Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 932 posts

Re: 15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete

#51

Post by m0zg »

outside1234 wrote: post #40
m0zg wrote: post #26

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 an…

I mean, if he had won the popular vote, then fine, he is the winner. All this is asking is 1 person 1 vote.

This would lead to e.g. Wyoming being run by California though. I'm sure Wyomingites would totally love that.

Re: 15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete

#52

Post by JoeAltmaier »

dlbucci wrote: post #18
not_a_moth wrote: post #15

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…

I'm all for rural representation, but people in rural areas essentially have their vote count more than people in cities, right? Cause that's the current system for us: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/map_of_the_w...

In Nevada, they joke that they have "the Senator from Reno" and "the Senator from Los Vegas".

Re: 15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete

#53

Post by bdcravens »

currymj wrote: post #25
reaperducer wrote: post #4

Up next: Abolishing the World Series. Make it one big, long game and count only the total number of runs.

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.

That's closer to how baseball used to be, but there were also less teams at that time.

Re: 15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete

#54

Post by nlh »

sevenf0ur wrote: post #20

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.

Re: 15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete

#55

Post by thomascgalvin »

not_a_moth wrote: post #15

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…

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?

[1] http://theconversation.com/whose-votes-count-the-least-in-th...

[2] http://www.laalmanac.com/population/po04a.php

Re: 15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete

#56

Post by [deleted] »

kaishiro wrote: post #41
chrisseaton wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you have multiple presidents? How would you break their roles up? Which one gets the nuclear code or do they all?

No, I believe the OP is referring to abolishing the "first past the post" system that the US currently has in place.

[deleted]

Re: 15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete

#58

Post by NoodleIncident »

flyingfences wrote: post #34
acomjean wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 is a flawed argument, because the House isn't proportional to population, either. It's _still_ weighted towards smaller, emptier states.

Re: 15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete

#59

Post by abacadaba »

dlbucci wrote: post #18
not_a_moth wrote: post #15

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…

I'm all for rural representation, but people in rural areas essentially have their vote count more than people in cities, right? Cause that's the current system for us: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/map_of_the_w...

I mean what's next? Senator's votes will count more than representatives?

We must stop this madness!

Re: 15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete

#60

Post by jjeaff »

chrisseaton wrote: post #14
shmerl wrote: post #5

Another thing to abolish - winner-takes-all system, which prevents wider parties variety.

Would you have multiple presidents? How would you break their roles up? Which one gets the nuclear code or do they all?

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.

Post reply on HN