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Comment by _heimdall | Hacker News Reader

I also take issue with the electoral college system, but to claim that a representative democracy is not a democracy based on the intermediary representation seems like a fairly hollow concern.

My bigger issue with regards to how democratic we are would be more related to campaign finance laws, corruption, and the immense power wielded by those in charge that can be pointed at political challengers if the politician is so inclined.

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It's not a democracy to the extent that it has systematically unequal representation. That's not a problem of “intermediary representation”, its a problem of both the system of executive election (more of a problem for the US than it would be in many other systems because the US also has an extremely powerful executive branch) and the system of apportionment of the more powerful house of bicameral legislature (having a less-democratic upper house is not uncommon, but having it still be functionally more powerful is, and having that simultaneously with it being as far from democratic as the US Senate is even less common among things that pretens to be representative democracies.)

The electoral college system wouldn't be nearly as bad of a system if you couldn't just rearrange some borders and suddenly change the results.

Unless I'm mistaken, electoral college representatives are assigned based on state borders and individual state laws - usually either winner take all or proportional. The electoral college itself can't be gerrymandered in the same way congress can.

Electoral college representatives are currently elected on a statewide winner-take-all basis except Maine and Nebraska, each of which assign two electors (corresponding to the votes due to two Senate seats each state gets) based on the statewide winner while assigning the other electors based on the winner in each Congressional district.

So, in those states only, electoral votes can be gerrymandered in exactly the same was as Congressional seats, because they are exactly the same districts. (Of course, both states are small enough that the gerrymandering opportunities are fairly limited, and would have limited impact on Presidentual elections, as Maine has only two CDs and Nebraska only 3.)

We also pick all our other leaders directly.

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