There are discussions about the electoral college favoring small states. Some people think that's bad, some people think it's good.
However, there's a more important issue: that's not really what the electoral college does. It gives a small edge to small states[0]. The much bigger effect is that in every given election, it favors a handful of battleground states over all the rest.
If you live in Wyoming, the electoral college does not help you, because your vote is secure. Ditto for Vermont. But if you live in Ohio or Florida, presidential candidates will spend all their time in your state, trying to get your vote.
While you can concoct a semi-coherent case for rural voters needing special protection, no one can explain why Ohio is more or less important than North Carolina, or Florida than Texas.
[0] Which, if you're paying attention, is at least correlated with being rural, but only partially--another lazy generalization that surrounds this subject.
I'm not in favor of the electoral college, but wouldn't its elimination merely shift this problem to politicians only visiting the most poulated states (e.g. California) anyway?
> I'm not in favor of the electoral college, but wouldn't its elimination merely shift this problem to politicians only visiting the most poulated states (e.g. California) anyway?
“Politicians”, no, it only effects Presidential (and Vice-Presidential) candidates. It has no direct effect on other politicians.
Would it make them more likely to visit densely populated areas (where you can influence more poeple per unit time)? Yeah, probably. Right now, they focus on “swing states”, but within those states, on densely populated areas, for just that reason.
But as long as there is a Senate, they'd be encouraged to visit small states (where a small number of voters determine a large share of power in the Senate, which can block both laws and Presidential appointments) for coattail effects.
And they’d still be encouraged to spend efforts on campaigning in low-cost media markets where small money reaches lots of voters (even ones that would currently be neglected because the states aren't viewed as swingable), just probably not with personal visits as much, without some kind of broader free media exposure opportunities, because the candidates themselves can't be in more than one place at once.
I've seen this pointed out, and absolutely do not see it as a problem. What's wrong with politicians paying more attention to the needs of more people?
They're going to campaign somewhere, why should they pay more attention to Cleveland, Ohio (metro area population ~2m) than Los Angeles (city population 3m, metro population over 13m)?
What's great about the electoral college is you need to have cross-regional appeal to win. So its less about which states are going to be battleground but that you generally can't just appeal to 1 or 2 regions and win. In a goal of preserving the union, it's better to have a system that pushes cross-regional appeal than a system based strictly on number of votes IMO.
My recollection from civics was that the college is to prevent populist candidates from winning. Someone very popular only in densely populated areas may have an agenda that hurts rural ones (eg, noting that federal taxes disproportionately go to rural areas for things like maintaining highways, make it “fair” and leave rural people with shit roads and diminished services).
> My recollection from civics was that the college is to prevent populist candidates from winning
The college was a compromise to give a larger voting share to slave owning states that had a high overall population, despite having a relatively smaller number of possible voters.
They worked hand in hand. In other words, given the 3/5s compromise, how to you implement it from a voting perspective? For example, if your state has a population that was 50/50 slave/non-slave, then each non-slave vote was theoretically worth 1 and 3/5s of a vote, but giving individual voters differing weights was deemed unacceptable. The solution was the electoral college in which the votes available to the state could reflect the extra voting power of the non-voting population.
I don't think the electoral college was intended to work the way it does today. If I'm remembering correctly, it was originally a "Frank from town is really smart and well-informed, so I'll send him to DC to choose the president" type of institution. (This is also part of why there was such a long gap between election day and inauguration - the electors still had to get together in DC)
So while the electoral college might have also functioned as a way to redistribute votes within a state... I don't think that was its main purpose.
> If this were the case you'd expect to see a lot more faithless electors in our history than we have seen.
...other than the large numbers in the late 1700s and early 1800s, you mean?
And in any case, "intent" and "actual practice" were pretty different here. But that doesn't mean that the Connecticut Compromise [0] (which split the US legislative body into the House with representation apportioned by population and the Senate with set representation per state) was solely or even primarily due to slavery. And once you had that, using the total of Senators and Representatives for your number of electors makes a good amount of sense.
The 3/5 compromise was to reduce the power of slave owning states as they wanted slaves to count fully for determining the states’ representation in the house so they could maintain more control of the house.
The compromise reduced the control the slave states had.
It was indeed intended to prevent populism; the idea is that instead of voting for the president you vote for a group of people who you trust to then choose a president. But it has never in practice worked that way.
Interesting, though this sounds like it would really hamper the idea of the national popular vote compact which I'm personally pulling for. And really calls into question the whole electoral system if the electors cannot be constrained by their states at all. Just bribe or threaten 271 people and the whole presidency is yours really since states can't invalidate faithless votes...
> though this sounds like it would really hamper the idea of the national popular vote compact which I'm personally pulling for.
I'm a supporter of NPV. I don't think it's likely to be a problem, although this feels like something that will shake out a lot further in the federal courts.
As I recall, the electoral college was primarily for logistical reasons— a number of people come to Washington, meet together, and the outcome of that meeting determines the next President, with no appeals because the people in the room are empowered to choose.
Communication happened at the speed of a horse, so if you need a decision quickly, you can’t have electors asking for instructions from their home government. For better or worse, the founders favored a definitive result in this case over a correct one.
That assumes that "only appeals to cities" is the only type of populist that we need protection from. The electoral college does nothing to protect against things like "only appeals to white people" or "only appeals to Christians" populists, which were not a big concern for America's founders or the much whiter and more Christian rural population today.
English and its ambiguous grammar... I mean when the founding fathers designed the electoral college, they wouldn't have been concerned about it taking power away from minority groups. In addition, the people in rural areas today who are so concerned about removing the electoral college giving more power to cities are not concerned about how the electoral college disenfranchises minorities because they are much less likely to be minorities or have many close friends who are than people in cities and suburbs so it's not something they'd normally think about.
> Why is cross regional appeal of any value, if these region don't make up even 10% of the combined US population.
Because those people control a large fraction of the country’s food supply and it would be a disaster if they decided to stop selling it to the rest of us.
You're probably being facetious, but I have heard some version of this argument before. It's akin to saying "give us what we want or we'll hold the country hostage."
In reality, free markets being a thing, this wouldn't happen. We can import from other countries and they need to sell their goods to live.
Do you want to eat unregulated Chinese mystery meat? Not that I agree with the sentiment of 'holding the urban areas hostage' but the US and the world need the agricultural production of the central US
California actually provides most of the produce (vegetables fruits and nuts) for the nation. The midwestern corn / soy / beef states are focused on producing bulk commodities for export to other countries.
More hyperbolic than facetious. It can’t be a good thing to disenfranchise the holders of your strategic resources en masse, and farmland was the easiest to point at.
You’re right that it’s extremely unlikely to get so bad that they get forcibly nationalized. However, my understanding is that market conditions are pretty bad for farmers right now, and have been for years. Any change that makes things worse for them will likely drive some to other lines of work and reduce overall production, driving food prices up.
This particular effect is probably extremely small in practice, but I felt the need to remind HN that not all value is produced in cities.
Why have those protections in the Presidency though who is the face of America. Low population states (more accurate than saying the EC favors small states really) already have an even more disproportional impact in the Senate where 40 Senators representing just 38.4M people can completely control the laws that get passed via filabuster (lowest 20 population states + 1 to prevent cloture). That's a little of 10% over the population that can in theory decide 100% what can get passed in the US. (Granted the 20 lowest population states do include a few democratic states, but it is largely consistently republican states)
Senators get elected at best about 70% to 30% in votes also so assume that only 70% of that 38.4M people actually 'control' the laws. "Completely control" is a bit of an exaggeration though, I think you mean not allow new laws to get passed. Having a small population with the ability to prevent new laws is less concerning to me than a populous majority with the ability to pass laws. New laws should have broad support and broad appeal before getting enacted. Due to the internet there is much more spread of culture and thought between states than ever before and I think we could see much more laws getting passed very soon if democrats and republicans, and the media, could stop acting like every single day is election day again and are contrarian to every single word that comes from the other party.
True they can only block but that's a lot of power just look at the whole last 4 years (plus a stolen SC seat) when Mitch was in charge in the Senate, it's a strong position. Also there's a lot of stuff that needs to pass just day to day that you can attach force things to be attached to if you have a solid anti cloture vote and are willing to use it.
I'm not so sure it's just the 24/7 life or death coverage that makes that happen though. In solidly red or blue seats the main threat to a senators seat is a challenge from the extreme of their party, left or right, which also pulls them further towards the extremes of their parties.
I don't think that was the core assumption. Recall that lack of representation in government was one of the reasons for the revolution that created the US.
Why do we only give disproportionate representation to people on the basis of their zip code?
Why not give disproportional representation to them on the basis of their race, or religion, or sexual orientation, or on whether or not they prefer big, or little-endian notation? Surely, it would only be appropriate that politicians should have cross-demographic appeal to win?
Every argument for why we should give extra influence to voters living in particular zip codes is just as valid, as any argument for giving extra influence to voters based on some other semi-arbitrary distinction.
Rural people have special, marginalized concerns, and are outnumbered by urban voters? Great. So do LGBT people, for example.
You don't get extra consideration for your vote for being a ______. Why should you get it on the basis of geography?
because the US is a union of quasi independent states. US government is built around that fact. The Senate, for example, represents each state equally Originally and by intent these were chosen by state legislatures. Similarly, originally and by intent, states governments play a large role in how Presidents get elected. Personally, I think the changes we've made have confused people about the basic theory of our constitutional system. People should be asking: why do we have states.
There is two methods that can be done by removing the electoral college that have vastly different results. First, without "removing" the electoral college, just deem that all electoral votes from a state are proportionate to that state's popular vote. So if a state is split 50-50 then electoral votes are split 50-50. The 2nd method is awarding all the state's electoral votes based on who wins the popular vote. This gives a vastly different outcome if only a few states implement this. It means even if you win even 80 percent of the votes of that state but lose the national popular vote then you still lose that state. I've seen more news about states leaning towards the 2nd option which is actually much worse than the electoral college in its current state.
> There is two methods that can be done by removing the electoral college that have vastly different results. First, without "removing" the electoral college, just deem that all electoral votes from a state are proportionate to that state's popular vote.
You can't do that with national effect by concerted state action with less than 100% of the states (you can simulate it by casting all votes for the candidate that would win by that rule with a bare makority, but that's just a chunky version of national popular vote.)
> I've seen more news about states leaning towards the 2nd option which is actually much worse than the electoral college in its current state.
It's worse if you care about the per-state vote and not the national outcome; it's better if you care about the outcome, since it produces the desired outcome of adopted by states with a majority of electoral votes (and the NPV only goes into effect in states adopting it when it has been adopted by states with a majority of electoral votes), while proportional allocation for electors needs universal adoption to implement it's effect.
What's the point of having "cross regional appeal" if you are appealing to virtually no one?
This isn't some discrimination thing. Those people can still vote. They just aren't given more representation than they deserve. That's the con of the electoral college.
Can you elaborate? You can't win while appealing to "virtually no one". In cases where the national popular vote didn't win - we're talking about a few % points of a difference.
What I mean is the states that are overrepresented based on their population. In EC, every state, regardless of population gets 3 electoral votes. Meaning low population states get more say than they should because they get electoral votes for free. This has caused elections in the past to be won because of this overrepresentation when they wouldn't have if the electoral college didn't exist.
A few percentage points is a big deal in an election where every vote is supposed to count. And this overrepresentation isn't a narrow margin like Brexit, we're talking about at least 5% more represented.
It has not produced that result. Instead it shifts the power from "most populated" (which at lease resembles SOME democratic values) to "most swing", which is totally arbitrary.
Define region and how the electoral college requires cross-regional appeal to win. You could technically win the electoral college with the 13 biggest states in the country, so I'm not seeing how the electoral college forces any kind of broad-based appeal.
Not the OP, but you could technically win the popular vote with those same 13 state's voters. When there is overwhelming support for one candidate the electoral college and popular vote would always be exactly the same. It actually only matters on a closely contest election and in that case the edge goes to the person with more broad support.
"Minority" does not always mean skin colour. John Stuart Mill wrote about the tyranny of the majority[0] in 1850's England∗, which I'll hazard a guess was 99% white, even with steamboats and the British Empire reaching right around the world.
∗and he appears to refer to it as a well established idiom so I suspect it goes further back
You can be a minority because you live in a small state,
or because you are LGBT,
or because you are black,
or because you have a disability.
But the small-state kind of minority seems to be the only one who deserves electoral protection from tyranny of the majority. Oh what a coincidence then, that these minorities also happen to be mostly white, christian, and straight.
Any of those minority groups can move to a small state (states being the usual voting boundary). White, christian, and straight cannot become those groups.
Would a register for who is LGBT be a good idea?
Would you support laws and voting based on ethnic background and/or skin colour?
As to it being their constitution, we're really talking about the Bill of Rights, and that was an updated version of the 1689 British Bill of Rights.
It's sad how we no longer have it, and that people in the past had more rights than we have now. American Constitutionalists are right to dig their heels in over anything that looks like it will encroach on their rights.
Because, without embarrassment at the facetiousness of the straightforward answer, it's a tyranny i.e. it (possibly) restricts or removes the liberty of individuals, sometimes with a big dollop of direct harm like violence.
That's a false dichotomy. The alternative isn't tyranny of the minority, it's a system that takes account of the views of everyone, by forcing candidates to appeal to a wide spectrum of the electorate.
How do you take into account the views of everyone, when different segments of the electorate sometimes have irreconcilable desires and views, and not wind up with "tyranny" of some sort simply by having to set some policy that can't please everyone?
You can take account of everyone without pleasing them all. For example, in systems with run-offs or some kind of ranked choice, you need to appeal to voters who might not have you as their first choice, but whose second choice votes you need. That's better than being able to use a divisive strategy that appeals only to your base, and positively repels the rest.
We are talking about the electoral college, which enables tyranny of the minority.
Not only can a candidate win the electoral college while losing the popular vote, but the winner-take-all system means that only votes in closely-contested states really matter. The Electoral College allows the minority to overrule the majority.
The president isn't the president of “the people” but of the states. It says so right there on the tin: “President of the United States.”
Which means the president is and should be, elected by representatives of the states. The House of Representatives should be the only federal office directly voted on by “the people.” If that were the case, especially eliminating the direct election of senators, you’d see a much less divisive, gridlocked system where governance is more about public service and less about these election soap operas.
If you want a system to appeal to a wide spectrum of the electorate, there are a large number of dimensions that are far better then geographic address. Gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, etc.
For some reason, though, I never see supporters of the electoral college feel that it's right and proper to give equal political power to social minority groups (Only geographical minority groups. As if where you live is more important to your interests than who you are.)
Because states are political units. If you don’t like the laws of one state you can move to another, and this extends to the state's voting power when choosing a president.
As to your innovation in voting, if you accept immutable aspects of identity as the basis for voting rights you're opening the door to some terrible ideas, like ethno-states and Jim Crow laws. Again, without embarrassment at the facetiousness, I'm also not sure how actually making the Jews have more power in 1930s Germany would've solved their problems. Would've probably fuelled grievances: "Hey, Adolf, you know that Jews really do run Germany?" Eeek!
The best way to protect minorities is by the protected freedoms of speech and to bear arms, not by weighting votes by arbitrarily chosen characteristics.
Most people are minorities in at least one aspect that they hold dear to their identity. Under tyranny of the majority, they risk finding that aspect made illegal.
The Electoral College lets the minority choose the president against the will of the Majority. That is called tyranny of the minority. I want to know why you think that's a good thing.
So, for one, I don't - I'm mildly in favor of direct popular votes combined with some form of runoff voting (either IRV, STV, or approval voting).
But I also get the arguments of people that say that without the electoral college, there is zero incentive for politicians to campaign in or pay attention to the interests of people in lightly-populated area. And I think that is a bad thing - whenever you completely disenfranchise people you get create a potential crack for revolution, secession, or other fragmentation processes to seep in. (It's also just shitty to the people involved.) I'd rather fix that by getting rid of first-past-the-post voting systems, but I also think you can't ignore that problem.
You still haven't answered why you believe there's an excluded middle. The opposite of tyranny is representation, and it's the system we have in the U.S. You can quibble about the degree of representation, but the fact that you can quibble about it means that we don't have a tyranny.
Do you think you are represented by the current system ?
You get to complain about being in jail when you are in jail but when you are innocent and complaining does that make it better ?
> But I also get the arguments of people that say that without the electoral college, there is zero incentive for politicians to campaign in or pay attention to the interests of people in lightly-populated area.
This is a lie probably told to you by a high school teacher who never really thought about it, and clearly you haven't either.
If the electoral college empowers lightly populated areas, how come no Presidential Candidate has ever gone stumping for those sweet sweet Wyoming voters?
Because it doesn't empower small states. It doesn't empower big states. It empowers closely contested states.
The electoral college makes no sense, it was not designed this way, the designers tried to get rid of it after they saw how it was being abused.
It's non-democratic, nonsensical, and there has been ~75% support for abolishing it for over 100 years but politicians have been holding off because it makes elections easier for them to fight because it lets them ignore most of the voters.
Does the EU presidency have a popular vote? Why aren’t the various leaders of the EU all German since Germany has the most people?
I love the electoral college. For those that bother to understand that America is a republic; the system was nearly perfectly designed. If we can get back to the original method of electing senators and back to the idea of “these United States” rather than “the United States,” we’d all be happier. States should have increased sovereignty. The 10th Amendment ought to matter.
Dude, the Electoral College takes sovereignty AWAY from the states, and concentrates it in only 4-5 states where the race is close.
If the Electoral College made every state matter equally, then candidates would be campaigning for support in every state equally. It is a fact that that's not what the Electoral College does.
Also, the Electoral College in its current form was not "designed". It was a mistake. The people who designed it, Hamilton and Madison, tried to get rid of it with constitutional amendments after they saw how it was being abused with "winner-take-all" laws.
You’re confusing where people campaign with who has influence.
Wyoming, as a state, has as much influence as California - and that’s how it was designed. Nobody campaigns in either state very much, because their state wide preferences are mostly set - but that doesn’t mean they have no influence.
A majority of state electors pick the president. The president won the most states, so he is president.
In the EU, is Ireland less important than Germany? Why doesn’t Germany get to pick the EU president each time? Since Germany has over 80 million people, they could team up with France and simply own the EU. Ireland and Poland would be forced to go along with whatever Germany and France wanted. Or, they would leave the EU.
If California and New York picked the president every single time, why would other states bother staying in the Union? If you just have to win New York City and Los Angeles and Chicago, then every single policy proposal would simply be to benefit those voters alone. You could deny federal protections and funding to every other part of the country because you’d rather have more money to spend in New York City. It would become just like the Hunger Games where the “districts” would serve the capitol.
The current system has worked for 200+ years. Just because some people didn’t like outcome, doesn’t make the system broken.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. Also, no witch burning.
It's an Electoral College witch burning, the majority said "no", but a lot of them live on the same street, so we're going to do it anyway, sucks to be you.
Seattle is still less white than the country as a whole, and Oregon has a weird history that makes it an outlier. In any case, a couple exceptions doesn't change that cities trend less white.
The issue is more that everyone should get attention, and removing the electoral college & going straight to popular vote will honestly erode that- as others have noted, politicians will spend more time in the highest population areas and possibly not the highest need areas.
They'll spend more time campaigning in the areas with the most people who can be convinced to change their votes. This isn't necessarily going to be the highest population areas, as those areas tend to be solidly liberal.
I don't know why the electoral college would be better at identifying high need areas than willingness to change your vote. Shouldn't people who need help be more likely to change their vote than to live in a purple state?
If a 10m pop area has a 70-30 split, it's still better to campaign there than a 5m pop area with a 50-50 split. In absolute numbers it's still 3 million supporters versus 2.5 million supporters.
My point is that you want to go to places where you can convince the most people to vote for you, not necessarily the places with the most people. This means you'll want to go to places with lots of undecided voters, supporters who need to be convinced to vote, and non-supporters who you think can be swayed to your side. You also want to avoid places with lots of people who will be energized by your visit to vote against you.
Under your model where the goal of the campaign is to visit your supporters, you'll favor smaller cities that strongly support you over larger cities that support your opponent. A place with 5 million population that's 70-30 in your favor has 3.5 million supporters.
They already don't spend time equally. Currently they spend time where the expected votes are closest to 50:50. Why is that preferable to going to where there are the most undecided voters, which is what would happen?
To be snide have they ever actually gone to the highest need areas? It has always gone towards whatever bloc will win them the most influence. The Dustbowl wasn't a major election campaign area - neighboring governors had to be told that they couldn't use the national guard to keep out US citizens at gunpoint.
> removing the electoral college & going straight to popular vote will honestly erode that- as others have noted, politicians will spend more time in the highest population areas and possibly not the highest need areas.
So I guess you're totally OK with the current system where they spend all their time in Florida & other swing states because the others don't matter...
The answer is probably complicated. Game theoretically, they’ll pay attention[0] to the places where their campaigning has the biggest marginal impact, but that doesn’t immediately tell us much.
That will make big urban areas appealing. However, if you think there are diminishing returns, it should cause them to spread that attention more, avoiding the last month where they repeatedly visit the same state over and over again.
[0] This might or might mean visiting those states.
I think the whole “visiting” thing is overblown. We have TV and the Internet. This isn’t the 19th century when the only way the average American might EVER see or hear a President would be a short speech off the back of a train car.
I totally underestimated the importance of visiting until I went to Iowa earlier this month. (My wife went to high school and college there and we went back for the state fair and some campaign events.) It shattered my East-coast preconceptions about how elections work. Because of the caucus system,[1] you actually have to meet people in person to encourage them to advocate for you at the caucus. My wife got selfies with nearly every democratic candidate. I met the mayor of New York at a Buffalo Wild Wings. (He was just there for a snack, as were we.) You go to a diner with like 20 people and a presidential candidate has to sit there and field rambling questions from 80 year old ladies. It’s completely nuts, but the people who engage in the process (and they are completely ordinary people) are incredibly committed to their role.
The other thing I came away with from the whole process is a newfound appreciation for the “who would I like to have a beer with” factor. The issues and policy proposals you read on the Internet don’t really matter—none of that stuff will ever get through Congress. Being able to look the person in the eye, and see how they carry themselves while shleping to half a dozen events every day—that really makes an impression.
[1] In the Iowa Democratic caucuses, registered party members in a precinct get together, discuss the candidates, take a first round vote where some candidates are cut, discuss the candidates some more, and then take a final vote.
I have a different opinion. Sanders and to a lesser extent Warren have created massive volunteer networks that do have a pretty big impact, like everywhere. Obama had that too, but it was dismantled when he took office (insanity). There's a good argument to say Obama would have been far more impactful had he kept it going.
Sanders has no intention of shutting down his "revolution" (not my words) whether he does or doesn't get the nomination. There's going to be some serious pressure (like there already has) on congress in the years to come. I don't think the same ol' same ol' will continue much longer.
I don't mean to be a fan boy, but it's pretty phenomenal what he / they have done since 2016, and it resonates with a lot of people. CNN and MSNBC don't talk about it too often, but it's very real.
Don't take my word for it though. Easily researched.
It's a 50/50 country. It would be alarming if, after one election, which will at best be decided 60/40 in their favor, a radically different (from their immediate predecessor) President was actually enable to enact their agenda. The system we have is literally designed to prevent that thing from happening. "Volunteer network" or not, Sanders isn't passing his agenda. If he was serious about doing that, he'd stay in the Senate.
Let's agree to disagree. I actually think big alarming changes are coming (and have already happened). I'm just a Canuck though, and not out to convince anyone. I'm really fascinated with the political changes I see happening (or think I see happening at least).
After 10 years in DC working in political circles, I can tell you that very little is actually changing. The giant, faceless bureaucracy still runs most of the show.
If you look into many of the "unprecedented events" you'll see that most of them aren't new and some of them are decades old.
Though if the events really are bad and were ignored before, it's worth asking "why?"
> After 10 years in DC working in political circles, I can tell you that very little is actually changing. The giant, faceless bureaucracy still runs most of the show.
Maybe but aren't you in danger of missing the big changes coming precisely because you are inside the bubble?
A political equivalent to "let them eat cake".
As an outside observer to the US it does seem like the pressure has to give somewhere soon at some point (and in a few other western democracies including my own though I think the US is further down the pipe on this one).
Valid line of reasoning but I'm 10 years out from that world specifically because the bubble was/is ugly.
I think you're 100% right that there's building pressure and something will give but that's precisely because things haven't changed much. If the general populace decides "no matter how I vote, things don't change" some will lose hope and give up.. while others will look to other approaches.
Canada is very different, because the party in power in the House of Commons can basically do anything it wants. By contrast, the political system of the US is effectively designed to produce gridlock. The Canadian Senate rarely blocks and introduces legislation unlike that of the US, just to name one example.
There are benefits and drawbacks to both systems. Right now I'm pretty happy with this aspect of the US system. (There are other parts of the US system I'm less happy with—such as the Electoral College.)
A lot of people think the changes Trump is making are radically different, and the system has turned out to be a gentleman's agreement that doesn't prevent anything.
Except that it's prevented all sorts of things, including the two biggest-ticket items in Trump's agenda --- the repeal of "Obamacare" and the construction of a wall on the southern border. I'd extend the argument by observing that the widespread belief in the Republican party that anything and everything was on the table ended up royally screwing them; it is, for instance, why they failed to repeal the ACA.
The reason why they failed is because they were the dog that caught the car - they had no plans that were remotely workable.
