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15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete

nytimes.com

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

#171

Post by TylerE »

komali2 wrote: post #128
peapicker wrote: post #71

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 happe…

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.

No they aren't, that's the whole problem!

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?

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

#172

Post by dymk »

cheez wrote: post #127
baddox wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

No state will ever actually secede from the US. Period.

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

#173

Post by human20190310 »

munk-a wrote: post #150

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 a related anachronism...

> 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...

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

#174

Post by zaroth »

pfisch wrote: post #148
zaroth wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Because of the EC I would argue that in most states, including California, your vote effectively doesn't matter at all. 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.

But this proves the point.

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.

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

#176

Post by _bxg1 »

munk-a wrote: post #150

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.

For some states - mostly red ones - that isn't true. Texans still identify primarily with their state.

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.

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

#177

Post by mamon »

danaris wrote: post #113
commandlinefan wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 :)

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

#178

Post by azernik »

nitrogen wrote: post #164
baddox wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah but maybe that's a good thing. 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 sc…

An individual voter in Wyoming should have more say over what happens in Wyoming than an individual voter in New York. Given the geographic clustering of opinions, it is not adequate to give every individual equal say over every area.

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.

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

#180

Post by dantheman »

munk-a wrote: post #136
umvi wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wh…

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…

Do you think the federal government is run better than state governments?
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