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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

It may actually happen in our lifetime.

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?

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So instead of your vote being lost in the mass of California or New York votes, it would just be lost in the much larger mass of national votes.

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.

It would not appear to, but in effect, it would make the entire election simply based on popular vote.

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.

What specific concrete difference do you see happening in that case? What does it mean to "campaign to all people"?

Candidates currently essentially have no reason to pay any attention whatsoever to non-competitive states, but if the election were a popular vote, going from, say, 20% to 40% in a state would be a significant advantage.

If you can move one percent of the population everywhere with some nation-wide issues, that's huge. Currently, that strategy is less useful, being costly and with less payoff.

One effect - economic conservatism may make a comeback.

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.

Isn't what you're describing more an effect of a two-party system? Unrelated policies tend to get pushed together just because they fit best under one party vs. the other one.

That'd be nice, but for the record, spending a lot of money on the military and cutting taxes (Bush, Romney) is not 'basically democrats with a little bit of jesus thrown in'.

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)

spending a lot of money on the military and cutting taxes (Bush, Romney) is not 'basically democrats with a little bit of jesus thrown in'

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).

Well, FWIW, Obama's cut federal domestic discretionary spending relative to the economy, inflation and other measures and has promised to continue to do so in his next term.

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 see your point, but have a strong suspicion that the election would just be fought out on TV to an even greater extent, with more mudslinging and rumor-mongering. Traditional city/country campaign rallies would become a fixture, but mainly as audience competitions. But the internet and broadcast media would become more critical than ever, and accuracy or integrity haven't exactly been at a premium in large-scale election campaigns.

I'll take mudslinging and rumor-mongering over harmful subsidies to e.g., corn.

Things like subsidies to special interest groups would become even more common since the payoff in terms of votes would be higher. Increase the corn subsidy and you don't just buy Iowa but corn farmers everywhere.

That would be around 1 million potential voters out of 235 million total. My suspicion is that attention would shift towards numerically larger special interest groups.

Reforming the electoral college isn't going to make the legislature disappear.

I'm surprised that most of the states supporting this are democrat or swing states.

I guess more red states will get behind this if Obama wins the election, but loses the popular vote.

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