.
(And those other approaches aren't usually good.)
There are benefits and drawbacks to both systems. Right now I'm pretty happy with this aspect of the US system. (There are other parts of the US system I'm less happy with—such as the Electoral College.)
That will make big urban areas appealing. However, if you think there are diminishing returns, it should cause them to spread that attention more, avoiding the last month where they repeatedly visit the same state over and over again.
[0] This might or might mean visiting those states.
“Politicians”, no, it only effects Presidential (and Vice-Presidential) candidates. It has no direct effect on other politicians.
Would it make them more likely to visit densely populated areas (where you can influence more poeple per unit time)? Yeah, probably. Right now, they focus on “swing states”, but within those states, on densely populated areas, for just that reason.
But as long as there is a Senate, they'd be encouraged to visit small states (where a small number of voters determine a large share of power in the Senate, which can block both laws and Presidential appointments) for coattail effects.
And they’d still be encouraged to spend efforts on campaigning in low-cost media markets where small money reaches lots of voters (even ones that would currently be neglected because the states aren't viewed as swingable), just probably not with personal visits as much, without some kind of broader free media exposure opportunities, because the candidates themselves can't be in more than one place at once.
They're going to campaign somewhere, why should they pay more attention to Cleveland, Ohio (metro area population ~2m) than Los Angeles (city population 3m, metro population over 13m)?
I’m not entirely convinced presidential candidates share this belief.
I don't know why the electoral college would be better at identifying high need areas than willingness to change your vote. Shouldn't people who need help be more likely to change their vote than to live in a purple state?
If a 10m pop area has a 70-30 split, it's still better to campaign there than a 5m pop area with a 50-50 split. In absolute numbers it's still 3 million supporters versus 2.5 million supporters.
Under your model where the goal of the campaign is to visit your supporters, you'll favor smaller cities that strongly support you over larger cities that support your opponent. A place with 5 million population that's 70-30 in your favor has 3.5 million supporters.
So I guess you're totally OK with the current system where they spend all their time in Florida & other swing states because the others don't matter...
It may encourage the discrimination against minorities.
∗and he appears to refer to it as a well established idiom so I suspect it goes further back
[0] On Liberty https://www.bartleby.com/130/1.html
But I also get the arguments of people that say that without the electoral college, there is zero incentive for politicians to campaign in or pay attention to the interests of people in lightly-populated area. And I think that is a bad thing - whenever you completely disenfranchise people you get create a potential crack for revolution, secession, or other fragmentation processes to seep in. (It's also just shitty to the people involved.) I'd rather fix that by getting rid of first-past-the-post voting systems, but I also think you can't ignore that problem.
You still haven't answered why you believe there's an excluded middle. The opposite of tyranny is representation, and it's the system we have in the U.S. You can quibble about the degree of representation, but the fact that you can quibble about it means that we don't have a tyranny.
Ballotpedia's congressional approval polling average: 20% (August 21, 2019)
Cambridge Analytica has shown the method to manipulate any political system. We are in for an "interesting" future.
This is a lie probably told to you by a high school teacher who never really thought about it, and clearly you haven't either.
If the electoral college empowers lightly populated areas, how come no Presidential Candidate has ever gone stumping for those sweet sweet Wyoming voters?
Because it doesn't empower small states. It doesn't empower big states. It empowers closely contested states.
The electoral college makes no sense, it was not designed this way, the designers tried to get rid of it after they saw how it was being abused.
It's non-democratic, nonsensical, and there has been ~75% support for abolishing it for over 100 years but politicians have been holding off because it makes elections easier for them to fight because it lets them ignore most of the voters.
I love the electoral college. For those that bother to understand that America is a republic; the system was nearly perfectly designed. If we can get back to the original method of electing senators and back to the idea of “these United States” rather than “the United States,” we’d all be happier. States should have increased sovereignty. The 10th Amendment ought to matter.
If the Electoral College made every state matter equally, then candidates would be campaigning for support in every state equally. It is a fact that that's not what the Electoral College does.
Also, the Electoral College in its current form was not "designed". It was a mistake. The people who designed it, Hamilton and Madison, tried to get rid of it with constitutional amendments after they saw how it was being abused with "winner-take-all" laws.
In the EU, is Ireland less important than Germany? Why doesn’t Germany get to pick the EU president each time? Since Germany has over 80 million people, they could team up with France and simply own the EU. Ireland and Poland would be forced to go along with whatever Germany and France wanted. Or, they would leave the EU.
If California and New York picked the president every single time, why would other states bother staying in the Union? If you just have to win New York City and Los Angeles and Chicago, then every single policy proposal would simply be to benefit those voters alone. You could deny federal protections and funding to every other part of the country because you’d rather have more money to spend in New York City. It would become just like the Hunger Games where the “districts” would serve the capitol.
The current system has worked for 200+ years. Just because some people didn’t like outcome, doesn’t make the system broken.
Do you disagree?
For some reason, though, I never see supporters of the electoral college feel that it's right and proper to give equal political power to social minority groups (Only geographical minority groups. As if where you live is more important to your interests than who you are.)
As to your innovation in voting, if you accept immutable aspects of identity as the basis for voting rights you're opening the door to some terrible ideas, like ethno-states and Jim Crow laws. Again, without embarrassment at the facetiousness, I'm also not sure how actually making the Jews have more power in 1930s Germany would've solved their problems. Would've probably fuelled grievances: "Hey, Adolf, you know that Jews really do run Germany?" Eeek!
The best way to protect minorities is by the protected freedoms of speech and to bear arms, not by weighting votes by arbitrarily chosen characteristics.
Not only can a candidate win the electoral college while losing the popular vote, but the winner-take-all system means that only votes in closely-contested states really matter. The Electoral College allows the minority to overrule the majority.
Which means the president is and should be, elected by representatives of the states. The House of Representatives should be the only federal office directly voted on by “the people.” If that were the case, especially eliminating the direct election of senators, you’d see a much less divisive, gridlocked system where governance is more about public service and less about these election soap operas.
It's not this.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. Also, no witch burning.
As to it being their constitution, we're really talking about the Bill of Rights, and that was an updated version of the 1689 British Bill of Rights.
It's sad how we no longer have it, and that people in the past had more rights than we have now. American Constitutionalists are right to dig their heels in over anything that looks like it will encroach on their rights.
or because you are LGBT,
or because you are black,
or because you have a disability.
But the small-state kind of minority seems to be the only one who deserves electoral protection from tyranny of the majority. Oh what a coincidence then, that these minorities also happen to be mostly white, christian, and straight.
Would a register for who is LGBT be a good idea? Would you support laws and voting based on ethnic background and/or skin colour?
Why do these ideas sound dangerous?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/08/22/he-tried-st...
I'm a supporter of NPV. I don't think it's likely to be a problem, although this feels like something that will shake out a lot further in the federal courts.
The college was a compromise to give a larger voting share to slave owning states that had a high overall population, despite having a relatively smaller number of possible voters.
So while the electoral college might have also functioned as a way to redistribute votes within a state... I don't think that was its main purpose.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_elector#List_of_fait...
As with so much in American history the explanation involves slavery but judging from the downvotes here, that wounds everyone's pride a bit.
...other than the large numbers in the late 1700s and early 1800s, you mean?
And in any case, "intent" and "actual practice" were pretty different here. But that doesn't mean that the Connecticut Compromise [0] (which split the US legislative body into the House with representation apportioned by population and the Senate with set representation per state) was solely or even primarily due to slavery. And once you had that, using the total of Senators and Representatives for your number of electors makes a good amount of sense.
The compromise reduced the control the slave states had.
Well, that didn't work.
Communication happened at the speed of a horse, so if you need a decision quickly, you can’t have electors asking for instructions from their home government. For better or worse, the founders favored a definitive result in this case over a correct one.
Why not give disproportional representation to them on the basis of their race, or religion, or sexual orientation, or on whether or not they prefer big, or little-endian notation? Surely, it would only be appropriate that politicians should have cross-demographic appeal to win?
Every argument for why we should give extra influence to voters living in particular zip codes is just as valid, as any argument for giving extra influence to voters based on some other semi-arbitrary distinction.
Rural people have special, marginalized concerns, and are outnumbered by urban voters? Great. So do LGBT people, for example.
You don't get extra consideration for your vote for being a ______. Why should you get it on the basis of geography?
This isn't some discrimination thing. Those people can still vote. They just aren't given more representation than they deserve. That's the con of the electoral college.
A few percentage points is a big deal in an election where every vote is supposed to count. And this overrepresentation isn't a narrow margin like Brexit, we're talking about at least 5% more represented.
Why is cross regional appeal of any value, if these region don't make up even 10% of the combined US population.
If US states were divided by population it would be a different think all together. But California has 40 times as many people as Wyoming.
Cross regional appeal is quoted as an obviously good thing to have, but the core assumption of equal distribution of population has been violated.
Because those people control a large fraction of the country’s food supply and it would be a disaster if they decided to stop selling it to the rest of us.
In reality, free markets being a thing, this wouldn't happen. We can import from other countries and they need to sell their goods to live.
You’re right that it’s extremely unlikely to get so bad that they get forcibly nationalized. However, my understanding is that market conditions are pretty bad for farmers right now, and have been for years. Any change that makes things worse for them will likely drive some to other lines of work and reduce overall production, driving food prices up.
This particular effect is probably extremely small in practice, but I felt the need to remind HN that not all value is produced in cities.
I'm not so sure it's just the 24/7 life or death coverage that makes that happen though. In solidly red or blue seats the main threat to a senators seat is a challenge from the extreme of their party, left or right, which also pulls them further towards the extremes of their parties.
Population isn't everything. We have states like Alaska, Hawaii and Wyoming which are national treasures with low populations.
You can't do that with national effect by concerted state action with less than 100% of the states (you can simulate it by casting all votes for the candidate that would win by that rule with a bare makority, but that's just a chunky version of national popular vote.)
> I've seen more news about states leaning towards the 2nd option which is actually much worse than the electoral college in its current state.
It's worse if you care about the per-state vote and not the national outcome; it's better if you care about the outcome, since it produces the desired outcome of adopted by states with a majority of electoral votes (and the NPV only goes into effect in states adopting it when it has been adopted by states with a majority of electoral votes), while proportional allocation for electors needs universal adoption to implement it's effect.
There are a huge number of Republicans in California that would have just as much of a say than Florida/Ohio/etc.
Something needs to be done to ensure all districts are equally represented and the representatives work for their constituents, not benefactors from out of state.
With FPTP, each side tries to have the smallest winning coalition. This results in more competitive races. So every vote would matter.
Said another way, our current unfair gerrymandering worsens partisanship.
Said yet another, when my local city council went from at-large positions to districts based, so kinda the opposite of from electoral college to presidential popular vote, candidate platforms went from "appeal city wide" mush to "better appeal to my district".
(A better moderator would be to change from FPTP to approval voting or ranked choice voting. But that's another thread.)
--
But to your point, in practical terms, with modern get out the vote (GOTV) technology and strategies, most every voter is already targeted. They're certainly accounted for.
As the de facto head of their parties, presidential candidates are expected to do well every where, to help with down ballot races.
As an extreme example, HRC 2016 was criticized for running up her margin in "safe" areas. But that's expected (demanded) of national (and statewide) candidates by the locals.
Why should people living dense regions be punished for it ?
Moreover, I'd wager that the stumps that stump speeches occur on will go to more places with more concentrated populations - there are more butts within n square miles to put in seats, as well as the most-watched news media.
My opinion is that both outcomes are preferable to stumps AND media going to half a dozen battleground states.
Some states haven’t been swing states for a long time, too.
I don't see this as a "states not counting" problem as much as the issues that come up in national elections affect different populations in different ways.
If there was a national popular vote, there would still be people who feel disenfranchised because the candidates don't see their chosen issues as vital to their coalition.
That was a short-term artifact of political realignments starting in the 1930s (New Deal Coalition) and—before that one had fully stabilized—1960s (Civil Rights).
Those overlapping realignments settled down into s new relatively stable alignment by the late 1980s; before the realignments most states were much stronger one-party states than the solid-red or solid-blue states today, and sometimes the second state party, if it existed at all, wasn't even the other major national party (Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party is a remnant of that: prior to the New Deal coalition, which it became part of and eventually joined the Democratic Party, the party competing with the dominant Republican Party in Minnesota was the Farmer-Labor Party, which was not associated with the Democrats.)
To be fair, there were only four elections in the previous 70 years that resulted in a Democrat winning. I think that avoiding something that like in the future is probably worthwhile, which is a minor argument against the electoral college based on past results.
Suddenly swung in 1992, and has been seen as solid blue since—not really an example of swing states switching as a state rapidly moving from Republican lock to Democratic lock.
Don't see why it would be. Obviously a flip will flip all of a states electors if it did all or nothing assignment, as most do, but sudden flip from consistent red to consistent blue in Presidential elections isn't a product of that. Might be a product of winner take all elections at other levels (e.g., state house, with the majority flipping reshaping donor alignments in the state and leading major voices to switch sides) but that's not what happened in CA either; the legislature didn't flip from solid Red to solid Blue at a time that would be consistent with it being a driving factor for the Presidential shift.
Thus, the question is: Do you want the majority of the USA geography being controlled by the will of people least knowledgeable about it?
If you eliminate the electoral college you give political control of resources to those who have absolutely NO physical control of those resources and yet still suffer the impact of their environmental influence.
What I mean is, people in California, Texas, and New York would push all the bad things to the rural states and take all the good parts, leaving those who live in the rural areas to feel the full brunt of those decisions. Take Louisiana as an example. It's been decimated by everyone who doesn't live there.
I would also add that the resources of the country belong to all of us, not just those who live in close proximity (aka the same state).
1. I’m gonna take a hard line that people deserve a vote, dirt doesn’t.
2. Louisiana is the 25th most populous state and I think 25th densest. So, I’m not sure the electoral college is protecting those less dense states’ environments. As the sibling points out, sometimes coastal liberals want environmental protection, while natives want to exploit the environment for profit.
Meanwhile, our state government seems more concerned with gutting education wherever possible and doing everything it can to destroy New Orleans' economy.
Louisiana can certainly give all that because they cannot force TX, NY, CA, etc to bow to their whim. But that would be sort of dumb.
To put this in blunt terms: there are a ton of impoverished African Americans in these states that receive a large chunk of that federal aid. The segments of Louisiana that don't receive that aid are tax-productive and will not vote against a Brexit-like decision, even if it means that federal aid stops flowing
This is 5%, not 0.5%. On top of that, your numbers aren't correct: they receive around $20bn net, and their GDP is around $250bn, which means that which means that direct net federal spending is about 8% of their GDP (and gross federal spending is a whopping 20%). These are pretty huge numbers, and they affect the entire state economy, directly affecting the profits of the business owners that you claim wouldn't care.