They pounded it with demagoguery to get elected but they didn't have anything behind the policy and knew it. They also knew that going forward with their disasters would hurt them even more.
Trump has been able to get almost nothing done. He got a tax cut, which was billed as radical but mostly just brings our corporate taxes in line with Western Europe. And he put tariffs on China—one of the few things the President can do without the support of Congress.
Is was my understanding it moves our nominal rates in line with the rest of the world, but this reduces our effective rates to below the rest of the world.
It’ll take a few years for the data to play out, but that’s likely not the case. A CBO study found that our effective corporate tax rate before the Trump tax cut was 18.6%. https://www.npr.org/2017/08/07/541797699/fact-check-does-the.... France, Australia, and Canada were from 8.5-11.2%. The Trump tax cut dropped the nominal rate by about 1/3 (accounting for state corporate taxes, which didn’t change). Assuming a proportional drop in the effective rate (which is a wild ass guess), that would move us below Brazil, Germany, and India, but keep us slightly above France, Canada, And Australia.
The US media coverage of Trump’s corporate tax cuts really misrepresented how completely mainstream it was: https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/wp-content/uplo.... While the US nominal rate of almost 40% total was around the OECD average in 1990, the rest of the OECD dropped to just over 20% by 2017. Meanwhile, the US nominal rate didn’t drop at all.
As of August 14, 2019, the United States Senate has confirmed 146 Article III judges nominated by President Trump, including 2 Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, 43 judges for the United States Courts of Appeals, 99 judges for the United States District Courts, and 2 judges for the United States Court of International Trade.
Visiting here is a proxy for overall campaign message initiatives, which includes physical visits, but also ad buy and even shaping the candidates message and platform to better appeal to the swing stage demographic. Arguably the last one is the biggest potential problem since it means some minority has an outside influence on candidates.
It's not just visiting, it's pork too, there's a reason why there's a net wealth transfer through taxes from those states that are not in play to those that are.
A NPV would go some way to spread the federal spending around a little more fairly
As an example of this imbalance shaping platforms see American policy on Cuba, where conservative policy is enduringly punitive appeal to Florida voters
No, at the end of the day. People are humans and are affected by face-to-face interactions. Communication via television and internet feels impersonal. When a candidate visits your city, they discuss how your local and state politics tie together. So candidates can personalize their speeches towards a specific region per visit. Some people might not care about this, but many others will
You can't discount Trump's stadium tours as an important part in his campaign strategy. It's essential for emotionalizing the base. Almost the same way a Spotify stream compares to a live arena concert. I would even go so far that offline events have in these digital times a much higher voter activation potential.
Probably the biggest reason for physically visiting places is to get bigger donations from people and interest groups. Also to generate buzz that will land in the 24 hour media cycle.
Nobody cares about visiting. They can craft their policies to entirely exclude or screw over states that aren't worth their time. For example, favor specific industries over others that are heavy in one state vs another. They'll do that anyway, but may think twice if they need to build a coalition of smaller states vs just winning the popular vote.
This idea doesn’t seem obvious to me. The biggest states are:
California
Texas
Florida
New York
Pennsylvania
Ohio
Illinois
Georgia
North Carolina
Michigan
Which major industry unites them? Which major industries are not represented? You have tech, finance, automakers, agriculture, tourism, and oil. Maybe not much mining and fishing? Probably something else, but these are very different states.
It's worth adding that those states aren't even close to as homogeneous as most tend to assume. Only 60% of California voted Democrat in 2016, and you have to assume the turnout for Republicans would be higher if it wasn't guaranteed that their vote (for president) was meaningless. With the current system, you can cater only to the populous parts of California and win the whole state, and that goes for most other states as well. With a popular vote, that ~30 to 40% of California is relevant again, along with significant chunks of other states.
It's also worth noting the math really doesn't work out, the electoral college makes it easier to win the whole thing while carrying less states/votes (Which really shouldn't be surprising). With both the popular vote and the electoral college, you only have to take the 10 most populous states to win the whole thing. But the difference is that, with the current electoral college you generally only need to get 51% of the vote to win the whole state, which is significantly easier and turns states like California from a 60% to a 100%. With the popular vote, to actually win in that fashion you would have to take almost every vote in those states, which is practically impossible considering the diversity.
Iowa and NH are targeted because of early caucus and primary, key in nomination contests because perceived momentum drives donations, media coverage, and later votes.
Because of primary campaign dynamics where those are literally the only stayed voting at the time, and underperforming there means you have no money, no positive news coverage and no reason to campaign anywhere else. So all energy goes into them at a certain point in the nomination campaign. (As a rough approximation.)
Totally different dynamic than general elections, which happen all at once rather than different dates in different states.
No, politicians would not need to visit California because the way in which the electoral college is being eliminated is by keeping it intact, but forcing the state electors to follow the federal trend instead of the local one. The result will be ALL of California's electors going "blue" regardless of how the individual people vote. If we figured out a way of actually eliminating the electoral college, then it's entirely possible that a presidential election would result in no candidate winning more than 50% of the popular vote, and there would need to be some way to conduct a run-off election. If this scenario had unfolded in the 1992 election, Bush would have won instead of Clinton.
What it shifts is advertising from expensive media markets with small geographical boundaries (NY, LA) to less expensive ones that have large boundaries (Kansas City, Raleigh.) It works out that, because of the large boundaries, the cost to reach each consumer is far lower.
Moreover, I'd wager that the stumps that stump speeches occur on will go to more places with more concentrated populations - there are more butts within n square miles to put in seats, as well as the most-watched news media.
My opinion is that both outcomes are preferable to stumps AND media going to half a dozen battleground states.
We already have a problem with politicians getting the majority of their donations from people out of their district and even have very low approval ratings in their district.
Something needs to be done to ensure all districts are equally represented and the representatives work for their constituents, not benefactors from out of state.
The issue is that states aren't - really. There is no barrier so said division is arbitrary and unenforcable. Local has been pushing its siren song for a while when marketing but it is actually a reactionary countertrend to essentially everything else.
The region that gows all of our food affects us all. Just because you dont live in the midwest and population density is lower, does not make them less important.
They would go to places where people are. Particularly the sort of people who might be amenable to changing their mind. It's true that because more people are in populated states, they would go to populated states more, but that's just fairness. See also https://xkcd.com/1138/
I predict a presidential popular vote would have a moderating effect. Meaning more voters would be targeted.
With FPTP, each side tries to have the smallest winning coalition. This results in more competitive races. So every vote would matter.
Said another way, our current unfair gerrymandering worsens partisanship.
Said yet another, when my local city council went from at-large positions to districts based, so kinda the opposite of from electoral college to presidential popular vote, candidate platforms went from "appeal city wide" mush to "better appeal to my district".
(A better moderator would be to change from FPTP to approval voting or ranked choice voting. But that's another thread.)
--
But to your point, in practical terms, with modern get out the vote (GOTV) technology and strategies, most every voter is already targeted. They're certainly accounted for.
As the de facto head of their parties, presidential candidates are expected to do well every where, to help with down ballot races.
As an extreme example, HRC 2016 was criticized for running up her margin in "safe" areas. But that's expected (demanded) of national (and statewide) candidates by the locals.
You should be careful about the word "small" here. What you mean is least populous, but geographically, they are large.
Thus, the question is: Do you want the majority of the USA geography being controlled by the will of people least knowledgeable about it?
If you eliminate the electoral college you give political control of resources to those who have absolutely NO physical control of those resources and yet still suffer the impact of their environmental influence.
What I mean is, people in California, Texas, and New York would push all the bad things to the rural states and take all the good parts, leaving those who live in the rural areas to feel the full brunt of those decisions. Take Louisiana as an example. It's been decimated by everyone who doesn't live there.
Weighting "resources" is not a good thing. In the past it's been used to justify some of the most horrific policies in the U.S.
The U.S. constitution counted slaves at 60% of a person. Some of the arguments for the three fifths compromise were that slaveholders didn't want people who weren't "knowledgable" about slaveholding to be meddling in slaveholder's business. This is essentially one of the causes that sparked the Civil War.
I don't understand why Americans are so against becoming a full democracy. It's not like the current system benefits anyone. Congress, presidents and our courts are dysfunctional. The government is becoming the laughingstock of the world. At least in a democracy there's more chances of unified rule instead of 6 years of gridlock followed by 2-years of whiplash changes.
All wars throughout all of history have been about resources. In the end, resources are all that matter. The civil war was about resources as well. It was the slaves that helped extract those resources from the land. It wasn't about slavery, it was about what they used the slaves to get.
This is really a red state vs blue state debate, but even on a county by county level, the majority of the counties of California, Oregon and Washington state are red. Those states' votes are determined by a handful of counties around a few urban centers. The rest of the counties' interests are more closely aligned with the red states.
And thus, the electoral college gives those red counties a voice that's ignored in their own states.
> And thus, the electoral college gives those red counties a voice that's ignored in their own states.
And in many cases gives them more of a voice.
There's an irony that the EC more accurately represents votes per acre/square mile than per constituent, and (one of) the reasons for the move to the US was to get away from tyrannical land/owners.
Again, the 3/5 compromise was forced on the slave states to reduce their power in federal decision making ( the House specifically). It had nothing to do with what you claim.
The standard would have been that the slaves would have counted for representation purposes, which would have given the slave states the power to ensure slavery continued. The compromise reduced their power drastically and paved the way for slavery to eventually end.
> The standard would have been that the slaves would have counted for representation purposes
No, there is no basis for even asserting that there was a standard, much less that the standard was that property, whether slaves, cattle, or horseshoes, would count for representation purposes.
Ok, since you don't like my phrasing, the argument from the slave states was that slaves should count, which would have given them greater representation.
No, they don't, because they assume the slave state argument wasn't just their argument but a privileged default position, such that giving them something that was a compromise between what they wanted and what the free states wanted was a harm to them from the privileged default and not an inducement to keep them in.
To be clear, there was no "privileged default", the "default" was that everyone counted. The 3/5 compromise was forced on the slave states to reduce their power from the default. It was not an "inducement", they were forced into it.
I’m not following your example. You clarified in another comment that Louisiana is environmentally decimated due to the actions or votes of the blue states. However Louisiana typically goes hard red, and the GOP is very much opposed to environmental protections.
Also I’m not sure what you mean by them pushing all the bad stuff to Louisiana and what that has to do with presidential elections (aside from that the president sets EPA policy, but again, Louisiana voted for trump so I don’t get it)
1. I’m gonna take a hard line that people deserve a vote, dirt doesn’t.
2. Louisiana is the 25th most populous state and I think 25th densest. So, I’m not sure the electoral college is protecting those less dense states’ environments. As the sibling points out, sometimes coastal liberals want environmental protection, while natives want to exploit the environment for profit.
In the case of Louisiana, we (natives) have been screaming for environmental protections for decades, because erosion has been eating away at our state.
Meanwhile, our state government seems more concerned with gutting education wherever possible and doing everything it can to destroy New Orleans' economy.
And if Louisiana's federal desires are consistently decided by more populous states, what is left that motivates Louisiana to remain a member of the United States?
They would expect other states to not be able to dictate things against them, not necessarily them against other states. This is looking increasingly likely as political opinion on immigration, gun control, abortion, etc continues to divide further left and right.
Agree this is a benefit, but in Louisiana's case this benefit is only 0.5% of their GDP (10 billion aid / 205 billion GDP). In a red state, where business interests more heavily control political power, I don't think federal tax benefits will influence a Brexit-tier decision too much.
To put this in blunt terms: there are a ton of impoverished African Americans in these states that receive a large chunk of that federal aid. The segments of Louisiana that don't receive that aid are tax-productive and will not vote against a Brexit-like decision, even if it means that federal aid stops flowing
> this benefit is only 0.5% of their GDP (10 billion aid / 205 billion GDP)
This is 5%, not 0.5%. On top of that, your numbers aren't correct: they receive around $20bn net, and their GDP is around $250bn, which means that which means that direct net federal spending is about 8% of their GDP (and gross federal spending is a whopping 20%). These are pretty huge numbers, and they affect the entire state economy, directly affecting the profits of the business owners that you claim wouldn't care.
I would assume Louisiana is not interested in the majority of those things. Free trade is the most obvious benefit Louisiana would want, but I wouldn't put it past a state to suspend disbelief and press forward with succession, similar to what happened with Brexit.
> Do you want the majority of the USA geography being controlled by the will of people least knowledgeable about it?
Well, if you want to propose a system where Alaska (area 570,640.95 sq mi) gets the same representation as Rhode Island, Delaware, Connecticut, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Hawaii, Maryland, West Virginia, South Carolina, Maine, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama combined (area ~525,000 sq mi),
...then I'm all ears...
* Please don't tell me "But Alaska has so few people!"
> Do you want the majority of the USA geography being controlled by the will of people least knowledgeable about it?
So you prefer that the majority of the USA population is being controlled by the will of people least knowledgeable about the issues faced by the most populous and developed regions of the USA?
Currently it seems that rural states push all the bad things on themselves, e.g. climate change and other environmental destruction, so how much worse can it be for them?
True, at that extreme, it's big, and I probably could state my claim more precisely.
Here's my claim: if you drew a curve of electoral votes per person by percentile, there would be a very small area that was significantly elevated, and the remaining portion would be moderately flat.
Because Wyoming's population is so small, the absolute impact isn't that big. Go up just a few spots to Hawaii and it's more like a 2:1 ratio. Yet still, substantially less than 10% of the population lives in such small states. So there's a very small minority of people who have a proportionally larger impact (but still a small impact in absolute terms).
To be clear, I think that's a bad result. So far as the democratic process can allow it, our votes should have equal weight. But it's somewhat exaggerated how systematic of an effect it has. In the same vein, I've argued that the best defense of the electoral college is that it only errs by giving the wrong result in elections that were already very close. In contrast, the Senate is thoroughly anti-democratic, unsalvagably so.
(Btw: I can't replicate your math. New York had 19,378,102 people in 2010, and 29 votes = 1.49 votes / million. Wyoming had 563,626 and 3 votes = 5.32 votes / million).
To quantify that "very close", in 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 3 million votes, which is 1.5% of the voting population. I would not call that very close. It isn't a difference of some 1000 votes. It's an election of a minority leader.
Well, if we're talking of why electoral college was designed to be this way, then we should read the intention of the founders.
> As Alexander Hamilton writes in “The Federalist Papers,” the Constitution is designed to ensure “that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.” The point of the Electoral College is to preserve “the sense of the people,” while at the same time ensuring that a president is chosen “by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice.” [0]
Firstly, that has nothing to do with a "blend", and secondly that purpose was far from served. I rest my case.
In those days I don’t think the electoral college members were bound by law to vote for the president that state-run popular votes determine are the state’s choice. Of course the purpose isn’t being served if the men and women of the college aren’t allowed to act on their own.
The original intent wasn't even that the president was democratically elected. In most states today the electoral college members aren't bound by law to vote for the winner of the state's general election. The original intent was that each state government sent their chosen electoral college members and then it was up to them to figure out who to vote for from that point onwards.
To be clear, I am not favoring the originalist interpretation. I don't think the founders of the constitution were god-sent. They were smart people, and we can put our own heads to work to create electoral systems congruent with our values.
PS: I like how you said "men and women" there. If we go by the founders, women wouldn't be part of the electoral college.
But we aren't talking about why it was designed this way, we are talking about why there are 538 electors, and why the popular vote total doesn't matter at all. The total amount of electors is a sum of the total house reps + total senate -- appears to be a blend of both systems to me.
You said "It's an election of a minority leader.", but that isn't the case by any measure that actually matters, however upsetting it may be for you.
Whatever case you are resting has nothing to do with how many total electors there are, and neither does Hamilton's opinion.
On one hand, I agree with you that the impact of states with high voting power is somewhat mitigated by the fact that they're small, and the effect of the electoral college only comes into play in elections that are relatively close to begin with.
But on the other hand:
a) All recent presidential elections have been close in popular vote. And as the article points out, two of the last three presidents have won the electoral college while losing the popular vote.
b) Everyone would be appalled by any other large systematic difference in voting power, even if the overall impact was limited. Can you imagine if instead of going by state, we decided to go by income and the top 0.2% of people were given 3.6 votes each? People would lose their minds.
As for the math, I was using electoral votes divided by the voting-age population of each state in the 2010 Census. So, Wyoming is 3 EV / 0.428M = 7.0 EV/M and New York is 29 EV / 15.053M = 1.9 EV/M. If you use total population instead, you get the basically the same ratio (3.55x vs 3.64x).
This [1] is population/EC vote rather than EC vote/population, and it's slightly out of order, but it's a steady slope. There's nothing like a normal distribution for people/EC vote ratio. There's just a large range between the power of a California voter and the power of a Wyoming voter. I think this graph shows just how ridiculous this is, Rhode Island voters being inexplicably much less powerful than Connecticut voters, when arguably they're all the same metro with either Boston or NYC, and would thus count as getting just as many "visits" if candidates only visited big population hubs.
> In contrast, the Senate is thoroughly anti-democratic, unsalvagably so.
Why is that bad? The Senate represents the states, the other sovereign entities in our federal republic.
I think that a) we should amend the Constitution to eliminate the direct election of Senators and mandating that they be appointed by the state legislatures; b) amend the Constitution to apportion 1 representative per 40,000–60,000 people (yes, this would mean over 6,000 representatives); c) amend the Constitution to mandate a similar structure for the states, with each state legislature required to be bicameral, with senators appointed by the counties and independent cities and representatives elected by the people.
Note that greatly increasing the number of representatives would make the Electoral College much more democratic. I'm not terribly fond of that, but it's a price I'm willing to pay for an overall healthier republic.
The downvotes are probably from those who see your proposal as still maintaining the powers of the states. The core dogma behind abolishing the Senate is the removal of the power of the state and placing it all in the population centers.
Those aren't static numbers though. California used to have 4 electoral votes in 1850s (edit) and now they have 55 (Wyoming has always had 3, New York has 29 today down from a peak of 47 in the 1940s).
The ratio of votes per capita is relatively consistent - assuming a baseline level of votes so individual states aren't totally excluded - and is more a sign of a potential problem with the distribution not the system itself. But there's plenty of arguments which favour both ways.
Much like gerrymandering, which both sides have a long legal record of accusing the other of taking advantage of as the last two Supreme Court cases on the matter clearly demonstrates - each by the other, this seems to be a who's on the "winning" side motivation which misses the bigger picture.
In this case it's the smaller states who have been basically given a guaranteed entrance ticket to play the game, which is different than simply giving the state extra votes relative to their size. It functions almost as a social safety net which gives you a shot, not a good shot at that, but only if you'd otherwise have no other shot. If it was only per capita (even with balancing for size) the numbers would look a lot different.
> California used to have 4 electoral votes in 1950s
California had 32 electoral votes in the 1950s. You may have meant the 1850s, when California did have only 4 electoral votes. That's because California was tiny back then, with a population of under 100,000 in 1850.
The electoral votes per capita has always been heavily skewed in favor small states. While it's true that some formerly small states have grown into large states, I don't see how that's relevant.
It's relevant because the numbers could be updated, while still giving the smaller states an entry ticket, while eliminating the only valid arguments against the whole policy (high multiples which are completely disconnected from population - not only when necessary, even among the big fast growing states like Texas).
The other stuff about battleground states would have only a small connection to the electoral college, as even the small states would (still) only have a small amounts of votes, and have more to do with regional political trends.
Of course there will be push back from who ever most benefits currently. But I'm sure the political machines will learn to adapt and adjust for their new markets. There will always be enough moderates to swing both ways. Each only has to focus on the important ones, so changing who is important shouldn't hurt the parties unless they don't like having power.
Re 1850, thanks I updated my comment, I should note that doesn't change the fact they're not static.
Wyoming is a state and this country is a union of states, not acres, or arbitrary units of population. We've failed to communicate the actual point of all this, which is to make sure each state--and not population districts--get representation at the federal level. If you have a problem with all this you should be asking: why do we need states?
I don't see this point often enough. People just want to do whatever tweak to the system will get them their short term boost and damn the consequences and long-term thinking.
There's a whole body called the Senate that gives small states equal representation. As it stands, the presidency is the only elected federal office where individuals aren't elected by popular choice.
States are entities of political significance, regardless of how many people happen to live in them. This is a union of states, and states get a say. If you don't believe that consider advocating for the replacement of states with population based administrative districts.
This is such an overwhelmingly stupid statement. It's effectively "if you don't like it, then leave."
Wyoming is not as desirable as California in many ways. People don't want to go there. Just because it's not as desirable doesn't mean it should get arbitrary favoritism when it comes to elections.
Second its only your perception that it receives favoritism, because of your mistaken interpretive frame that sees electoral college electors as being about individual citizens instead of as a compromise between two sets of stakeholders: states and the citizens living in them. Until you recognize that states themselves have an interest in Federal elections, you will continue to misunderstand the role the EC plays.
Fairness isn't a simple concept. There can be many mutually incommensurable notions of fairness. Unfortunately, partisans pick and choose those that suit their interests best.
Just as an example from domestic life. Consider a family of 4 individuals with different caloric requirements. One notion of fairness would split a pizza pie into four equal portions, but another would split it in proportion to their caloric needs. Getting everyone to agree on the notion that should be operant is hard because each choice implies winners and losers.
If you don't think states interest in Federal elections shouldn't count for anything, say so, and then give some thought about whether you think states should just be replaced with population based administrative districts that change with the census.
It also makes many votes useless. I live in California, it has gone to a Democrat every time since I've been a voter. For president, I can't affect California, and I can't affect the national election either, due to the EC. Not that I'd vote for Trump, but there's no practical reason to vote for president in that circumstance.
Swing states shift, though. California was basically solid red from the 1950s through the 1980s. Until 2016, few people would have called Wisconsin or Michigan "swing states" judging from their voting in the past few elections. People move, demographics change.
This is true, but I’m not sure having your vote count for a decade, then not count, then count again is all that much better. Note that going in to an election, the potential battleground states are usually known.
Some states haven’t been swing states for a long time, too.
I'm not sure what the correct answer is. Winning a national contest is always going to be about coalition-building all said and done. Trump changed the calculus on the traditional GOP coalition (going after unions -- once considered a Democrat lock), and won states he "shouldn't" have. Coalitions line up with states in a lot of cases. If Democrats started pandering to farmers (I can see this happening), the midwest might look different.
I don't see this as a "states not counting" problem as much as the issues that come up in national elections affect different populations in different ways.
If there was a national popular vote, there would still be people who feel disenfranchised because the candidates don't see their chosen issues as vital to their coalition.
I'm not sure that's actually true. There was a great graphic a few years back that showed party allegiance by state over time. You could see how most states used to be fairly split between both parties and how they frequently swung from party to party between elections. However, in the 80s or so many states started to align more closely with one party. Given the duration for which that has been going on, I wonder if that's the natural end state of a defacto two party system.
> You could see how most states used to be fairly split between both parties and how they frequently swung from party to party between elections.
That was a short-term artifact of political realignments starting in the 1930s (New Deal Coalition) and—before that one had fully stabilized—1960s (Civil Rights).
Those overlapping realignments settled down into s new relatively stable alignment by the late 1980s; before the realignments most states were much stronger one-party states than the solid-red or solid-blue states today, and sometimes the second state party, if it existed at all, wasn't even the other major national party (Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party is a remnant of that: prior to the New Deal coalition, which it became part of and eventually joined the Democratic Party, the party competing with the dominant Republican Party in Minnesota was the Farmer-Labor Party, which was not associated with the Democrats.)
> That was a short-term artifact of political realignments starting in the 1930s (New Deal Coalition) and—before that one had fully stabilized—1960s (Civil Rights).
To be fair, there were only four elections in the previous 70 years that resulted in a Democrat winning. I think that avoiding something that like in the future is probably worthwhile, which is a minor argument against the electoral college based on past results.
> California was basically solid red from the 1950s through the 1980s
Suddenly swung in 1992, and has been seen as solid blue since—not really an example of swing states switching as a state rapidly moving from Republican lock to Democratic lock.
California was never "solidly red". Aside from President, it's been mostly blue, as a simple look at the makeup of the state legislature shows (it's been mostly Democrat controlled for over two generations).
> Phase transition is a natural outcome of all-or-nothing elector pledging.
Don't see why it would be. Obviously a flip will flip all of a states electors if it did all or nothing assignment, as most do, but sudden flip from consistent red to consistent blue in Presidential elections isn't a product of that. Might be a product of winner take all elections at other levels (e.g., state house, with the majority flipping reshaping donor alignments in the state and leading major voices to switch sides) but that's not what happened in CA either; the legislature didn't flip from solid Red to solid Blue at a time that would be consistent with it being a driving factor for the Presidential shift.
Why aren't we talking about the Cambridge Analytica scandal example? Another issue of the Electoral colleges is that a candidate could target only a few amount of people (70k according to the documentary) for changing the course of the election.
Even if this has been fixed by Facebook. Shouldn't it be considered as a major flaw of the election system?
Why is it that the Cambridge Analytica "hack" is even an issue? The reason is because the data was used to get an "evil" republican elected. The exact same tactics were used to get Obama elected, and nobody seems to be complaining.
Indeed, the system Harper Reed built for the 2012 Obama campaign was widely hailed at the time for how it personalized campaigns to each individual voter, by building a big data store about every voter in the US:
"Those apps include sophisticated analytics programs like Dreamcatcher, a tool developed to "microtarget" voters based on sentiments within text."
