Damn, I wish I lived in one of the states that gets to choose our president.
The small states would never allow such a change to the constitution. (A presidential voter in Wyoming has almost 4 times the vote of a Californian.) But the big states may have found a work around: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstat...
In short, the states that agree to the compact agree to proportion all of their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote. (For example, if Romney wins the national popular vote, CA would give Romney all of CA's electoral votes.) The compact will only kick in once the states that have ratified it have 270 electoral votes (enough to win). It's already about halfway there at 132.
How crazy would it be to see campaigning in California and New York?
You'd still be in a winner-take-all situation with your vote, but on a national level rather than a state level.
I don't think this change would have the effect people imagine. At all.
Therefore your vote is not lost, it simply becomes equal.
This is far better than your vote actually being lost in the mass of California votes, since you, living in California, would still have some impact on the national outcome. And candidates, looking for popular votes instead of electoral votes, would have much higher incentive to campaign to all people, not just those in states where votes carry "more weight."
In all ways, this is more equal and more fair. Every election is a winner-take-all situation—it might as well be a winner-take-all situation where your vote actually has an impact independent of your state.
NY, CA and several other liberal states tend to have people who call themselves "conservatives" (folks like me). We tend to be libertarian leaning economic conservatives who don't identify with religious culture war stuff (war on christmas, the gays are gonna get you).
We get ignored since our vote doesn't matter. This leads to national candidates who are basically Democrats with a little bit of Jesus thrown in (e.g. Bush, Romney), albeit answering to different special interest groups.
I think your beef is more with the national security conservatives than the religious ones, religion is orthogonal to economic conservatism and often employed in its favor (megachurches hating on 'socialism', etc)
I'm referring to spending lots of money on subsidized medicine (Busy, Romney), assorted redistribution schemes (Bush, Romney), increasing the regulatory state (Bush), more executive power (Bush), opposing freedom of political speech (Romney), opposing free speech on the internet (Bush, Romney) and pushing/subsidizing real estate speculation (Bush, Romney).
Of course, military and entitlements need to be addressed as well but reducing healthcare costs is obviously a priority of his as is reducing military spending.
Maybe you should just vote democrat.
I guess more red states will get behind this if Obama wins the election, but loses the popular vote.
It's time to switch to popular vote and end this gaming of the system.
The point of the campaigning process is chiefly to elect new representation, but secondarily (and closely so) to debate and test competing theories on the primary problems of the time.
In the electoral college model, the concerns of the swing states get the most attention, for reasons which are far too numerous and obvious to go in to. This is unfair to people that don't live in the swing states.
In the popular model, it's a bit subtle. At first, you think "well everyone's vote counts equally so everyone's concerns get counted according to the proportion of the constituents with those concerns." But this is not correct when you get down to the details.
If you're a candidate, you have to spend your resources in the most efficient way possible. Politicians do this (spend resources) by paying for messaging, spending their time campaigning in person and with volunteers/staffers, and by adopting policy positions (this is a resource in the political landscape).
In the electoral college model, the best return on your time, money, and issue consideration is found in the swing states, because everywhere else you have basically zero probability of success, which cannot be balanced out by any weight that electoral votes afford.
In the popular model, the best return is to target the largest population possible. People get divvied up into geographical regions no matter what---be it by local news network, regional speaking venue, or major political issue---and it's to these regions that our votes then become divided. In the popular model, the only places worth considering are those places with the largest populations, that still stand a chance of being easy to target with a single message, TV ad, or speaking appearance. If you're in a rural town, a candidate coming to speak to you only gets to speak to you, not to the nearest million voters. But in a city, the candidate that comes to you does get an audience of a million or more. So in the popular model, candidates will only bother to work for the concerns of those who live in population centers.
You get skewed either way. Personally, I think skewing toward regions with lots of people, even if they may not be the overall majority, is the best thing to do, but that's just my opinion, I don't have an optimal solution.
The problem is that "optimal" means that everyone's concerns get addressed in an equal manner, not necessarily that everyone gets an equivalent vote. The game theory involved is subtle and the emotions on all sides even more so.
"Skewing" a democratic political system towards regions with more people in them would be vastly, vastly preferable to our current system. A number of big warts in US policy can be explained, at least in part, by the biases and misincentives introduced by our election system.
Probably the most obvious is the federal government's support of corn ethanol: supposedly it's done in the name of energy independence, but in reality it's done because almost all US Senators believe that they're going to run for President one day, and none of them have to try to win an Iowa caucus with a vote against corn ethanol on their record.
Political views are not along a one-dimensional spectrum. As soon as you add another dimension, FPTP elections favor extremism according to the visualizations I linked to elsewhere in the thread (http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/).
In fact the more urban someone is, the more likely they are to vote Democrat. The more rural, the more likely they are to vote Republican. If you're targeting swing votes, you're interested primarily in suburbs and smaller cities.
My theory is that the value of government and getting along with very different people is forced on those who live in cities. And the feeling that government doesn't do anything for you is reinforced if you live in the country. Therefore people who live in urban areas are more likely to be Democrat, and people who live in the country are more likely to be Republican. (People do move and keep their political beliefs, but that trend is pretty much universal.)
(Ironically government spends more per capita on people who live in the country than on people who live in the city. But the spending is less visible to them.)
Of course that's just my theory. But the trend exists.
A recent podcast on the subject: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/10/rodden_on_the_g.htm...
Suddenly, U.S. transportation & communications infrastructure problems make a lot more sense. I knew the U.S. was a big place, but I vastly underestimated how spread out our population was.
The Electoral College also helps to avoid a national recount should the popular vote be very close.
Even so, you really want to consider the 'pain' associated with the unlikely event not the probability of the event itself. The pain associated with the recount within a single state is much less than the pain associated with a recount for the entire country, even if the national recount scenario is less likely (even much less likely).