The U.S. constitution counted slaves at 60% of a person. Some of the arguments for the three fifths compromise were that slaveholders didn't want people who weren't "knowledgable" about slaveholding to be meddling in slaveholder's business. This is essentially one of the causes that sparked the Civil War.
I don't understand why Americans are so against becoming a full democracy. It's not like the current system benefits anyone. Congress, presidents and our courts are dysfunctional. The government is becoming the laughingstock of the world. At least in a democracy there's more chances of unified rule instead of 6 years of gridlock followed by 2-years of whiplash changes.
This is really a red state vs blue state debate, but even on a county by county level, the majority of the counties of California, Oregon and Washington state are red. Those states' votes are determined by a handful of counties around a few urban centers. The rest of the counties' interests are more closely aligned with the red states.
And thus, the electoral college gives those red counties a voice that's ignored in their own states.
And in many cases gives them more of a voice.
There's an irony that the EC more accurately represents votes per acre/square mile than per constituent, and (one of) the reasons for the move to the US was to get away from tyrannical land/owners.
a) read more widely, there's a lot of governments out there that are more worthy of the moniker (and even more that are horrifying)
b) read more widely, the newspapers you're reading aren't being honest (otherwise you'd know about (a))
To claim it reduced their power is false. It was less than they preferred, and more than the free states preferred
The argument for any consideration of slaves in apportionment included the arguments GP puts forward.
The standard would have been that the slaves would have counted for representation purposes, which would have given the slave states the power to ensure slavery continued. The compromise reduced their power drastically and paved the way for slavery to eventually end.
No, there is no basis for even asserting that there was a standard, much less that the standard was that property, whether slaves, cattle, or horseshoes, would count for representation purposes.
My statements stand.
No, they don't, because they assume the slave state argument wasn't just their argument but a privileged default position, such that giving them something that was a compromise between what they wanted and what the free states wanted was a harm to them from the privileged default and not an inducement to keep them in.
Also I’m not sure what you mean by them pushing all the bad stuff to Louisiana and what that has to do with presidential elections (aside from that the president sets EPA policy, but again, Louisiana voted for trump so I don’t get it)
Land doesn't vote.
Your question presumes quite a lot. I'll start with "what makes you think people who don't live in Wyoming are incapable of understanding Wyoming?"
Well, if you want to propose a system where Alaska (area 570,640.95 sq mi) gets the same representation as Rhode Island, Delaware, Connecticut, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Hawaii, Maryland, West Virginia, South Carolina, Maine, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama combined (area ~525,000 sq mi),
...then I'm all ears...
* Please don't tell me "But Alaska has so few people!"
So you prefer that the majority of the USA population is being controlled by the will of people least knowledgeable about the issues faced by the most populous and developed regions of the USA?
That's a 3.6x difference -- I would hardly call that a "small" edge.
The ratio of votes per capita is relatively consistent - assuming a baseline level of votes so individual states aren't totally excluded - and is more a sign of a potential problem with the distribution not the system itself. But there's plenty of arguments which favour both ways.
Much like gerrymandering, which both sides have a long legal record of accusing the other of taking advantage of as the last two Supreme Court cases on the matter clearly demonstrates - each by the other, this seems to be a who's on the "winning" side motivation which misses the bigger picture.
In this case it's the smaller states who have been basically given a guaranteed entrance ticket to play the game, which is different than simply giving the state extra votes relative to their size. It functions almost as a social safety net which gives you a shot, not a good shot at that, but only if you'd otherwise have no other shot. If it was only per capita (even with balancing for size) the numbers would look a lot different.
California had 32 electoral votes in the 1950s. You may have meant the 1850s, when California did have only 4 electoral votes. That's because California was tiny back then, with a population of under 100,000 in 1850.
The electoral votes per capita has always been heavily skewed in favor small states. While it's true that some formerly small states have grown into large states, I don't see how that's relevant.
The other stuff about battleground states would have only a small connection to the electoral college, as even the small states would (still) only have a small amounts of votes, and have more to do with regional political trends.
Of course there will be push back from who ever most benefits currently. But I'm sure the political machines will learn to adapt and adjust for their new markets. There will always be enough moderates to swing both ways. Each only has to focus on the important ones, so changing who is important shouldn't hurt the parties unless they don't like having power.
Re 1850, thanks I updated my comment, I should note that doesn't change the fact they're not static.
Here's my claim: if you drew a curve of electoral votes per person by percentile, there would be a very small area that was significantly elevated, and the remaining portion would be moderately flat.
Because Wyoming's population is so small, the absolute impact isn't that big. Go up just a few spots to Hawaii and it's more like a 2:1 ratio. Yet still, substantially less than 10% of the population lives in such small states. So there's a very small minority of people who have a proportionally larger impact (but still a small impact in absolute terms).
To be clear, I think that's a bad result. So far as the democratic process can allow it, our votes should have equal weight. But it's somewhat exaggerated how systematic of an effect it has. In the same vein, I've argued that the best defense of the electoral college is that it only errs by giving the wrong result in elections that were already very close. In contrast, the Senate is thoroughly anti-democratic, unsalvagably so.
(Btw: I can't replicate your math. New York had 19,378,102 people in 2010, and 29 votes = 1.49 votes / million. Wyoming had 563,626 and 3 votes = 5.32 votes / million).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_2010_Census_State_Popu...
The house is elected by population, the senate by state. The electoral college is designed to be a blend of the house and senate systems.
> As Alexander Hamilton writes in “The Federalist Papers,” the Constitution is designed to ensure “that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.” The point of the Electoral College is to preserve “the sense of the people,” while at the same time ensuring that a president is chosen “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.” [0]
Firstly, that has nothing to do with a "blend", and secondly that purpose was far from served. I rest my case.
[0] https://www.factcheck.org/2008/02/the-reason-for-the-elector...
PS: I like how you said "men and women" there. If we go by the founders, women wouldn't be part of the electoral college.
You said "It's an election of a minority leader.", but that isn't the case by any measure that actually matters, however upsetting it may be for you.
Whatever case you are resting has nothing to do with how many total electors there are, and neither does Hamilton's opinion.
The reason we're not talking about electoral votes is because the discussion revolves around how things would change if we went with the popular vote.
Yes, he got more electoral votes. Many would argue this is a broken system which has fucked our country for the second time in 3 presidents.
But on the other hand:
a) All recent presidential elections have been close in popular vote. And as the article points out, two of the last three presidents have won the electoral college while losing the popular vote.
b) Everyone would be appalled by any other large systematic difference in voting power, even if the overall impact was limited. Can you imagine if instead of going by state, we decided to go by income and the top 0.2% of people were given 3.6 votes each? People would lose their minds.
As for the math, I was using electoral votes divided by the voting-age population of each state in the 2010 Census. So, Wyoming is 3 EV / 0.428M = 7.0 EV/M and New York is 29 EV / 15.053M = 1.9 EV/M. If you use total population instead, you get the basically the same ratio (3.55x vs 3.64x).
Why is that bad? The Senate represents the states, the other sovereign entities in our federal republic.
I think that a) we should amend the Constitution to eliminate the direct election of Senators and mandating that they be appointed by the state legislatures; b) amend the Constitution to apportion 1 representative per 40,000–60,000 people (yes, this would mean over 6,000 representatives); c) amend the Constitution to mandate a similar structure for the states, with each state legislature required to be bicameral, with senators appointed by the counties and independent cities and representatives elected by the people.
Note that greatly increasing the number of representatives would make the Electoral College much more democratic. I'm not terribly fond of that, but it's a price I'm willing to pay for an overall healthier republic.
States are entities of political significance, regardless of how many people happen to live in them. This is a union of states, and states get a say. If you don't believe that consider advocating for the replacement of states with population based administrative districts.
This is such an overwhelmingly stupid statement. It's effectively "if you don't like it, then leave."
Wyoming is not as desirable as California in many ways. People don't want to go there. Just because it's not as desirable doesn't mean it should get arbitrary favoritism when it comes to elections.
Second its only your perception that it receives favoritism, because of your mistaken interpretive frame that sees electoral college electors as being about individual citizens instead of as a compromise between two sets of stakeholders: states and the citizens living in them. Until you recognize that states themselves have an interest in Federal elections, you will continue to misunderstand the role the EC plays.
Fairness isn't a simple concept. There can be many mutually incommensurable notions of fairness. Unfortunately, partisans pick and choose those that suit their interests best.
Just as an example from domestic life. Consider a family of 4 individuals with different caloric requirements. One notion of fairness would split a pizza pie into four equal portions, but another would split it in proportion to their caloric needs. Getting everyone to agree on the notion that should be operant is hard because each choice implies winners and losers.
If you don't think states interest in Federal elections shouldn't count for anything, say so, and then give some thought about whether you think states should just be replaced with population based administrative districts that change with the census.
For now. But if Wyoming doesn't like what happens with Republican party, it can change. There's a huge inertia in large parties, so probably won't happen overnight, but it's not a law of nature. From what I've heard, one of the reasons 2016 election went the way it did because Democrats considered certain states (not Wyoming) "secure" and didn't campaign there, while Republicans did, and turned out they've been not as secure as it seemed. The margins of victory in many states are not that wide, and the margins of uncertainty in any polls are wide, so it's never certain forever.
If you look at 538 (https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/), they were pretty accurate predicted which states were most and least likely to vote Trump or Clinton.
It's just that in several states where they thought Clinton had a small lead, she lost. Meanwhile, there were no states they thought Trump had a small lead but he lost.
The comparative judgments (Wisconsin is easier for Clinton to win than North Carolina, which is easier than Alabama) were right. The absolute judgments (Clinton will win Wisconsin) were wrong.
If you had gone back in time and told Clinton's team "all the polls are too positive for you, you don't have a safety margin" they'd have known that Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania were at risk.
On my memory, this is not the first time polls tilt left. Politicians should have already learned that this is possible, especially with such an unorthodox candidate as Trump.
My point also was that not many states are really "safe", yet less - forever. Relatively yes, some are further from the middle than others, but it's not a static picture and it's not a product of some permanent law but only current configuration which should never be taken for granted.
In an act of self sabotaging 12-d chess they decided not to campaign there to give the impression they were safe.
As a gambler betting on the election this cost me a lot of money.
Fascinating. Would you happen to have a link or more details on the rationale?
It’s not a matter of whether battleground states deserve special protection, it’s a matter of whether or not the battleground states in any given election serve as a good representation of the nation as a whole? Are they a better representation than a popular vote which would consistently favor coastal urban centers?
In other words: if a candidate really wants to spend their whole campaign in Ohio, I could give a shit. Go for it.
Abolish the electoral college. Now.
Source: "The great Hack" - Netflix doc.
You’re right, it was also used to get Obama elected. It’s still wrong.
"Those apps include sophisticated analytics programs like Dreamcatcher, a tool developed to "microtarget" voters based on sentiments within text."
"All of the data collected through various volunteer interactions and other outreach found its way into Narwhal's data store, where it could be mined for other purposes. Much of the data was streamed into Dreamcatcher and into a Vertica columnar database cluster used by the analytics team for deep dives into the data."
[1] from Ars Technica: Built to win: Deep inside Obama’s campaign tech https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/built...
Edit:math
Complaining that "it's always been that way" is like saying, "We've been pwned that way for a decade. Why should we fix that security hole?"
I find it incredible that people don't look at elections with the same critical eye that they do software security systems. The other cool thing is that all of your candidates for president are chosen by proxy vote! So as long as you can subvert the people who have all the proxy votes, you can choose who can even enter the election! Heck, you can stuff up both sides just for giggles. How much is the POTUS worth? Surely billions.
That's why I've always found "the Russians stole the election with $100k of Facebook ads!" comical.
Both Facebook and Putin wish they could get that kind of ROI.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_electors_in_the_2016...
I found the title to be self-fulfilling. That documentary was awful! It's just a tag along the journey of a smart narcissist to cover her ass.
Right now, if an election system is "compromised" (electronically, corrupt officials, etc), it will affect that precinct, the local elections, possibly the state-wide races, and rarely the Presidential.
With a simple majority vote, a compromise anywhere in the system - adding or removing votes - impacts the system as a whole.
In those cases, you don't directly elect a Prime Minister either. You elect an MP in little winner-take-all elections and then the party (or coalition) gets together and elect the PM from their own ranks.
It's not quite 1:1 with an Electoral College but it's not direct democracy either.
Which countries are direct democracies?
The problem with this, and with the pledge, is that it requires the states that benefit from the current system to voluntarily decrease their own influence. Which won't happen.
a popular vote presidency would be a disaster for the US, the illusion that votes matter would be completely destroyed at that level. it is like the difference of comparing a state only lottery to the multi state lottery
This is completely false. Having a popular vote would at least adequately represent, mathematically, the demographics of the US citizenry and what they want in a candidate. Now, FPTP is not the greatest voting scheme, I would prefer some sort of rank choice voting, but at least you would get a statistical representation of the populace with FPTP.
The electoral college is such an antiquated, outdated system that only favors fringe views.
As for the charge of hypocrisy, were Republicans passionately praising the wisdom of the electoral college in the 1990s? It cuts both ways.
A person's political views is not just shaped by where they live, but their race, gender, sexual orientation, education etc etc. If "location" is just another column in the table properties that describe a person, what if we had a "college" or "senate" based on some other property of an individual?
How about we give all citizens who identify as straight 2 seats and all those who identify as gay 2 seats in this imaginary senate?
Or a college roughly based on race, but for some reason the smaller races are grossly over represented?
How about by religion? As an atheist myself, I'd love to get in on some of that sweet over-representation-of-minorities mojo that Ohioans get.
My point is, cut this along any other descriptive property of an individual other than what state they live in and you get all sorts of colorful results that I'm sure would appall all the conservative proponents of the Electoral college or the Senate.
Is state or location really the most important a property when it comes to deciding whether or not you are a "minority?" When it comes to national issues, do you think a gay black man in Nebraska has more in common with a striaght white man in Nebraska? Or another gay black man in New York? Why does the one in Nebraska get to be an overrepresented minority, yet the one in New York get to be an underrepresented majority?
That layer of indirection continues to exist today. Article II provides that “each state shall appoint” electors “in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” So Minnesota could decide to have the state legislature appoint its electors, without a popular vote. (That would raise the importance of state government elections, which might be a good thing.)
At the same time, that layer of indirection could exist even in a purely proportional system. You could assign electoral votes based on population or number of house members.
So the debate over getting rid of the electoral college actually involves two different issues. Should the number of electors be proportional? And should we reduce the independent status of the states even more by taking away their intermediary role in electing the President?