"All of the data collected through various volunteer interactions and other outreach found its way into Narwhal's data store, where it could be mined for other purposes. Much of the data was streamed into Dreamcatcher and into a Vertica columnar database cluster used by the analytics team for deep dives into the data."
One aspect of the Electoral College is that it's a built in corruption firewall.
Right now, if an election system is "compromised" (electronically, corrupt officials, etc), it will affect that precinct, the local elections, possibly the state-wide races, and rarely the Presidential.
With a simple majority vote, a compromise anywhere in the system - adding or removing votes - impacts the system as a whole.
Most of which are Parliamentary systems which are very similar structurally.
In those cases, you don't directly elect a Prime Minister either. You elect an MP in little winner-take-all elections and then the party (or coalition) gets together and elect the PM from their own ranks.
It's not quite 1:1 with an Electoral College but it's not direct democracy either.
Yes, it’s not new to manipulate people, the low cost for high efficiency is new. Clinton had almost 3M more votes than Trump.
It would be much more expensive to manipulate 3M (1% us population, 1.2% voters), rather than 70k (0.02% pop, 0.028% voters).
If winning the election is about properly manipulating 0.04% of the voters, that’s very scary and not working as initially designed.
Really, whether or not it's new or old is a complete red herring. As is whether or not it has historically helped on candidate or another. The issue is whether or not it's a vunlerability.
Complaining that "it's always been that way" is like saying, "We've been pwned that way for a decade. Why should we fix that security hole?"
I find it incredible that people don't look at elections with the same critical eye that they do software security systems. The other cool thing is that all of your candidates for president are chosen by proxy vote! So as long as you can subvert the people who have all the proxy votes, you can choose who can even enter the election! Heck, you can stuff up both sides just for giggles. How much is the POTUS worth? Surely billions.
in some states electors are legally bound to vote for the popular majority from the state. I thought I had read this was true almost universally though it appears some states don't have this rule.
Maybe if Clinton had bothered to campaign in the Rust Belt, she would have won. Trump's politics was aimed at industrial workers, and Clinton thought she didn't need them to win. She bet wrong.
> If you live in Wyoming, the electoral college does not help you, because your vote is secure.
For now. But if Wyoming doesn't like what happens with Republican party, it can change. There's a huge inertia in large parties, so probably won't happen overnight, but it's not a law of nature. From what I've heard, one of the reasons 2016 election went the way it did because Democrats considered certain states (not Wyoming) "secure" and didn't campaign there, while Republicans did, and turned out they've been not as secure as it seemed. The margins of victory in many states are not that wide, and the margins of uncertainty in any polls are wide, so it's never certain forever.
It's just that in several states where they thought Clinton had a small lead, she lost. Meanwhile, there were no states they thought Trump had a small lead but he lost.
The comparative judgments (Wisconsin is easier for Clinton to win than North Carolina, which is easier than Alabama) were right. The absolute judgments (Clinton will win Wisconsin) were wrong.
If you had gone back in time and told Clinton's team "all the polls are too positive for you, you don't have a safety margin" they'd have known that Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania were at risk.
> "all the polls are too positive for you, you don't have a safety margin" they'd have known
On my memory, this is not the first time polls tilt left. Politicians should have already learned that this is possible, especially with such an unorthodox candidate as Trump.
My point also was that not many states are really "safe", yet less - forever. Relatively yes, some are further from the middle than others, but it's not a static picture and it's not a product of some permanent law but only current configuration which should never be taken for granted.
The electoral college most certainly favors small states but I agree with you it also creates battleground states and I agree that is the more important effect.
It’s not a matter of whether battleground states deserve special protection, it’s a matter of whether or not the battleground states in any given election serve as a good representation of the nation as a whole? Are they a better representation than a popular vote which would consistently favor coastal urban centers?
Is visiting really the problem? I get the impression that issues that are huge for non-swing states, like housing, can be easily ignored despite the fact that they impact millions more people.
Here is a fun thought exercise: why group by state?
A person's political views is not just shaped by where they live, but their race, gender, sexual orientation, education etc etc. If "location" is just another column in the table properties that describe a person, what if we had a "college" or "senate" based on some other property of an individual?
How about we give all citizens who identify as straight 2 seats and all those who identify as gay 2 seats in this imaginary senate?
Or a college roughly based on race, but for some reason the smaller races are grossly over represented?
How about by religion? As an atheist myself, I'd love to get in on some of that sweet over-representation-of-minorities mojo that Ohioans get.
My point is, cut this along any other descriptive property of an individual other than what state they live in and you get all sorts of colorful results that I'm sure would appall all the conservative proponents of the Electoral college or the Senate.
Is state or location really the most important a property when it comes to deciding whether or not you are a "minority?" When it comes to national issues, do you think a gay black man in Nebraska has more in common with a striaght white man in Nebraska? Or another gay black man in New York? Why does the one in Nebraska get to be an overrepresented minority, yet the one in New York get to be an underrepresented majority?
It is not there to protect small states, it is there to protect from super large states. As in, no matter how big you get or how lopsided your political apparatus is the state cannot absolutely tip the balance.
a popular vote presidency would be a disaster for the US, the illusion that votes matter would be completely destroyed at that level. it is like the difference of comparing a state only lottery to the multi state lottery
a popular vote presidency would be a disaster for the US, the illusion that votes matter would be completely destroyed at that level.
This is completely false. Having a popular vote would at least adequately represent, mathematically, the demographics of the US citizenry and what they want in a candidate. Now, FPTP is not the greatest voting scheme, I would prefer some sort of rank choice voting, but at least you would get a statistical representation of the populace with FPTP.
The electoral college is such an antiquated, outdated system that only favors fringe views.
Yes. You don't need to abolish the whole college, just do this. And states can do it on their own and immediately, no need to sign a pledge only takes effect at some possible future time.
The problem with this, and with the pledge, is that it requires the states that benefit from the current system to voluntarily decrease their own influence. Which won't happen.
Alternatively, have each congressional district elect its own elector instead of a statewide pool. It gets even more interesting if the ballot only shows the potential electors’ names, without any party affiliation.
What I find interesting is this only came up after Trump got elected. What this says is it’s not about how “broken” the electoral college is and more so trying to elect more liberal presidents, since the densely populated areas tend to hive mind. We would have essentially 2 states voting in the new president, and both of these states are very liberal. Why didn’t this come up during Obama? This is an attempt at the liberal elite to get rid of a system that stops them from winning 100% of the time. This is how civil wars are started
Furthermore: Ohio is the single strongest predictor of the presidential election winner. Ohio is the only state where the local winner has matched the overall winner since 1960.
Very few people care if a candidate visits their state. I know I don't and I would be hard-pressed to list a single person that does. All I care about is if they're willing to answer questions directly and if their policies match my general ideas.
In other words: if a candidate really wants to spend their whole campaign in Ohio, I could give a shit. Go for it.
Debates over the electoral college tend to conflate two different things. The original purpose of the electoral college was a compromise between those who wanted the president directly elected, and those who wanted Congress to elect the president. While very small states have a modest edge as a result of using the number of members of Congress to decide the number of electors, the real purpose of the system is to add a layer of indirection to the election of the President, where the states have a say in their capacity as states.
That layer of indirection continues to exist today. Article II provides that “each state shall appoint” electors “in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” So Minnesota could decide to have the state legislature appoint its electors, without a popular vote. (That would raise the importance of state government elections, which might be a good thing.)
At the same time, that layer of indirection could exist even in a purely proportional system. You could assign electoral votes based on population or number of house members.
So the debate over getting rid of the electoral college actually involves two different issues. Should the number of electors be proportional? And should we reduce the independent status of the states even more by taking away their intermediary role in electing the President?
The founding fathers did not predict that a few states would become hyper-partisan and stop giving EC votes proportionally. The few states, early on, did this because they were decidedly red/blue and wanted a bigger say in who is president. A bunch of other states wound up following suit to level the playing field.
Now, we have winner-takes-all for almost every state. Now, politicians don't spend time pandering for votes they already have locked.
Alexander Hamilton and James Madison tried that in the 1800s. Politicians benefit from the broken system (presidential campaigns are easier and cheaper because fewer voters matter) so it is hard to build support.
The NPVIC is a modern attempt to do the same thing, coordinated by mutual agreement instead of constitutional amendment.
First, the number of House reps is no longer proportionate to the population. Second, the layer of indirection as it exists today does nothing. Electors aren’t free to choose a president. They in most cases must elect the person they pledged to elect and if they don’t they instantly get replaced by a new elector who will. What purpose does that serve? Seems to me like we should either buck up and actually allow these people to elect a president, or abolish the whole institution as it currently is a farce.
First, the number of House reps is no longer proportionate to the population.
Yes they are. Each house district has about 750,000 people. You get a bit of deviation because states don't necessarily have a precise multiple of 750k people. Also we only redraw districts every 10 years, so things have drifted a bit since 2010.
the largest is Montana's at large district with 1,050,493 and the smallest is Rhode Island 2 with 520,389. I tried to find a full list but couldn't with a few minutes of Googling. I'm a little surprised that Wikipedia doesn't have a page on this.
Perils of the fact that districts are confined to state borders so you've gotta round up or down for some states.
It's also just that at the extremes we have house districts representing just over one million people and just over half a million people. 750k +/- 50% isn't great.
You think adding more people to the room in an already-dissonant chamber will make thing more coherent? We moved to a modified republic precisely because a huge-scale town meeting isn't practical.
Hmm. I'd say the biggest argument I could see is that it would result in less stupid bills, e.g. fewer "bridges to nowhere". Maybe less federal bureaucracy. You probably shouldn't really be able to pass something if you can't convince at least 15,001 Americans. On the other hand, logistics would be an insane challenge, and you'd have a huge issue with the inability to have an actual in-person debate. Also, who wants to pay 30,000 people six figures a year? We'd have to stop paying them for it to be practical.
For reference, the current wage is $174,000/yr (a stupidly-high amount). $174,000 * 30,000 = $5,220,000,000. I'm severely disinclined to pay over five billion dollars per year (plus additional logistics costs) for pencil-pushers to sit around deliberating what bureaucratic idiocy they will next hand down from on high.
As a counter argument I say the place to skimp out on payment isn't in the people making our democracy 30k is a bit OTT in my opinion but 5 billion isn't that much in the grand scheme of the US budget coming in at just .1% of our current spending.
There's loads of ways to solve it though. Let them form groups and pool money to pay for analysts and staff as blocks or beef up the OMB to provide better faster analysis of bills and let them use those. The pooling makes a lot of sense to me because with groups that large you're going to have to form shared interest groups just to have reasonable length debates.
Not if actual experts get elected. With 30,000 reps you are going to get a wide variety of people elected many of who will know something about the world outside of politics.
If you include the staff there already are 30,000 reps, just that most of them are not elected. The current system is more like having 450 mini corporations running the place.
Set expansion rules so the number of reps is always equal to the cubed root of the population rounded down. They would provide adequate scaling rules imo.
If the UK can stomach well over 600 MPs the so can we.
> Second, the layer of indirection as it exists today does nothing. Electors aren’t free to choose a president. They in most cases must elect the person they pledged to elect and if they don’t they instantly get replaced by a new elector who will. What purpose does that serve? Seems to me like we should either buck up and actually allow these people to elect a president, or abolish the whole institution as it currently is a farce.
That is not correct. There has just been a ruling that the states cannot impose these sorts of restrictions on the process already delineated in the US Constitution.
>Article II provides that “each state shall appoint” electors “in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” So Minnesota could decide to have the state legislature appoint its electors, without a popular vote.
Technically correct but as per the 13th (?) amendment, when a state denies any male citizen aged 18 or over and not a felon the right to vote, said states representation in the electoral college and congress is recalculated as though they didn't have said residents. Therefore if Minnesota went through with this they would have no more than the baseline 3 electoral votes.
> Section 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.
I’m not sure if this question has ever been addressed, but I’m not sure this requires a popular vote for electors, but rather if there is such a popular vote the suffrage has to include all adult males.
I had believed the original reason was that politicians could not travel to each district/county/state and that it was easier to get a small, informed, educated group together than a large, unfocused, sometimes uneducated group together.
Let the states that will never get their way in a "fixed" elector college, secede.
To mess with the electoral college in this point in time - when its basically 49% vs 51% - and at such a level of divide in the country is not exactly a testament to how empathetic the two sides are. It would be a disaster.
Everyone thinks Trump himself is the problem but this awful idea to change the goalposts literally to win elections would do way more damage than Trump could ever do but I guess it doesn't come in an 'easy to hate' package with agenda serving talking points, etc.
I don't know where these idiots think this whole "OK - we'll follow these laws, but not those" thing is going but it is incredibly damaging and at the moment only one side is picking and choosing which laws to obey and not obey (then writing publicly about it) but soon enough the other side will be picking and choosing which laws to ignore.
Get your helmets on once we are on _that_ slippery slope.
By your logic there can never be a suitable time for democratic reform. The current political situation can only get worse until the united states becomes more democratic or more authoritarian.
That doesn’t follow. Even in recent history, most Presidents command large electoral vote majorities. In my life time, 7 of 10 elections ended in a more than 60-40 margin in the electoral college, including both Obama wins.
What difference does that make? It's either moving the goal posts so your team can win if they're out of power or it's entrenching your team's position if they have power. Either way is an outrage to someone, and so any reform comes at the wrong time.
I took the OP’s argument to mean that, even if you can get a consensus that the electoral college should be changed, people should hesitate to do so where close races mean that the change will be outcome determinative for particular races. My point is that we still routinely have candidates winning massive electoral college majorities. If people otherwise were in agreement that a change was warranted (note that more than 50% of republicans supported abolishing the electoral college as recently as 2012), there are still opportunities to change the system where it won’t change the result of the current election.
This movement predates Donald Trump by decades, I don’t really think you can paint it in that light UNLESS you are putting him up as a strawman, as the legislator quoted in the article clearly was.
> Let the states that will never get their way in a "fixed" elector college, secede.
Why has every one abandoned the idea of federalism? The whole point was that you could have your way and I could have mine; we only had to agree on the bare minimum tasks which absolutely had to be handled at the federal level.
If California wants socialized medicine and Texas does not, fine. Why can't they do it on the state level? I see no reason. This has the double benefit of allowing experimenting with different solutions before committing on a national scale.
This shouldn't be a "red state/blue state" issue. The only reason why it would be is if you are hellbent on ramming your positions down the throats of those with whom you disagree. What so many forget is that when the other side gets power, it will do the same to you. The Democrats, for instance, spent years centralizing federal authority in President Obama so he could abuse it and are now surprised when President Trump abuses it too. Maybe if we just invested less power in the executive, both sides would be happier.
It makes sense to handle the taxes for something like healthcare on the national level because people aren't going to renounce their IS citizenship to avoid their tax obligation, but they may move to a different state.
But if I want to move states and forego both the costs and benefits of socialized medicine, why would some one care? Why make some one who does not wish to work under that system do so? Again, the only reason is because you wish to force your position down some one else's throat via the tyranny of the majority.
> the real purpose of the system is to add a layer of indirection to the election of the President, where the states have a say in their capacity as states.
The real purpose of the system was to balance the interests of states who had as many slaves as free people with the interests of states who would have dominated the legislature if representation were determined only by the number of citizens within the state.
It's not about division of power between rural/urban or big states/small states. The Electoral College is about buffering purely democratic power. The President doesn't represent "the people." He/she represents the interests of the states. The Legislative Branch represents the will of the people (most directly through the House of Representatives). One of the biggest problems is vesting too much power and importance in the Executive, which was never intended. Throw the balance of power out of whack, and we get these conversations (the President has to represent "the people" and therefore should be elected by popular vote)
I wish someone with $$ would start plastering this message everywhere the absurd "get rid of the elctoral college" debate comes up. We are not a democracy, seriously no one wants a democracy of 300 million plus. We are a federation of states that is supposed to have most of the control in their region and sacrifice a little bit of control to the federal government for purposes of defense and commerce. Your "democracy" should be your state legislature, but sadly authoritarians of the past have taken that away.
Your argument seems confused to me, but maybe I don’t quite understand, can you elaborate? We do have state level democracy. The electoral college’s purpose is solely for presidential elections, not for local elections. Why shouldn’t we have a democracy for presidential elections? Your reasons given (local control) don’t apply to federal elections. Even with the electoral college, we’re pretty close to democratic representation for president anyway, and the discrepancy between what we have, a federal republic, and a pure democracy doesn’t serve the same purpose that it used to. So why should we keep it? Why is the proposal to get rid of the electoral college “absurd”? What do you mean about authoritarians taking away state level democracy?
The structure of the Federal government is fundamentally geared towards mediating the relationships between the various states, as that was its original purpose. Actual governance of the populace was the purview of state government.
Over time, however, decisions about domestic law have increasingly been made at the Federal level. At this point, the interstate commerce clause in the Constitution is used to justify almost any regulation that the Federal government wants to pass. When that doesn’t work, availability of Federal tax money is made contingent on states aligning their laws with whatever national policy is.
Also, the legislature has been ceding its rule-making authority to the executive by passing broadly-worded legislation and leaving the details to administrative rules committees that work for the executive.
I suspect that ‘vturner is suggesting the correct fix is to shift the overall balance of power back towards the more democratic parts of government instead of reforming the election process of the government’s chief clerk.
Thanks for insightful comments. Its sometime easy to forget that USA means union of states. Each state has a freedom to create its own laws within the limits of constitution to satisfy needs of its population. The way I see it, different states present different philosophy and lifestyle. People are free to get attached to the one they feel most aligned. President is supposed to be representing this union of states, not just the major population centers.
Thank you for the very reasonable and rational explanation! That does broaden my interpretation of vturner’s comment.
Your comment seems broadly true and open minded as well. I have a couple of questions, possibly from a devil’s advocate perspective, purely for the sake of discussion because I’m curious:
When you say the government was originally geared to mediate the states and that real governance was supposed to be states, what does the Supremacy Clause in the constitution mean to you? It was there originally from the start, and it declares the federal government the winner of conflicting state and federal laws.
Second, while I am personally a fan of states’ rights in a bunch of specific scenarios, it makes little sense to me to talk vaguely about who should be in control of most laws without a specific list of regulations in mind. Where can I find a list of federal laws that are broadly viewed to be overreach by most people, that most people agree should be in state control?
Acknowledging that there is politics here, that it’s a fight over control, and your point that the Federal government is leveraging tax money, is it possible that the natural order of things is for laws to drift in the federal direction anyway - as travel across state boundaries has become faster and faster, as the internet blurs the lines, as state laws individually become closer together, as we see more needs for consistent standards nationally, etc.? When the constitution was written it took a minimum of days to even communicate with another state, let alone spend money, purchase goods, or visit. The geographic, financial, and communication boundaries between states has literally almost disappeared compared to what it used to be.
Unfortunately, Aside from identifying general trends, I haven’t looked into the issues enough to hold any strong opinions, nor am I in a position to cite any specifics without significant research. I think you may be right about increased interconnectedness naturally leading to a larger federal role in everyday governance.
As far as the supremacy clause goes, it’s necessary for the treaty to work. The states are agreeing to give up some of their sovereign rights to be executed by the federal government instead, in the interests of the union. The bulk of the Constitution describes exactly those rights that the states are giving up, and this clause confirms that they can’t pass legislation to opt out of individual federal decisions they don’t like that fall within those bounds. Without it, the federal government would in practice only be able to make suggestions— a situation that led to bankruptcy under the Articles of Confederation.
I’m actually more concerned about the shift in power from the legislature to the executive. As the role of the federal government has grown, it feels like every executive agency has grown its own miniature legislature and judiciary that are primarily beholden to the executive. Agency regulations are law, so why aren’t they drafted and approved by an arm of the relevant congressional committee?
This exactly. If the issue is people feeling/being disenfranchised, changing how we elect the President isn't going to help. It just reinforces the idea that we're a monarchy and the job of the rest of the government is to do the will of the President. We can do better than this!
The Presidential horse race every 4 years is mostly for television. Federalism works because you want the decisions that affect your life the most to have the most direct accountability.
because legitimate government is based on the consent of the governed? Supreme Court justices are picked by popularly elected Senators.
It's not even direct democracy, its a representative democracy. Except in the case of the presidency we're not even allowed to directly pick our representative in the executive branch.
Senators were legitimized through popular elections since before the whole body was appointed via backroom deals with state legislatures, and have been popularly elected for over 100 years.
Okay, I read the sentence again, and I appreciate you reading my comment and responding to me, but I honestly don’t know what you’re trying to tell me. Maybe you could elaborate?
The 10th amendment says that when there isn’t already a constitutional directive or a conflicting state law, then either the states or the people can make their own new rules, right?
The electoral college is a constitutional directive, but are you saying you’re favor of an amendment abolishing the electoral college, and suggesting the 10th amendment provides grounds for “the people” to democratically elect a president?
> We are not a democracy, seriously no one wants a democracy of 300 million plus.
I do. This sounds much better than a federation of states with weird layers of indirection based on borders drawn by historical accident or anachronistic geographic boundaries like rivers.
A federation would be fine if it was a proper one. One where cities have an equal position against their state inasmuch as they represent their residents and those residents have more say over the state government as a result. Today, we have a dated system which refuses to update its political infrastructure where it's needed. Now, more than ever, there's a need to make more direct levers of power to the citizens of a given location and less power to the technocrats and bureaucrats which 'represent' them.
Do you think any reform is ill-advised? What would for instance be wrong with giving each state 1 vote in the EC? Upon naive inspection, that would at least get rid of battleground/swing states somewhat.
We've been giving up control to the federal government because more often than not, the local and state governments have failed [1]. Political corruption, corporate interests etc somehow don't just vanish and go away when you give power to the states.
There's a balance to be made between federal and state government powers. And ultimately the electoral college is one of the things that needs to go, because it unfairly tips the system in favor of extremely rural areas whom influence policy that then directly harm those living in more urban environments.
The point isn't that corruption goes away when power is given to the states, the point is that the state is easier to protest than the federal government. I can get to my state capital in ~4 hours of driving, but it would take me >40 hours to get to DC. The electoral college is better than straight democracy.
It should be obvious by now that if that were the case, scenarios like what happened in Flint, Michigan should've ended with Rick Snyder in jail and more action taken.
And in cases like these, the federal government is needed in order to apply some culpability to times when the local government behaves negligently. Not to mention this only really works if the state government actually cares about local issues, otherwise you end up with cases such as states vying to ban gay marriage because there's a tyranny of the majority at the local state level and a tyranny of the minority at the federal level.
It's a lose-lose situation because then the rural votes dictate not only the things within their state but the things that are completely outside of their purview.
> the federal government is needed in order to apply some culpability to times when the local government behaves negligently.
And who will apply culpability when the federal government behaves negligently? Creating a higher institution to address the issue just shifts the problem of apply culpability to an institution that you have even less chance of influencing.
The answer is that we have a system of checks and balances in the federal government which are meant to ensure that one branch doesn't overshadow another. The states and the electoral college were supposed to add another layer of said balance, but what they've done is shifted power further towards the federal government advancing rural interests.
Many of those rural areas could not survive without the federal government's aid because they already suffer from dwindling infrastructure and population. Now if you want to break apart the federal government entirely from the equation, then you would also have to agree to let those rural areas die out instead of being propped up through subsidy and taxes from the urban taxpayer's pocket. Otherwise you would be arguing that not only do the rural states get to dictate policy, but they also get to benefit from the GDP generated by the urban states. Why is it fair then, for the federal government to give preferential treatment?
This assumes that states in America have some sort of distinct cultural/political interests, divided along state lines. This isn't really the case. For example there are no significant cultural differences between North Dakota and South Dakota. The dividing line there is pretty arbitrary.
Similarly, some places that have very significant cultural/political differences are lumped together, like the Bay Area and the Central Valley in California.
Your argument would make more sense if applied to a political arrangement like the EU. Each member of the EU has a long history as a sovereign, distinct political and cultural entity. The border between, for example, Hungary and Romania is much much more significant than that between Colorado and Arizona.
I can't speak specifically to North and South Dakota, but having lived in both Arizona and Colorado I can tell you they absolutely are different places culturally and politically.
Speaking to your second point, even in the EU this can be the case. Look at Wallonia and Flanders in Belgium. Spain is also a good example, Catalonia especially.
I think this is anachronistic. Yes, there are places where the founders suggested that there would be a conflict between large and small states.
But can we point to any reasonably non-controversial case where the electoral college has acted to safeguard the "American republic"? There are two points here.
First: the Supreme Court has many controversies, but also many decisions that seem very compelling in hindsight. I tend to vote for Democrats, and I'm not entirely convinced I'd disagree with the median Scalia decision (I can remember agreeing with several). It seems to fare better as an anti-majoritarian institution.
Second: suppose, for the sake of argument, that you think that Trump and Bush are great examples favoring the electoral college. In both cases, the results are extremely fragile. Either candidate could've easily lost, and the electoral college was a small bit of noise in the result (some early predictions suggested Obama would win the 2012 electoral college, but lose the popular vote). The fact that a mechanism has given you results you like in two cases, by chance, is not the same as saying that it's an important constitutional safeguard.
Firstly, I'm an independent - I actually have a great deal of issues with both major parties. My concern with abandoning the college starts with this observation:
Swing states are the states most likely to have divided government. And if divided government is good for anything, it is accountability. So with the Electoral College system, when we do wind up with a razor-thin margin in an election, it is likely to happen in a state where both parties hold some power, rather than in a state controlled by one party. The Electoral college system focuses a great deal of energy on states in this condition when an election is close.
