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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
So why, in your view, do the states get to appoint the electors?
> 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.
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.
Another way of looking at it is to note that New York City is the most important city in the history of world civilization, and the global center of media, finance, culture, commerce, fashion, and art, while the rest of the state is mostly stripmalls and like a few dozen people plus a confusingly located NFL team, so maybe we should let the millions of people living in the city run things?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
>>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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> "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 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?
> 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.
> 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.
> "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.
We're actually in an abberation right now with respect to how states select Senators. Originally, state legislatures selected senators, not popular votes. Direct election of senators has only happened since the 1970s, and imo the senate is functionally gridlocked unless one party has a super majority or decides to lower the threshold for getting things one to a simple majority.
I wonder if we would be in a better place if we retained the old system.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
> 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.
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?
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 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.
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 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. 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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'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.
>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.
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
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?
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?
> 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 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.
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 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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]
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.
"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.
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.
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?
> 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.
> 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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 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).
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Communication is good but the control of the communication and the media is in the coasts. All the media organisations and all the social networks are sitting in the coasts and run by people with a certain political agendas. I am actually amazed how relevant the idea of electoral college is even today. It gives people with no voice the power they deserve as it did 200 years ago.
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.
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.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 621 ms ] threadNothing wrong with that constitutionally, but I suspect the politicians will feel differently after the voters express their opinion of the matter.
It will be easy enough to note which states' vote counts favor candidate B, despite the national popular vote favoring candidate A.
As parent says, that's the design, but I'm sure there will be upset people in those states.
There are people upset with the plurality winner getting all the states votes, too.
That's why I'm not too worried about it. If it would really change the result, it's easy for a State to hit the pause button.
Is it that easy? It's a compact, not trivial to pull out of.
- Enough states pass this for it to be in force in 2020.
- Trump wins the popular vote in 2020. However, he would not have won an EC vote because of California and New York.
- California decides to renege on the compact, and votes for Biden instead.
- A bunch of red states sue California. Long before the court cases go anywhere, Biden takes the oath of office.
And what then?
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.
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.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia...
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.
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.
Remember, this will work both ways - eventually we will have a democrat that doesn't win the popular vote as well in the current system.
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".
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Two_of_the_United_Stat...
We must stop this madness!
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.
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.
But no. Land owners make money extracting rent. The difference is that farming is subsidized.
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.
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.
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.
Best I can do to clarify.
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.
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.
Given the geographic clustering of opinions, it is not adequate to give every individual equal say over every area.
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.
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.
https://www.constitution.org/fed/federa68.htm
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.
So why, in your view, do the states get to appoint the electors?
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.
Well yeah. There's a reason why it's called the United STATES.
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.
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.
* But love cashing their welfare checks sent from urban citizens.
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.
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.
So just call me Mr. Populist Myth I guess.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why.
The tyranny of the minority who sit on emptier ground is not a sacred value.
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.
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.
Isn’t this literally not true?
Of course it’s true. WY has 1 representative to CA’s 53.
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.
Should some states have zero?
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.
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.
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.
I would not mind that
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.
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.
Not sure where you live, but since 1914 in Colorado:
1914 - four representatives
1973 - five representatives
1983 - six representatives
2003 - seven representatives
So clearly seats are added as population changes in a state.
See also: https://www.insightsassociation.org/article/states-expected-...
To truly remedy this situation in the House, you have to bring the House up to about 930.
https://time.com/5423623/house-representatives-number-seats/
I'm not sure adding more reps would make the system work any better - part of me thinks it would be even more expensive and chaotic.
The House reapportions by population after each census (10 years), with the exception of the notable failure after the 1920 Census.
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Two_of_the_United_Stat...
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?
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.
All states have two Senators and at least one member of the House, with additional House members based on their population.
This is why California (with it's large population) has 55 electoral college votes, while Alaska only gets the default minimum of three.
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.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGarvie_Model
Disclaimer: Australian so obviously biased
> 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
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese
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.
If the trend doesn't change for the next 80 years. Which is a big if.
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.
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.
That's one take. Another take is that urban centers are being actively disenfranchised.
Btw, those politicians who benefit from the EC are the ones creating policies that are destroying the rural populace at the same time.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
The political implications of showing urbanites that (some) rural areas are better places to live than is currently being preached could get interesting.