Yes they are. Each house district has about 750,000 people. You get a bit of deviation because states don't necessarily have a precise multiple of 750k people. Also we only redraw districts every 10 years, so things have drifted a bit since 2010.
But it's pretty close.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_ap...
https://247wallst.com/special-report/2018/10/26/americas-lar...
It ranges quite a bit above and below that. (About half a million to a million is the range.)
https://247wallst.com/special-report/2018/10/26/americas-lar...
the largest is Montana's at large district with 1,050,493 and the smallest is Rhode Island 2 with 520,389. I tried to find a full list but couldn't with a few minutes of Googling. I'm a little surprised that Wikipedia doesn't have a page on this.
Perils of the fact that districts are confined to state borders so you've gotta round up or down for some states.
For reference, the current wage is $174,000/yr (a stupidly-high amount). $174,000 * 30,000 = $5,220,000,000. I'm severely disinclined to pay over five billion dollars per year (plus additional logistics costs) for pencil-pushers to sit around deliberating what bureaucratic idiocy they will next hand down from on high.
If you include the staff there already are 30,000 reps, just that most of them are not elected. The current system is more like having 450 mini corporations running the place.
If the UK can stomach well over 600 MPs the so can we.
That is not correct. There has just been a ruling that the states cannot impose these sorts of restrictions on the process already delineated in the US Constitution.
Please see https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/politics/federal-appea....
To mess with the electoral college in this point in time - when its basically 49% vs 51% - and at such a level of divide in the country is not exactly a testament to how empathetic the two sides are. It would be a disaster.
Everyone thinks Trump himself is the problem but this awful idea to change the goalposts literally to win elections would do way more damage than Trump could ever do but I guess it doesn't come in an 'easy to hate' package with agenda serving talking points, etc.
I don't know where these idiots think this whole "OK - we'll follow these laws, but not those" thing is going but it is incredibly damaging and at the moment only one side is picking and choosing which laws to obey and not obey (then writing publicly about it) but soon enough the other side will be picking and choosing which laws to ignore.
Get your helmets on once we are on _that_ slippery slope.
I really don't see the point you're making.
Why has every one abandoned the idea of federalism? The whole point was that you could have your way and I could have mine; we only had to agree on the bare minimum tasks which absolutely had to be handled at the federal level.
If California wants socialized medicine and Texas does not, fine. Why can't they do it on the state level? I see no reason. This has the double benefit of allowing experimenting with different solutions before committing on a national scale.
This shouldn't be a "red state/blue state" issue. The only reason why it would be is if you are hellbent on ramming your positions down the throats of those with whom you disagree. What so many forget is that when the other side gets power, it will do the same to you. The Democrats, for instance, spent years centralizing federal authority in President Obama so he could abuse it and are now surprised when President Trump abuses it too. Maybe if we just invested less power in the executive, both sides would be happier.
Technically correct but as per the 13th (?) amendment, when a state denies any male citizen aged 18 or over and not a felon the right to vote, said states representation in the electoral college and congress is recalculated as though they didn't have said residents. Therefore if Minnesota went through with this they would have no more than the baseline 3 electoral votes.
I’m not sure if this question has ever been addressed, but I’m not sure this requires a popular vote for electors, but rather if there is such a popular vote the suffrage has to include all adult males.
Now, we have winner-takes-all for almost every state. Now, politicians don't spend time pandering for votes they already have locked.
It created the concept of "battle ground states".
The NPVIC is a modern attempt to do the same thing, coordinated by mutual agreement instead of constitutional amendment.
The real purpose of the system was to balance the interests of states who had as many slaves as free people with the interests of states who would have dominated the legislature if representation were determined only by the number of citizens within the state.
There's a balance to be made between federal and state government powers. And ultimately the electoral college is one of the things that needs to go, because it unfairly tips the system in favor of extremely rural areas whom influence policy that then directly harm those living in more urban environments.
[1] https://www.insider.com/what-us-cities-looked-like-before-ep...
And in cases like these, the federal government is needed in order to apply some culpability to times when the local government behaves negligently. Not to mention this only really works if the state government actually cares about local issues, otherwise you end up with cases such as states vying to ban gay marriage because there's a tyranny of the majority at the local state level and a tyranny of the minority at the federal level.
It's a lose-lose situation because then the rural votes dictate not only the things within their state but the things that are completely outside of their purview.
And who will apply culpability when the federal government behaves negligently? Creating a higher institution to address the issue just shifts the problem of apply culpability to an institution that you have even less chance of influencing.
Many of those rural areas could not survive without the federal government's aid because they already suffer from dwindling infrastructure and population. Now if you want to break apart the federal government entirely from the equation, then you would also have to agree to let those rural areas die out instead of being propped up through subsidy and taxes from the urban taxpayer's pocket. Otherwise you would be arguing that not only do the rural states get to dictate policy, but they also get to benefit from the GDP generated by the urban states. Why is it fair then, for the federal government to give preferential treatment?
The balance of power is working precisely because the legislative is very much majority rule.
As such, if the executive did away without the electoral college, it would also overrepresent populous, majority populations.
By doing away with the electoral college , you literally destroy whatever is left of the Republic
Over time, however, decisions about domestic law have increasingly been made at the Federal level. At this point, the interstate commerce clause in the Constitution is used to justify almost any regulation that the Federal government wants to pass. When that doesn’t work, availability of Federal tax money is made contingent on states aligning their laws with whatever national policy is.
Also, the legislature has been ceding its rule-making authority to the executive by passing broadly-worded legislation and leaving the details to administrative rules committees that work for the executive.
I suspect that ‘vturner is suggesting the correct fix is to shift the overall balance of power back towards the more democratic parts of government instead of reforming the election process of the government’s chief clerk.
The Presidential horse race every 4 years is mostly for television. Federalism works because you want the decisions that affect your life the most to have the most direct accountability.
The Electoral College is fundamentally undemocratic and the lack of democracy de-legitimizes the office.
It's not even direct democracy, its a representative democracy. Except in the case of the presidency we're not even allowed to directly pick our representative in the executive branch.
Your comment seems broadly true and open minded as well. I have a couple of questions, possibly from a devil’s advocate perspective, purely for the sake of discussion because I’m curious:
When you say the government was originally geared to mediate the states and that real governance was supposed to be states, what does the Supremacy Clause in the constitution mean to you? It was there originally from the start, and it declares the federal government the winner of conflicting state and federal laws.
Second, while I am personally a fan of states’ rights in a bunch of specific scenarios, it makes little sense to me to talk vaguely about who should be in control of most laws without a specific list of regulations in mind. Where can I find a list of federal laws that are broadly viewed to be overreach by most people, that most people agree should be in state control?
Acknowledging that there is politics here, that it’s a fight over control, and your point that the Federal government is leveraging tax money, is it possible that the natural order of things is for laws to drift in the federal direction anyway - as travel across state boundaries has become faster and faster, as the internet blurs the lines, as state laws individually become closer together, as we see more needs for consistent standards nationally, etc.? When the constitution was written it took a minimum of days to even communicate with another state, let alone spend money, purchase goods, or visit. The geographic, financial, and communication boundaries between states has literally almost disappeared compared to what it used to be.
As far as the supremacy clause goes, it’s necessary for the treaty to work. The states are agreeing to give up some of their sovereign rights to be executed by the federal government instead, in the interests of the union. The bulk of the Constitution describes exactly those rights that the states are giving up, and this clause confirms that they can’t pass legislation to opt out of individual federal decisions they don’t like that fall within those bounds. Without it, the federal government would in practice only be able to make suggestions— a situation that led to bankruptcy under the Articles of Confederation.
I’m actually more concerned about the shift in power from the legislature to the executive. As the role of the federal government has grown, it feels like every executive agency has grown its own miniature legislature and judiciary that are primarily beholden to the executive. Agency regulations are law, so why aren’t they drafted and approved by an arm of the relevant congressional committee?
The 10th amendment says that when there isn’t already a constitutional directive or a conflicting state law, then either the states or the people can make their own new rules, right?
The electoral college is a constitutional directive, but are you saying you’re favor of an amendment abolishing the electoral college, and suggesting the 10th amendment provides grounds for “the people” to democratically elect a president?
I do. This sounds much better than a federation of states with weird layers of indirection based on borders drawn by historical accident or anachronistic geographic boundaries like rivers.
> He/she represents the interests of the states
This assumes that states in America have some sort of distinct cultural/political interests, divided along state lines. This isn't really the case. For example there are no significant cultural differences between North Dakota and South Dakota. The dividing line there is pretty arbitrary.
Similarly, some places that have very significant cultural/political differences are lumped together, like the Bay Area and the Central Valley in California.
Your argument would make more sense if applied to a political arrangement like the EU. Each member of the EU has a long history as a sovereign, distinct political and cultural entity. The border between, for example, Hungary and Romania is much much more significant than that between Colorado and Arizona.
Speaking to your second point, even in the EU this can be the case. Look at Wallonia and Flanders in Belgium. Spain is also a good example, Catalonia especially.
The red and blue on electoral college maps is a lie. About 40% of Californians supported Trump in 2016, and vice versa for Alabama.
But can we point to any reasonably non-controversial case where the electoral college has acted to safeguard the "American republic"? There are two points here.
First: the Supreme Court has many controversies, but also many decisions that seem very compelling in hindsight. I tend to vote for Democrats, and I'm not entirely convinced I'd disagree with the median Scalia decision (I can remember agreeing with several). It seems to fare better as an anti-majoritarian institution.
Second: suppose, for the sake of argument, that you think that Trump and Bush are great examples favoring the electoral college. In both cases, the results are extremely fragile. Either candidate could've easily lost, and the electoral college was a small bit of noise in the result (some early predictions suggested Obama would win the 2012 electoral college, but lose the popular vote). The fact that a mechanism has given you results you like in two cases, by chance, is not the same as saying that it's an important constitutional safeguard.
Isn't that obvious by the fact that the electors are under no legal obligation to choose the candidate they were voted to do?
Swing states are the states most likely to have divided government. And if divided government is good for anything, it is accountability. So with the Electoral College system, when we do wind up with a razor-thin margin in an election, it is likely to happen in a state where both parties hold some power, rather than in a state controlled by one party. The Electoral college system focuses a great deal of energy on states in this condition when an election is close.
National Popular Vote (NPV) rewards states with high population - the higher the turnout, the more power for that state. Additionally, under NPV, each state would certify its own "national" vote total. What would happen when there are charges of skullduggery? Would states really trust, with no power to verify, other state’s returns?
I have other concerns as well but feel the EC system is superior. Just as an observation, the parliamentary systems of the UK, Canada, Israel, (& others) have the parliament elect the Prime Minister and likewise don't elect their leaders by popular vote.
[edited: removing poor wording about 'lax laws', seems I implied things in a FUD way that I didn't mean to]
States have select powers over the federal government that are specifically provided by our Constitution: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/States%27_rights. When you vote in local elections, you are in effect in control of certain outcomes within your state, as accorded by our Constitution.
The federal election determines representation for every single person in the United States and, in part, how federal governmental power is exercised on their behalf. There is no conceivable logical reason why citizens in any particular state should have more or less say in such matters than those in any other. The electoral college system is an absolute sham that deprives a significant number of people of their Constitutionally-guaranteed right to fair representation at the federal level.
I’d welcome any well-formed argument to the contrary. I’ve yet to ever hear one.
Yet the constitution defines the presidential election as being done by the representatives of the state's electoral college: "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors."
The NPV interstate pact may not even itself be constitutional as it ignores the Article I, Section 10 requirement that interstate compacts receive congressional consent.
On that same note the 500 person community will have different needs compared to other 500 person communities in the same riding. In a big city the issues will be very similiar citywide.
So should we abolish the senate too? Not being snarky just wondering what those who support NPV think.
How difficult is it to corrupt a man like Mitch McConnell? How robust is our system of representation when one senator holds so much power?
Every actual study of the matter I've seen or heard of has shown no evidence of any significant fraudulent voting, particularly not systemic fraudulent voting. While there might be a theoretical concern about incentives here, there's a lot of problems we know are happening right now with voter suppression under the system that we have.
Machine politics and the nonsense behind it is a form of vote fraud. While southern states have a long history of denying African Americans the ability to vote, states where county politics controls voting like New York are also problematic.
More directly, there are plenty of schemes to fraudulently get votes counted, from absentee ballot fraud in nursing homes to voting irregularities in religious communities.
California recently had to be forced by lawsuit to remove 5 million invalid voter registrations. Multiple counties have more registered voters than they have age 18+ citizens. It is unclear how often these registrations were actually used to vote, but isn't it possible that ballots could be printed and filled surreptitiously for these registrations in the future?
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/06/20/calif_...
Oregon (where I live) is blessed with vote-by-mail -- it affords high turnout with high vote verifiability. Being able to consider & research arguments on both sides of the issues and candidates in detail before voting is fantastic.
Even if you could verify that a given vote is counted, it's much harder to verify that the voter's choice was not made under duress, or influenced by a bribe.
There are methods for mitigating these problems (like allowing an in-person vote to override your postal vote), but these have their own issues, and I worry that becoming accustomed to vote-by-mail will increase the calls for online-voting.
Illegal voting is already illegal, and states can already in theory do shady things in their elections (and some probably already do). The courts should absolutely go after this, and I don't see NPV really changing this.
> The NPV system focus the most energy on states with a high population in this condition.
Perhaps so, but the one of the main points of NPV is for state boundaries to be meaningless for campaigning. Maybe politicians should spend more time in densely populated areas because, well, there are more people there.
> What would happen when there are charges of skullduggery? Would states really trust, with no power to verify, other state’s returns?
Do states currently trust that other states hold fair elections to determine how their electors vote? I don't see any change here.
No, it wouldn't.
California and New York, even voting as a 100% block, don't represent a national majority. Heck, they aren't even the two largest states (#2 is Texas.)
It wouldn't be states representing a relatively small fraction of the population dictating control of the Senate while be overly powerful in choosing the President—but they'd still control the Senate, and hereby have a veto on federal law. So why would they secede?
> You would definitely see a mass succession.
(1) you mean secession, and
(2) if the low-population, mostly low-GDP states secede and thereby sacrifice their disproportionate control over be rest of the country, that they otherwise retain as long as the Senate exists with or without also having extra Presidential vote weighting (the small, high-GDP states have largely signed on to the national popular vote, so aren't likely to secede over it), whose loss is that?
It seems unlikely to me, but perhaps some states would try to secede if the system changed such that their voters receives the same influence as every other voter in the country. I would not support that decision.
The Electoral College is apportioned by population already (with a slight bias). If California and New York had a mojority of the voters, they would already have a majority of EC votes.