National Popular Vote (NPV) rewards states with high population - the higher the turnout, the more power for that state. Additionally, under NPV, each state would certify its own "national" vote total. What would happen when there are charges of skullduggery? Would states really trust, with no power to verify, other state’s returns?
I have other concerns as well but feel the EC system is superior. Just as an observation, the parliamentary systems of the UK, Canada, Israel, (& others) have the parliament elect the Prime Minister and likewise don't elect their leaders by popular vote.
[edited: removing poor wording about 'lax laws', seems I implied things in a FUD way that I didn't mean to]
> National Popular Vote (NPV) would reward states with lax election laws - the higher the turnout, legal or not, the more power for that state.
Illegal voting is already illegal, and states can already in theory do shady things in their elections (and some probably already do). The courts should absolutely go after this, and I don't see NPV really changing this.
> The NPV system focus the most energy on states with a high population in this condition.
Perhaps so, but the one of the main points of NPV is for state boundaries to be meaningless for campaigning. Maybe politicians should spend more time in densely populated areas because, well, there are more people there.
> What would happen when there are charges of skullduggery? Would states really trust, with no power to verify, other state’s returns?
Do states currently trust that other states hold fair elections to determine how their electors vote? I don't see any change here.
> Do states currently trust that other states hold fair elections to determine how their electors vote? I don't see any change here.
Currently the effects of any illegal voting are contained to the state that the illegal voting happened in; North Dakota's electors aren't going to vote differently even if there are 6 million illegal votes in California. With an NPV that isn't the case.
There are those on the right that think over a million of illegal votes happen (based on estimates of number of illegal aliens, surveys of if they vote, lack of voter ID in certain states, etc.)
The current system is resistant to these concerns, so the lack of a nation-wide voter ID is less important than it would be with a national popular vote.
The reason the United States are United is because there was a uniform consideration. You'll be seeing states secede as there will be no benefit for them to remain.
It would be unfortunate if states felt they wanted to secede because their citizens were given the same political influence over presidential election as citizens of other states.
> It would be California and New York deciding the fate of all other states.
No, it wouldn't.
California and New York, even voting as a 100% block, don't represent a national majority. Heck, they aren't even the two largest states (#2 is Texas.)
It wouldn't be states representing a relatively small fraction of the population dictating control of the Senate while be overly powerful in choosing the President—but they'd still control the Senate, and hereby have a veto on federal law. So why would they secede?
> You would definitely see a mass succession.
(1) you mean secession, and
(2) if the low-population, mostly low-GDP states secede and thereby sacrifice their disproportionate control over be rest of the country, that they otherwise retain as long as the Senate exists with or without also having extra Presidential vote weighting (the small, high-GDP states have largely signed on to the national popular vote, so aren't likely to secede over it), whose loss is that?
The first state to secede will be California, and rightfully so, when the Trump wave of 2020 gives the Repubs control of 37 state legislatures, and the first ridiculous Constitutional amendment focuses on who and who is not allowed to use particular public restrooms. They might be joined by other west-coast states...
Low-population states seceding from the union would fuck themselves over hard, since they are overwhelmingly the beneficiaries of federal aid. In fact, I suspect many of them would cease to be viable entities altogether.
It would be all voters across the country electing the president, regardless of which state they live in. Right now, you have state electors directly electing the President, and certain states have extremely disproportionately low influence, and those states don't even secede.
It seems unlikely to me, but perhaps some states would try to secede if the system changed such that their voters receives the same influence as every other voter in the country. I would not support that decision.
California and New York only have about 25% of Americans. Check my math, but i think that's less than a majority.
The Electoral College is apportioned by population already (with a slight bias). If California and New York had a mojority of the voters, they would already have a majority of EC votes.
California and New York also aren't monolithic. Remember: the electoral college is a lie. People in states don't actually all have the same opinions. Californians supported Trump by 40%.
Honest question: how realistic is it for small states like Wyoming to secede from US if this system changes. I strongly suspect the probability is close to impossible.
> the higher the turnout, legal or not, the more power for that state
Every actual study of the matter I've seen or heard of has shown no evidence of any significant fraudulent voting, particularly not systemic fraudulent voting. While there might be a theoretical concern about incentives here, there's a lot of problems we know are happening right now with voter suppression under the system that we have.
That context for those statements is the voter ID boogeyman, which is 100% bullshit.
Machine politics and the nonsense behind it is a form of vote fraud. While southern states have a long history of denying African Americans the ability to vote, states where county politics controls voting like New York are also problematic.
More directly, there are plenty of schemes to fraudulently get votes counted, from absentee ballot fraud in nursing homes to voting irregularities in religious communities.
From the perspective of systems security -- there are too many security vulnerabilities regardless of whether or not they are being actively exploited to centralize national elections to a couple heavily populated states. These are states that have a bad track record of internal governance, and abolishing the EC will provide ample additional motivation to abuse those vulnerabilities if they aren't already.
California recently had to be forced by lawsuit to remove 5 million invalid voter registrations. Multiple counties have more registered voters than they have age 18+ citizens. It is unclear how often these registrations were actually used to vote, but isn't it possible that ballots could be printed and filled surreptitiously for these registrations in the future?
I like your point about incentivizing high turnout (and the resulting inter-state race for turnout). I wouldn't necessarily equate it with lax election laws though.
Oregon (where I live) is blessed with vote-by-mail -- it affords high turnout with high vote verifiability. Being able to consider & research arguments on both sides of the issues and candidates in detail before voting is fantastic.
> vote-by-mail -- it affords high turnout with high vote verifiability
Even if you could verify that a given vote is counted, it's much harder to verify that the voter's choice was not made under duress, or influenced by a bribe.
There are methods for mitigating these problems (like allowing an in-person vote to override your postal vote), but these have their own issues, and I worry that becoming accustomed to vote-by-mail will increase the calls for online-voting.
Nothing you said provides an argument against equally weighting each citizen’s vote at the federal level.
States have select powers over the federal government that are specifically provided by our Constitution: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/States%27_rights. When you vote in local elections, you are in effect in control of certain outcomes within your state, as accorded by our Constitution.
The federal election determines representation for every single person in the United States and, in part, how federal governmental power is exercised on their behalf. There is no conceivable logical reason why citizens in any particular state should have more or less say in such matters than those in any other. The electoral college system is an absolute sham that deprives a significant number of people of their Constitutionally-guaranteed right to fair representation at the federal level.
I’d welcome any well-formed argument to the contrary. I’ve yet to ever hear one.
In Canada we do this because it allows more representation in minority populations provinces. Very small provinces or Quebec get slightly overrepresented in seats. Rural areas have less people per riding but greater distances makes it logical to do that. If the person who represents you has to travel 100 miles by plane to meet up with small 500 people villiages compared to walking a few blocks in a big city to reach everyone. It doesn't make sense to make them ridings/counties equal.
On that same note the 500 person community will have different needs compared to other 500 person communities in the same riding. In a big city the issues will be very similiar citywide.
"The electoral college system is an absolute sham that deprives a significant number of people of their Constitutionally-guaranteed right to fair representation at the federal level."
Yet the constitution defines the presidential election as being done by the representatives of the state's electoral college: "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors."
The NPV interstate pact may not even itself be constitutional as it ignores the Article I, Section 10 requirement that interstate compacts receive congressional consent.
I don't see how you can draw a logical equivalency here? There is one president representing every single American. There are 100 senators, each of whom represents a particular state and subset of Americans. In fact, all you've managed to do is further substantiate NPV, by rightly pointing out that there already exists a body of federal government having control of the legislative process that reflects an equal representation of states. Whether this is appropriate or not is its own separate question, unrelated to issues surrounding the electoral college.
because it's representing the states themselves in addition to the population that happen to live in them. if you don't like all this you really should ask: why have states at all?
> National Popular Vote (NPV) rewards states with high population - the higher the turnout, the more power for that state
Without EC presidential candidates wouldn't be focused on states at all, they would be focused on large demographics of the US population, which is exactly what they should be focused on.
> National Popular Vote (NPV) rewards states with high population - the higher the turnout, the more power for that state.
Well, it rewards people who vote. If more people in my state turn out to vote for the candidate that I didn't vote for, and who didn't get the majority of the states votes, I and most of the people that voted in my state are not rewarded by NPV.
OTOH, getting more Democratic votes in a Red state, or more Republican votes in a Blue state suddenly makes a difference in the national outcome; national elections no longer are about doing the minimum necessary to keep a majority in party-dominated states while focussing primarily on narrow appeal to the particular perceived interests of “swing state” voters, but about getting as much support as possible nationally.
the parliamentary systems of the UK ... have the parliament elect the Prime Minister and likewise don't elect their leaders by popular vote.
This isn't totally accurate: the leader of the winning party is basically the Prime Minister. You vote for the party & leader together, you can't have one and not the other.
The system is otherwise just as broken as the US; meaning that outcomes are decided by a small number of "rural" people combined with gerrymandering.
Reward how? The electoral college system determines the election of president. How does one state being more populated matter? Votes are distributed equally across all citizens.
Look at the huge disparity towards small rural states. This is bad, but it's even worse because due to the effect of the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 (https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1901-1950/Th...) the number of Represenatives has been fixed at 435 for almost 100 years, and since the smallest number of electoral votes a state can have is 3, this makes the small states even more overpowered than they would be in a "fair" electoral college system.
Why should a voter in Wyoming have 3.71x as much weight (effectively) as mine does a North Carolinian?
What about something like a tax rebate for high voter turnouts as percentage of the state's total eligible voter population? The amount would have to be large enough to be consequential. Making it based on a percentage of population would give small states a good chance. It might also end up being an extra pressure on states to open more polling stations nearer to voters. If a percentage of total eligible voter population is skewed too far in favor towards smaller states (easier to organize, less polling stations, or whatever else), then some combination of that plus total voter turnout might be more fair. This idea might also take advantage of the love that team sports receive.
The MP's in the UK are elected by popular vote though.
I agree you would have to have the same standard for voter registration.
One way of improving the current system (from an outsiders pov) would be to make electors all faithless and having parties switch to One member one vote and do a way with registering.
I want to point out this article was written in May, and is a bit out of date. For example, Nevada (heavily mentioned in the article) never adopted the National Popular Vote compact because the governor vetoed the bill after the legislature passed it.
> Unsurprisingly, given that almost every state government to pass the National Popular Vote compact was completely controlled by Democrats,
It kinda feels like this part keeps getting glossed over when people talk about this. I don't think those signing on have really thought it through, and are just reacting to the 2016 election results. Of course the party that lost wants to change the system in a way that, that time, they may have ended up winning - especially with all the open hate for Trump.
It's worth noting that the same thing happened to the Democrats in 2000, and hadn't happened in the US at that point for over 100 years.
Looked at from the perspective of the Democratic party: they have won the popular vote 4 out of the last 5 elections, but only won the presidency twice. It's not surprising the party's frustration with the Electoral College would continue to grow.
Interestingly in 2008 Hillary Clinton won the popular vote to be the Democratic Nominee but did not become the Nominee. The Democrats criticize the EC, but also don't mind using a form of it internally.
Super delegates have never decided a Democratic primary, and Obama got more votes in 2008 (the official tally excludes Washington, Michigan, and Florida, who went for Obama but didnt publish vote tallies)
The delegate system is proportional, not winner-take-all, it is utterly unlike the electoral college.
The NPVIC was introduced into state legislators in 2006, so it's pretty hard to write off as just a reaction to Trump. And while there certainly is a lot of open hate for Trump, it's the fact that he lost the popular vote and won anyway that kicked this back up again. The Bush election in 2000 was the first time that'd happened since 1888. Having it happen again just 16 years later -- and with Clinton winning the popular vote by a bigger margin than Gore did in 2000 or Cleveland did in 1888! -- and this is to be expected.
And, sure, it benefits the Democrats -- but given that population trends over the last few decades have all been about migration to urban areas from rural ones, I think it's at least worth asking whether keeping the electoral college and giving ever fewer voters a disproportionately ever-greater say over the country is truly what we want.
If another national election goes the "lose popular election, win election anyway" route within the next few cycles, this is going to start getting a lot of noise around it.
An argument I heard recently against this is, if abolished, politicians won't have incentives to campaign in rural territories, and they won't be accountable to rural territories. That basically makes sense. The EC is the only thing that really gives rural territories any stake, as the majority population has shifted to larger urban centers.
People who want to get away from the big cities and live a different kind of life with different priorities (and different legislative interests), shouldn't be totally shut out, should they? Even though I live in a giant urban area, I wouldn't want to feel pressured to due so due to lack of political stake if I move elsewhere.
The counterpoint to that is that the Electoral College has transferred so much power to rural areas that we are no longer an actual representative democracy.
For example, a vote in Wyoming counts 3.6 times more than a vote in California.[1] The people in California are not represented in the Presidential election; it would be more accurate to say that one-quarter of the people in California are represented.
"Rural issues" do not deserve special protection if that protection results in a tyranny of the minority. People are choosing to actively leave rural communities and congregate in urban areas; this does not on its face mean that their concerns have become less important.
Moreover, people congregating in urban areas tend to be center- and left- leaning, so skewing the Presidential vote towards urban areas also results in US politics as a whole shifting to the right. It also results in a judiciary that is more conservative than the population as a whole.
There are only eight states in America that have more people than Los Angeles county.[2] Why are the concerns of the people living in LAC less important than the concerns of the people in Nevada or Arkansas? What is it about their geography that makes their issues unimportant?
> "Rural issues" do not deserve special protection if that protection results in a tyranny of the minority.
"Tyranny of the minority" gets this issue exactly backwards. The problem the Electoral College was designed to mitigate is a tyranny of the majority.
> Why are the concerns of the people living in LAC less important than the concerns of the people in Nevada or Arkansas? What is it about their geography that makes their issues unimportant?
Why do any of these concerns need Federal intervention to solve? Why can't LAC and Arkansas and Nevada manage their own affairs? I understand rare emergencies like natural disasters require pooling national resources, but everyone talks now as if no locality at all can survive from day to day without Federal benefits.
> "Tyranny of the minority" gets this issue exactly backwards. The problem the Electoral College was designed to mitigate is a tyranny of the majority.
The point they're making is that while it was designed to prevent a tyranny of the majority, it goes too far and results in a tyranny of the minority.
> Why do any of these concerns need Federal intervention to solve? Why can't LAC and Arkansas and Nevada manage their own affairs? I understand rare emergencies like natural disasters require pooling national resources, but everyone talks now as if no locality at all can survive from day to day without Federal benefits.
No one mentioned federal benefits. We are talking about the relative voting power of a voter in one area versus another in the presidential election. Let's not get distracted here.
Sure you did; you said LAC voters don't have their concerns addressed as well because they are part of a large, populous state whose EC votes count for less per capita. My question is, if LAC is capable of managing its own affairs, why does it care?
In other words, you're assuming that the President's job is to "take care of everyone's concerns", so everyone needs an equal vote to elect the President. That seems to me to be absurd. The President's job is to faithfully execute the laws and to make executive decisions about national needs like defense and foreign policy. It's not to address the individual concerns of every voter or the local concerns of every city, county, etc.
Similar remarks apply to the Federal government more generally. The fact that everyone takes it for granted now that the Federal government is supposed to address everyone's concerns is a sign of how corrupt and inefficient our system has become. Everyone judges their Senators and Representatives, not according to how well they take care of national issues, but how much pork they send home.
Even when you take for granted--and we shouldn't, but just for funsies we will--that the whole point of the thing is to make executive decisions about national needs...why the heck should Nevada get a bigger say than Los Angeles County?
It has become evident that the federalist experiment has failed; because an integrated modern society cuts across state lines, while land can't vote and people matter more than land. Everything else is a side effect, no matter how tightly it's clung to by parties whose high-minded rhetoric, if we're being frank, is honored more in the breach than the observance as they look for low-status, low-power people to cudgel, using the guise of federalism to make it easier to do in their own little pond.
> It has become evident that the federalist experiment has failed
Not so much failed, but massively misaligned after the civil war. The nation made many compromises at every level for slave power, and should have renegotiated everything afterwards.
Agreed. I should have said that American federalism has failed; that misalignment is endemic to America--it goes back as far as the Missouri bleeping Compromise, and that's just the part labeled "America"--and is probably unfixable.
It doesn't though. Do you really believe voting is the most powerful way to influence lawmakers? There generally is far more wealth, power, and influence in population centers. How can you feel like some of the most powerful cities in the world are getting an unfair shake?
> why the heck should Nevada get a bigger say than Los Angeles County?
To start with, states are the compositional unit of the United States. If Los Angeles County wants to become its own state, there is a process to do that.
But to answer the correct question: Nevada has the same say as California, both being states.
> In other words, you're assuming that the President's job is to "take care of everyone's concerns", so everyone needs an equal vote to elect the President. That seems to me to be absurd.
Yeah you're probably right. Let's just disenfranchise more than half the population of the country. That'll give the federal government a ton of legitimacy!
> The President's job is to faithfully execute the laws and to make executive decisions about national needs like defense and foreign policy.
And we the people get to decide which candidate will do the better job. Or we should. But because of the electoral college, we don't.
> we the people get to decide which candidate will do the better job. Or we should. But because of the electoral college, we don't.
If we accept that we the people should get to directly decide, then of course the decision should be made by popular vote. But that's just assuming your conclusion.
Also, this is a different argument from the one you gave before: now you're accepting that the President's job is not to take care of everyone's concerns.
> Why do any of these concerns need Federal intervention to solve? Why can't LAC and Arkansas and Nevada manage their own affairs?
Because issues like immigration, national defense, and environmental policy are all national issues. California voters are held hostage to the preferences of the people in Nevada, even though they vastly outnumber them.
> everyone talks now as if no locality at all can survive from day to day without Federal benefits
They plainly cannot. The federal government funds a large portion of everything from infrastructure to education to healthcare, but our government structure ensures that only people in small states have a say in how those programs actually work.
Maybe your argument is going to be that they shouldn't fund those things, but the fact is that the majority of Americans disagree with you on that.
>>>The federal government funds a large portion of everything from infrastructure to education to healthcare,
Stuff that should be handled at the state and local level, with granularity specific to each state's unique geographic and demographic circumstances. I would limit the Federal-level influence to just establishing/recommending common standards (kinda like ISO standards) that multiple states can choice to implement.
Maybe if we didn't have Federal taxes, the states could charge more for additional services without over-burdening their populations. Federal income tax is one of many reasons why I consider Woodrow Wilson the worst American President ever.
If that's really true, then we as a country are screwed, because the money the federal government is spending on all this stuff comes from us. We can't pay ourselves more money than we have, and if we all get paid equally, then we're all just getting back what we paid and nothing is actually happening. So basically what you're describing is localities fighting over who gets to take money from whom. And the argument about popular vote is then just an argument that the most populous localities should be the ones taking from everyone else.
> "Tyranny of the minority" gets this issue exactly backwards. The problem the Electoral College was designed to mitigate is a tyranny of the majority.
States have representation, done universally by popular vote within those states for their representatives in Congress. (if you know any states that are an exception, feel free to add). Most of the country, and the world, experiences elections by popular vote except for a single particular position.
The Electoral College is only for the appointment of 1 person for the office of the President. It is an aberration. Even when looking at the President's ability to appoint people, many other popular vote elected representatives have the ability to appoint people too.
This aberration was from a time when the non-slave population of the United States was 1 million people, completely coastal (although those states had widely different boundaries back then which stretched deep into Appalachia), and in some of those states only the land owners could vote.
The purpose of the Electoral College was a compromise, not part of the grand wisdom and design. A compromise that has been merely tolerable and now has been stretched to its limits.
The democracy we exported throughout the whole world for the next 200 years looked at our older iteration and said "no, we'll patch that".
US Electoral College has reached its peak of tolerance, and the inability to amend it is maintained by the states that are the very reason why the electoral college is intolerable.
"experiences elections", like the surrounding part of my comment, was referring to how every other position that electors get to weigh in on are by popular vote only.
I specifically was not referring to positions that are not.
If we want to talk about Head of State selection processes, I am a fan of Switzerland's Federal Council which contains 7 heads of state that act together but represent the interests of the constituent parties, while one acts as a frontman for diplomatic purposes with other nations. It maintains professional tact privately and publicly - concept only rarely strained in Switzerland's Federal Council history - and more importantly maintains representation. A brief civil war between that collection of small counties and cities was needed to get those reforms and other forms of direct representation into their constitution.
To your arguement about why do LA residents count less. I say it's not neccesarily less. Just differently. Do you want someone who has never farmed in their lives. Probably never even picked up a shovel, have a say in the rules and regs about agriculture throughout the midwest? Same goes vice versa. Country folk who hate living in concrete jungles shouldn't make rules for city dwellers. Thus an equal vote, isn't equal. Because my one vote for some other industry I don't know isn't fair for someone who lives it.
That was the original point to electoral votes and a representative government system. It's not that the system doesn't work, it's been perverted. If we can end the gerrymandering and other political machine issues, we'd have a better system. Not perfect. But I think its steered the wrong way with political affiliation as platform rather than constituent needs.
This cuts both ways, why should someone who lives in an area with hardly any immigrants be making policy for people who live in places like LA which are full of them?
Not arguing. I did say vice versa applies to my example.
But this is the point to the whole system. It's supposed to attempt to keep everyone's needs in mind. Gov body structures were originally figured out for countries the size of... Florida. Maybe California. Thus, your nation has roughly the same "issues" and "needs". But the USA is the "same" country for 3,000 miles of driving. West and east coast Americans are not the same. New Englanders and Southerners are not the same. West coast and is not the save as Mid-westerners. Hell, even folks on the Pacific Northwest are not the same as Californians. Then you have Texans. Shit, let's not forget Hawaii and Alaskans. Different land. Different climates. WAY different industries and lifestyles. I learned this first hand since I've traveled and lived in different parts of the country every 1-2 years (roughly).
So yea. Pretending like axing the electoral college is just a simple fix that solves this super simple problem... you're out of your god damn mind.
This is somewhat balanced by representation in the other house of Congress.
It’s not only the US which has to balance rural vs urban electorates. Some are even further down the spectrum like Japan where rural areas have even larger influence than cities compared to other democracies.
But in a way it makes sense. Without people in the countryside the people in the cities would have little to eat. Most countries go to some lengths to ensure some modicum of food security/self-sufficiency.
It would be somewhat balanced if there wasn't a cap on the number of representatives and there was 1 rep per N population. But that's not the case. So even in the House there is an imbalance.
> But in a way it makes sense. Without people in the countryside the people in the cities would have little to eat. Most countries go to some lengths to ensure some modicum of food security/self-sufficiency.
This argument would be accurate if we lived in a mercantile oriented world still, but there are plenty of countries that are entirely on other countries for basic necessities. While I can sympathize with the fact that farmers have gotten the rough end of the stick from seed corporations (like Monsanto) lately and that they have been forced into incredibly thin profit margins their work isn't inherently more valuable because it results in edible objects.
There are plenty of countries out there with a net import of food like the UAE, Germany, Russian, Japan, Egypt and Venezuela - that's a pretty diverse group of varying GDP per capita and political stability so I think it's pretty safe to dismiss any concerns of a strategic food reserve.
> we are no longer an actual representative democracy.
Claiming that because California has 57 votes and Wyoming a whopping 3 votes, instead of California having 70 and Wyoming one (if at all), we "no longer have representative democracy" is nonsense. California still have wastly more votes. Yes, Wyoming also gets some, otherwise it why bother voting at all if everything is essentially decided by the most populous states anyway?
> protection results in a tyranny of the minority
3 votes against 57 is hardly "tyranny".
> Why are the concerns of the people living in LAC less important than the concerns of the people in Nevada or Arkansas?
Why people leaving in LAC should be in virtually full control (with the current power of federal government it's very close to that) over people of Nevada and Arkansas and Wyoming? What's the point for Wyoming to sign up for such a deal to be ruled by LAC?
> everything is essentially decided by the most populous states anyway?
The state isn't voting homogenously. Just like Eastern Washington could vote differently to the Puget Sound with more direct representation.
The key word in your argument is 'populous'. Thinking in terms other than people, be it states/counties/acreage is another version of putting "landowners" in charge.
> Why people leaving in LAC should be in virtually full control (with the current power of federal government it's very close to that)
Which explains why politicians spend so much time in Election season in LAC. Except they don't. They are instead in Ohio, Montana, NH, Wyoming, Iowa, Florida.
> Thinking in terms other than people, be it states/counties/acreage is another version of putting "landowners" in charge.
Again, having 3 votes against 57 does not put whoever has 3 votes "in charge" in any sensible meaning of the word.
> Except they don't.
Because they think LAC has already made up their minds, no matter what. And judging from voting patterns, they are correct. So whose fault is that? If more LAC voters would vote diversely, politicians would pay more attention to LAC, they are not stupid. But when it's 70+% to one side, why bother? Same campaigning dollar would bring much more impact elsewhere, and campaign resources are finite.
> Again, having 3 votes against 57 does not put whoever has 3 votes "in charge" in any sensible meaning of the word.
LAC and NYC both voted very blue, yet here we are. How do you credibly claim that "LAC is by and large in charge of the direction of the federal government"?
