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Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

It's weird to divide the 300 million people that live in urban conditions and the 60 million people that live in rural conditions into 2 sides (that's using the statistical definition of urban that counts many small towns as urbanized areas, not the definition of urban that means super-dense megalopolis).

And then Kansas actually has cities in it. Why does a resident of Kansas City (Kansas) get more national voting power than a resident of Los Angeles?

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In my mind one of the biggest negative effects of the Electoral College is that it doesn't just provide more/less national voting power, but in many cases effectively strips voters of any power over the Presidential election.

Unless you live in a swing state, you generally know how the Presidential election will turn out in your state. So if you're in the minority in a non-swing state, you know going in that your vote will have no effect on the outcome, it's effectively just going to get discarded. If you're in the majority, your individual vote still doesn't have a lot of power, anything over the 51% is irreverent and effectively discarded.

With a popular vote, every single vote counts. No matter how big the majority or how small the minority in a state, every vote still has power. Nobody's vote is invalidated by where they happen to live.

This is why I've suggested a proportionate representation within the states (several states do this already). I do think the EC needs a lot of restructuring but I feel like most of the responses I'm getting are still reducing it to the dichotomy and applying positions to me that I don't hold. All I've stated is that the EC is broken so keeping it as is isn't a great solution and I don't think going to purely a popular vote is a good solution either. But there's a lot in between there and limiting ourselves to only those two solutions is a bit insane.

I did not intend to imply anything in regard to your positions, my intention was only to argue my interpretation of, and issues with, the current system and discuss why I think alternatives are better. Apologies if any of my posts came off as a personal attack.

I am in full agreement that proportionate representation (e.g. Maine and Nebraska) is a step in the right direction, but my personal feeling is that the presidential election should be the one place that every citizen's voice and vote should be equal. I can't imagine another situation where that should/could be the case and I think it's important to have that one place where every voice in the country can be equally involved and every vote equally weighted.

The short version of why I don't think any vote-per-district approach makes sense for the presidential election is that it will always reduce the election down to the "swing" districts that actually decide the outcome and get the most attention from the candidates. It can come down to very few votes, and a candidate pandering to the more extreme fractions can flip those sometimes-tiny margins.

I'm left-of-center in a very Blue state, but it bothers me that more conservative voices in my state have no impact on federal elections. They can't swing the state for the presidential election or congressional representatives, so they are provided little voice on the national stage. I think giving more influence to right-leaning voices from left-leaning areas, and visa-versa, could help bring the whole nation much more into balance and away from extremism.

You can try to minimize the issues I'm describing, but I think they're inherent to any vote-per-district approach such as the Electoral College. So I am seeing the two options as vote-per-district, and popular vote. Are there other solutions you're considering that I'm not seeing here?

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