California and New York also aren't monolithic. Remember: the electoral college is a lie. People in states don't actually all have the same opinions. Californians supported Trump by 40%.
Currently the effects of any illegal voting are contained to the state that the illegal voting happened in; North Dakota's electors aren't going to vote differently even if there are 6 million illegal votes in California. With an NPV that isn't the case.
The current system is resistant to these concerns, so the lack of a nation-wide voter ID is less important than it would be with a national popular vote.
I agree you would have to have the same standard for voter registration.
One way of improving the current system (from an outsiders pov) would be to make electors all faithless and having parties switch to One member one vote and do a way with registering.
http://theconversation.com/whose-votes-count-the-least-in-th...
Look at the huge disparity towards small rural states. This is bad, but it's even worse because due to the effect of the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 (https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1901-1950/Th...) the number of Represenatives has been fixed at 435 for almost 100 years, and since the smallest number of electoral votes a state can have is 3, this makes the small states even more overpowered than they would be in a "fair" electoral college system.
Why should a voter in Wyoming have 3.71x as much weight (effectively) as mine does a North Carolinian?
the parliamentary systems of the UK ... have the parliament elect the Prime Minister and likewise don't elect their leaders by popular vote.
The system is otherwise just as broken as the US; meaning that outcomes are decided by a small number of "rural" people combined with gerrymandering.
Without EC presidential candidates wouldn't be focused on states at all, they would be focused on large demographics of the US population, which is exactly what they should be focused on.
Well, it rewards people who vote. If more people in my state turn out to vote for the candidate that I didn't vote for, and who didn't get the majority of the states votes, I and most of the people that voted in my state are not rewarded by NPV.
OTOH, getting more Democratic votes in a Red state, or more Republican votes in a Blue state suddenly makes a difference in the national outcome; national elections no longer are about doing the minimum necessary to keep a majority in party-dominated states while focussing primarily on narrow appeal to the particular perceived interests of “swing state” voters, but about getting as much support as possible nationally.
States become irrelevant under the NPV.
Based on what we've seen in the midwest, what you're actually saying here is that divided government isn't good for anything.
FiveThirtyEight published an article last week on the current state of the compact: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-movement-to-skip-th...
It kinda feels like this part keeps getting glossed over when people talk about this. I don't think those signing on have really thought it through, and are just reacting to the 2016 election results. Of course the party that lost wants to change the system in a way that, that time, they may have ended up winning - especially with all the open hate for Trump.
And, sure, it benefits the Democrats -- but given that population trends over the last few decades have all been about migration to urban areas from rural ones, I think it's at least worth asking whether keeping the electoral college and giving ever fewer voters a disproportionately ever-greater say over the country is truly what we want.
If another national election goes the "lose popular election, win election anyway" route within the next few cycles, this is going to start getting a lot of noise around it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Democratic_Party_presiden...
Super delegates have never decided a Democratic primary, and Obama got more votes in 2008 (the official tally excludes Washington, Michigan, and Florida, who went for Obama but didnt publish vote tallies)
The delegate system is proportional, not winner-take-all, it is utterly unlike the electoral college.
People who want to get away from the big cities and live a different kind of life with different priorities (and different legislative interests), shouldn't be totally shut out, should they? Even though I live in a giant urban area, I wouldn't want to feel pressured to due so due to lack of political stake if I move elsewhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Two_of_the_United_Stat...
We must stop this madness!
Yeah but maybe that's a good thing. Otherwise you have a situation like New York where NYC gets to dictate everything since it's super high population density even though the majority of geographical NY state is farmers. So the farmers get screwed over by the interests of the city folk who have never even stepped foot out of the city. For example, city folks are more likely to vote for increases in property taxes - not that they care too much since they only have a tiny apartment - but it hits the people outside of the city with lots of land (for farming) really hard.
It's just like the "rich getting richer" conundrum. Once you have a large city, it will gain more people faster than a small town just by virtue of the properties of growth. So pretty soon you'll have a few megacities that get to dictate the government of the entire country and if you live anywhere else; too bad, the city folk are in charge now.
Cost of a small apartment in NYC is equal to the cost of several acres of farmland. Proportional property taxes would impact both demographics similarly.
But no. Land owners make money extracting rent. The difference is that farming is subsidized.
I live and work in rural NY State. For every farmer out here, there are dozens of teachers, janitors, computer programmers, hairstylists, restaurant owners & workers, and every other type of profession you have in hamlets, small towns, and non-mega-cities.
And yeah, there are a lot of people here who don't want property taxes to go up. They don't want any taxes to go up, because they're rural Republicans who have bought into the line that taxes are bad hook, line, and sinker. But as rural Republicans, they mostly don't even make much noise about wanting taxes to go down. The signs you see along the side of the road are clamoring to repeal gun control laws that prevent violent criminals and the mentally ill from purchasing guns.
Just because New York City has enough population to drown the rest of the state in doesn't mean that we should give the rest of the state disproportionate power.
Is it in the best interests of all the people to have proportionate power? I believe so.
The EC is an abstraction, which philosophically and practically takes choice away from individuals. Population centers having more power than rural areas (even when they are the geographical majority, otherwise) is a proxy for land-owners having more power. While, ironically, land-owners (like farmers) often tend to be poorer than city-dwellers in absolute terms, I don't believe they should have some sort of relative power difference.
Is it in the best interests of all the people to have proportionate power? I believe so.
I don't believe they (rural vs metropolitan citizens) should have some sort of relative power difference, despite their relative wealth and land-ownership differences. That's not important to me, philosophically.
Best I can do to clarify.
So the "land-owners," or at least, the owners of the companies that own the land, also live in the cities, and are themselves among the vastly wealthy.
Only if you start with the assumption that different individuals voters should have different amounts of political influence, which the NPV movement is explicitly rejecting.
> Otherwise you have a situation like New York where NYC gets to dictate everything since it's super high population density even though the majority of geographical NY state is farmers. So the farmers get screwed over by the interests of the city folk who have never even stepped foot out of the city.
I think the problem here is that you're portraying it as if cities or states are the agents making decisions, rather than individuals. Obviously the electoral college establishes states as the agents making decisions in Presidential elections. The NPV movement seeks to make individuals the agents that decide Presidential elections.
Given the geographic clustering of opinions, it is not adequate to give every individual equal say over every area.
That was exactly the point of the Electoral College - that states would elect the president.
You may think that's a bad idea. That's fine. You may want to change it. But it's a really fundamental change to the architecture. If it's to be changed, it should be changed by a constitutional amendment, not just by a compact among the states.
Also, the framers expected that most of the time, there would be too many candidates for any to win a majority. In that case, the House would select a winner from the candidates.
A system where electors do not make their own decisions, and one candidate always wins a majority, was simply not conceived of.
https://www.constitution.org/fed/federa68.htm
This is the most easily digestible evidence, but Hamilton is obviously not the only one who thought this way. He is representing the position of most of the framers, that's why the system he describes here is what ended up in the constitution. Note that there is no mention at all of rural vs. urban, underrepresented communities, states' rights, anything like that. Those factors contributed to the creation of the Senate and the House, but not the electoral college. That was entirely due to the men writing the constitution not trusting the men they were allowing to vote.
So why, in your view, do the states get to appoint the electors?
That was part of the purpose; a part that we have since mostly neutered. But the number of electors was definitely chosen to compromise between small and large (population) states.
Senate representation is apportioned constantly per state. House representation is apportioned approximately proportional to population. The electoral college is a compromise (sum) of these too.
States have gotten to choose how to select their electors, and most have chosen winner-take-all (in part because this is a strategy that is strategically powerful). So it remains a forum of state-chosen electors, with a weight that is a compromise between per-state and per-population representation, like it has always been.
Well yeah. There's a reason why it's called the United STATES.
Local politicians should be concerned with their locality - national politicians should be concerned with the nation and making sure that no localities are presented with problems beyond the scope of their power... the state sorta does both - but it also serves to mask local issues within the state's representation up to the national level. It's why I'm rather fond of the house and less fond of the senate - as a former Vermonter I had intensely good representation at the national level - I had one house rep and two senators which were concerned with representing me specifically - but when I resided in MA our rep was concerned with local issues but the Senators were more focused on pushing forth agendas that the state-house was pushing out... so the representation of individual localities were lost on those senators.
Land doesn't (shouldn't) vote.
> too bad, the city folk are in charge now.
You mean democracy? You mean 1 person 1 vote? You mean the majority? This is what you have a problem with? Go ahead and state that view, but let's be honest about what you are saying.
You think somehow people should be punished for population density. That their votes should be worth less, person for person, than a rural vote.
Why.
The tyranny of the minority who sit on emptier ground is not a sacred value.
Firstly, property taxes are levied at the town(ship) levels in New York State. Secondly, property taxes are levied on the assessed property value of the property in question, which will be $1-5000/acre for agricultural land, so an $800,000 Manhattan studio will have the same assessed value of up to 800 acres of farmland. Thirdly, property taxes on farm land are fully deductible business expenses, while property taxes on your primary residence is not.
Finally, it doesn't come through in text, but allow me to spend the next seven minutes laughing on the floor at the notion that city dwellers are blase about their property taxes going up.
Urban cities form extremely powerful electoral blocks in Congress which can pass huge amount of pro-urban legislation and pro-urban budgets. The rural areas have much less representation but at least enough so that they can perhaps dog-trade for policies that are important to them.
Remember that laws pass on majority or super-majority rules in Congress. So once you have enough to form a coalition your vote “matters” or not.
Isn’t this literally not true?
Of course it’s true. WY has 1 representative to CA’s 53.
For example: Right now in the US there are 2 senators from each state. California with a population of over 39 million has 2 senators, Alaska with a population around 700,000 also has 2 senators.
Should some states have zero?
Words have histories of course, and probably at one point this was a spatial metaphor - maybe some bicameral legislature literally did have one of their higher status body on a different floor than their lower status body. But the words upper and lower when applied to the legislative branch have evolved since then.
In particular, for any bill requiring spending, the Senate can only amend a bill that started in the House. Impeachment must start in the house and is then tried in the Senate. The Senate can't nominate someone to office, they can only confirm a nominee presented by the executive.
I understand our federal politics are a complete mess but think that has more to do to equating money with freedom of speech, the great return on campaign donations, the polarization of our media and the lack of solid non-partisan research institutes that our elected leaders can rely upon. Have you ever watched CSPAN? Our leaders routinely become informed about the world around us through the same mass media as we do.
I would not mind that
This is why we have the House of Representatives, which is based on population. California has 53 representatives, Alaska has one.
The original idea as I understand it, before the 17th amendment, was that the Senate was supposed to represent the interests of the states, hence two senators from each equally represented state. While the House was supposed to represent the interests of the residents of those states.
As does:
1. Wyoming (Population: 572,381)
2. Vermont (Population: 627,180)
3. Alaska (Population: 735,720)
4. North Dakota (Population: 760,900)
5. South Dakota (Population: 892,631)
6. Delaware (Population: 975,033)
7. Rhode Island (Population: 1,056,738)
8. Montana (Population: 1,074,532)
9. Maine (Population: 1,342,097)
10. New Hampshire (Population: 1,363,852)
These states combined control 20% of the Senate with a roughly combined population of 10 million people. That's only 25% the population of California alone, or 3% of the total country.
Now obviously the Senate/House power balance was designed with this in mind. But the House hasn't reapportioned representation by population in a century.
Seems to me like the American democratic system has a very large bias for rural voters, especially when you consider where in the country presidential campaigns start every 4 years.
Not sure where you live, but since 1914 in Colorado:
1914 - four representatives
1973 - five representatives
1983 - six representatives
2003 - seven representatives
So clearly seats are added as population changes in a state.
See also: https://www.insightsassociation.org/article/states-expected-...
To truly remedy this situation in the House, you have to bring the House up to about 930.
https://time.com/5423623/house-representatives-number-seats/
I'm not sure adding more reps would make the system work any better - part of me thinks it would be even more expensive and chaotic.
The House reapportions by population after each census (10 years), with the exception of the notable failure after the 1920 Census.
The House hasn't increased total size since the reapportionment after the 1910 census, which is probably what you are thinking of.
Doesn't this effectively make it impossible to correctly reapportion by population though, because without a change in size a number of low population states "should" have < 1 member?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Two_of_the_United_Stat...
I’m surprised that given technology advances people don’t just cut out the expensive elected officials and put everything up to several national votes per day. If you think that the founders got the proportional balance wrong, what about the temporal balance? Why invest decision making power in one person over such long time frames?
You can define “correctly reapportion” in a way that this is true, but there is no reason to think that was the Constitutional intent.
Which isn't to say I don't think there is a policy problem, I just don't think you can reduce it to incorrect apportionment.
All states have two Senators and at least one member of the House, with additional House members based on their population.
This is why California (with it's large population) has 55 electoral college votes, while Alaska only gets the default minimum of three.
This was all by design. The smaller states would not have joined the union if it mean that the bigger states would monopolize all the power.
The President would become a ceremonial figurehead (directly elected by popular vote or a McGarvie model -see below), sign the bills and maybe still hold but rarely use veto power.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGarvie_Model
Disclaimer: Australian so obviously biased
> People who want to get away from the ~big cities~ small towns and live a different kind of life with different priorities (and different legislative interests), shouldn't be totally shut out, should they? Even though I live in a ~giant urban area~ rural area, I wouldn't want to feel pressured to due so due to lack of political stake if I move elsewhere.
who's to say one direction is more important than the other? At least if we ditch the electoral college, individual voices always have the same volume
I grew up rural, but I long ago moved to an urban life. Politicians — and to be honest rural folk themselves — often try to enforce the idea that rural life is somehow more genuine. You’ll hear this as “Real America”, or how city folks don’t understand how “the Real World works”, or are some how “out of touch”. Which is fundamentally a completely bizarre idea when the majority of Americans (and I believe the world in general now) live an urban life. While there are unique and legitimate concerns that may need to be addressed for rural life, they are not mainstream concerns. Similarly, allowing rural politics and social mores to dominate national politics is as absurd as saying the Sentinelese[0] should dominate world culture because they’re more in touch with the land or something.
I think you're underestimating the figures. 80.7% of Americans lived in urban areas according to the 2010 census. Estimates for the entire world are over 50% for over a decade now (since 2007, to be more accurate). It increases slowly but steadily, so we were at about 55.27% in 2018. It's going to be about 68% by 2050 and about 85% by 2100.
If the trend doesn't change for the next 80 years. Which is a big if.
Edit: I'm not disputing the larger point. I just think the number is probably a little lower than that if you adjusted for being "truly" urban.
Its sort of like the analogous effect showing up in Michigan in the auto manufacturing areas had for Trump. He showed up, Hillary did not, and he won more of those votes.