I don't claim they are. I claim they would be, if Wyoming had 1 vote and California 70. Right Wyoming specifically has a little more influence than it would have in purely population-based system. That was by design - otherwise large urban conglomerates would totally dominate all the politics and more rural states would have no chance to influence politics at all. Now they have a larger chance, while still being very far from any dominancy, but at least they have guaranteed minimum influence of 3 votes.
The president is the chief executive of the government, and the government is a union of state governments. The federal government itself was never intended to be all that powerful. Tyranny of the minority is not really a problem in the US because state governments can diverge so much from each other. CA, for instance, is a huge outlier already; there really is no "tyranny" at play here. Residents of CA have a state government presiding over a $2.7 trillion GDP working for them and only them; they also have more representatives than any other state in the country. Arkansas by comparison has a GDP of only ~$118B, and their GDP per capita is half that of CA; they have only 4 representatives. It's hard for me to imagine why CA somehow needs more power than it already has.
"Our" Federal government is currently imprisoning hundreds or thousands of children in squalid conditions. Some of these children are being held in California.
This policy was enacted by a President that lost the popular vote in California, and lost the popular vote nationwide.
> This policy was enacted by a President that lost the popular vote in California, and lost the popular vote nationwide.
Remember that picture of the children in cages floating around the news? That wasn't our current president. That was during the time of a president elected by both the popular vote in Cali and the national vote.
Also remember that those detention centers are literally that- short term holding. The intended duration for a stay is max 72 hours, and rarely exceeds a week- and that's only because HHS literally can't find suitable places fast enough with how many are entering the country.
So if he'd won the popular vote nationwide but lost it in CA you'd be okay with that? Moreover, while detention facilities have become more crowded under Trump, he certainly didn't invent them.
The solution here is to understand and address why so many millions of people voted for him, not to give even more power to the most powerful and wealthiest states that hardly need it. One reason Trump managed to drum up so much support is because interior states had been neglected for so many decades. Is neglecting them further your solution? Maybe just completely disenfranchise them on a national level and then you don't have to ever worry about what life is like in most of the country?
The above poster is saying that Trump shouldn't have been allowed to be president because he didn't win the popular vote. This means that, under the above poster's scheme, they wouldn't have any president fighting for them at all, and I doubt CA would suddenly start caring about them were that the case. I see this as an abandonment of the poor in favor of the rich and powerful.
If Trump fails, then he fails. But that's a lot different from completely disenfranchising many states when it comes to the presidency.
>I see this as an abandonment of the poor in favor of the rich and powerful.
Trump represents the rich and powerful, though, arguably more so than Hillary Clinton, who's rich and elite but not even in the same league as Trump, or as entrenched with multinational business interests (although as far as the common voter is concerned, the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire may be irrelevant.)
And realistically, electing any President based on a laundry list of partisan grievances is going to disenfranchise the rest of the country. The Electoral College is no more or less fair than a popular vote in that regard.
> There are only eight states in America that have more people than Los Angeles county.[2] Why are the concerns of the people living in LAC less important than the concerns of the people in Nevada or Arkansas? What is it about their geography that makes their issues unimportant?
Why would Arkansas or Nevada have joined a union of states where their votes mean essentially nothing?
Sure, California's votes may mean less on a per capita basis, but if you're asserting that California is under-represented compared to Wyoming on a national basis, you're going to have to give some supporting evidence there. That's a pretty wild claim.
To get the benefits that you would get from such a union (whether they see those as benefits is up to them):
* access to single market and currency
* federal loans/money
* territory protection from other countries military intervention
* freedom of movement (including study, work, living, etc) within all the other states of the union
If states want to do some things differently that's why there are state level laws. If those states don't find that they have the right amount of freedom at the state level and think those benefits above matter less than being able to outvote 3:1 a citizen in California when it comes to presidential election then, I guess, they are free to leave the union?
Sure they are, in modern times. If there's an overwhelming majority that wants independence, a state will eventually secede. In a democratic or even a hybrid system, a country's politics, laws and constitution eventually change to adapt to overwhelming wishes of the majority.
If you want to look at recent trends, it’s hard to say the electoral college is helping Republicans. A lot of states have only voted in one direction since Bush Sr (the last republican to win CA). If you take those results for granted going forward, a Democrat needs to swing 83 votes to become president, and a Republican needs to swing 173. If Trump hadn’t flipped Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan for the first time since Bush Sr, Democrats would typically only need to swing 44 votes to win.
It’s also hard to say this is even problematic in general. The winner of the popular vote has only lost 5 times in history (or 6 depending on who you ask about 1960), and not by large margins either. But you can’t take this to mean that the results would have been different if the election was to be decided by popular vote to begin with. Currently Republican candidates have little incentive to campaign in CA or NY, and Democrat candidates have little incentive to campaign in TX. If the outcome was to be decided by popular vote to begin with, there’s no way to say that the outcomes would have been any different.
Conversely, there are many issues where California can wag the dog by instituting state-specific policies which effectively drag the whole country with it.
Some people like what California does with its state-specific policies. Some people even choose to live there.
If the Executive branch was less powerful and the States retained more of what they were originally intended to oversee for themselves, I might have less of a problem with California liberals electing the Executive for the whole country.
As it is, California has 53 of 435 seats in Congress and 55 electoral votes. The disparity with Wyoming is just because the minimum is 3 per state, and Wyoming’s population is minuscule.
If you eliminate the per-state minimum I expect there would be large geographical areas of the country which would eventually become uninhabitable / unsustainable.
That's not an argument against the Electoral College per se, but rather an argument against letting states allocate all of their Electoral College votes to the winner of the popular vote. This particular problem could be solved by forcing all states to apportion their Electoral College votes based on the distribution of the popular vote.
> This particular problem could be solved by forcing all states to apportion their Electoral College votes based on the distribution of the popular vote.
That is not a realistic proposal. Political gridlock will never allow a change like this. Doing it state by state is even worse because it just creates a system where dems try to do it to only red states and the GOP tries to do it to only blue states. It would just further skew the outcomes away from a democratic result.
This is exactly what the article is about, and 16 states with 194 votes have already done it. It will eventually pass 270 because most states (all non-swing states) have a lot to gain from it.
That’s exactly what the NPVIC is trying for... they’re not abolishing the electoral college, just making an agreement that 270+ of them will vote for whomever wins the entire nation’s popular vote.
Maine and Nebraska apportion their electoral votes on a per-Congressional district basis. But because Congressional districts can be heavily gerrymandered this is not a substitute for a truly proportional allocation scheme.
Exactly. I live in NYC. I still vote, but really it doesn't matter whom I vote for since there's an approximately 100% chance of New York's electoral votes going to the Democratic candidate. On the other hand, Kansas hasn't voted for a Democrat since Lyndon B. Johnson; I'm sure people there don't feel particularly enfranchised either.
it invalidates all voters. Overvotes are a thing. You can have 90% of CA vote against a candidate and it won't mean anything more than 51% voting against.
So roughly half of the votes in all non competitive states do not count.
So those people in California are citizens just like you who pay the same federal taxes and have the same rights yet when it comes to voting for the President they do not have have those same rights. It might be annoying to us that they are all "liberals" or whatever you like to brand them with but they are people with equal rights and deserve equal vote. If it means that the majority of the country is made of these "liberals" that we dislike or disagree with then so be it, but that's what it means to have a representative democracy.
A representative democracy by definition means that each vote does not count exactly equally.
My point is that while the current setup probably dilutes CA liberals voting power the most in terms of the EC, there are other ways the system works that is particularly empowering to CA liberals.
I don’t want to be repetitive with my other comments, but I think a good example is environmental regulations CA passes for automobiles effectively setting standards for the country.
If rural issues aren't handled then you'll have even more urbanization and even more expensive housing. The odds are already attacked against rural life.
>Why are the concerns of the people living in LAC less important than the concerns of the people in Nevada or Arkansas?
So instead you want even more people from Nevada and Arkansas to move to LAC, because that's where politicians will pay attention?
The difference is that while the vote of each Californian might have less impact on the outcome of elections, there are so many of them that the problems that California has to deal with become important enough that politicians won't ignore them. If you make the situation work the other way around, then Wyoming's problems become even less important than they are right now and you can pretty much just ignore them and campaign in a certain county instead. If you don't handle people's problems then that makes them more likely to move, to seek a better future elsewhere.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I can see how people would feel that way. Can also understand how people on the other side are frustrated when a minority of the population has disproportionate power though. So as with most things it sounds like there's no easy/perfect solution.
> I'm all for rural representation, but people in rural areas essentially have their vote count more than people in cities, right?
Yeah but maybe that's a good thing. Otherwise you have a situation like New York where NYC gets to dictate everything since it's super high population density even though the majority of geographical NY state is farmers. So the farmers get screwed over by the interests of the city folk who have never even stepped foot out of the city. For example, city folks are more likely to vote for increases in property taxes - not that they care too much since they only have a tiny apartment - but it hits the people outside of the city with lots of land (for farming) really hard.
It's just like the "rich getting richer" conundrum. Once you have a large city, it will gain more people faster than a small town just by virtue of the properties of growth. So pretty soon you'll have a few megacities that get to dictate the government of the entire country and if you live anywhere else; too bad, the city folk are in charge now.
Only if you start with the assumption that different individuals voters should have different amounts of political influence, which the NPV movement is explicitly rejecting.
> Otherwise you have a situation like New York where NYC gets to dictate everything since it's super high population density even though the majority of geographical NY state is farmers. So the farmers get screwed over by the interests of the city folk who have never even stepped foot out of the city.
I think the problem here is that you're portraying it as if cities or states are the agents making decisions, rather than individuals. Obviously the electoral college establishes states as the agents making decisions in Presidential elections. The NPV movement seeks to make individuals the agents that decide Presidential elections.
> I think the problem here is that you're portraying it as if cities or states are the agents making decisions, rather than individuals.
That was exactly the point of the Electoral College - that states would elect the president.
You may think that's a bad idea. That's fine. You may want to change it. But it's a really fundamental change to the architecture. If it's to be changed, it should be changed by a constitutional amendment, not just by a compact among the states.
No, that was not the point, why do people keep saying this? The framers were very open about the purpose. They thought that the average voter could not be trusted to choose a president, and that a direct election would result in "tumult and disorder". Instead, the decision would be made by "men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station", who would not be so easily swayed by the "heats and ferments" of the people.
Also, the framers expected that most of the time, there would be too many candidates for any to win a majority. In that case, the House would select a winner from the candidates.
A system where electors do not make their own decisions, and one candidate always wins a majority, was simply not conceived of.
This is the most easily digestible evidence, but Hamilton is obviously not the only one who thought this way. He is representing the position of most of the framers, that's why the system he describes here is what ended up in the constitution. Note that there is no mention at all of rural vs. urban, underrepresented communities, states' rights, anything like that. Those factors contributed to the creation of the Senate and the House, but not the electoral college. That was entirely due to the men writing the constitution not trusting the men they were allowing to vote.
> No, that was not the point, why do people keep saying this? The framers were very open about the purpose. They thought that the average voter could not be trusted to choose a president, and that a direct election would result in "tumult and disorder". Instead, the decision would be made by "men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station", who would not be so easily swayed by the "heats and ferments" of the people.
That was part of the purpose; a part that we have since mostly neutered. But the number of electors was definitely chosen to compromise between small and large (population) states.
Senate representation is apportioned constantly per state. House representation is apportioned approximately proportional to population. The electoral college is a compromise (sum) of these too.
States have gotten to choose how to select their electors, and most have chosen winner-take-all (in part because this is a strategy that is strategically powerful). So it remains a forum of state-chosen electors, with a weight that is a compromise between per-state and per-population representation, like it has always been.
>
No, that was not the point, why do people keep saying this? The framers were very open about the purpose. They thought that the average voter could not be trusted to choose a president, and that a direct election would result in "tumult and disorder". Instead, the decision would be made by "men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station", who would not be so easily swayed by the "heats and ferments" of the people.
So why, in your view, do the states get to appoint the electors?
I very much understand the point of the electoral college and the point of the NPV movement. And I don't necessarily disagree that a constitutional amendment would be a better way to change the policy.
The solution is federalism, which we already have; a Wyoming voter controls the Wyoming state government, which has power over things that are purely internal Wyoming concerns.
What incentive do rural states have to stay in the union if the federal government is controlled by populous state bullies? Wouldn't it be better for them to fragment into separate-but-open-border-countries like the EU?
Probably roughly the same incentives any state has ever had to join and remain in a federation. Things like free trade and movement among states and a combined military. One of the incentives to remain in a federation should not be the ability to disproportionately influence the federal government compared to other member states.
That's certainly fine for state-by-state issues, and it is the case for most of them, like state income tax, sales tax, most laws, etc. Unfortunately there's only one President, which is why this NPV issue concerns the presidential election and not anything else.
The plurality of the geography of NY State may be agricultural land, but that is not the same thing as saying that the majority of its people are farmers. If you cut NYC off from the rest of the state, yes, you'd have a majority-rural population, and probably a red state—but not majority farmer and farm workers.
I live and work in rural NY State. For every farmer out here, there are dozens of teachers, janitors, computer programmers, hairstylists, restaurant owners & workers, and every other type of profession you have in hamlets, small towns, and non-mega-cities.
And yeah, there are a lot of people here who don't want property taxes to go up. They don't want any taxes to go up, because they're rural Republicans who have bought into the line that taxes are bad hook, line, and sinker. But as rural Republicans, they mostly don't even make much noise about wanting taxes to go down. The signs you see along the side of the road are clamoring to repeal gun control laws that prevent violent criminals and the mentally ill from purchasing guns.
Just because New York City has enough population to drown the rest of the state in doesn't mean that we should give the rest of the state disproportionate power.
"doesn't mean that we should give the rest of the state disproportionate power."
Is it in the best interests of all the people to have proportionate power? I believe so.
The EC is an abstraction, which philosophically and practically takes choice away from individuals. Population centers having more power than rural areas (even when they are the geographical majority, otherwise) is a proxy for land-owners having more power. While, ironically, land-owners (like farmers) often tend to be poorer than city-dwellers in absolute terms, I don't believe they should have some sort of relative power difference.
I think it's also important to remember that (to the best of my knowledge) the majority of farmland is not individually owned: it's run by large agricultural companies.
So the "land-owners," or at least, the owners of the companies that own the land, also live in the cities, and are themselves among the vastly wealthy.
I wasn't trying to be obtuse. I'm not sure what's confusing.
Is it in the best interests of all the people to have proportionate power? I believe so.
I don't believe they (rural vs metropolitan citizens) should have some sort of relative power difference, despite their relative wealth and land-ownership differences. That's not important to me, philosophically.
High population density = more people, more voters. Yes, I think thier opinion should count more than the less people, less voters of the rest of the state.
Land doesn't (shouldn't) vote.
> too bad, the city folk are in charge now.
You mean democracy? You mean 1 person 1 vote? You mean the majority? This is what you have a problem with? Go ahead and state that view, but let's be honest about what you are saying.
You think somehow people should be punished for population density. That their votes should be worth less, person for person, than a rural vote.
I don't think this is a valid reason to continue with the electoral college - but it might be a good reason to slowly dissolve the concept of states and instead let local and national politics interact directly - the state level is where the needs of different localities are being erased more than the national level.
Local politicians should be concerned with their locality - national politicians should be concerned with the nation and making sure that no localities are presented with problems beyond the scope of their power... the state sorta does both - but it also serves to mask local issues within the state's representation up to the national level. It's why I'm rather fond of the house and less fond of the senate - as a former Vermonter I had intensely good representation at the national level - I had one house rep and two senators which were concerned with representing me specifically - but when I resided in MA our rep was concerned with local issues but the Senators were more focused on pushing forth agendas that the state-house was pushing out... so the representation of individual localities were lost on those senators.
Cost of a small apartment in NYC is equal to the cost of several acres of farmland. Proportional property taxes would impact both demographics similarly.
> For example, city folks are more likely to vote for increases in property taxes - not that they care too much since they only have a tiny apartment - but it hits the people outside of the city with lots of land (for farming) really hard.
Firstly, property taxes are levied at the town(ship) levels in New York State. Secondly, property taxes are levied on the assessed property value of the property in question, which will be $1-5000/acre for agricultural land, so an $800,000 Manhattan studio will have the same assessed value of up to 800 acres of farmland. Thirdly, property taxes on farm land are fully deductible business expenses, while property taxes on your primary residence is not.
Finally, it doesn't come through in text, but allow me to spend the next seven minutes laughing on the floor at the notion that city dwellers are blase about their property taxes going up.
For instance: gun control. Rules for millions of people crowded into a pressure-cooker city, vs rules for folks living a mile apart with varmints, police protection an hour away, hunting, are reasonably very different. Same for zoning, licensing, inspections, on and on.
Rural residents often get saddled with metro rules that make no sense.
Except not every city is midtown Manhattan, and not every rural area is the Ozarks. You can get "varmints" and long police response times in New York and LA. Most people in the "country" don't hunt, fish, or gather firewood, and most people in the "cities" aren't living hyperdense urbane chic lifestyles. In reality, most of the country lives in between these extremes.
Most people (by pure numbers) by definition live in very large cities. In fact, in the USA, most Americans live in very large coastal cities. So that argument doesn't hold water.
When the "urban/rural" divide is brought up in American political discourse, it's always done so describing extremes. Yet living in a city - even a large city, doesn't always mean living in an urban "pressure cooker," nor does living outside of a city mean seeing more wildlife than people. I live in a suburb of Austin. I don't hunt my own food or drink from a well, nor am I surrounded by concrete jungle.
The premise that urban and rural dwellers generally have such radically divergent ways of life that it's infeasible for a single entity to govern both is a bit of a populist myth.
'A suburb of Austin' may not be rural by many definitions. Its another city? Look at a map. See all those spaces between a city and its suburbs, and the next city and its suburbs? That's where 'rural' is.
I can see half a mile in any direction, and not see another human habitation. Clearly this is rural. And clearly, things around here work a little differently from a city. For instance, I pay for fire service (volunteer fire association; I donate). I essentially don't have police service except for cleaning up after major catastrophes (half a dozen sheriffs per 100 square miles). I saw an eagle swoop by my kitchen window the other night, with a rabbit in its claws (yeah eagle! I'm a gardener). When the deer get out of hand harvesting my garden before I do, I'm allowed to shoot them. With one of my guns, a bigger one because the little ones are for varmints like rabbit, skunk, rats, the occasional badger.
My interactions with a neighbor are purely voluntary, because other than annual discussions about fences (and the fireman's ball) we have little we need to talk about. There are no association rules; there are no inspections nor even inspectors. If my neighbor parks a bunch of trailers behind his windbreak in an ugly rusting mess, go neighbor. I guess I'll just plant a row of trees and wait 10 years to mask the view in that direction.
>'A suburb of Austin' may not be rural by many definitions. Its another city? Look at a map. See all those spaces between a city and its suburbs, and the next city and its suburbs? That's where 'rural' is.
Except no one who talks about "city dwellers" is talking about people living in small towns or suburbs. And if I am living in a city, it doesn't conform to any of the political or cultural assumptions that the urban/rural divide makes about "city dwellers." It also isn't nearly as rural as your definition of "rural," although I've lived in those areas as well. I certainly don't think it would be accurate to lump the culture and community of the town I'm in with LA or New York - certainly people there would consider me rural.
And maybe that's one problem - "city dweller" and "rural" are vague and subjective labels.
>So just call me Mr. Populist Myth I guess.
The myth is that your experience is typical for Americans not living in large cities. It's an outlier, not the norm.
>their concerns are not addressed by rules made up in the Capitol City
They are, depending on the concern. Rural voters have representatives and lobbyists in Washington and there are plenty of laws intended to favor rural interests. Part of the argument in this thread is that the Electoral College itself gives rural states out-sized influence in determining the Presidency. It isn't true that Washington is ignoring rural populations entirely, or that they have no political power.
Most of the issues you listed upthread as examples of how urban and rural lives differ are examples of issues which should be (and usually are) handled locally, not nationally. Gun control might be an exception (although personally I believe it should be entirely a state issue) but I think it would be absurd to claim that rural populations don't have a powerful influence on that through the NRA already, given that most of the country supports stricter gun control laws than would ever be politically feasible in the US.
Locally being a euphemism for "by folks in the State capitol"?
Sure there are attempts to design government to balance rural and urban. They work better or worse, at each level. Abolishing them because they are 'out of balance' is maybe not the best solution.
Just recently I learned that most of the land in Nevada is owned by the federal government (84.9 percent according to https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/heres-how-land-is-used-by...). It's more a federal state, than a state state in a land ownership sense.
That alternative is that the rural vote doesn’t count at all.
Urban cities form extremely powerful electoral blocks in Congress which can pass huge amount of pro-urban legislation and pro-urban budgets. The rural areas have much less representation but at least enough so that they can perhaps dog-trade for policies that are important to them.
Remember that laws pass on majority or super-majority rules in Congress. So once you have enough to form a coalition your vote “matters” or not.
CA has 53 districts. Those districts are under representative because they each get 2/53 of a Senator and WY district gets 2. State borders are fictions.
And states were never intended to be drawn to balance out slave power. And political parties were never intended to exist in federal government. Guess someone fucked up.
I am picturing an interview conducted by the 'news team' at The Onion, interviewing a sage brush somewhere in Wyoming, because it's more important that actual people in, say, California.
...and adjustments have been happening over many decades. That's why, say, California has many more electoral votes (55) than Montana (3). Yet it's still not completely proportional as California has about 40M people while Montana has just over 1M.
> People who want to get away from the ~big cities~ small towns and live a different kind of life with different priorities (and different legislative interests), shouldn't be totally shut out, should they? Even though I live in a ~giant urban area~ rural area, I wouldn't want to feel pressured to due so due to lack of political stake if I move elsewhere.
who's to say one direction is more important than the other? At least if we ditch the electoral college, individual voices always have the same volume
To reinforce this idea, my city has 3x the population of Wyoming.
I grew up rural, but I long ago moved to an urban life. Politicians — and to be honest rural folk themselves — often try to enforce the idea that rural life is somehow more genuine. You’ll hear this as “Real America”, or how city folks don’t understand how “the Real World works”, or are some how “out of touch”. Which is fundamentally a completely bizarre idea when the majority of Americans (and I believe the world in general now) live an urban life. While there are unique and legitimate concerns that may need to be addressed for rural life, they are not mainstream concerns. Similarly, allowing rural politics and social mores to dominate national politics is as absurd as saying the Sentinelese[0] should dominate world culture because they’re more in touch with the land or something.
> when the majority of Americans (and I believe the world in general now) live an urban life.
I think you're underestimating the figures. 80.7% of Americans lived in urban areas according to the 2010 census. Estimates for the entire world are over 50% for over a decade now (since 2007, to be more accurate). It increases slowly but steadily, so we were at about 55.27% in 2018. It's going to be about 68% by 2050 and about 85% by 2100.
The Census's definition of "urban area" doesn't quite match what most people think of, I don't think. It's any area of over 50k people. If you reverse sort the list provided on Wikipedia[0], you'll find a lot of places that aren't top of mind when people think about "urban life:" Grand Island, NE; Hazleton, PA; Albany, OR.
Edit: I'm not disputing the larger point. I just think the number is probably a little lower than that if you adjusted for being "truly" urban.
Yeah, I was thinking about adding that there's some talk about what constitutes as "urban area", but thought it wasn't relevant enough for the context of my comment.
Electoral college is for the presidency. But the political power discrepancy between rural and urban areas is quite stark in other branches of government.
For example:
Right now in the US there are 2 senators from each state. California with a population of over 39 million has 2 senators, Alaska with a population around 700,000 also has 2 senators.
> Alaska with a population around 700,000 also has 2 senators
As does:
1. Wyoming (Population: 572,381)
2. Vermont (Population: 627,180)
3. Alaska (Population: 735,720)
4. North Dakota (Population: 760,900)
5. South Dakota (Population: 892,631)
6. Delaware (Population: 975,033)
7. Rhode Island (Population: 1,056,738)
8. Montana (Population: 1,074,532)
9. Maine (Population: 1,342,097)
10. New Hampshire (Population: 1,363,852)
These states combined control 20% of the Senate with a roughly combined population of 10 million people. That's only 25% the population of California alone, or 3% of the total country.
Now obviously the Senate/House power balance was designed with this in mind. But the House hasn't reapportioned representation by population in a century.
Seems to me like the American democratic system has a very large bias for rural voters, especially when you consider where in the country presidential campaigns start every 4 years.
> The House hasn't increased total size since the reapportionment after the 1910 census, which is probably what you are thinking of.
Doesn't this effectively make it impossible to correctly reapportion by population though, because without a change in size a number of low population states "should" have < 1 member?
Ok, but that's heading into a circle though. The complaint I thought is that the "correct" method does not result in proportion by population, and some people think that would be better.
Many people often think that something different than an existing system would be better or more advantageous for themselves and advocate for it. Claiming rightness or correctness is an appeal to a moral sense of fair play for which their counter-parties are not likely imagine reciprocated once the change comes to fruition.
I’m surprised that given technology advances people don’t just cut out the expensive elected officials and put everything up to several national votes per day. If you think that the founders got the proportional balance wrong, what about the temporal balance? Why invest decision making power in one person over such long time frames?
> Doesn't this effectively make it impossible to correctly reapportion by population though, because without a change in size a number of low population states "should" have < 1 member?
You can define “correctly reapportion” in a way that this is true, but there is no reason to think that was the Constitutional intent.
Which isn't to say I don't think there is a policy problem, I just don't think you can reduce it to incorrect apportionment.