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?
[1] http://theconversation.com/whose-votes-count-the-least-in-th...
[2] http://www.laalmanac.com/population/po04a.php
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.
Unless you are in a purple state you basically don't have a vote, and politicians can ignore your entire State.
So while the EC does empower some rural voters, in reality it effectively disenfranchises most of the country.
The issue you are having at the state level is a dominant majority makes the views of the minority irrelevant.
And to be clear, the EC does not disenfranchise all the voters in states like CA, just the minority voters.
This is actually precisely what the Senate and the Electoral College is designed to mitigate.
So roughly half of the votes in all non competitive states do not count.
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.
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.
>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?
Why would Arkansas or Nevada have joined a union of states where their votes mean essentially nothing?
Why would California have joined a union of states where their votes mean 1/4 of Wyoming's?
Read higher up in the thread:
> For example, a vote in Wyoming counts 3.6 times more than a vote in California.[1]
* 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?
But it needs to be on agreed upon and mostly amicable terms, or the state(s) desiring to leave will be unable to get the necessary votes.
The southern states trying to take their slavery and go home knew this for decades before, so they didn't even bother.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
(Though I worry for the EU, too.)
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.
Thank you for illustrating the bankruptcy of the regressive position.
I guess if you want to just "thoughts and prayers" it then that's your prerogative.
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.
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.
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.
Actually, as someone else remarked upthread, in most parliamentary democracies the Prime Minister is elected by the parliament, not by popular vote.
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.
I wonder if we would be in a better place if we retained the old system.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So ... separate but equal?
Apologies if there’s a direct linkage that I’m simply missing
This policy was enacted by a President that lost the popular vote in California, and lost the popular vote nationwide.
That is tyranny.
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?
Why? They elected Trump to address those concerns. If he can't or won't, the rest of the country is under no obligation to do so on his behalf.
If Trump fails, then he fails. But that's a lot different from completely disenfranchising many states when it comes to the presidency.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
The question we should be asking is, why are Ohio, PA, Michigan and Florida more important than any other state?
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.
If you get rid of the electoral college then no matter where you live your vote would count. At least for President.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Should African Americans ger 3.6x the vote as White Americans because there are fewer of them?
Because it's not the United Races 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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_Colleg...
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...)
Without the electoral college, "states" collectively don't get any say at all. Only citizens of those states.
https://time.com/4558510/electoral-college-history-slavery/
We see that that backfired. :)
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.
All this is asking is 1 person 1 vote.
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.
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.
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.
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's no provision forbidding secession either, so they technically very much can. All that's not forbidden is allowed.
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.
Says literally nothing about secession.
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.
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.
That said... I think there's a solution for this. Hard term limits for everyone, in all the branches.
It already exists for the Executive branch. I think it should be instituted for both Legislative and Judicial as well.
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.)
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.
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 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.
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.
> Yeah, slavery.
No, tyranny of the majority. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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.]
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.
What is your point?
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]
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.
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.
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.
So should we abolish the senate too? Not being snarky just wondering what those who support NPV think.
How difficult is it to corrupt a man like Mitch McConnell? How robust is our system of representation when one senator holds so much power?
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.
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.
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?
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/06/20/calif_...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
http://theconversation.com/whose-votes-count-the-least-in-th...
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?
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.
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.
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.
States become irrelevant under the NPV.
Based on what we've seen in the midwest, what you're actually saying here is that divided government isn't good for anything.
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.
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.
Yeah, I don't think all the people in smaller states falling over themselves to join the Compact are really thinking this through.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
The alternative is that it's an appointed position. That won't be less political.
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.
There are other alternatives than just elected vs appointed.
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.
The president is one of three branches of government. Congress/Senate balances the power across states.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynolds_v._Sims
FiveThirtyEight published an article last week on the current state of the compact: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-movement-to-skip-th...
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Democratic_Party_presiden...
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.
> 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].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta...
The founders’ concerns about that are well-documented. A cursory search yielded a decent starting point: https://www.planetizen.com/node/18841
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.
That said, it's still a stupid reason for giving fewer people more votes. There is no reasonable argument for that, no matter which way you slice it.
>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.
"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.
https://dilbert.com/strip/1994-03-04
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.