That's one take. Another take is that urban centers are being actively disenfranchised.
Btw, those politicians who benefit from the EC are the ones creating policies that are destroying the rural populace at the same time.
1. Rural places do have representation, through Congress. Abolishing the EC will not change that.
2. Rural areas already have outsized representation due to how the Senate is set up.
3. The electoral college only matters for presidential candidates, during the general election, and they aren't spending a lot of time in rural areas already anyway. I grew up in North Dakota, and no presidential candidates ever wasted their time campaigning there.
Right now in order to win Florida you must win a popular vote in Florida. There is no internal electoral college in Florida. Winning Florida is incredibly important for presidential candidates.
Where do they campaign in Florida? Everywhere. They don't just hang out in Miami. If candidates do not avoid less populated areas when aiming to win a popular vote in a state, why would they do so for the nation?
If it was much cheaper to convince undecided voters in urban areas, they’d go there first... but the competition among candidates spending would start to drive up the cost per voter to an equilibrium where it started to make sense to go to rural areas, and if that started to drive prices up, maybe next is suburban. But it’s everywhere, all over the country, appealing to everybody as effectively as you can, to win. And since the president affects everybody, it only seems right they should be elected by 1 person, 1 vote, across all citizens.
> Even though I live in a giant urban area, I wouldn't want to feel pressured to due so due to lack of political stake if I move elsewhere.
Imagine a developer in San Francisco tempted to move to Austin, but who won't because the state as a whole will always go Republican even though Austin tends to be more liberal.
The political implications of showing urbanites that (some) rural areas are better places to live than is currently being preached could get interesting.
For example, a vote in Wyoming counts 3.6 times more than a vote in California.[1] The people in California are not represented in the Presidential election; it would be more accurate to say that one-quarter of the people in California are represented.
"Rural issues" do not deserve special protection if that protection results in a tyranny of the minority. People are choosing to actively leave rural communities and congregate in urban areas; this does not on its face mean that their concerns have become less important.
Moreover, people congregating in urban areas tend to be center- and left- leaning, so skewing the Presidential vote towards urban areas also results in US politics as a whole shifting to the right. It also results in a judiciary that is more conservative than the population as a whole.
There are only eight states in America that have more people than Los Angeles county.[2] Why are the concerns of the people living in LAC less important than the concerns of the people in Nevada or Arkansas? What is it about their geography that makes their issues unimportant?
[1] http://theconversation.com/whose-votes-count-the-least-in-th...
Some people like what California does with its state-specific policies. Some people even choose to live there.
If the Executive branch was less powerful and the States retained more of what they were originally intended to oversee for themselves, I might have less of a problem with California liberals electing the Executive for the whole country.
As it is, California has 53 of 435 seats in Congress and 55 electoral votes. The disparity with Wyoming is just because the minimum is 3 per state, and Wyoming’s population is minuscule.
If you eliminate the per-state minimum I expect there would be large geographical areas of the country which would eventually become uninhabitable / unsustainable.
Unless you are in a purple state you basically don't have a vote, and politicians can ignore your entire State.
So while the EC does empower some rural voters, in reality it effectively disenfranchises most of the country.
The issue you are having at the state level is a dominant majority makes the views of the minority irrelevant.
And to be clear, the EC does not disenfranchise all the voters in states like CA, just the minority voters.
This is actually precisely what the Senate and the Electoral College is designed to mitigate.
So roughly half of the votes in all non competitive states do not count.
That is not a realistic proposal. Political gridlock will never allow a change like this. Doing it state by state is even worse because it just creates a system where dems try to do it to only red states and the GOP tries to do it to only blue states. It would just further skew the outcomes away from a democratic result.
My point is that while the current setup probably dilutes CA liberals voting power the most in terms of the EC, there are other ways the system works that is particularly empowering to CA liberals.
>Why are the concerns of the people living in LAC less important than the concerns of the people in Nevada or Arkansas?
So instead you want even more people from Nevada and Arkansas to move to LAC, because that's where politicians will pay attention?
Why would Arkansas or Nevada have joined a union of states where their votes mean essentially nothing?
Why would California have joined a union of states where their votes mean 1/4 of Wyoming's?
Read higher up in the thread:
> For example, a vote in Wyoming counts 3.6 times more than a vote in California.[1]
* access to single market and currency
* federal loans/money
* territory protection from other countries military intervention
* freedom of movement (including study, work, living, etc) within all the other states of the union
If states want to do some things differently that's why there are state level laws. If those states don't find that they have the right amount of freedom at the state level and think those benefits above matter less than being able to outvote 3:1 a citizen in California when it comes to presidential election then, I guess, they are free to leave the union?
But it needs to be on agreed upon and mostly amicable terms, or the state(s) desiring to leave will be unable to get the necessary votes.
The southern states trying to take their slavery and go home knew this for decades before, so they didn't even bother.
"Tyranny of the minority" gets this issue exactly backwards. The problem the Electoral College was designed to mitigate is a tyranny of the majority.
> Why are the concerns of the people living in LAC less important than the concerns of the people in Nevada or Arkansas? What is it about their geography that makes their issues unimportant?
Why do any of these concerns need Federal intervention to solve? Why can't LAC and Arkansas and Nevada manage their own affairs? I understand rare emergencies like natural disasters require pooling national resources, but everyone talks now as if no locality at all can survive from day to day without Federal benefits.
The point they're making is that while it was designed to prevent a tyranny of the majority, it goes too far and results in a tyranny of the minority.
> Why do any of these concerns need Federal intervention to solve? Why can't LAC and Arkansas and Nevada manage their own affairs? I understand rare emergencies like natural disasters require pooling national resources, but everyone talks now as if no locality at all can survive from day to day without Federal benefits.
No one mentioned federal benefits. We are talking about the relative voting power of a voter in one area versus another in the presidential election. Let's not get distracted here.
Sure you did; you said LAC voters don't have their concerns addressed as well because they are part of a large, populous state whose EC votes count for less per capita. My question is, if LAC is capable of managing its own affairs, why does it care?
In other words, you're assuming that the President's job is to "take care of everyone's concerns", so everyone needs an equal vote to elect the President. That seems to me to be absurd. The President's job is to faithfully execute the laws and to make executive decisions about national needs like defense and foreign policy. It's not to address the individual concerns of every voter or the local concerns of every city, county, etc.
Similar remarks apply to the Federal government more generally. The fact that everyone takes it for granted now that the Federal government is supposed to address everyone's concerns is a sign of how corrupt and inefficient our system has become. Everyone judges their Senators and Representatives, not according to how well they take care of national issues, but how much pork they send home.
It has become evident that the federalist experiment has failed; because an integrated modern society cuts across state lines, while land can't vote and people matter more than land. Everything else is a side effect, no matter how tightly it's clung to by parties whose high-minded rhetoric, if we're being frank, is honored more in the breach than the observance as they look for low-status, low-power people to cudgel, using the guise of federalism to make it easier to do in their own little pond.
Not so much failed, but massively misaligned after the civil war. The nation made many compromises at every level for slave power, and should have renegotiated everything afterwards.
(Though I worry for the EU, too.)
To start with, states are the compositional unit of the United States. If Los Angeles County wants to become its own state, there is a process to do that.
But to answer the correct question: Nevada has the same say as California, both being states.
Thank you for illustrating the bankruptcy of the regressive position.
I guess if you want to just "thoughts and prayers" it then that's your prerogative.
Yeah you're probably right. Let's just disenfranchise more than half the population of the country. That'll give the federal government a ton of legitimacy!
> The President's job is to faithfully execute the laws and to make executive decisions about national needs like defense and foreign policy.
And we the people get to decide which candidate will do the better job. Or we should. But because of the electoral college, we don't.
If we accept that we the people should get to directly decide, then of course the decision should be made by popular vote. But that's just assuming your conclusion.
Also, this is a different argument from the one you gave before: now you're accepting that the President's job is not to take care of everyone's concerns.
States have representation, done universally by popular vote within those states for their representatives in Congress. (if you know any states that are an exception, feel free to add). Most of the country, and the world, experiences elections by popular vote except for a single particular position.
The Electoral College is only for the appointment of 1 person for the office of the President. It is an aberration. Even when looking at the President's ability to appoint people, many other popular vote elected representatives have the ability to appoint people too.
This aberration was from a time when the non-slave population of the United States was 1 million people, completely coastal (although those states had widely different boundaries back then which stretched deep into Appalachia), and in some of those states only the land owners could vote.
The purpose of the Electoral College was a compromise, not part of the grand wisdom and design. A compromise that has been merely tolerable and now has been stretched to its limits.
The democracy we exported throughout the whole world for the next 200 years looked at our older iteration and said "no, we'll patch that".
US Electoral College has reached its peak of tolerance, and the inability to amend it is maintained by the states that are the very reason why the electoral college is intolerable.
Actually, as someone else remarked upthread, in most parliamentary democracies the Prime Minister is elected by the parliament, not by popular vote.
I specifically was not referring to positions that are not.
If we want to talk about Head of State selection processes, I am a fan of Switzerland's Federal Council which contains 7 heads of state that act together but represent the interests of the constituent parties, while one acts as a frontman for diplomatic purposes with other nations. It maintains professional tact privately and publicly - concept only rarely strained in Switzerland's Federal Council history - and more importantly maintains representation. A brief civil war between that collection of small counties and cities was needed to get those reforms and other forms of direct representation into their constitution.
Because issues like immigration, national defense, and environmental policy are all national issues. California voters are held hostage to the preferences of the people in Nevada, even though they vastly outnumber them.
> everyone talks now as if no locality at all can survive from day to day without Federal benefits
They plainly cannot. The federal government funds a large portion of everything from infrastructure to education to healthcare, but our government structure ensures that only people in small states have a say in how those programs actually work.
Maybe your argument is going to be that they shouldn't fund those things, but the fact is that the majority of Americans disagree with you on that.
Stuff that should be handled at the state and local level, with granularity specific to each state's unique geographic and demographic circumstances. I would limit the Federal-level influence to just establishing/recommending common standards (kinda like ISO standards) that multiple states can choice to implement.
Maybe if we didn't have Federal taxes, the states could charge more for additional services without over-burdening their populations. Federal income tax is one of many reasons why I consider Woodrow Wilson the worst American President ever.
If that's really true, then we as a country are screwed, because the money the federal government is spending on all this stuff comes from us. We can't pay ourselves more money than we have, and if we all get paid equally, then we're all just getting back what we paid and nothing is actually happening. So basically what you're describing is localities fighting over who gets to take money from whom. And the argument about popular vote is then just an argument that the most populous localities should be the ones taking from everyone else.
It’s not only the US which has to balance rural vs urban electorates. Some are even further down the spectrum like Japan where rural areas have even larger influence than cities compared to other democracies.
But in a way it makes sense. Without people in the countryside the people in the cities would have little to eat. Most countries go to some lengths to ensure some modicum of food security/self-sufficiency.
This argument would be accurate if we lived in a mercantile oriented world still, but there are plenty of countries that are entirely on other countries for basic necessities. While I can sympathize with the fact that farmers have gotten the rough end of the stick from seed corporations (like Monsanto) lately and that they have been forced into incredibly thin profit margins their work isn't inherently more valuable because it results in edible objects.
There are plenty of countries out there with a net import of food like the UAE, Germany, Russian, Japan, Egypt and Venezuela - that's a pretty diverse group of varying GDP per capita and political stability so I think it's pretty safe to dismiss any concerns of a strategic food reserve.
That was the original point to electoral votes and a representative government system. It's not that the system doesn't work, it's been perverted. If we can end the gerrymandering and other political machine issues, we'd have a better system. Not perfect. But I think its steered the wrong way with political affiliation as platform rather than constituent needs.
But this is the point to the whole system. It's supposed to attempt to keep everyone's needs in mind. Gov body structures were originally figured out for countries the size of... Florida. Maybe California. Thus, your nation has roughly the same "issues" and "needs". But the USA is the "same" country for 3,000 miles of driving. West and east coast Americans are not the same. New Englanders and Southerners are not the same. West coast and is not the save as Mid-westerners. Hell, even folks on the Pacific Northwest are not the same as Californians. Then you have Texans. Shit, let's not forget Hawaii and Alaskans. Different land. Different climates. WAY different industries and lifestyles. I learned this first hand since I've traveled and lived in different parts of the country every 1-2 years (roughly).
So yea. Pretending like axing the electoral college is just a simple fix that solves this super simple problem... you're out of your god damn mind.
So ... separate but equal?
Apologies if there’s a direct linkage that I’m simply missing
This policy was enacted by a President that lost the popular vote in California, and lost the popular vote nationwide.
That is tyranny.
The solution here is to understand and address why so many millions of people voted for him, not to give even more power to the most powerful and wealthiest states that hardly need it. One reason Trump managed to drum up so much support is because interior states had been neglected for so many decades. Is neglecting them further your solution? Maybe just completely disenfranchise them on a national level and then you don't have to ever worry about what life is like in most of the country?
Why? They elected Trump to address those concerns. If he can't or won't, the rest of the country is under no obligation to do so on his behalf.
If Trump fails, then he fails. But that's a lot different from completely disenfranchising many states when it comes to the presidency.
Trump represents the rich and powerful, though, arguably more so than Hillary Clinton, who's rich and elite but not even in the same league as Trump, or as entrenched with multinational business interests (although as far as the common voter is concerned, the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire may be irrelevant.)
And realistically, electing any President based on a laundry list of partisan grievances is going to disenfranchise the rest of the country. The Electoral College is no more or less fair than a popular vote in that regard.
Remember that picture of the children in cages floating around the news? That wasn't our current president. That was during the time of a president elected by both the popular vote in Cali and the national vote.
Also remember that those detention centers are literally that- short term holding. The intended duration for a stay is max 72 hours, and rarely exceeds a week- and that's only because HHS literally can't find suitable places fast enough with how many are entering the country.
Claiming that because California has 57 votes and Wyoming a whopping 3 votes, instead of California having 70 and Wyoming one (if at all), we "no longer have representative democracy" is nonsense. California still have wastly more votes. Yes, Wyoming also gets some, otherwise it why bother voting at all if everything is essentially decided by the most populous states anyway?
> protection results in a tyranny of the minority
3 votes against 57 is hardly "tyranny".
> Why are the concerns of the people living in LAC less important than the concerns of the people in Nevada or Arkansas?
Why people leaving in LAC should be in virtually full control (with the current power of federal government it's very close to that) over people of Nevada and Arkansas and Wyoming? What's the point for Wyoming to sign up for such a deal to be ruled by LAC?
The state isn't voting homogenously. Just like Eastern Washington could vote differently to the Puget Sound with more direct representation.