No. 385 are redistributed, which still enforces unequal representation, as states with less population than some territories have more purchasing power in the House. For example, Wyoming get a rep for 500,000 people, but everyone else has to pay 700,000 people.
To truly remedy this situation in the House, you have to bring the House up to about 930.
That was the explicit purpose of the Senate: each state is equal in the union. Senators weren't even supposed to represent the state's people; they represented the state itself up until the misguided Seventeenth Amendment. Representation proportional to the population is the purpose of the House - that's why our government has two chambers.
The House is the chamber with actual power, while the Senate was intended to act as a check on the House and the executive. That's why the 17th amendment made such a mess: they were supposed to represent state interests, and especially having a balanced budget is much more a state interest than a popular interest.
In particular, for any bill requiring spending, the Senate can only amend a bill that started in the House. Impeachment must start in the house and is then tried in the Senate. The Senate can't nominate someone to office, they can only confirm a nominee presented by the executive.
This isn't a spatial metaphor any more than "upperclassmen" and "underclassmen" are for high schools or "left" and "right" are for politics. We call it the "upper" chamber because it's supposed to be the higher status, more "dignified" chamber.
Words have histories of course, and probably at one point this was a spatial metaphor - maybe some bicameral legislature literally did have one of their higher status body on a different floor than their lower status body. But the words upper and lower when applied to the legislative branch have evolved since then.
Misguided? Are you saying you want to go back to when your state's House Reps decided your state's Senators?
I understand our federal politics are a complete mess but think that has more to do to equating money with freedom of speech, the great return on campaign donations, the polarization of our media and the lack of solid non-partisan research institutes that our elected leaders can rely upon. Have you ever watched CSPAN? Our leaders routinely become informed about the world around us through the same mass media as we do.
This would give even more power to special interests, as they only need to influence a governor (or a small number of state reps) to get their senate choice, rather than all the voters in the state. I can’t see why that’s better, since at least now senators have to pretend to represent constituents.
>>For example: Right now in the US there are 2 senators from each state. California with a population of over 39 million has 2 senators, Alaska with a population around 700,000 also has 2 senators.
This was all by design. The smaller states would not have joined the union if it mean that the bigger states would monopolize all the power.
Yes but maybe we can reform the system to make US more democratic. This question is about why this has been this way, rather it's about whether it's worth to change it even it was originally justified. Are people in Wyoming willing to leave the union if their votes are exactly equal to Californians?
>For example: Right now in the US there are 2 senators from each state. California with a population of over 39 million has 2 senators, Alaska with a population around 700,000 also has 2 senators.
This is why we have the House of Representatives, which is based on population. California has 53 representatives, Alaska has one.
The original idea as I understand it, before the 17th amendment, was that the Senate was supposed to represent the interests of the states, hence two senators from each equally represented state. While the House was supposed to represent the interests of the residents of those states.
It's still not proportional. Life the limit of Representatives in the house. It was passed by simple law, it can be repealed by simple law. Make it proportional and you will have an argument, though not a great one because the Senate has more power than the House based on judicial appointments alone.
1. Rural places do have representation, through Congress. Abolishing the EC will not change that.
2. Rural areas already have outsized representation due to how the Senate is set up.
3. The electoral college only matters for presidential candidates, during the general election, and they aren't spending a lot of time in rural areas already anyway. I grew up in North Dakota, and no presidential candidates ever wasted their time campaigning there.
There's a great reply to this in Pod Save America, the gist of which is: politicians ALREADY don't go to Wyoming or Montana or Central California or Upstate New York. Presidential hopefuls, especially in the GE, go to swing states.
The question we should be asking is, why are Ohio, PA, Michigan and Florida more important than any other state?
I’ve often wondered how much knowing that the electoral college is in place drives voter turnout: how many conservatives in New York or California (or liberals in Texas) don’t bother to go to the hassle of showing up to the polls because they know their state won’t win anyway? In most presidential races, the race is called before the polls even close in Hawaii, so I’m sure an awful lot of people don’t bother to show up there.
It even works both ways. I know people here in NYS who don't go to the polls to vote Democrat because they know they don't have to—the state as a whole voting Democrat is a foregone conclusion, so what does their vote matter?
Which is also why trying to question, say, Trump win based on popular vote is stupid: yes, he got 46% of votes vs 48% for Clinton, but if there was no Electoral College and every vote counted people would probably have voted differently. How differenlty? We'll never know until we try :)
CA voter here - I believe that's correct to an extent. This is a blue state so you cannot influence presidential election here. However, there are local policies/measures/propositions and that is why people turn up to vote.
Can you provide any sources to back that assertion? It seems counterintuitive to me. NAFTA comes to mind as one such policy that was pretty hard on rural areas, but I’m not sure if that’s what you meant?
Why should people residing in any geographic group intentionally be given outsized political power when picking the president? Giving equal input to every voter is not advantaging non-rural people over rural people, it's advantaging more popular political policies over less popular ones.
While people living in rural areas may have distinct cultural values and may face real inequities when it comes to infrastructure, economic opportunity, education, health care access, etc., this seems completely unrelated to deciding the fairest way to pick a president.
It’s pretty simple that the reason to give disproportionate power to small states was to get them to join the USA.
I’m not sure it’s possible to convince small states to give up power now that they have it. Although I’m sure they may want to cecede. Can you imagine the immense power that Wyoming would have as a sovereign nation? Or Delaware? They would be protected from threat by being surrounded by the US and could become havens for activities not allowed in the US. Basically become super Switzerlands.
Right now in order to win Florida you must win a popular vote in Florida. There is no internal electoral college in Florida. Winning Florida is incredibly important for presidential candidates.
Where do they campaign in Florida? Everywhere. They don't just hang out in Miami. If candidates do not avoid less populated areas when aiming to win a popular vote in a state, why would they do so for the nation?
Exactly.. what a smart candidate does is spend their next dollar on whatever is the best bang for the buck in getting elected. So an NPV would mean figuring out where the undecided voters are, nation-wide, and figuring out the cheapest ones to go after first, and working your way up the low-hanging fruit.
If it was much cheaper to convince undecided voters in urban areas, they’d go there first... but the competition among candidates spending would start to drive up the cost per voter to an equilibrium where it started to make sense to go to rural areas, and if that started to drive prices up, maybe next is suburban. But it’s everywhere, all over the country, appealing to everybody as effectively as you can, to win. And since the president affects everybody, it only seems right they should be elected by 1 person, 1 vote, across all citizens.
There could be a risk that if they did so, they'd get a reputation as "only caring about urban people" and lose votes in majority-rural states outside of Florida.
The EC supports battleground states, NOT rural states. Maine is very rural, Florida is not, but Florida is where the campaigning occurred.
This distorts our national priorities. For example ethanol subsidies are so high because Iowa is a battleground state.
We could conduct a popular vote where a Wyoming resident gets 3x the vote of a California resident. This would be an enormous improvement over the EC and I would support it.
> An argument I heard recently against this is, if abolished, politicians won't have incentives to campaign in rural territories, and they won't be accountable to rural territories.
This doesn't effect politicians other than Presidential candidates, and doesn't effect territories (rural or otherwise) because those get no votes in Presidential elections. Though moving to a national popular votes in the states proper could be the first step to a national popular vote of US Citizens, which would give Presidential candidates a reason to campaign in territories.
Also, as long as there is a Senate and Presidential candidates are seen to have electoral coattails, there will be an incentive for Presidential candidates to campaign in low-population states.
Also, the association of low-population states with “rural areas” is wrong: California has a rural population about equal to the total population of South Dakota; Texas—the second most populated state—has the largest rural population, bigger than the total population of South Dakota and the four smaller states; North Carolina and Pennsylvania (also top 10 population states) have rural populations that also each exceed the total population of several of the smallest states combined.
>An argument I heard recently against this is, if abolished, politicians won't have incentives to campaign in rural territories, and they won't be accountable to rural territories. That basically makes sense. The EC is the only thing that really gives rural territories any stake, as the majority population has shifted to larger urban centers.
With the modern ratio of the voting to the total populations being about the same across rural and city populations the EC doesn't do that much for the rural territories. The EC was specifically made to give huge political weight to the very specific rural demography back then - plantation owners in the South states - i.e. the time and place of extremely low ratio of voting to total populations. Without EC the south states would back then have political weight of about 0, ie. equal to its share of voting population - white male landowners; with EC - the political weight of those states was its share of all the white population plus 3/5 of the slaves.
Of course with universal voting rights and slavery abolishment the EC is just an obsolete undemocratic remnant of those old times.
We could implement a proportional representation system, which would make sure that their voices are represented in a far way. If people vote 30/60/10 for parties A/B/C, 30/60/10% of candidates elected would be of that party. Now its more like 45/55/0 or some other random result, based on gerrymandering.
As a thought - what if you gave up The Great Experiment and implemented a Westminster system instead...
The President would become a ceremonial figurehead (directly elected by popular vote or a McGarvie model -see below), sign the bills and maybe still hold but rarely use veto power.
> Even though I live in a giant urban area, I wouldn't want to feel pressured to due so due to lack of political stake if I move elsewhere.
This makes no sense. You've just made an error in thinking.
The pro-EC argument is people who tend to live rural have a different set of issues, and also tend to be a relative minority of people, and thus those issues aren't given due weight with 1-person-1-vote.
Deciding to move to a rural area does not decrease the power of your vote in a non-EC system - your vote has equal power.
Territories aren't people. People are people. By granting more power to "territories" what you're really doing is over-representing people who hold land.
Even if you took the side that disproportional voting power to rural voters was a just goal, does this argument even make sense? The electoral college leads to winner take all situations such that many states are not contested and thus not catered to.
If you're a swing voter in a heavily partisan district, it doesn't matter how dense the district is, you won't be campaigned for.
This is an innumerate talking pointing point repeated endlessly by Republican talking heads. There is somewhat of a numerical advantage to small states, but it helps Vermont, Delaware, Rhode Island, New Mexico etc for Democrats, and it hurts Texas, Florida, Ohio, Georgia etc for Republicans.
With winner-take-all allocation of states' electoral votes, politicians are incentivized to put all of their effort into battleground/swing states, regardless of size. Presidential candidates spend 99% of their time in swing states, except for when they go to NY/CA/TX/FL to fundraise. Iowa gets attention because it's the earliest primary, not because it's rural.
The argument against that is under the current system if you're voting in a hard blue or red (spit) state, your vote doesn't matter in practice. Because the amount of 'swing' isn't enough to change the outcome.
If you get rid of the electoral college then no matter where you live your vote would count. At least for President.
> the only thing that really gives rural territories any stake
Whatever percentage of the population they make up, that's the stake they'll get (and the amount of accountability the politicians will have to them). What's wrong with that?
I guess when we're talking about actual campaign tours there might be some neglect that happens because of the logistics of physical travel. Although I have to question the real benefit of those visits to the citizens. They benefit the politicians themselves, but they aren't exactly a vital source of information in a world with the internet.
> An argument I heard recently against this is, if abolished, politicians won't have incentives to campaign in rural territories, and they won't be accountable to rural territories.
I don't see a problem with that if we confront and dismiss the notion that certain individuals (e.g. individuals who live in rural areas) should have more political influence than certain other individuals (e.g. individuals who live in urban areas).
Something as arbitrary as the amount of unpopulated land around a person's home should not affect how much political influence that person receives.
The flip side is that candidates ignore large states that are unlikely to change (think California for Republicans or Texas for Democrats), even though both states have a ton of people who don't have the same ideologies and values as their state is stereotyped.
> Even though I live in a giant urban area, I wouldn't want to feel pressured to due so due to lack of political stake if I move elsewhere.
Imagine a developer in San Francisco tempted to move to Austin, but who won't because the state as a whole will always go Republican even though Austin tends to be more liberal.
Due to rapidly changing demographics, Texas will soon be in play. (I certainly hope people don't move for fear the new state may not vote their candidate of choice.)
Why not? You have one life to live, and laws certainly impact it. If you’re a young adult interested in having children, and not blessed with working at the handful of companies with generous parental leave laws, why live in a state that doesn’t have paid parental leave laws? Or if you want access to assisted suicide, or marijuana, or abortion, or proper sex education for kids, etc.
This would make a lot more sense of the federal government were a lot weaker and state government a lot stronger, like it was originally. As it stands now, the President governs over the people far more than it governs over the state, so the people should get to choose the President, not the states.
The real core issue is: the president and the federal govt has way too much power. There is no reason why a centralized authority should decide on policies for both rural and urban communities.
If political power was surrendered back down to where it naturally belongs, i.e. to the state, or even better to the city level, and the fed was stripped and left with little to no political power, this whole electoral college charade would become entirely moot.
Why doesn’t this same logic also apply to, say, black people? The percentages are about the same. Why do we dedicate the entire shape of our system to ensuring that rural Americans aren’t forgotten, as opposed to any other group of that size?
The problem is not rural vs. high population states. It is whether a state has a strong party lead or not. Those who have not are the so-called "battleground" states. So some rural states get a lot of attention, where the outcome of the election is not already decided, while other states are completely ignored in campaigning. This is not bound to the size of the state.
Some people have wondered whether candidates might concentrate on big cities or ignore rural areas in an election in which the winner is the candidate receiving the most popular votes.
If there were any such tendency, it would be evident from the way real-world presidential candidates campaign today inside battleground states. Every battleground state contains big cities and rural areas. Presidential candidates—advised by the country’s most astute political strategists—necessarily allocate their candidate’s limited time and money between different parts of battleground states. The facts are that, inside battleground states, candidates campaign everywhere—big cities, medium-sized cities, and rural areas. Far from concentrating on big cities or ignoring rural areas, they hew very closely to population in allocating campaign events.
No, you shouldn’t count for 50 Californians or whatever. The few hundred thousand people in Wyoming could care less that millions of people in big cities live under the threat of gun violence. That’s highly unfair and a big reason for the disfunction in the US today.
rural territories still have the senate to balance things out.
counter-point is that the political stake is currently being taken away from people who live in large states, and is thus negatively affecting the most amount of people possible.
Why should 'rural' be a protected minority as opposed to any other minority? Should African Americans ger 3.6x the vote as White Americans because there are fewer of them?
> States, however, are an important part of the United States of America
The current system claims to be a Union of States, but the current system also defines a goal of a more perfect Union . The Constitution was meant to be a living document, IIRC Jefferson himself believed that it should be rewritten every generation. If the right to govern comes from the mandate of the people, then does the creation of a more perfect Union not entail representation of people not states? From first principles it still doesn't make sense to me why we should privilege the rights of states over the rights of people.
I understand pre-industrial revolution why we needed to make sure rural voters got a little boost. Back then 50%+ of the population was agrarian. Now it's 0.3%. You can go to wal-mart anywhere. The main difference in your lifestyle across regions is determined by local politics, not national ones.
Since almost everyone lives in a quasi-suburbia in america now, who exactly needs protecting? Why does someone in North Dakota deserve more of a say than someone in california these days?
Perhaps those who live in urban areas may want to consider moving to a rural area so their vote can matter more. Living in a large urban area and voting Democratic is generally meaningless. Move to a rural area (or a small city), and the game's different.
The political implications of showing urbanites that (some) rural areas are better places to live than is currently being preached could get interesting.
They still have 1 person 1 vote. There are a lot of people in rural areas and if one politician shows up there more the will get more of their votes.
Its sort of like the analogous effect showing up in Michigan in the auto manufacturing areas had for Trump. He showed up, Hillary did not, and he won more of those votes.
>On Tuesday, Nevada became the latest state to pass a bill that would grant its electoral votes to whoever wins the popular vote across the country, not just in Nevada. The movement is the brainchild of John Koza, a co-founder of National Popular Vote, an organization that is working to eliminate the influence of the Electoral College.
I don't think this will survive constitutional challenge, because it is not the voters of the state who are deciding how the state's electors are decided. For example, would it be allowed for a swing state such as Florida which now has a Republican governor and state legislature, to pass a law stating that their state's electors would be allocated based on how Alabama votes? That way, even if the Democratic candidate won a majority of votes in Florida, the electors would still go to the Republican candidate if the Republican candidate wins in Alabama.
> I don't think this will survive constitutional challenge, because it is not the voters of the state who are deciding how the state's electors are decided.
Is this US constitutional law or Nevada constitutional law that I'm not familiar with? There's no law I'm familiar with against faithless electors and Ray v. Blair made it clear that states are allowed to exclude electors if they won't pledge their support a certain way. Finally, article 2 clause 2 of the US constitution gives fairly broad leeway on how states assign their electors.
I could be mistaken though. Outside observers from other countries often are.
It’s a shame most of these comments are debating the merits of the Electoral College, skipping right past the much more interesting & relevant argument of whether the NPV compact is constitutional.
I agree with you that it’s not. States can indeed choose electors with any constitutional method they wish, but if they hold a statewide election, it has to be a fair election or it will run afoul of the 14th Amendment.
How is NPV "unfair"? It is more in the spirit of the 14th than the winner-take-all system, where your vote means more or less depending on where you live (which was a core part of the 14th amendment logic of Gore v Bush)
States don’t get to hold elections for statewide officials (e.g. electors) where some votes are effectively discarded because of some fact external to that state election. Adding up votes from other states isn’t materially different in that regard than performing an augury.
For the same reason, the Western states couldn’t engage in a pact to elect their governors by party slate (especially without triggering the interstate compacts clause).
And why not? The constitution says that the states can choose their electors for President any way they see fit. They can be named directly in the law if the legislature wanted them to: "Our Electors are Joe Bloggs, James Jameson, and Person McPersonface". There is no constitutional limit on how a state can choose its electors.
When states started switching from the original plan of "electoral districts" to "winner-take-all", Hamilton and Madison decried it as contrary to the spirit of the Constitution, but recognized that they couldn't do anything about it because the text of the constitution says "in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct", and Hamilton's amendment to strike that clause and replace it with an explicit by-district electoral process failed.
It seems like failing a constitutional challenge is the best case.
Electors don’t actually have to vote the way state law tells them to—that would require a constitutional amendment that restructures the whole process. When they vote counter to state law, they are called “faithless electors”.
A state system which ignores the will of its constituents is going to be much more susceptible to faithless electors, who may face tremendous incentives and pressure to trade votes.
I would expect the first such election to lead to the dissolution of the republic.
Please stop spouting nonsense, none of this is true.
Faithless electors are electors who vote contrary to the opinion of their state. In some states this is legal, in other states it isn't, the constitution has nothing to do with it.
The states are free to outlaw faithless electors and many of them already do.
If you are going to accuse someone of "spouting nonsense", it would behoove you to know the facts on the ground, not just have a vague notion.
Some states have laws about how faithless electors "must" vote. The only related case to reach SCOTUS was regarding "pledge" laws, which require electors to pledge they will be faithful. The court has not ruled on laws requiring a certain vote or punishments for violating such laws. There is a case winding its way through the courts on the issue, and different courts have come to different conclusions (the latest of which is to rule them unconstitutional).
Technically every single voter in Nevada could vote for one candidate yet under certain circumstances all their votes would go to the the opposing candidate under the Compact.
Yeah, I don't think all the people in smaller states falling over themselves to join the Compact are really thinking this through.
The argument "but the majority of people in Nevada could vote for candidate X and candidate Y could still carry their state?" is true, yet a little misleading; the net effect of the Pact is to effectively weight all votes equally at a national level rather than a state level. If you believe that the condition we have now -- that the majority of people in the United States could vote for candidate X and candidate Y could still win the election -- then this is an improvement, even if it's effectively a hack of the electoral college system to make it behave as if it wasn't there at all.
The original idea going into the Constitutional Convention was to have Congress pick the president. A majority of delegates going into the Convention supported this, but discarded it after debates established it would violate the separation of powers.
The popular vote wasn't an option, however, because it would mean the southern states with their large, non-voting slave populations would have vastly reduced influence. The southern delegates would have never supported a popular vote. Thus, the electoral college.
To say that the electoral college exists "because of slavery" is an oversimplification. It ignores the misgivings about a popular vote that are mentioned in the page you linked, and it also ignores the desire of the state governments to exert control over their representation in the Federal government -- senators were not directly elected for the same reason.
If you want to point to part of the Constitution that exists purely because of slavery, the 3/5 compromise is a better example. The decision to adopt an electoral college was certainly influenced by complications introduced by slavery, but there were a lot of other arguments in favor of an electoral college that were persuasive at the time.
Actually, or perhaps also, the electoral college exists because the founding fathers didn't trust the people to make good decisions. This is discussed at length in the letters the founding fathers wrote about their political opinions.
> The popular vote wasn't an option, however, because it would mean the southern states with their large, non-voting slave populations would have vastly reduced influence.
I'm not saying you're wrong, bc clearly you've done at least some research and I've done none. But didn't most states not have anything resembling a "popular" vote at first?
In the first presidential election 43,782 cast a ballot. (Population nearly 4 million in 1790.. so about 1% got a vote.)
When many states didn't even HAVE a popular vote at the state level, is it really true that they were considering using a popular vote rather than state electors based on populations?
I'm really confused about this because I don't understand the incentives politicians have to adopt this in their own state. It clearly undermines their state's power in national elections.
My (cynical) assumption is that this will be obeyed insofar as it helps bring about the desired outcome by those in power. It will be disregarded if it would shift the outcome in the other direction.
It's not confusing if you ditch the cynicism. Many people genuinely believe that a system wherein the president is elected after winning fewer voters then their opponent on a regular basis is a system that should be changed.
Let's completely take away the cynicism. If California cared about representation for minorities they would divvy up their electors proportionally so that the minority of their voters, republicans, would receive electors. But that would defeat the purpose of using their overwhelming majority of democrats to bludgeon national elections towards their preference.
It is the tragedy of the commons: an equilibrium of bad choices, where if one state does the right thing alone, then it loses all of its influence to the competition (see Maine and Nebraska).
The solution to the tragedy of the commons is coordination: if everyone does the right thing at the same time, nobody gets screwed for being first. Thus the NPVIC.
The urban/rural thing is a red herring. The Electoral college doesn't give more power to rural areas. It gives power to purple states, where the election is close. How many people are in the state doesn't matter.
If a state votes for the popular winner then they are already going to give their electoral votes to that winner, right? For the people of the state, this basically diluted the impact their vote has (kind of self evident, since that is the point of the electoral college)
I think a lot of people forget that US = United States. That is, states that are united. The electoral college attempts to "balance" the power that each STATE has to elect a president.
The election is a state-level function. In my opinion, to switch to a popular-vote-wins system is to basically say "hey everyone in other states, go ahead and decide for our actual citizens".
In that case Federal government has to regulate fewer things and needs to have less power. President's executive order will affect people in California too but somehow people in Wyoming had 2 times more power to elect this said president. I don't think this is fair at all. If you say States are given inalienable right to veto any and all law/executive order passed by the federal government, then you might as well just keep the senate (2 repr per state) and it could still be considered fair. But the current system blindly favors rural parts of the country.
Not really, it balances the power. The knob that can be turned is the number of electoral votes each state has. Whereas changing it to the popular vote would favor the populous states, and remove the knob completely, so there'd be no path to balancing the power between small and large states in national elections.
The electoral college achieves one very useful function thats ignored by everyone calling for its abolition in favour of the popular vote: it produces a clear winner and contains the contagion of litigating and delegitimizing the outcome of an election.
Think about this: there are a number of elections that have a very small popular vote margin. What if this gets less than, say, 20,000? That's entirely possible. In a strictly popular vote election, what's to stop each side from scrounging up votes or invalidating votes in every county in the country?
The most contentious and litigated election is probably the 2000 election. The electoral college contained those shenanigans to Florida alone (and largely to Miami-Dade and Broward countries, specifically).
There are four main problems with the US election system as I see it:
1. Voting needs to be mandatory. Americans who love "freedom" chafe against this but optional voting undermines democracy. You can see this in the organized efforts to suppress voting and disqualify voters by US political parties.
2. The US needs preferential voting. Third-party votes are otherwise largely a waste.
3. Paper ballots with optical recognition only. No punch cards, certainly no electronic voting. You need the paper trail of actual ballots. This could be filling in a ballot and validating it with a machine or using a machine to print out a ballot. These have an exceptionally low error rate.
4. Stop politicizing the election process. Like, why is the supervisor for elections an elected political position? This is the case in Florida, for example. Likewise, you have the Senate majority holding up election reform because of there is suspicion this will help the Democrats in the House who passed it. Seriously, Mitch McConnell needs to go to jail.
5. I'm fine with states being represented in the US system. The problem is that this system was designed at a time when populations were rural and cities were small. I don't think anyone predicted the disparity between ~40M people in California and ~150k people in Vermont having 2 Senators each.
You'll note that none of these are having the popular vote. IMHO that's fixing the wrong problem.
Patenntly false. Chairman of the Federal Reserve is largely apolitical. Judges have philosophies that tend to reflect the wishes of the President who nominated them but other than that are largely independent.
Look at how other countries handle election. In Australia the Australian Electoral Commission ("AEC") is responsible for running elections and I can tell you that none of the problems with politicized elections that exist in the US exist in Australia.
Very well. Appointed people are not always political. I bet that an appointed election supervisor would be political at least some of the time, though. (Source: human nature.)
The electoral college doesn't necessarily help the voting process produce a clear winner, nor does it necessarily stop each side from scrounging votes.
