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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

#201

Post by baddox »

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.

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.

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

#202

Post by jakelazaroff »

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.

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.

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

#203

Post by mikeash »

mieseratte wrote: post #198
mikeash wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

The EC is a check on populism, and very clearly still needed.

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.

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

#204

Post by baddox »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #184
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…

> 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 constituti…

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.

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

#205

Post by JshWright »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #184
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…

> 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 constituti…

So... the EC empowers the states, but the states shouldn't have power?

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

#206

Post by pdonis »

thomascgalvin wrote: post #55
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 is…

> "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.

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

#207

Post by Scramblejams »

human20190310 wrote: post #173
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...

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.

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

#208

Post by baddox »

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.

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.

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

#209

Post by trhway »

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…

>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.

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

#210

Post by lotsofpulp »

francisofascii wrote: post #77
bdcravens wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 develope…

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.
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