The key word in your argument is 'populous'. Thinking in terms other than people, be it states/counties/acreage is another version of putting "landowners" in charge.
> Why people leaving in LAC should be in virtually full control (with the current power of federal government it's very close to that)
Which explains why politicians spend so much time in Election season in LAC. Except they don't. They are instead in Ohio, Montana, NH, Wyoming, Iowa, Florida.
Again, having 3 votes against 57 does not put whoever has 3 votes "in charge" in any sensible meaning of the word.
> Except they don't.
Because they think LAC has already made up their minds, no matter what. And judging from voting patterns, they are correct. So whose fault is that? If more LAC voters would vote diversely, politicians would pay more attention to LAC, they are not stupid. But when it's 70+% to one side, why bother? Same campaigning dollar would bring much more impact elsewhere, and campaign resources are finite.
LAC and NYC both voted very blue, yet here we are. How do you credibly claim that "LAC is by and large in charge of the direction of the federal government"?
It’s also hard to say this is even problematic in general. The winner of the popular vote has only lost 5 times in history (or 6 depending on who you ask about 1960), and not by large margins either. But you can’t take this to mean that the results would have been different if the election was to be decided by popular vote to begin with. Currently Republican candidates have little incentive to campaign in CA or NY, and Democrat candidates have little incentive to campaign in TX. If the outcome was to be decided by popular vote to begin with, there’s no way to say that the outcomes would have been any different.
While people living in rural areas may have distinct cultural values and may face real inequities when it comes to infrastructure, economic opportunity, education, health care access, etc., this seems completely unrelated to deciding the fairest way to pick a president.
I’m not sure it’s possible to convince small states to give up power now that they have it. Although I’m sure they may want to cecede. Can you imagine the immense power that Wyoming would have as a sovereign nation? Or Delaware? They would be protected from threat by being surrounded by the US and could become havens for activities not allowed in the US. Basically become super Switzerlands.
If you're a swing voter in a heavily partisan district, it doesn't matter how dense the district is, you won't be campaigned for.
With winner-take-all allocation of states' electoral votes, politicians are incentivized to put all of their effort into battleground/swing states, regardless of size. Presidential candidates spend 99% of their time in swing states, except for when they go to NY/CA/TX/FL to fundraise. Iowa gets attention because it's the earliest primary, not because it's rural.
Since almost everyone lives in a quasi-suburbia in america now, who exactly needs protecting? Why does someone in North Dakota deserve more of a say than someone in california these days?
I don't see a problem with that if we confront and dismiss the notion that certain individuals (e.g. individuals who live in rural areas) should have more political influence than certain other individuals (e.g. individuals who live in urban areas).
Something as arbitrary as the amount of unpopulated land around a person's home should not affect how much political influence that person receives.
This makes no sense. You've just made an error in thinking.
The pro-EC argument is people who tend to live rural have a different set of issues, and also tend to be a relative minority of people, and thus those issues aren't given due weight with 1-person-1-vote.
Deciding to move to a rural area does not decrease the power of your vote in a non-EC system - your vote has equal power.
The question we should be asking is, why are Ohio, PA, Michigan and Florida more important than any other state?
The real core issue is: the president and the federal govt has way too much power. There is no reason why a centralized authority should decide on policies for both rural and urban communities.
If political power was surrendered back down to where it naturally belongs, i.e. to the state, or even better to the city level, and the fed was stripped and left with little to no political power, this whole electoral college charade would become entirely moot.
If you get rid of the electoral college then no matter where you live your vote would count. At least for President.
This distorts our national priorities. For example ethanol subsidies are so high because Iowa is a battleground state.
We could conduct a popular vote where a Wyoming resident gets 3x the vote of a California resident. This would be an enormous improvement over the EC and I would support it.
With the modern ratio of the voting to the total populations being about the same across rural and city populations the EC doesn't do that much for the rural territories. The EC was specifically made to give huge political weight to the very specific rural demography back then - plantation owners in the South states - i.e. the time and place of extremely low ratio of voting to total populations. Without EC the south states would back then have political weight of about 0, ie. equal to its share of voting population - white male landowners; with EC - the political weight of those states was its share of all the white population plus 3/5 of the slaves.
Of course with universal voting rights and slavery abolishment the EC is just an obsolete undemocratic remnant of those old times.
counter-point is that the political stake is currently being taken away from people who live in large states, and is thus negatively affecting the most amount of people possible.
Whatever percentage of the population they make up, that's the stake they'll get (and the amount of accountability the politicians will have to them). What's wrong with that?
I guess when we're talking about actual campaign tours there might be some neglect that happens because of the logistics of physical travel. Although I have to question the real benefit of those visits to the citizens. They benefit the politicians themselves, but they aren't exactly a vital source of information in a world with the internet.
This doesn't effect politicians other than Presidential candidates, and doesn't effect territories (rural or otherwise) because those get no votes in Presidential elections. Though moving to a national popular votes in the states proper could be the first step to a national popular vote of US Citizens, which would give Presidential candidates a reason to campaign in territories.
Also, as long as there is a Senate and Presidential candidates are seen to have electoral coattails, there will be an incentive for Presidential candidates to campaign in low-population states.
Also, the association of low-population states with “rural areas” is wrong: California has a rural population about equal to the total population of South Dakota; Texas—the second most populated state—has the largest rural population, bigger than the total population of South Dakota and the four smaller states; North Carolina and Pennsylvania (also top 10 population states) have rural populations that also each exceed the total population of several of the smallest states combined.
> Should African Americans ger 3.6x the vote as White Americans because there are fewer of them?
Because it's not the United Races of America.
The current system claims to be a Union of States, but the current system also defines a goal of a more perfect Union . The Constitution was meant to be a living document, IIRC Jefferson himself believed that it should be rewritten every generation. If the right to govern comes from the mandate of the people, then does the creation of a more perfect Union not entail representation of people not states? From first principles it still doesn't make sense to me why we should privilege the rights of states over the rights of people.
If there were any such tendency, it would be evident from the way real-world presidential candidates campaign today inside battleground states. Every battleground state contains big cities and rural areas. Presidential candidates—advised by the country’s most astute political strategists—necessarily allocate their candidate’s limited time and money between different parts of battleground states. The facts are that, inside battleground states, candidates campaign everywhere—big cities, medium-sized cities, and rural areas. Far from concentrating on big cities or ignoring rural areas, they hew very closely to population in allocating campaign events.
I don't think this will survive constitutional challenge, because it is not the voters of the state who are deciding how the state's electors are decided. For example, would it be allowed for a swing state such as Florida which now has a Republican governor and state legislature, to pass a law stating that their state's electors would be allocated based on how Alabama votes? That way, even if the Democratic candidate won a majority of votes in Florida, the electors would still go to the Republican candidate if the Republican candidate wins in Alabama.
Yeah, I don't think all the people in smaller states falling over themselves to join the Compact are really thinking this through.
Is this US constitutional law or Nevada constitutional law that I'm not familiar with? There's no law I'm familiar with against faithless electors and Ray v. Blair made it clear that states are allowed to exclude electors if they won't pledge their support a certain way. Finally, article 2 clause 2 of the US constitution gives fairly broad leeway on how states assign their electors.
I could be mistaken though. Outside observers from other countries often are.
Electors don’t actually have to vote the way state law tells them to—that would require a constitutional amendment that restructures the whole process. When they vote counter to state law, they are called “faithless electors”.
A state system which ignores the will of its constituents is going to be much more susceptible to faithless electors, who may face tremendous incentives and pressure to trade votes.
I would expect the first such election to lead to the dissolution of the republic.
Faithless electors are electors who vote contrary to the opinion of their state. In some states this is legal, in other states it isn't, the constitution has nothing to do with it.
The states are free to outlaw faithless electors and many of them already do.
Some states have laws about how faithless electors "must" vote. The only related case to reach SCOTUS was regarding "pledge" laws, which require electors to pledge they will be faithful. The court has not ruled on laws requiring a certain vote or punishments for violating such laws. There is a case winding its way through the courts on the issue, and different courts have come to different conclusions (the latest of which is to rule them unconstitutional).
I agree with you that it’s not. States can indeed choose electors with any constitutional method they wish, but if they hold a statewide election, it has to be a fair election or it will run afoul of the 14th Amendment.
For the same reason, the Western states couldn’t engage in a pact to elect their governors by party slate (especially without triggering the interstate compacts clause).
When states started switching from the original plan of "electoral districts" to "winner-take-all", Hamilton and Madison decried it as contrary to the spirit of the Constitution, but recognized that they couldn't do anything about it because the text of the constitution says "in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct", and Hamilton's amendment to strike that clause and replace it with an explicit by-district electoral process failed.
The original idea going into the Constitutional Convention was to have Congress pick the president. A majority of delegates going into the Convention supported this, but discarded it after debates established it would violate the separation of powers.
The popular vote wasn't an option, however, because it would mean the southern states with their large, non-voting slave populations would have vastly reduced influence. The southern delegates would have never supported a popular vote. Thus, the electoral college.
Madison wrote about it here: http://memory.loc.gov/ll/llfr/002/0000/00610057.tif
I'm not saying you're wrong, bc clearly you've done at least some research and I've done none. But didn't most states not have anything resembling a "popular" vote at first?
In the first presidential election 43,782 cast a ballot. (Population nearly 4 million in 1790.. so about 1% got a vote.)
When many states didn't even HAVE a popular vote at the state level, is it really true that they were considering using a popular vote rather than state electors based on populations?
To say that the electoral college exists "because of slavery" is an oversimplification. It ignores the misgivings about a popular vote that are mentioned in the page you linked, and it also ignores the desire of the state governments to exert control over their representation in the Federal government -- senators were not directly elected for the same reason.
If you want to point to part of the Constitution that exists purely because of slavery, the 3/5 compromise is a better example. The decision to adopt an electoral college was certainly influenced by complications introduced by slavery, but there were a lot of other arguments in favor of an electoral college that were persuasive at the time.
My (cynical) assumption is that this will be obeyed insofar as it helps bring about the desired outcome by those in power. It will be disregarded if it would shift the outcome in the other direction.
Remember, this will work both ways - eventually we will have a democrat that doesn't win the popular vote as well in the current system.
The election is a state-level function. In my opinion, to switch to a popular-vote-wins system is to basically say "hey everyone in other states, go ahead and decide for our actual citizens".
The solution to the tragedy of the commons is coordination: if everyone does the right thing at the same time, nobody gets screwed for being first. Thus the NPVIC.
Think about this: there are a number of elections that have a very small popular vote margin. What if this gets less than, say, 20,000? That's entirely possible. In a strictly popular vote election, what's to stop each side from scrounging up votes or invalidating votes in every county in the country?
The most contentious and litigated election is probably the 2000 election. The electoral college contained those shenanigans to Florida alone (and largely to Miami-Dade and Broward countries, specifically).
There are four main problems with the US election system as I see it:
1. Voting needs to be mandatory. Americans who love "freedom" chafe against this but optional voting undermines democracy. You can see this in the organized efforts to suppress voting and disqualify voters by US political parties.
2. The US needs preferential voting. Third-party votes are otherwise largely a waste.
3. Paper ballots with optical recognition only. No punch cards, certainly no electronic voting. You need the paper trail of actual ballots. This could be filling in a ballot and validating it with a machine or using a machine to print out a ballot. These have an exceptionally low error rate.
4. Stop politicizing the election process. Like, why is the supervisor for elections an elected political position? This is the case in Florida, for example. Likewise, you have the Senate majority holding up election reform because of there is suspicion this will help the Democrats in the House who passed it. Seriously, Mitch McConnell needs to go to jail.
5. I'm fine with states being represented in the US system. The problem is that this system was designed at a time when populations were rural and cities were small. I don't think anyone predicted the disparity between ~40M people in California and ~150k people in Vermont having 2 Senators each.
You'll note that none of these are having the popular vote. IMHO that's fixing the wrong problem.
The alternative is that it's an appointed position. That won't be less political.
Look at how other countries handle election. In Australia the Australian Electoral Commission ("AEC") is responsible for running elections and I can tell you that none of the problems with politicized elections that exist in the US exist in Australia.
There are other alternatives than just elected vs appointed.
As you mentioned, in the 2000 election, the outcome came down to Florida, specifically two counties. The electoral college helps create situations like this. The officials and what happened that election in those two counties essentially set the pace of America for the next decade. If they did fudge the numbers, the electoral college did not do anything to make the vote safer.
The electoral college causes there to be very specific places that can be targeted to swing the entire election. Those places must be secured, but in the end, it makes more sense to take the secure voting practices and apply them everywhere, not just to the places the electoral causes the votes to matter.
Friends I've talked to about just seem to default to a majority system because it seems more 'fair', or its easier to understand? I dont know.
In the USA, I think we are conditioned to belive in the democratic process, so I guess it feels 'natural' to just tally up the votes, & majority wins.
We've done it countless times in our personal lives. Anytime there's a disagreement, or a group decision to be made, "Ok, lets vote on it". Majority wins. Simple.
This is a fine & easy way to decide things in small groups, but is it really the best way to decide something among 300 million?
I'm not convinced. I'm not saying the EC is perfect, I just suspect a simple majority wins vote could cause other serious problems that are not immediately obvious.
What if I told you that the framers Hamilton and Madison were appalled by winner-take-all laws passed by states in the early 1800s, and tried to change the constitution to abolish the Electoral College, it having become an abomination completely unlike their intent?
I'm not really a history guy, but I wonder why states decided to move in that direction to begin with? Guess I'll have to look into it.
What I don't get is if there are this many states trying to push this idea, why do they need a bill like this to do it. Why don't those states just take it upon themselves to change their laws individually. What's stopping them right now?
Moreover, it seems one of the main points is that the current system causes candidates to only focus their campaign in a few battleground states. I'm struggling to see how the National Popular Vote system would change this. Maybe it would break up the current pattern, if so, I have a feeling another similar pattern would emerge.
The battlegrounds would just shift. For example, it might just redistribute the candidates focus to the greater metro areas where 2/3 of the population lives, and republican/ democrat distributions are more even (according to the site). If the city centers are strongly democrats, and rural strongly republican, the I imagine the same problem emerging since those areas are a 'done deal'. Why would the candidates spend any resources there is there is no chance of swaying them?
> In [Republican CO State Senator Sonnenberg's] view, the Electoral College was created so that “people in rural areas did not get overrun by the masses.”
This can't be true since in 1790 (roughly the same time period the EC was created), "the masses" were rural; at that point only about 5% of the population was urban[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta...
The founders’ concerns about that are well-documented. A cursory search yielded a decent starting point: https://www.planetizen.com/node/18841
Unlike most people today trying to come up with justifications for an obviously broken system, the founders knew that minority rule is worse than majority rule.