As you mentioned, in the 2000 election, the outcome came down to Florida, specifically two counties. The electoral college helps create situations like this. The officials and what happened that election in those two counties essentially set the pace of America for the next decade. If they did fudge the numbers, the electoral college did not do anything to make the vote safer.
The electoral college causes there to be very specific places that can be targeted to swing the entire election. Those places must be secured, but in the end, it makes more sense to take the secure voting practices and apply them everywhere, not just to the places the electoral causes the votes to matter.
For (5), I'm pretty sure they not only foresaw it but specifically designed the system this way. This is why they created both the Senate and the House. CA has 53x as many representatives as Vermont.
I always hear people complain about the electoral college, but I've never once heard a detailed, objective argument as to why they think a popular vote would be a better system.
Friends I've talked to about just seem to default to a majority system because it seems more 'fair', or its easier to understand? I dont know.
In the USA, I think we are conditioned to belive in the democratic process, so I guess it feels 'natural' to just tally up the votes, & majority wins.
We've done it countless times in our personal lives. Anytime there's a disagreement, or a group decision to be made, "Ok, lets vote on it". Majority wins. Simple.
This is a fine & easy way to decide things in small groups, but is it really the best way to decide something among 300 million?
I'm not convinced. I'm not saying the EC is perfect, I just suspect a simple majority wins vote could cause other serious problems that are not immediately obvious.
If majority rule is a bad thing, why do you think minority rule is better?
What if I told you that the framers Hamilton and Madison were appalled by winner-take-all laws passed by states in the early 1800s, and tried to change the constitution to abolish the Electoral College, it having become an abomination completely unlike their intent?
So after looking it over, the idea is to eliminate get rid of the 'winner take all' system in the participating states. Seems fine to me. It's definitely hard to argue for winner takes all electoral votes.
I'm not really a history guy, but I wonder why states decided to move in that direction to begin with? Guess I'll have to look into it.
What I don't get is if there are this many states trying to push this idea, why do they need a bill like this to do it. Why don't those states just take it upon themselves to change their laws individually. What's stopping them right now?
Moreover, it seems one of the main points is that the current system causes candidates to only focus their campaign in a few battleground states. I'm struggling to see how the National Popular Vote system would change this. Maybe it would break up the current pattern, if so, I have a feeling another similar pattern would emerge.
The battlegrounds would just shift. For example, it might just redistribute the candidates focus to the greater metro areas where 2/3 of the population lives, and republican/ democrat distributions are more even (according to the site). If the city centers are strongly democrats, and rural strongly republican, the I imagine the same problem emerging since those areas are a 'done deal'. Why would the candidates spend any resources there is there is no chance of swaying them?
The Connecticut Compromise is good and all, but I think it's about time we discard it as an artifact of the days when communication was difficult and states had expectations around operating as semi-autonomous bodies. States used to be a strong identity tie than the nation but our general mindset has shifted toward identifying as Americans before Delawareans.
> In [Republican CO State Senator Sonnenberg's] view, the Electoral College was created so that “people in rural areas did not get overrun by the masses.”
This can't be true since in 1790 (roughly the same time period the EC was created), "the masses" were rural; at that point only about 5% of the population was urban[0].
In the US they were rural. The founders and early lawmakers took much inspiration from the histories and travails of other governments around the world.
And nowhere did the founders say that the electoral college was intended to counteract it.
Unlike most people today trying to come up with justifications for an obviously broken system, the founders knew that minority rule is worse than majority rule.
In every document where the framers discuss "tyranny of the majority", it is clear that their solution is not minority rule, it is CONSENSUS. That is why the most important functions of government: constitutional changes, impeachments, censorship, rule changes, and veto overrides, require supermajorities.
You don't overcome tyranny of the majority by letting minorities win. That's just regular tyranny.
The electoral college was created to protect Southern slavery.
The "masses" he is speaking of were slaves, whose bodies were used to give voting power to their oppressors.
There's some impressive logical bootstrapping here.
"States aren't autonomous anymore, so let's make the legal situation match that."
Except, wait, why are you even spending your time talking about this? Because it impacts federal elections, right? Seems like some states are still autonomous, you just don't think they're legitimately so.
Eeeeh... Texan's have a lot of state pride - but try confusing a Texan for a Delawarean vs. confusing a Texan with a Canadian or Kiwi - pretty sure the Texan will be more offended with either of those later confusions if they've got that weird patriotism streak.
I find patriotism to be weird because it's so arbitrary - patriotic immigrants get a pass, but natural born citizens didn't ever make an active choice or put in the effort to become a citizen. I also fail to see why people in one country should be inherently given benefits that people in another country lack... Patriotism to me boils down to a weird form of elitism.
Such an odd sentiment. It's not elitism in the conventional sense. It's an investment in the System passed down to you by your forebearers, and faith in it being something of value to maintain and eventually pass down to your descendants.
>I also fail to see why people in one country should be inherently given benefits that people in another country lack...
Do you understand the underlying driving concept behind the concept of a country's sovereignty? It's an understanding that the people of a certain geographical region are free to establish their own political systems of governance to get stuff done. It's kind of complicated now, because of the whole corpus of International recognition and that whole jazz, but the fundamentals remain the same.
If you don't connect how patriotism comes out as a natural extension of investment with regards to the resulting structure that allows for the flexing of the country in question's capabilities to become greater than the sum of its parts...well... I can understand it to a point, but it strikes me as folding ones arms, sitting on a fence, and declaring everywhere is terrible.
Which is okay too I suppose. Though, it likely won't ingratiate you to anyone. Especially considering it demonstrates an unwillingness to make any type of fundamental value judgement or to accept a particular corpus or ideal of government as being the yard stick you measure with.
I.e. as an American, I measure other non-U.S. countries vs. how well their system guarantees freedoms enshrined in the national Bill of Rights . Heck, I judge my own country, and the various States that compose it at different time periods via how well it stays true to it's Constitutional intent, and the ideal of a government as laid out in the Declaration of Independence. Common Law divergence from Constitutional statute all have an impact, but I believe the system is about as good as it's going to get.
Anyway. Not sure if I've done anything to clear it up. Just... Didn't want to scroll by without leaving something in response to such a solitary viewpoint.
It's in the Constitution.
If you don't like the Constitution:
--amend it.
--call for a Constitutional Convention.
These are the agreed methods to change the document.
"End runs," state compacts and attempts to game the system are unconstitutional and doomed.
Winner take all is not in the constitution. When states started arranging their elections this way in the early 1800s, the chief creators of the Electoral College Madison and Hamilton, called it an abomination and sued, and when that failed, tried to amend the constitution to get rid of winner-take-all.
The constitution says that states can apportion their votes however they want. If they want to give them to the national popular winner, that's their prerogative.
The electoral college was just a kludge to allow elections before modern instant long distance communication became a thing. The gold standard for democracy was always "one person, one vote", but nowadays there's a lot of people that consider their personal gain more important than being democratic and those people (the Republican party mostly) will try to hang on to the electoral college, no matter the cost apparently.
“The gold standard for democracy has always been one person one vote”: it’s much more complicated than that. At least for US legal history, the idea of “who has the right to vote” has changed significantly, from land owning white males to citizens who haven’t committed felonies (and a few other exceptions like residents of Puerto Rico or citizens who live abroad and a few more). If you look even further back, Athens, the creator of democracy, would generally view our government as oligarchy (rule by the few) as popular vote elections were viewed as possible to be games/bought by the wealthy or connected. You can see echoes of that in today’s politics with dynastic families (Clintons, Bushes). To solve the problem, the Athenians employed the concept of “sortion” or essentially a civil service lottery where the ruling council of the city was chosen at random from all eligible citizens. A modern example of something close to sortition today is Jury Duty.
This is not true. Go read about the formation of the Constitution.
It doesn't even make any sense. States were just as capable of holding elections and sending six-digit numbers to Washington as they were holding elections and sending two-digit numbers to Washington.
I have often thought that part of the rationale for the electoral college was that in the 18th century they did not have the internet, TV, Radio, even newspapers were pretty scarce. So it just wasn't all that practical for a candidate to ride a horse around all 13 colonies to meet each voter. The logical solution would have been to have a parliamentary system whereby the congress would select the president for you. The problem there was that the president would be beholden to the congress and you would lose some of the checks and balance features because he would be less likely to veto something. So they developed a "shadow congress" that did not have law making responsibilities but sole purpose was to travel to Philadelphia or DC and hear the speeches and so forth and select the president for you as your representative.
Looking at it from this 18th century perspective highlights why it is completely unnecessary today. Obviously the voter has many ways of getting to know the positions of the candidates themselves and hence able to elect the president directly. There is no need for it today.
On the other hand, the electoral college, like congress, gives actual weight to the idea that a state is more than just the sum of its population, by automatically getting two votes for being a state.
Whether or not that is necessary is a different conversation from the information dissemination purpose of the EC.
I agree, the idea that you get equal "credit" for just being a state is also something that is no longer relevant. In the 18th and even 19th century the ratio of highly populated to low populated states was not significant. Today we have huge disparities that deteriorates our democracy.
How can a single state hold back progress in this case?
Individual states can apportion their EC votes however they want. 48/50 states are all-or-nothing states (arguably the actual problem), which is decided at the state level.
The "electoral college helps small states" thing isn't true. It's a convenient justification that high school teachers repeat without thinking. It makes no sense.
If the EC helps small states, then why has there never been a presidential visit to Wyoming?
The answer is that the electoral college doesn't empower small or large states, it empowers battleground states. This is dumb, undemocratic, and contrary to the framers intentions.
Why cant states just give out percents of electoral votes based on who voted?
Example: Lets say CA has 10 Electoral Votes (for easy math)
60% vote Dem, 40% vote Republican. California then Gives 6 Electoral Votes to the Democrat and 4 to the Republican instead of all 10 to the Democrat.
Feels like that would more fairly represent the voters of each state no?
Yes, I also think this is the simplest way to make it more fair. States can do this unilaterally without pact. That's why I feel the pact is not about fairness.
The pact is necessary because whoever changes the system first loses out on influence. You never hear of presidential candidates appealing to Maine or Nebraska. It only works if everyone does it together.
I feel like I've seen some maps for past elections done hypothetically like this. I can't recall the conclusions though. I think the Senate situation still gives disproportionate power to small states in that model, even if it is slightly less dramatic than the winner take all in each state we have now.
Why can't one party campaign like the rules were written down beforehand, instead of hanging out running up the score in California?
Getting rid of the electoral college won't necessarily make Hilary win this time around. It will be a different vote entirely. Republicans will actually contest California and some others. They'll try to run up the score in Texas. They'll shift a couple issues left.
The only sure thing from this change would be ignoring the spread out population.
Most modern countries have similar systems, where smaller areas are disproportionally represented in the legislative power. Its only when you loose that is a problem?
"Legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests." - Justice Earl Warren
There's a long history of the US electoral system favoring rural areas over urban areas. Typically, the courts had to intervene in order to remedy an issue where clearly the legislature has a conflict of interest. The most famous is Reynolds v Sims (1964), which stated that electoral districts of state legislative chambers must be roughly equal in population [1].
Hopefully, we can see similar change happen in the Electoral College.
this is the cricket approach. baseball typically plays multi-game series instead.
i agree in spirit though. i have long thought it would make sense to abolish the playoffs. give the pennants to the teams with the best records. then, have them play a 21-game World Series in the fall.
yeah, they never had 21 games, but the winningest team from each league played in the World Series until 1969. They did have a few 9 game World Series, but most were 7.
If this happens, Democrats will be very unhappy with how many Republicans there are in Upstate New York, Southern Illinois and Rural California who's vote now counts for something.
Perhaps. But when I know that there are people with a partisan axe to grind pushing for it, I think arguments for "fair" should be regarded with a certain amount of skepticism...
Democrats want rural Republicans in New York to have their voice heard, that's the whole point: everyone's vote should count equally and the winner should need to seek majority support.
Unlike Republicans, Democrats have these things called "principles". They are ideas that you believe in whether they benefit you or not.
The Democrats want Republicans in New York and California to have their votes count for President, because they believe all votes should count equally.
The Republicans want Democrats in Texas, Michigan, and North Carolina to have their votes ignored or be unable to vote, because all they believe in is winning at any cost.
This is known as the "Winner take-all effect". The electoral college also has a small-state bias (smaller states get more electoral votes per person than larger ones).
Historically, these two have often approximately cancelled eachother out as they favored opposite parties. But there's no guarantee of that - when Reagan won with 58.8% of the popular vote, he took 97.5% of the electoral vote.
Similarly, sometimes the small state bias is a substantially stronger effect: when Trump won with 56% of the electoral vote, he had only 46% of the popular vote, largely due to Clinton's higher "wasted" margin of victory in larger winner-take-all states.
There are 2 major data points that are forgotten in this discussion
#1 The founding fathers responsible for the american revolution risked everything by creating the constitution and the electoral college. They literally went against the most powerful empire in the world. They determined that the electoral college was the best system to defend the freedom of the naescent Republic.
Then on the other side, you have a bunch of armchair bureaucrats and talking heads trying to change the system they inherited thanks to the blood of others. They want the benefits from the change ("more votes") but should the system implode, they will surely socialize losses among USA (they wont even join the army , let alone fight for what they believe in ).
Then you have switzerland. The longest continuous government in the world operates as an extreme version of Republic, giving ample powers to small groups, where they can undo anything enacted by the majority. Nothing gets done as people bicker about small things. Majority does not get its sat. Yet the country is the most stable in the world.
Maybe its time to consider what is the price for changing something that was forged with the blood of tears of more brave men, and has proven to stand the test of time.
The electoral college also serves as a “firewall” of sorts to contain any local election fraud to that state (such that the will of the voters in that state is compromised, but the compromise doesn’t extend beyond that).
For all I care, CA could pick their votes out of a lotto machine and it wouldn’t affect the power of my vote (as a non-CA resident). The fact that my vote is meaningless (deep blue state) is a collateral issue, perhaps.
This is an interesting point. The EC provides a kind of process isolation, in theory.
Election fraudsters and hackers hoping to control the outcome of an election have to make big splashes in small ponds, so to speak. It seems intuitive then, that their shenanigans are more likely to be noticed - and are at least somewhat contained if they aren't.
If we're going down the "1 person, 1 vote" road, that isolation vanishes. No more big splashes needed - only very small droplets in a vast, vast ocean.
And if Ohio or Florida has election fraud? The electoral college doesn’t firewall off election fraud. It creates vulnerabilities by concentrating voting power.
It's like we've been trying to destroy the electoral college almost since it's inception. And every step makes it worse.
The electoral college was supposed to be a sort of bulwark between the public and the highest office in the nation.
State governments choose their electors. Those electors are supposed to be tasked with choosing the best among the candidates for president and vice-president.
But instead, state governments threw that decision to the public. Effectively making the electoral college a proxy popularity vote for a state. And that's a big fucking ask of any person. Choose the person who is capable of running the country and making all these decisions, whose policies will guide your nation to prosperity, etc.
Hell man, I'm just trying to get my budget straight. Do I look like I have time in between everything else I do to also seriously investigate every single candidate? And I'm not a complete moron either. And I know I cannot actually make a completely informed decision here. But I know complete morons. And they get a vote just like me.
But, it's a good social engineering mechanism to discuss these issues so the next gen and others who don't understand the US thanks to pop culture can learn why the EC is important.
Repeal the 17th Amendment while you're at it and then increase the house reps to 5000 and triple the senators.
Then we'll see how effective or profitable lobbying, campaign finance or gerrymandering is.
Personally I think it does, and I also think it means that there would be a spectrum shift among the candidates to more "left of center" positions.
For example I think you would still have a broad selection of candidates who differ greatly on economic ideas. But, I think that social ideas that currently are still being debated (abortion, church and state, drugs) would be resolved. I am willing to estimate that maybe 70% of Americans agree on these social issues, compared to economic issues being more 50/50.
The rationale for the EC and every other compromise in the Constitution was simple: it’s what was required to get the states to actually sign up.
There was the very real possibility that the individual states would go their own way if they didn’t like the proposed Constitution. Larger states could have easily decided that they didn’t need to be part of a larger country. Smaller states could have easily decided that they would be ruled by the larger states and that they’d be better off independent.
The electoral college was needed to convince everyone to stick together. Same with the different structures of the House and the Senate, the 3/5ths compromise, and more.
Things are completely different now. There’s no realistic possibility that any state will exit the union. The major purpose of so many elements of our federal system is completely gone.
That's fair. We have a set of rules, and the rationale for many of them is gone. Therefore... what?
Throw them all out? If so, replace them with what? Worse: How do you get everyone to agree on what to replace them with?
As it turns out, there's a mechanism for getting everyone to agree, and to prevent changes that everyone does not agree with (for certain values of "everyone"): Amend the Constitution.
It turns out that there’s another mechanism to accomplish this: a collection of states adding up to a majority of electoral votes can agree to cast all of their votes to the winner of the national popular vote. Hence the subject of the article.
I don't think it will "accomplish this", because it's too low a threshold. This mechanism doesn't add up to "getting everyone to agree". It adds up to "getting 50% + 1 of the electoral votes", which is not the same thing. It's going to leave far too many people feeling bypassed and marginalized. In today's political environment, those people might become problematic.
Oh, I thought you were saying this was the mechanism for deciding how to change the rules.
At any rate, people may well feel bypassed and marginalized, but hopefully the ones outside of swing states will come around once they realize that their vote actually matters for once. And if they don’t, well, lots more people feel bypassed and marginalized now.
If it’s a bad idea, what do you propose to do about it? The Constitution allows states to cast their votes as they see fit.
> Oh, I thought you were saying this was the mechanism for deciding how to change the rules.
That too. This "compact" approach bugs me partly because it's a hack to get around the appropriate way of doing this, which they know they can't get enough support to do.
> The Constitution allows states to cast their votes as they see fit.
That may be correct. But the Wikipedia article on this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...) indicates that the constitutionality is at least in question. I'd really like to see the Supreme Court decide on the constitutionality of this approach before the first election where it would be in force.
What makes it a hack, but amending the Constitution isn’t? I agree it feels like one, but it is entirely above board. I’m sure the authors of the Constitution didn’t anticipate states choosing to allocate their votes this way, but they didn’t bother to specify how they could or couldn’t do it.
From the Wikipedia article, the only question I see is whether the agreement requires Congress to approve it or not. There seems to be no question that the agreement is allowed and would work.
And, under current circumstances, do you see congressional approval to be forthcoming? For myself, I rather doubt it.
[Edit: Why isn't amending the Constitution a hack? Because it's the recognized mechanism for changing the rules.
What makes the compact a hack? I guess it feels like a hack because the expectation is that, if you're going to change the way the president gets elected, you have to change the Constitution - and therefore having to withstand the full level of scrutiny that such a change would involve. Changing it within the parameters allowed - just barely - by the Constitution is not technically a hack, legally. But it's still feels like a hack to make the change without as much scrutiny, and without the need for the massive majority. At least, so it seems to me.]
Right now, no. Next time the Democrats have control of both chambers, though, it seems possible.
In any case, my point is just that a constitutional amendment isn’t required and this is totally above-board. The odds of an amendment being ratified are far lower.
The EC never fulfilled that function. Faithless electors have never changed the outcome of an election. The notion that the EC exists to ensure that popular sentiment doesn’t elect someone deeply unfit for the office was definitely disproven in the last election.
Swinging it to Hillary would also have elected someone deeply unfit for the office.
I agree that last election was the perfect scenario for the EC to do its job. But who should it have elected instead? And, could it have actually done so without touching off a civil war? (Not a rhetorical one, not a metaphorical one - a real live shooting live rounds, dead bodies piling up, state against state and brother against brother civil war.)
> The founders had a very good rationale for putting it in.
Yeah, slavery. How would you have a popular vote if you're allowing slaves to count as 3/5ths of a person for vote share? They obviously wouldn't have allowed them to vote. Fortunately, we no longer have slavery as an official institution, so it may be time to revise why we're doing it.
Even women couldn't vote, so it's not fair to say that slavery was the rationale. No reasonable person today would say that the 3/5 Compromise or denying universal suffrage is desirable.
Other commenters have also mentioned a necessity to ratify the Constitution. That also applies here as well.
The founders could not have foreseen shifts in population demographics the like of which have occurred in the last 200 years. The urbanization of our population has been staggering during that time, and the percent of people who own or work on farms has dropped to nearly a rounding error, compared to most of the people in the world.
The idea that we must worship every aspect of the founders' thoughts on the makeup of a country, when the world has changed so drastically since their lifetimes, makes no rational sense. Sure, a lot of their ideas (checks and balances, good!) are still relevant. Others (slavery, no women's suffrage, bad), not so much.
> The founders had a very good rationale for putting it in.
Well, it had a reason: like the per-state represt in the Senate which was locked in against amendment, like the 3/5 compromise, like the prohibition locked against amendment protecting the slave trade for a set time period, and probably like a handful of other things I'm probably not remembering off the top of my head, it was a mechanism of politically securing slavery and reassuring the slave states that the more populace free states, where ethical objections to slavery were already common, would not be able to band together and demand that all people be treated as people rather than some being treated as property.
(Before anyone starts quoting the Federalist Papers, I'll point out that those weren't working documents that the Constitutional Convention made decisions based on, but campaign literature to sell ratification particularly in New York. So they weren't going to say “A lot of this document is about mollifying the slave states to get them to stay by giving them as much assurance as possible that it will never be structurally possible to abolish slavery.” But, not saying it when selling the document in New York doesn't stop it from being true.)
The slave states wanted population based representation.
For instance the 3/5 compromise was because the slave states wanted 5/5 and the free states wanted 0/5.
Virginia had the most Representatives in the first US congress because they had the largest population. It was small states like New Hampshire and Rhode Island that benefited from the 2 senators per state rule.
> The slave states wanted population based representation
No states wanted population-based representation, or all did, depending on how you look at it: that is, no one wanted to count non-assimilated Native American population, all of them wanted to count the remaining free population, and there was a dispute about how to count the people that the slave states weren't going to treat as people and, particularly, certainly weren't going to let vote.
The electoral college was created to strike a balance between valuing a diversity of perspectives and popularity of perspectives. The probability that a geographically restricted monoculture gets it right is very close to zero.
That's not what the electoral college does. It's a post-hoc justification your high school teacher probably came up with on the fly, and you clearly haven't thought about it critically since.
The only thing the electoral college does is give the voting power of local minorities to local majorities.
3 million people in the state vote for A
4 million people in the state vote for B
B gets 7 million people's worth of electoral votes, A gets nothing. Repeat 47 times.
There is no explanation for this that makes sense. It wasn't designed this way, it happened by accident. The framers tried to stop it in the 1790s and 1800s, but there was no political will: everybody wanted to exploit the antidemocratic loophole in the constitution instead of fixing it.
Woo there buddy, slow down there a gorsh durned second.
The nature of our republic and bicameral system is a recognition that both the elites (in the form of states, in this case) and the population have important things to contribute. If your fundamental theory of politics is that the elite don't have anything extraordinary to contribute, then how about you start by cleaning your own house and getting rid of superdelegates before you go on trying to change the entire country to match your pet political power distribution
The electoral college gives extra votes to certain people. Why stop at rural vs urban? Why not give extra votes to people shorter than 5 feet? To people with black hair and blue eyes? To people who can wiggle their ears and roll their tongues at the same time?
I certainly am conservative but the things I said are not false. The USA government is not merely a representative democracy, it's more formally a republic.
Consider this: the purpose behind the bicameral legislature is that in order for the federal government to act, it requires the consent of both the majority of the population and the majority of the states subject to it. If the population and the states can't agree, then we shouldn't do it at the federal level. It's foundational to the structure, and it's a process of slowing down the system against them whims of both the elite and the masses.
If you disagree with this, that's perfectly fine. I don't know a conservative that isn't in favor of CA and NY seceding. After all, most of the wealthy people live there anyway. Conduct the Marxist cleansing behind the border wall, but don't bring the rest of us into the shit. Let CA burn itself to the ground, we don't have a problem with that. Don't bring the rest of us down with you. We shouldn't have to support the insanity.
>Consider this: the purpose behind the bicameral legislature is that in order for the federal government to act, it requires the consent of both the majority of the population and the majority of the states subject to it.
The idea that this is a virtue that outweighs the effective disenfranchisement of hundreds of millions of people rests on the presupposition that it is virtuous that certain states should have an outsized voice. There are two obvious problems with this.
The first is that its central claimed virtue is false in practice. It does not actually reliably give smaller states more power, as many proponents claim. Voters' voices in certain areas of Florida matter much, much more than the voice of anyone in Wyoming.
The second is that states themselves were created either 1) somewhat arbitrarily, by the happenstance of where various colonial landing parties decided to set up shop, or 2) through explicitly political processes where the states' admissions were pushed through Congress, in no small part, to help win Presidential elections.
The system was arbitrary from the outset. It has been gamed ever since.
It is not possible to create a non arbitrary system. You may attempt to create what appears to you to be a more parsimonious system, but know, at least, that in doing so you will change the fundamental power dynamic.
Thank God we need the consent of a supermajority of Congress and 3/4ths of the states to change the electoral college. It's not going to happen, just give it up.
Once enough states join the National Popular Vote compact to clear 270 electors, the electoral college will be nullified in practice. It may take a couple more decades, but it'll happen eventually.
Don't worry. The first time a Republican wins the popular vote, but Democrat carries the state, people will cry about their vote not being counted in THAT race, will drop out of the compact fast, and electors will probably defect no matter what the state does. NPV doesn't really solve the problem.
