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

311–320 of 932 posts

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

#311

Post by adolph »

smolsky wrote: post #83
wishinghorse wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's the point. Adjust votes' "weight" based on population density.

...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.

Yes, any state always gets a minimum of three since the number of senators is two and representatives is one (the minimum).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Two_of_the_United_Stat...

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

#312

Post by AnimalMuppet »

mikeash wrote: post #298
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#313

Post by invalidOrTaken »

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.

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.

https://dilbert.com/strip/1994-03-04

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

#314

Post by Izkata »

mshirley wrote: post #106

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. FiveThirtyEight published an article last week on the current state of the compact: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-movement-to-skip-th...

> 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.

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

#315

Post by ben509 »

LargeWu wrote: post #88
NoodleIncident wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Also, the two chambers are not equal. The Senate is very clearly the upper chamber.

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.

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

#316

Post by paggle »

squirrelicus wrote: post #305

The electoral college was created to strike a balance between valuing a diversity of perspectives and popularity of perspectives. The probability that a geographically restricted monoculture gets it right is very close to zero.

The electoral college gives extra votes to certain people. Why stop at rural vs urban? Why not give extra votes to people shorter than 5 feet? To people with black hair and blue eyes? To people who can wiggle their ears and roll their tongues at the same time?

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

#317

Post by LanceH »

cgb223 wrote: post #261

Why cant states just give out percents of electoral votes based on who voted? Example: Lets say CA has 10 Electoral Votes (for easy math) 60% vote Dem, 40% vote Republican. California then Gives 6 Electoral Votes to the Democrat and 4 to the Republican instead of all 10 to the Democrat. Feels like that would more fairly represent the voters of each state no?

Why can't one party campaign like the rules were written down beforehand, instead of hanging out running up the score in California?

Getting rid of the electoral college won't necessarily make Hilary win this time around. It will be a different vote entirely. Republicans will actually contest California and some others. They'll try to run up the score in Texas. They'll shift a couple issues left.

The only sure thing from this change would be ignoring the spread out population.

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

#318

Post by adolph »

ska wrote: post #146
dragonwriter wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the House hasn't reapportioned representation by population in a century. 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.

> 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?

No, they are performing the task as outlined by the constitution, which is the “correct” method, and which the people are free to amend.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Two_of_the_United_Stat...

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

#319

Post by crusso »

The states agreed to the Constitution with the Electoral College provision. If there's national will to change it, it should be through the amendment process described in the Constitution.

Having some states band together to subvert the intention of the EC fundamentally breaks the compact of the Constitution. What is the authority of a President chosen through subversion of the Constitution?

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

#320

Post by ShamelessC »

hyperpape wrote: post #302

There are discussions about the electoral college favoring small states. Some people think that's bad, some people think it's good. However, there's a more important issue: that's not really what the electoral college does. It gives a small edge to small states[0]. The much bigger effect is that in every given election, it favors a handful of battleground states over all the rest. If you live in Wyoming, the electora…

I'm not in favor of the electoral college, but wouldn't its elimination merely shift this problem to politicians only visiting the most poulated states (e.g. California) anyway?
Post reply on HN