In every document where the framers discuss "tyranny of the majority", it is clear that their solution is not minority rule, it is CONSENSUS. That is why the most important functions of government: constitutional changes, impeachments, censorship, rule changes, and veto overrides, require supermajorities.
You don't overcome tyranny of the majority by letting minorities win. That's just regular tyranny.
That said, it's still a stupid reason for giving fewer people more votes. There is no reasonable argument for that, no matter which way you slice it.
>I also fail to see why people in one country should be inherently given benefits that people in another country lack...
Do you understand the underlying driving concept behind the concept of a country's sovereignty? It's an understanding that the people of a certain geographical region are free to establish their own political systems of governance to get stuff done. It's kind of complicated now, because of the whole corpus of International recognition and that whole jazz, but the fundamentals remain the same.
If you don't connect how patriotism comes out as a natural extension of investment with regards to the resulting structure that allows for the flexing of the country in question's capabilities to become greater than the sum of its parts...well... I can understand it to a point, but it strikes me as folding ones arms, sitting on a fence, and declaring everywhere is terrible.
Which is okay too I suppose. Though, it likely won't ingratiate you to anyone. Especially considering it demonstrates an unwillingness to make any type of fundamental value judgement or to accept a particular corpus or ideal of government as being the yard stick you measure with.
I.e. as an American, I measure other non-U.S. countries vs. how well their system guarantees freedoms enshrined in the national Bill of Rights . Heck, I judge my own country, and the various States that compose it at different time periods via how well it stays true to it's Constitutional intent, and the ideal of a government as laid out in the Declaration of Independence. Common Law divergence from Constitutional statute all have an impact, but I believe the system is about as good as it's going to get.
Anyway. Not sure if I've done anything to clear it up. Just... Didn't want to scroll by without leaving something in response to such a solitary viewpoint.
"States aren't autonomous anymore, so let's make the legal situation match that."
Except, wait, why are you even spending your time talking about this? Because it impacts federal elections, right? Seems like some states are still autonomous, you just don't think they're legitimately so.
The constitution says that states can apportion their votes however they want. If they want to give them to the national popular winner, that's their prerogative.
It doesn't even make any sense. States were just as capable of holding elections and sending six-digit numbers to Washington as they were holding elections and sending two-digit numbers to Washington.
Looking at it from this 18th century perspective highlights why it is completely unnecessary today. Obviously the voter has many ways of getting to know the positions of the candidates themselves and hence able to elect the president directly. There is no need for it today.
Whether or not that is necessary is a different conversation from the information dissemination purpose of the EC.
Individual states can apportion their EC votes however they want. 48/50 states are all-or-nothing states (arguably the actual problem), which is decided at the state level.
*and also includes Washington D.C.
If the EC helps small states, then why has there never been a presidential visit to Wyoming?
The answer is that the electoral college doesn't empower small or large states, it empowers battleground states. This is dumb, undemocratic, and contrary to the framers intentions.
Example: Lets say CA has 10 Electoral Votes (for easy math) 60% vote Dem, 40% vote Republican. California then Gives 6 Electoral Votes to the Democrat and 4 to the Republican instead of all 10 to the Democrat.
Feels like that would more fairly represent the voters of each state no?
Getting rid of the electoral college won't necessarily make Hilary win this time around. It will be a different vote entirely. Republicans will actually contest California and some others. They'll try to run up the score in Texas. They'll shift a couple issues left.
The only sure thing from this change would be ignoring the spread out population.
There's a long history of the US electoral system favoring rural areas over urban areas. Typically, the courts had to intervene in order to remedy an issue where clearly the legislature has a conflict of interest. The most famous is Reynolds v Sims (1964), which stated that electoral districts of state legislative chambers must be roughly equal in population [1].
Hopefully, we can see similar change happen in the Electoral College.
Here is a conservative or traditionalist political point of view in favor of the Electoral College
https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/danger-attacks-electoral-coll...
Here is a liberal or progressive point of view against the Electoral College
https://harvardpolitics.com/united-states/the-case-against-t...
These are but two opinions. Politics is ultimately creating policy on opinions from a large community.
i agree in spirit though. i have long thought it would make sense to abolish the playoffs. give the pennants to the teams with the best records. then, have them play a 21-game World Series in the fall.
Historically, these two have often approximately cancelled eachother out as they favored opposite parties. But there's no guarantee of that - when Reagan won with 58.8% of the popular vote, he took 97.5% of the electoral vote.
Similarly, sometimes the small state bias is a substantially stronger effect: when Trump won with 56% of the electoral vote, he had only 46% of the popular vote, largely due to Clinton's higher "wasted" margin of victory in larger winner-take-all states.
Unlike Republicans, Democrats have these things called "principles". They are ideas that you believe in whether they benefit you or not.
The Republicans want Democrats in Texas, Michigan, and North Carolina to have their votes ignored or be unable to vote, because all they believe in is winning at any cost.
#1 The founding fathers responsible for the american revolution risked everything by creating the constitution and the electoral college. They literally went against the most powerful empire in the world. They determined that the electoral college was the best system to defend the freedom of the naescent Republic.
Then on the other side, you have a bunch of armchair bureaucrats and talking heads trying to change the system they inherited thanks to the blood of others. They want the benefits from the change ("more votes") but should the system implode, they will surely socialize losses among USA (they wont even join the army , let alone fight for what they believe in ).
Then you have switzerland. The longest continuous government in the world operates as an extreme version of Republic, giving ample powers to small groups, where they can undo anything enacted by the majority. Nothing gets done as people bicker about small things. Majority does not get its sat. Yet the country is the most stable in the world.
Maybe its time to consider what is the price for changing something that was forged with the blood of tears of more brave men, and has proven to stand the test of time.
For all I care, CA could pick their votes out of a lotto machine and it wouldn’t affect the power of my vote (as a non-CA resident). The fact that my vote is meaningless (deep blue state) is a collateral issue, perhaps.
Election fraudsters and hackers hoping to control the outcome of an election have to make big splashes in small ponds, so to speak. It seems intuitive then, that their shenanigans are more likely to be noticed - and are at least somewhat contained if they aren't.
If we're going down the "1 person, 1 vote" road, that isolation vanishes. No more big splashes needed - only very small droplets in a vast, vast ocean.
- https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/
Explanation - https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/written-explanation
Myths - https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/answering-myths
As for the compact being a partisan issue, losing the presidency despite winning the popular vote can happen in either direction:
A shift of 59,393 votes in Ohio in 2004 would have elected John Kerry despite President Bush’s nationwide lead of over 3,000,000 votes.
Edit: C-SPAN interview with NPV co-founder John Koza from March 2019:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?458502-6/washington-journal-jo...
The electoral college was supposed to be a sort of bulwark between the public and the highest office in the nation.
State governments choose their electors. Those electors are supposed to be tasked with choosing the best among the candidates for president and vice-president.
But instead, state governments threw that decision to the public. Effectively making the electoral college a proxy popularity vote for a state. And that's a big fucking ask of any person. Choose the person who is capable of running the country and making all these decisions, whose policies will guide your nation to prosperity, etc.
Hell man, I'm just trying to get my budget straight. Do I look like I have time in between everything else I do to also seriously investigate every single candidate? And I'm not a complete moron either. And I know I cannot actually make a completely informed decision here. But I know complete morons. And they get a vote just like me.
But, it's a good social engineering mechanism to discuss these issues so the next gen and others who don't understand the US thanks to pop culture can learn why the EC is important.
Repeal the 17th Amendment while you're at it and then increase the house reps to 5000 and triple the senators.
Then we'll see how effective or profitable lobbying, campaign finance or gerrymandering is.
I am not saying whether this is good or bad.
But, I think the two party system would crumble very quickly if the Electoral College were removed, and something else would come into place instead.
Disclaimer: I do not vote despite being an American citizen. I am also an anarchist.
For example I think you would still have a broad selection of candidates who differ greatly on economic ideas. But, I think that social ideas that currently are still being debated (abortion, church and state, drugs) would be resolved. I am willing to estimate that maybe 70% of Americans agree on these social issues, compared to economic issues being more 50/50.
That said... I think there's a solution for this. Hard term limits for everyone, in all the branches.
It already exists for the Executive branch. I think it should be instituted for both Legislative and Judicial as well.
Well, it had a reason: like the per-state represt in the Senate which was locked in against amendment, like the 3/5 compromise, like the prohibition locked against amendment protecting the slave trade for a set time period, and probably like a handful of other things I'm probably not remembering off the top of my head, it was a mechanism of politically securing slavery and reassuring the slave states that the more populace free states, where ethical objections to slavery were already common, would not be able to band together and demand that all people be treated as people rather than some being treated as property.
(Before anyone starts quoting the Federalist Papers, I'll point out that those weren't working documents that the Constitutional Convention made decisions based on, but campaign literature to sell ratification particularly in New York. So they weren't going to say “A lot of this document is about mollifying the slave states to get them to stay by giving them as much assurance as possible that it will never be structurally possible to abolish slavery.” But, not saying it when selling the document in New York doesn't stop it from being true.)
For instance the 3/5 compromise was because the slave states wanted 5/5 and the free states wanted 0/5.
Virginia had the most Representatives in the first US congress because they had the largest population. It was small states like New Hampshire and Rhode Island that benefited from the 2 senators per state rule.
No states wanted population-based representation, or all did, depending on how you look at it: that is, no one wanted to count non-assimilated Native American population, all of them wanted to count the remaining free population, and there was a dispute about how to count the people that the slave states weren't going to treat as people and, particularly, certainly weren't going to let vote.
The idea that we must worship every aspect of the founders' thoughts on the makeup of a country, when the world has changed so drastically since their lifetimes, makes no rational sense. Sure, a lot of their ideas (checks and balances, good!) are still relevant. Others (slavery, no women's suffrage, bad), not so much.
Yeah, slavery. How would you have a popular vote if you're allowing slaves to count as 3/5ths of a person for vote share? They obviously wouldn't have allowed them to vote. Fortunately, we no longer have slavery as an official institution, so it may be time to revise why we're doing it.
> Yeah, slavery.
No, tyranny of the majority. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority
Even women couldn't vote, so it's not fair to say that slavery was the rationale. No reasonable person today would say that the 3/5 Compromise or denying universal suffrage is desirable.
Other commenters have also mentioned a necessity to ratify the Constitution. That also applies here as well.
There was the very real possibility that the individual states would go their own way if they didn’t like the proposed Constitution. Larger states could have easily decided that they didn’t need to be part of a larger country. Smaller states could have easily decided that they would be ruled by the larger states and that they’d be better off independent.
The electoral college was needed to convince everyone to stick together. Same with the different structures of the House and the Senate, the 3/5ths compromise, and more.
Things are completely different now. There’s no realistic possibility that any state will exit the union. The major purpose of so many elements of our federal system is completely gone.
I agree that last election was the perfect scenario for the EC to do its job. But who should it have elected instead? And, could it have actually done so without touching off a civil war? (Not a rhetorical one, not a metaphorical one - a real live shooting live rounds, dead bodies piling up, state against state and brother against brother civil war.)
Throw them all out? If so, replace them with what? Worse: How do you get everyone to agree on what to replace them with?
As it turns out, there's a mechanism for getting everyone to agree, and to prevent changes that everyone does not agree with (for certain values of "everyone"): Amend the Constitution.
At any rate, people may well feel bypassed and marginalized, but hopefully the ones outside of swing states will come around once they realize that their vote actually matters for once. And if they don’t, well, lots more people feel bypassed and marginalized now.
If it’s a bad idea, what do you propose to do about it? The Constitution allows states to cast their votes as they see fit.
That too. This "compact" approach bugs me partly because it's a hack to get around the appropriate way of doing this, which they know they can't get enough support to do.
> The Constitution allows states to cast their votes as they see fit.
That may be correct. But the Wikipedia article on this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...) indicates that the constitutionality is at least in question. I'd really like to see the Supreme Court decide on the constitutionality of this approach before the first election where it would be in force.
From the Wikipedia article, the only question I see is whether the agreement requires Congress to approve it or not. There seems to be no question that the agreement is allowed and would work.
[Edit: Why isn't amending the Constitution a hack? Because it's the recognized mechanism for changing the rules.
What makes the compact a hack? I guess it feels like a hack because the expectation is that, if you're going to change the way the president gets elected, you have to change the Constitution - and therefore having to withstand the full level of scrutiny that such a change would involve. Changing it within the parameters allowed - just barely - by the Constitution is not technically a hack, legally. But it's still feels like a hack to make the change without as much scrutiny, and without the need for the massive majority. At least, so it seems to me.]
In any case, my point is just that a constitutional amendment isn’t required and this is totally above-board. The odds of an amendment being ratified are far lower.
Consider this: the purpose behind the bicameral legislature is that in order for the federal government to act, it requires the consent of both the majority of the population and the majority of the states subject to it. If the population and the states can't agree, then we shouldn't do it at the federal level. It's foundational to the structure, and it's a process of slowing down the system against them whims of both the elite and the masses.
If you disagree with this, that's perfectly fine. I don't know a conservative that isn't in favor of CA and NY seceding. After all, most of the wealthy people live there anyway. Conduct the Marxist cleansing behind the border wall, but don't bring the rest of us into the shit. Let CA burn itself to the ground, we don't have a problem with that. Don't bring the rest of us down with you. We shouldn't have to support the insanity.
The idea that this is a virtue that outweighs the effective disenfranchisement of hundreds of millions of people rests on the presupposition that it is virtuous that certain states should have an outsized voice. There are two obvious problems with this.
The first is that its central claimed virtue is false in practice. It does not actually reliably give smaller states more power, as many proponents claim. Voters' voices in certain areas of Florida matter much, much more than the voice of anyone in Wyoming.
The second is that states themselves were created either 1) somewhat arbitrarily, by the happenstance of where various colonial landing parties decided to set up shop, or 2) through explicitly political processes where the states' admissions were pushed through Congress, in no small part, to help win Presidential elections.
The system was arbitrary from the outset. It has been gamed ever since.
Thank God we need the consent of a supermajority of Congress and 3/4ths of the states to change the electoral college. It's not going to happen, just give it up.
The only thing the electoral college does is give the voting power of local minorities to local majorities.
3 million people in the state vote for A
4 million people in the state vote for B
B gets 7 million people's worth of electoral votes, A gets nothing. Repeat 47 times.
There is no explanation for this that makes sense. It wasn't designed this way, it happened by accident. The framers tried to stop it in the 1790s and 1800s, but there was no political will: everybody wanted to exploit the antidemocratic loophole in the constitution instead of fixing it.