Use a condorcet method [0] to elect a US president that represents common ground.
Needs of specific groups of people can be taken into account as transparent supplementary conditions. Sparsely populated areas constitute one potential parameter. Maybe the opinions of poor and ill people can also be taken into account for while respecting their privacy.
I turned 30 this year,and the Republican candidate has won the popular vote once in my life,and he was an incumbent. There has been a Republican president 14 of the 30 years of my life. Now,the first president of my life ( Bush 1) won the popular vote before I was born, but if we don't count him, no Republican has entered office with the popular vote in my life.
Regardless of political beliefs does this seem right to everyone?
If you removed only California from the popular vote then Hillary lost. The share number of people there still cause Hillary to get the popular vote. Is it fair that 1 state has a controlling share over every other state?
Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, the people who designed it, called it their greatest mistake, an abomination, and presented constitutional amendments to abolish it in the 1800s.
Right or wrong, the only thing that matters is the constitution.
It is easy to imagine that a purely democratic system would be better, but I find it easy to imagine that it would be substantially worse.
The founding fathers rightly believed that most people were ignorant and relatively stupid so the people vote for the house, but senators and electors were appointed.
The agreement to get small states to join was that they would have an equal number of senators. If you want a different system change the constitution. Im skeptical that a democratic system would be better.
They setup the system to be a collection of states with a weak federal govt with limited power. The federal govt over time has taken more and more power from the states.
When california joined the union it had 33X less population than the most populous state (new york). Californians were happy to have the overrepresentation when it benefitted them.
Overall a strongly federal system is worse than a system where 50 states each try something different. In a 50 state system we get many chances to find the best policies. For example when marijuana is illegal at the federal level the antis predicted wholesale mayhem. There was no way to test to see what would happen until some states defied federal law. Once one state showed that it was fine others could come on board.
The same goes for open carry. Antis claimed there would massive increases in crime and shootings. It turns out not to be the case.
My problem with the electoral college is that it doesn’t seem to matter who I vote for or which way my state goes.
The election comes down to some key battleground states, which is where the candidates spend the vast majority of their time campaigning.
The constitution shouldn’t be put on a pedestal. The men who wrote that document were flawed just like any other human. Many of them owner slaves. I’m not saying we should disregard our laws but I am saying we should keep an open mind to amending the constitution as needed.
> "Sanford Levinson, a constitutional law scholar at the University of Texas at Austin, is sharply critical of the Electoral College system, but does not believe the interstate pact would solve all of the problems inherent to America’s election design."
Same argument as we can't try any gun restrictions because none of them will stop all shootings.
What if Congress revoked all (or nearly all) implicitly and explicitly delegated powers to the Executive? The jockeying over who runs for President and how we elect them always seems to miss the point that the modern Executive is much too powerful.
Make the Presidency weaker, and then let's have this discussion about how we elect them.
Every time this debate comes up I can't help but wonder if we are letting the office of the president have too much power. To over-simplify a bit: the president should be executing the will of Congress, right?
The electoral college is a fault domain for voter fraud, and scaler to mitigate differences in voter accessibility, which cannot otherwise be fully mitigated given differences in geography.
Questions like this push me more and more to the idea that places like China have got governance nailed. Why bother about all this? It's disorder for little gain.
This does not make any sense to me. Elections is not a game, it is people's inalienable right to have equal representation compared to others. If politicians decide that State X doesn't matter since it's not powerful with respect to EC, this is blatantly undemocratic and needs to be fixed asap.
The real core issue is the president and the federal govt has way too much power. There is no reason why a centralized authority should decide on policy for both rural and urban communities and for states as deeply different as Louisiana and Washington state.
If political power was surrendered back down to where it naturally belongs, i.e. to the state, or even better to the city level, and the fed was stripped and left with little to no political power, this whole electoral college charade would become entirely moot.
Obviously only the "blue" states want this change. Fortunately there are more "red" states than blue states, so the original purpose of the electoral collage, as created by the founding fathers, will be preserved. Otherwise we would be in "tyranny of the majority" mode, which we are anyway, but at least not with regard to presidential elections.
It’s really not a blue state vs red state thing as much as a swing state vs non-swing state thing. Right now it’s more blue because trump is in power, but if democrats take the White House (and especially if it’s without winning the popular vote), red states will be jumping on the bandwagon. Before 2016 red states were terrified of the electoral college “blue wall” and many were very close to joining the compact before the 2016 election made it politically infeasible.
you could make a strong argument that the 'winner-takes-all' electoral votes in states that have winner-takes-all systems is essentially already doing what the proposal to effectively eliminate the electoral college is doing -- it's saying that individual votes dont count, only the collective whole.
Winner takes all refers to the fact that in most states, the winning candidate gets 100% of the electoral college votes. Even though the candidate may have gotten just 50% plus 1 of the votes.
This is the main reason a popular vote winner can still lose.
You could be the 51% winner in most states but lose by nearly 100% in the more populous states and still win. Which is why this keeps happening to Democrats. They win by landslides in NY and CA but then eek out a loss in some of the swing States.
You're still choosing one president - it refers to how you award a state's electoral votes.
CA has 55 electoral votes, all of which went to Hillary. If CA removed winner-take-all, Trump would have received 17 electoral votes, Hillary would only receive 34, Gary Johnson would receive 2, and Jill Stein 1.
TX has 36 electoral votes, all of which went to Trump. If TX removed winner-take-all, Trump would only have received 19, Hillary would receive 16, and Gary Johnson 1.
1. Even if NPV is a good idea, this is the wrong way to do it. Doing it the wrong way means legal chaos. Doing it the wrong way means it can probably be undone or made worse the wrong way.
2. George Mason vs. Elisabeth Warren. James Madison vs. Jay Inslee. These match-ups aren't even close.
3. I don't think the results will match the intentions.
For point 1 this seems like parts of Obamacare. Whether you support it or not, enforcing/creating parts of it via executive order means it can be unenforced/dismantled via executive order. This isn't a direct comparison, my point, if you base something on legally weak and questionable methods you will end up with weak and questionable outcomes.
Another way I look at point 2, can Justin Beiber rewrite Mozart and improve upon it? There are very few political intellectuals I would put on par with the founding fathers, and sadly most of those are not politicians. The founders' system has worked very well for centuries, the USofA has faults sure, but from ragtag rebel colonies to world super-power, this part is working fine. We have many problems, isolate the variables, I don't think the EC is the cause.
Point 3, this is mostly a party issue, Democrats support it, Republicans do not. Of the 16 states to pass it through legislature 15 had Democrat governors, the single Republican governor vetoed. I think it is safe to say the elections of Bush and Trump, without winning the popular vote, are the big driving factors for the NPV. I don't think NPV will have the intended effect. I think people are wrongly taking new rules and applying old stats but if you change the rules of the game you can't expect players (candidates and voters) to play with old strategies. A lot more Republicans will show up to vote in solidly blue states where currently voting for an R is a waste of time.
> Jerry Sonnenberg, a Republican state senator in Colorado who opposed the bill, said he believed the change would weaken the electoral power of sparsely populated rural states like Wyoming and Utah, while strengthening states like California and New York.
No. But states' representatives will often work together across party lines to try to do something that benefits the state. "Political power of a state" is not a totally idiotic concept.
the electoral college system has become a scam to give the presidential election to the wealthy. they can, during the election year establish residency in the swing states and in affect have more of a say as to who becomes president. people here claiming that it gives the rural population more of a say, that's a lot of bs. with national popular vote the urban and rural states will have just as much of a say as each vote will count for one vote. none of this crap of increasing the representative count and taking advantage of the numbers being rounded in favor of one party vs the other.
now if a party wants to rig the election, they will have a much harder time.
Wake me up when it's 35 states. Before that, it's just a political stunt - blue states promise to vote for popular vote winner, thinking it would be a Democrat, which they'd be voting for anyway.
It's quite likely that without the electoral college, Donald Trump would have won the popular vote. Republican turnout in NY is terrible for presidential elections, because they all know there vote won't matter. Registered Democrats out number Republicans in NY by more than 2 to 1, and yet there are more Republicans in NY that there are people in New Mexico and Vermont combined.
It's definitely not a given, but predicting what would happen is not a clear exercise. You can't change the rules without changing peoples behavior.
Most of these comments are about the structural issues with the electoral college.
I’m not really concerned about that. What concerns me is this insistence that a popular vote for President in a country of 350M people is a good idea. Does anyone actually believe this? The executive branch these days has essentially become a proxy for what laws one wants passed, and you end up voting accordingly. This might be fine, if the results were restricted to being local - and by the way, the original design of this country accented on exactly that point. But we don’t live in that country anymore, I guess. Now we want more democracy, all the time.
So I find it really hard to believe that introducing more “democracy” in a nation as divided and diverse as this one is a good idea. This, I thought, was supposed to be one of the reasons that people wanted to move here ... the whole Federalism thing. Taxes can be different between states. So can Social policy. The extension of this is of course the Electoral College.
Spare me the criticism of “slippery slope” but getting rid of the Electoral College seems like we’d be on the road to a government “of the majority, by the majority, and for the majority”. That is categorically absurd, at least in my view.
The cynic in me says that the only reason we’re even talking about this is because Trump won in 2016 via the EC. Sure. He did. And Clinton won the “popular vote” because of LA, SF, and NYC.
For those in SF (or whatever proxy): do you want folks in Sioux Falls or Fargo making your economic and social policy? No? I didn’t think so. So why is it okay to institute the reverse?
The point I’m trying to make here is this country, as diverse as it is, is best run as a distributed network. And centralizing the election of the Executive into a singular popular vote will help destroy what’s left of that network.
News flash: Trump would still have won, just with a different campaign strategy and a different platform. Promise a little more of what CA and NY want, and a little less of what everybody else wants, and he'd get the popular vote, too.
In fact I think this would make it _easier_ for a populist to win, not harder, because all they'd have to worry about is crafting a campaign message that resonates with the majority and portrays their opponent as Satan in the flesh.
That's exactly the goal. The point is not to pick a different winner, it is to re-enfranchise voters in states that are strongly 'red' or strongly 'blue'
Wyoming would still have a state legislature - I am not sure I see your point.
If you are saying that each person in Wyoming would have 1 vote towards the presidency and each person in California would have 1 vote towards the presidency, then I agree.
>>Wyoming would still have a state legislature - I am not sure I see your point.
It means that California would have more influence at the federal level than it does now. And since federal laws apply to all states it means that indirectly California would have more influence on Wyoming.
so? California has more people - it should have influence proportional to it's population - remember that in most states (except for Wyoming) electoral college votes are dominated by house seats (which are proportional to population).
If you want the US to stay whole, that's a big problem. Technically states can secede, or form a separate union if they so desire. That's also why Senate representation is _NOT_ proportional to population. I suspect that'd be the next thing to be dismantled if whoever is pushing this actually succeeds.
> Technically states can secede, mlor form a separate union if they so desire.
Technically, they can't. There is no provision for secession in the US Constitution.
Practically, well, the one notable attempt didn't work out, so not that, either.
> That's also why Senate representation is _NOT_ proportional to population. I suspect that'd be the next thing to be dismantled if whoever is pushing this actually succeeds.
Well, you can't do that through coordinated state action.
Or even a Constitutional amendment. Maybe two amendments, because the provision prohibiting amendments which alter the equal representation in the Senate isn't itself explicitly protected the same way. Of course, small states can easily block a Constitutional amendment, so that's not going to happen unless they are on board.
>There is no provision for secession in the US Constitution.
Yes, but Article I of the UN Charter expressly provides for the right of Self-Determination.
>Practically, well, the one notable attempt didn't work out, so not that, either.
Yes, that resulted in more American deaths than all other US wars combined. However, notably that was also before the UN. Moreover, not only does the UN provide for a right of Self-Determination it also restricts the right for any nation to use force (i.e. armed conflict, Article 2(4)). If a group of people with a well defined territory peacefully secedes, and armed conflict and use of force is implemented to prevent the secession that would violate the UN Charter, use of force and laws of armed conflict.
Obviously one of the best examples case studies of applying international laws and norms to the real world is Palestine, which is recognized by the UN and 193 member nations as an independent State, but Israel does not. Obviously its not as easy as Palestine simply secedes through a democratic vote, as there are all kinds of claims from both sides regarding land disputes, use of force and laws of armed conflict. Still international recognition of Palestine as an independent State is a giant mile stone in the process.
> There's no provision forbidding secession either
The Article IV Sec. 4 guarantee cannot be interpret as even coherent if a state can secede; once a state is admitted to the union, he federal government is irrevocably obligated to preserve it as a subject and republican government; if a state government could escape this oversight by secession, the guarantee would be empty.
Further, there is ample historical evidence that the idea of reserving the right to secede when ratifying was raised by New York, and rejected because it was understood that it would be viewed by the Congress as an inconsistent condition attached to ratification and thereby nullify the ratificstion.
The Supreme Court has also ruled on the issue, in Texas v. White. So your concept of a right to secession is inconsistent with the text, historical evidence of intent and case law of the Constitution.
The point is, Wyoming and many other less populated states, would then have very, very limited say in who becomes the head of the executive branch, and therefore holds the veto power over whatever the legislative branch is able to put together whenever they feel like actually doing any work. That's the whole idea: no matter how sparsely populated, each state has at least _some_ say when electing the dude (or dudette) who runs the country, and that say is deliberately disproportionate to its population. Were it up to me, I'd let the smaller states have a larger number of representatives as well. E pluribus unum and all that.
That's how democracy works. If a region wants more say, they should have more people.
No one complains that Lost Springs (population 4) has a "very, very limited say in who becomes the head of the executive branch" of Wyoming. It's same really. It's just lines on a map, nothing to do with state or national identity.
Wyoming gets 3 votes in the electoral college, California gets 55 - I am not sure what point you are making.
The net effect of the electoral college is that the president is effectively picked by the voters of a handful of swing states. Wyoming is not one of these swing states.
Removing the electoral college would lead to the president being picked by the voters of all states, which seems a lot better.
yes exactly - FPP voting as practiced in the US (at the house seat level right up to state electoral college votes) means that vast numbers of people are disenfranchised
I wonder how many people arguing for the abolishment of the EC would like it if India and China automatically had the most votes in whatever supranational government arises in the future and got to decide everything that happened across the world. The US is still supposed to be a federation. The EC was part of the deal the US made with smaller states to become part of the Union precisely because they were afraid of being drowned out by the big states. Don't like it? Convince the smaller states. Might not be that hard. There are plenty of dumb people in the smaller states willing to permanently consign their land to irrelevance because they don't like a President who's going to be gone in a handful of years.
The democrats crucified Trump in 2016 for not accepting the outcome of the election. Today they want to amend the constitution to abolish the electoral college. Maybe it's a good thing that we can't change these things on a whim.
Your first two sentences are both accurate, but I don't think your third necessarily follows. There are strong arguments for getting rid of the Electoral College and they should be (and are being) debated.
My issue with the electoral college is that winner take all - rather than each electoral vote being counted and rolled up, only the winner is. There are a couple states that do this, I’d like to see the others adopt this.
Anyone proposing this is doing so in the blind. Nobody knows how this would change the complex executive and legislative systems we have. Nobody could know, for decades. So why the confidence that this is the right thing to do?
Let's imagine a state signs this and is a tipping point state for the presidential election. If this compact has any effect, it will be for the state's electors to vote against the popular vote in that state, resulting in the election of the undesired president according to the state's voters.
Nothing wrong with that constitutionally, but I suspect the politicians will feel differently after the voters express their opinion of the matter.
Yes, of course. If you support the election of President based on national popular vote, then you surely realize that sometimes the President will not be the candidate that was preferred in certain states.
If this actually does pass the tipping point, nobody will even be counting electors any more, they will only be counting the popular vote. The electors will be considered just a formality.
Well, yeah, people who don't like the winning candidate will be upset. Perhaps some people will be upset that the preferred candidate in their household, neighborhood, city, county, or state didn't win. I don't see how this is an effective argument against this policy.
The US constitution says that presidential electors are chosen in a manner prescribed by the state legislature. They change the prescription, just as some have changed it now.
This is stupid. The entire point of the electoral college is to ensure small states have a say and the country isn’t ruled by the majority mob. Small states would have to be pretty ignorant to make themselves irrelevant like that.
Are you sure that that's not exactly what it's designed to do? Can you explain what it _is_ designed to do? (edit: I'm not claiming either way, but would like to understand what you're claiming) (edit: hmmm, a single downvote ...)
However, it's not clear there's anything that small states can do about this (other than make sure that this doesn't get passed in states making up a majority of EC votes).
The states that would arguably be stupid to go for this are actually the purple ones rather than the large or small ones, because they are the ones that are currently the focus of presidential campaigning but they would no longer be if there was a mechanism for making the EC reflect popular vote. That's perhaps why Colorado may remove itself (see https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-movement-to-skip-th...)
I'm not sure the electoral college does that except when successfully gerrymandered. Electoral college votes are applied on a population basis. So small states get less votes.
Without the electoral college, "states" collectively don't get any say at all. Only citizens of those states.
It looks like there are at least three dumb fucks on Hacker News. According to Alexander Hamilton's Federalist 68, avoiding mob rule was the first reason for the electoral college. The second was to ensure qualified people chose the president of the U.S. The third was to prevent civil disorder (again, mob rule) by spreading the elector's votes around the nation. The fourth was to prevent corruption. Without the electoral college, small states don't have the numbers to counter states like California, New York, and other heavily populated areas. Mob rule is a problem to some degree with the electoral college; nevertheless, its purpose was to prevent that.
If trump is re-elected it may be the last time a republican wins a presidential election in the current system, due to demographic changes in key states (FL, TX, NC, etc.)
If the electoral college is abolished, it could actually end up getting another few republicans elected, since it would incentivize republican turnout in solidly democratic states like California.
All right, the Republicans have to move their position just enough to appeal to the median electoral vote just a bit more than the Democrats do. If the Democrats go full off-the-deep-end leftist (as seen by the bulk of the voters), then the Republicans may not have to move at all.
The states agreed to the Constitution with the Electoral College provision. If there's national will to change it, it should be through the amendment process described in the Constitution.
Having some states band together to subvert the intention of the EC fundamentally breaks the compact of the Constitution. What is the authority of a President chosen through subversion of the Constitution?
Great. With no electoral college, Wyoming would have 1.44% of the weight California would have towards who was elected. The only thing keeping Wyoming in the Union would be their two senators. Maybe then Wyoming folks should have to pay 1.44% of the Federal Income Tax that Californians pay.
Campaigning for President? Just go to New York, LA, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, and maybe a few other cities.
Maybe city folks can start making their own food while they're at it.
Guess what? Wyoming pays less than 1.07% <1> of the federal income tax that California does so you have gotten your wish.
Also California grows about 100x <2> the food of Wyoming so yeah we can eat our own food, thank you.
The most important reason the electoral college was invented was so that states with large slave populations could count 60% of them for representation without actually giving them the vote. You don't hear about it that much anymore for obvious reasons.
Nice response. With actual data. Of course I am not sure the folks in the San Jaoquin Valley (who produce all that food) would be colored blue if they were an independent state.
I don't buy the slave argument -- I think the electoral college was created for the same reason we have two senators per state. Of course those states with large slave populations would have been colored blue, but that is another history folks ignore.
And if the San Jaoquin Valley became its own state conservative votes in San Jaoquin valley and San Fransico would count more if they were seperate states. Which is the whole point. It's telling that my point about economics and representation got turned into a blue / red thing.
>> I don't buy that slave arguement..
And you are a historian? The slave states that were large like Virginia wanted the electoral college, contradicting your argument.
It seems the electoral college was exploited by slave owners, but what I challenge is that is was created for that purpose. It articles see the electoral college was a vestige of slavery, but that does not seem like a reasonable conclusion. The sources you give all have a serious bias and a vested interest in seeing the electoral college disbanded.
It was supported by the largest state at the time, so the idea that it was created to "help small states" makes no sense. It served that purpose but that is not why it was made.
You provide no evidence and when I site sources you say they are biased. If you believe the sources are biased please note that they site books, experts etc. If you just reject every piece of evidence you will always be right.
I think this is both a dumb move and unconstitutional.
Present day politics aside, allowing for pure demographic voting in this day and age is even more dangerous than it was in the early days of the republic.
States and regions have different needs that need to be considered in the governance of the nation. You can already see warning signs, the Democratic Party platform has been so brain dead, they even managed to marginalize union voters. Kansas and Wisconsin were progressive strongholds.
Changing the way we count isn’t a fix for that issue — fixing how candidates and parties approach the people is. A more productive approach would be to reduce the carnival nature of the election process... candidates shouldn’t be picked based on their ability to shuck and jive in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Direct popular vote is basically a beacon for reactionary politics. It’s easy to churn out old people to vote.
What is unconstitutional about a state using its constitutional authority to cast its votes for President?
Why should fictional state borders take precedence over actual humans when allocating voting blocs?
If different states have difference needs, then those states residents will vote for leaders who serve them.
Your problem seems to be that that giving supreme power to an arbitrary majority
is flawed. And it surely is. But giving supreme power to an arbitrary minority is surely as bad or worse.
Old people live in every state.
If you have a problem with old people exercising their sacred voting right too much, surely the solution is to enable young people to vote, not give rural state citizens extra vote weight?
My problem is that this is a solution looking for a problem. In fact, it’s a solution that will make the problem that some people want to solve far worse.
I think before we change the system we might want to get politicians to actually do their job and represent the people in their district. With all these people voting by mail and all these government provided or subsidized phones and internet connections it's not only trivial but should be mandatory to quantify and qualify what each person who votes wants as a matter of a public record of accountability rather than having some party line being towed. If the politicians were doing their job and not serving some party or political agenda, the electoral college I think would work just fine. Popular vote/mob rules? I don't think so. The majority should never rule over the minority, and the only good government is a democracy where the majority vote in the best interest of all citizens and compromise in order to do so. Or as I like to sum it up, don't confuse a coop game with a competitive game.
An amendment is proposed on the floor of the House to change the formula in a bill for how funding is allocated.
The amendment presents a pro-urban allocation which provides a greater share of funding for larger cities compared to a baseline per-capita allocation.
Urban center representatives stand up and argue how their cities need a higher reimbursement rate because the issue at hand is costlier to fix or more prevalent in their environment.
Rural representatives stand up and argue they need the baseline funding to run an effective program.
A vote is taken, and 54% of votes approve the amendment, urban center reps effectively pooling their votes to enact the funding paradigm that most benefited their constituents.
——
The moral of the story is that it’s a lot more complicated than 1 person 1 vote.
Often times policies may benefit a rural area over and urban environment or vice versa. One type of community benefiting and the expense of another. Cities already carry a massive voting advantage, because, that’s where most people live!
When bills pass on a majority vote, urban already wins over rural every time. The rural areas maybe can form blocks to help push otherwise divided city reps one way or another, but policy debate is already dominated by urban voters, despite the claim of urban votes “counting less”. The simple math belies the reality that urban center reps vote for pro-urban national policies and the rural states with 1 rep sit on the sidelines.
The last place these votes matter, even in the slightest, is in the EC in a closely contested election, and in the Senate. Frankly I’m not convinced more populism is any benefit, or that cities are particularly hurting from a lack of representation.
The thing I've never understood about this argument is why the urban/rural divide is so special that it needs special rules? There are a bajillion other types of ways to categorize people that there is a majority and a minority besides the population density of their state.
It’s a hypothetical, of course it’s contrived. Thankfully things break down much more chaotically than just an urban/rural split! That’s not to say there is not a general effect present.
Here’s another way to think of it. How many congressional votes does Los Angeles get before it’s people are adequately represented? Right now I believe it’s 18.
Even at that level their vote per capita is technically 3:1 less powerful than a person in WY. But whose interests are being served better in Congress?
Is the population of LA really disenfranchised in Congress due to WY getting a representative, or because LA didn’t get 30?
There’s a power effect which is very much non-linear due to the individual votes in Congress being decided on a win/loss by majority or super-majority and this effect already greatly benefits these so-called “disenfranchised” voters.
The city/rural divide in American political rhetoric is mostly a populist dog-whistle for the conflict between secular progressivism and Christian conservative identity politics.
There are legitimate issues with agricultural funding, infrastructure and whatnot that fall along those lines but mostly when people say they don't want "small state X run by California" or "New York" what they mean is they don't want Federal laws passed which force those small states to adopt more progressive or leftist policies than their local culture would be comfortable with.
Right? As I was reading GP, all I could think is that there are a million other instances of an issue having two interested but opposed parties, one being larger than the other, and in advanced pluralistic democracies, we generally find ways to balance the two interests that don’t involve completely hosing one party. I recognize that the Electoral College was developed in a context where people were very concerned about tyranny of the majority, but it’s a drastic solution to a not altogether exceptional problem.
However, there's a more important issue: that's not really what the electoral college does. It gives a small edge to small states[0]. The much bigger effect is that in every given election, it favors a handful of battleground states over all the rest.
If you live in Wyoming, the electoral college does not help you, because your vote is secure. Ditto for Vermont. But if you live in Ohio or Florida, presidential candidates will spend all their time in your state, trying to get your vote.
While you can concoct a semi-coherent case for rural voters needing special protection, no one can explain why Ohio is more or less important than North Carolina, or Florida than Texas.
[0] Which, if you're paying attention, is at least correlated with being rural, but only partially--another lazy generalization that surrounds this subject.