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Comment by FactKnower69 | Hacker News Reader

Damn imagine if everyone's vote was equally weighted, what a disaster for democracy that would be. Mob rule!!

I sense some sarcasm. But you ought to know that the founders, along with Aristotle and other Greeks (basically, the inventors of democracy), were afraid of mobs and sought to temper the whims of the people.

States are given representation proportional to their populations, and also equal representation (in the Senate). The EC and House seats aren't just based on voter turnout, voter population, or even the actual number of citizens in the state (which is rather problematic). So this whole push for direct democracy in the presidential election is stupid. Yes, swing states are a thing, but only because the other states vote consistently in a particular way.

Another problem with using the popular vote to decide the presidential election is that it inventivizes fraud. If someone managed to corrupt a few populous states, they could generate extremely high numbers of fake votes to drown out every other state.

The current system incentivizes fraud in swing states, so the fraud is simply shifted elsewhere.

I think it's different. In any case, you can imagine a scenario where different states have wildly different voter turnout. That could even happen due to a natural disaster such as the hurricanes we've seen in the past few weeks. How messed up would it be for a state ravaged by a hurricane, tsunami, earthquake, or whatever to have its influence diminished because people were unable to vote? It is already bad enough that the votes could be skewed based on specific counties. But imagine the whole state losing its actual representation because of power outages and stuff. It might even encourage some states to sabotage other states, to reduce turnout.

> But imagine the whole state losing its actual representation because of power outages and stuff.

What you are describing would be a problem regardless of the presence of the electoral college.

It is more of a problem without the electoral college, because as I said the popular vote is sensitive to voter turnout. No turnout means no representation. The electors can always step up to represent their state, and if even they can't then presumably the entire election would be delayed.

I’m not sure if the electors are legally allowed to decide in the absence of voter turnout. Besides, if you can suppress popular vote, you can also suppress the electors.

It is far more likely that electors can do what they need to do. They can be substituted if some candidates become unavailable. However, there is no replacement for voters. Barring an emergency that completely stops a state from having elections, the decision will be made. I've never heard of a state election being delayed due to natural disasters or anything. There is no minimum required voter turnout for a conclusion to be reached, in any case.

> the founders, along with Aristotle and other Greeks

Slavers who designed and oversaw slaver states.

That does not discredit what they said or thought on this issue. This is essentially an ad hominem.

It matters when you are pointing to the 'hominem' as political thought leaders. I think it's fair as a counter to an appeal to authority.

It would only be fair as a counter to their authority if the attack is relevant. I don't think it is relevant to drag slavery into a discussion about the nature of democracy and mob rule, or that the existence of widespread slavery on every continent at the time detracts from their insight. It is a purely tangentual argument to be had. For all your moralizing, I know for a fact that a vast majority of the whiners today would not have had the courage to fight slavery when it was happening literally everywhere. The ancient Greeks and the founders of the US have in common the fact that they laid the groundwork for the slavery-free condition we enjoy today, whether you like that or not. They were the geniuses of their time, and outstanding among all geniuses of all time.

Current system theoretically allows for the presidency to be won even though the candidate got less than 30% of the popular vote. In my opinion the existence of such an edge case makes it undefendable.

What do you mean here by "incentivizes fraud"? Lying on the campaign trail is not fraud. In any case, the same argument about fraud still applies, you just need to target swing states.

Every system has edge cases. You can't defend the possibility of millions of people having zero representation just because they did not vote either.

I think it's obvious what fraud I'm talking about: fraudulent votes. It stands to reason that a large state can generate more fraudulent votes than a small state can generate legitimately. Fraud is always an issue but it is more of an issue with popular vote because who can question extremely high voter turnout?

Can you name edge cases of popular vote system that electoral college system does not also have?

You do realize that just because the popular vote is national does not mean that all the votes would be dumped at a desert in New Mexico and then tallied? Vote tally would still happen at the level of polling places and then aggregated - exactly how it's done in the electoral college system now. The only difference would be an introduction of one more level of aggregation (from state to nationwide). You could still detect fraud at earlier stages.

I did already name an edge case of popular vote that the electoral college system doesn't have (sorry, in another thread). Actually more than one. If a state has low turnout for any reason then their contribution to the election is proportionally diminished with popular voting. That DOES NOT happen with EC, because the weight of the state is decided by its population.

>You do realize that just because the popular vote is national does not mean that all the votes would be dumped at a desert in New Mexico and then tallied? Vote tally would still happen at the level of polling places and then aggregated - exactly how it's done in the electoral college system now.

I don't trust the vote counting systems we have now. We have unverified ballots by mail, voting without ID, and unaccountable voting machines. If you look into it you'll find that it is surprisingly easy to harvest votes from invalids at nursing homes, homeless people, and dead people. There is no way for me to to make sure my own vote is counted and no illegitimate ones are counted. Compare our elections that are increasingly uncertain for weeks or months to other countries like Argentina where everyone is required to vote and the result is known the next day.

Yeah, people that don't care enough to vote should not be weighted in, that's the whole point. Weighing them in does not mean they actually get represented. The only problem is people that want to vote but can't are going to be disenfranchised, but that is true in both systems and should be addressed separately. This is what is actually exploitable with EC - suppress the vote of a specific population within a state and you're going to kill 2 birds with 1 stone as they not only didn't vote against you, but they also will be weighted in towards you on the national scale.

Your entire point about fraud does not get worse with popular vote system so it's irrelevant here.

Does Argentina get automatic recounts? How many people are covered by a single polling station in Argentina? How many people count the votes within a single polling station? Those are all the things that'll affect how quickly the results are known, not how the votes get aggregated later. And EC can slow things down significantly more than popular vote (one slower state could be deciding factor for EC even though nationwide results would already be known because the uncertainty is too small to matter on national scale; Bush v. Gore).

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