The nature of our republic and bicameral system is a recognition that both the elites (in the form of states, in this case) and the population have important things to contribute. If your fundamental theory of politics is that the elite don't have anything extraordinary to contribute, then how about you start by cleaning your own house and getting rid of superdelegates before you go on trying to change the entire country to match your pet political power distribution
Needs of specific groups of people can be taken into account as transparent supplementary conditions. Sparsely populated areas constitute one potential parameter. Maybe the opinions of poor and ill people can also be taken into account for while respecting their privacy.
What is your point?
That's a nice number of comments.
It is easy to imagine that a purely democratic system would be better, but I find it easy to imagine that it would be substantially worse.
The founding fathers rightly believed that most people were ignorant and relatively stupid so the people vote for the house, but senators and electors were appointed.
The agreement to get small states to join was that they would have an equal number of senators. If you want a different system change the constitution. Im skeptical that a democratic system would be better.
They setup the system to be a collection of states with a weak federal govt with limited power. The federal govt over time has taken more and more power from the states.
When california joined the union it had 33X less population than the most populous state (new york). Californians were happy to have the overrepresentation when it benefitted them.
Overall a strongly federal system is worse than a system where 50 states each try something different. In a 50 state system we get many chances to find the best policies. For example when marijuana is illegal at the federal level the antis predicted wholesale mayhem. There was no way to test to see what would happen until some states defied federal law. Once one state showed that it was fine others could come on board.
The same goes for open carry. Antis claimed there would massive increases in crime and shootings. It turns out not to be the case.
The election comes down to some key battleground states, which is where the candidates spend the vast majority of their time campaigning.
The constitution shouldn’t be put on a pedestal. The men who wrote that document were flawed just like any other human. Many of them owner slaves. I’m not saying we should disregard our laws but I am saying we should keep an open mind to amending the constitution as needed.
Same argument as we can't try any gun restrictions because none of them will stop all shootings.
Make the Presidency weaker, and then let's have this discussion about how we elect them.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/faithless-elector-a-...
Either land area matters or people matter.
Choose.
Not that the current system is completely equitable.
Run to win the election under the rules that are in force.
If political power was surrendered back down to where it naturally belongs, i.e. to the state, or even better to the city level, and the fed was stripped and left with little to no political power, this whole electoral college charade would become entirely moot.
CA has 55 electoral votes, all of which went to Hillary. If CA removed winner-take-all, Trump would have received 17 electoral votes, Hillary would only receive 34, Gary Johnson would receive 2, and Jill Stein 1.
TX has 36 electoral votes, all of which went to Trump. If TX removed winner-take-all, Trump would only have received 19, Hillary would receive 16, and Gary Johnson 1.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia...
This is the main reason a popular vote winner can still lose.
You could be the 51% winner in most states but lose by nearly 100% in the more populous states and still win. Which is why this keeps happening to Democrats. They win by landslides in NY and CA but then eek out a loss in some of the swing States.
2. George Mason vs. Elisabeth Warren. James Madison vs. Jay Inslee. These match-ups aren't even close.
3. I don't think the results will match the intentions.
For point 1 this seems like parts of Obamacare. Whether you support it or not, enforcing/creating parts of it via executive order means it can be unenforced/dismantled via executive order. This isn't a direct comparison, my point, if you base something on legally weak and questionable methods you will end up with weak and questionable outcomes.
Another way I look at point 2, can Justin Beiber rewrite Mozart and improve upon it? There are very few political intellectuals I would put on par with the founding fathers, and sadly most of those are not politicians. The founders' system has worked very well for centuries, the USofA has faults sure, but from ragtag rebel colonies to world super-power, this part is working fine. We have many problems, isolate the variables, I don't think the EC is the cause.
Point 3, this is mostly a party issue, Democrats support it, Republicans do not. Of the 16 states to pass it through legislature 15 had Democrat governors, the single Republican governor vetoed. I think it is safe to say the elections of Bush and Trump, without winning the popular vote, are the big driving factors for the NPV. I don't think NPV will have the intended effect. I think people are wrongly taking new rules and applying old stats but if you change the rules of the game you can't expect players (candidates and voters) to play with old strategies. A lot more Republicans will show up to vote in solidly blue states where currently voting for an R is a waste of time.
States. Are. Not. People.
It's definitely not a given, but predicting what would happen is not a clear exercise. You can't change the rules without changing peoples behavior.
I’m not really concerned about that. What concerns me is this insistence that a popular vote for President in a country of 350M people is a good idea. Does anyone actually believe this? The executive branch these days has essentially become a proxy for what laws one wants passed, and you end up voting accordingly. This might be fine, if the results were restricted to being local - and by the way, the original design of this country accented on exactly that point. But we don’t live in that country anymore, I guess. Now we want more democracy, all the time.
So I find it really hard to believe that introducing more “democracy” in a nation as divided and diverse as this one is a good idea. This, I thought, was supposed to be one of the reasons that people wanted to move here ... the whole Federalism thing. Taxes can be different between states. So can Social policy. The extension of this is of course the Electoral College.
Spare me the criticism of “slippery slope” but getting rid of the Electoral College seems like we’d be on the road to a government “of the majority, by the majority, and for the majority”. That is categorically absurd, at least in my view.
The cynic in me says that the only reason we’re even talking about this is because Trump won in 2016 via the EC. Sure. He did. And Clinton won the “popular vote” because of LA, SF, and NYC.
For those in SF (or whatever proxy): do you want folks in Sioux Falls or Fargo making your economic and social policy? No? I didn’t think so. So why is it okay to institute the reverse?
The point I’m trying to make here is this country, as diverse as it is, is best run as a distributed network. And centralizing the election of the Executive into a singular popular vote will help destroy what’s left of that network.
In fact I think this would make it _easier_ for a populist to win, not harder, because all they'd have to worry about is crafting a campaign message that resonates with the majority and portrays their opponent as Satan in the flesh.
All this is asking is 1 person 1 vote.
If you are saying that each person in Wyoming would have 1 vote towards the presidency and each person in California would have 1 vote towards the presidency, then I agree.
No one complains that Lost Springs (population 4) has a "very, very limited say in who becomes the head of the executive branch" of Wyoming. It's same really. It's just lines on a map, nothing to do with state or national identity.
It means that California would have more influence at the federal level than it does now. And since federal laws apply to all states it means that indirectly California would have more influence on Wyoming.
Technically, they can't. There is no provision for secession in the US Constitution.
Practically, well, the one notable attempt didn't work out, so not that, either.
> That's also why Senate representation is _NOT_ proportional to population. I suspect that'd be the next thing to be dismantled if whoever is pushing this actually succeeds.
Well, you can't do that through coordinated state action.
Or even a Constitutional amendment. Maybe two amendments, because the provision prohibiting amendments which alter the equal representation in the Senate isn't itself explicitly protected the same way. Of course, small states can easily block a Constitutional amendment, so that's not going to happen unless they are on board.
There's no provision forbidding secession either, so they technically very much can. All that's not forbidden is allowed.
The Article IV Sec. 4 guarantee cannot be interpret as even coherent if a state can secede; once a state is admitted to the union, he federal government is irrevocably obligated to preserve it as a subject and republican government; if a state government could escape this oversight by secession, the guarantee would be empty.
Further, there is ample historical evidence that the idea of reserving the right to secede when ratifying was raised by New York, and rejected because it was understood that it would be viewed by the Congress as an inconsistent condition attached to ratification and thereby nullify the ratificstion.
The Supreme Court has also ruled on the issue, in Texas v. White. So your concept of a right to secession is inconsistent with the text, historical evidence of intent and case law of the Constitution.
Says literally nothing about secession.
Yes, but Article I of the UN Charter expressly provides for the right of Self-Determination.
>Practically, well, the one notable attempt didn't work out, so not that, either.
Yes, that resulted in more American deaths than all other US wars combined. However, notably that was also before the UN. Moreover, not only does the UN provide for a right of Self-Determination it also restricts the right for any nation to use force (i.e. armed conflict, Article 2(4)). If a group of people with a well defined territory peacefully secedes, and armed conflict and use of force is implemented to prevent the secession that would violate the UN Charter, use of force and laws of armed conflict.
Obviously one of the best examples case studies of applying international laws and norms to the real world is Palestine, which is recognized by the UN and 193 member nations as an independent State, but Israel does not. Obviously its not as easy as Palestine simply secedes through a democratic vote, as there are all kinds of claims from both sides regarding land disputes, use of force and laws of armed conflict. Still international recognition of Palestine as an independent State is a giant mile stone in the process.
The net effect of the electoral college is that the president is effectively picked by the voters of a handful of swing states. Wyoming is not one of these swing states.
Removing the electoral college would lead to the president being picked by the voters of all states, which seems a lot better.
The president is one of three branches of government. Congress/Senate balances the power across states.
It's also worth considering the distortions that illegal aliens put on electoral college numbers.
2) 15 States can do what they want, but unless they meet the provisions in Article 5, the college is here to stay.
Thank goodness the Framers had the foresight to include the process for amending the Constitution in the document.
The framers intended for them to be locally elected or proportional, like Maine and Nebraska today.
Nothing wrong with that constitutionally, but I suspect the politicians will feel differently after the voters express their opinion of the matter.
It will be easy enough to note which states' vote counts favor candidate B, despite the national popular vote favoring candidate A.
As parent says, that's the design, but I'm sure there will be upset people in those states.
There are people upset with the plurality winner getting all the states votes, too.
That's why I'm not too worried about it. If it would really change the result, it's easy for a State to hit the pause button.
Is it that easy? It's a compact, not trivial to pull out of.
- Enough states pass this for it to be in force in 2020.
- Trump wins the popular vote in 2020. However, he would not have won an EC vote because of California and New York.
- California decides to renege on the compact, and votes for Biden instead.
- A bunch of red states sue California. Long before the court cases go anywhere, Biden takes the oath of office.
And what then?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_Colleg...
The states that would arguably be stupid to go for this are actually the purple ones rather than the large or small ones, because they are the ones that are currently the focus of presidential campaigning but they would no longer be if there was a mechanism for making the EC reflect popular vote. That's perhaps why Colorado may remove itself (see https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-movement-to-skip-th...)
Without the electoral college, "states" collectively don't get any say at all. Only citizens of those states.
https://time.com/4558510/electoral-college-history-slavery/
We see that that backfired. :)
If the electoral college is abolished, it could actually end up getting another few republicans elected, since it would incentivize republican turnout in solidly democratic states like California.
Having some states band together to subvert the intention of the EC fundamentally breaks the compact of the Constitution. What is the authority of a President chosen through subversion of the Constitution?
Campaigning for President? Just go to New York, LA, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, and maybe a few other cities.
Maybe city folks can start making their own food while they're at it.
Also California grows about 100x <2> the food of Wyoming so yeah we can eat our own food, thank you.
The most important reason the electoral college was invented was so that states with large slave populations could count 60% of them for representation without actually giving them the vote. You don't hear about it that much anymore for obvious reasons.
<1> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_tax_revenue_by_state
<2> https://www.farmprogress.com/management/what-us-states-produ...
I don't buy the slave argument -- I think the electoral college was created for the same reason we have two senators per state. Of course those states with large slave populations would have been colored blue, but that is another history folks ignore.
>> I don't buy that slave arguement.. And you are a historian? The slave states that were large like Virginia wanted the electoral college, contradicting your argument.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/electoral-college-slav... https://time.com/4558510/electoral-college-history-slavery https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/opinion/electoral-college...
You provide no evidence and when I site sources you say they are biased. If you believe the sources are biased please note that they site books, experts etc. If you just reject every piece of evidence you will always be right.
Present day politics aside, allowing for pure demographic voting in this day and age is even more dangerous than it was in the early days of the republic.
States and regions have different needs that need to be considered in the governance of the nation. You can already see warning signs, the Democratic Party platform has been so brain dead, they even managed to marginalize union voters. Kansas and Wisconsin were progressive strongholds.
Changing the way we count isn’t a fix for that issue — fixing how candidates and parties approach the people is. A more productive approach would be to reduce the carnival nature of the election process... candidates shouldn’t be picked based on their ability to shuck and jive in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Direct popular vote is basically a beacon for reactionary politics. It’s easy to churn out old people to vote.
Why should fictional state borders take precedence over actual humans when allocating voting blocs? If different states have difference needs, then those states residents will vote for leaders who serve them.
Your problem seems to be that that giving supreme power to an arbitrary majority is flawed. And it surely is. But giving supreme power to an arbitrary minority is surely as bad or worse.
Old people live in every state.
If you have a problem with old people exercising their sacred voting right too much, surely the solution is to enable young people to vote, not give rural state citizens extra vote weight?
My problem is that this is a solution looking for a problem. In fact, it’s a solution that will make the problem that some people want to solve far worse.
An amendment is proposed on the floor of the House to change the formula in a bill for how funding is allocated.
The amendment presents a pro-urban allocation which provides a greater share of funding for larger cities compared to a baseline per-capita allocation.
Urban center representatives stand up and argue how their cities need a higher reimbursement rate because the issue at hand is costlier to fix or more prevalent in their environment.
Rural representatives stand up and argue they need the baseline funding to run an effective program.
A vote is taken, and 54% of votes approve the amendment, urban center reps effectively pooling their votes to enact the funding paradigm that most benefited their constituents.
——
The moral of the story is that it’s a lot more complicated than 1 person 1 vote.
Often times policies may benefit a rural area over and urban environment or vice versa. One type of community benefiting and the expense of another. Cities already carry a massive voting advantage, because, that’s where most people live!
When bills pass on a majority vote, urban already wins over rural every time. The rural areas maybe can form blocks to help push otherwise divided city reps one way or another, but policy debate is already dominated by urban voters, despite the claim of urban votes “counting less”. The simple math belies the reality that urban center reps vote for pro-urban national policies and the rural states with 1 rep sit on the sidelines.
The last place these votes matter, even in the slightest, is in the EC in a closely contested election, and in the Senate. Frankly I’m not convinced more populism is any benefit, or that cities are particularly hurting from a lack of representation.
There are legitimate issues with agricultural funding, infrastructure and whatnot that fall along those lines but mostly when people say they don't want "small state X run by California" or "New York" what they mean is they don't want Federal laws passed which force those small states to adopt more progressive or leftist policies than their local culture would be comfortable with.
Here’s another way to think of it. How many congressional votes does Los Angeles get before it’s people are adequately represented? Right now I believe it’s 18.
Even at that level their vote per capita is technically 3:1 less powerful than a person in WY. But whose interests are being served better in Congress?
Is the population of LA really disenfranchised in Congress due to WY getting a representative, or because LA didn’t get 30?
There’s a power effect which is very much non-linear due to the individual votes in Congress being decided on a win/loss by majority or super-majority and this effect already greatly benefits these so-called “disenfranchised” voters.