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.
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15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete
321–330 of 932 posts
Re: 15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete
#322Re: 15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete
#323The 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?
The only people who say that are those who want rural people's values to have an outsized influence in our elections. That is, conservatives.
Re: 15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete
#324If people are up in arms about the electoral college giving small states outsized influence, wait until they hear about the senate.
Re: 15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete
#325An 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…
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.
Re: 15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete
#326There 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?
At least then they'd be representing the concerns of a larger number of people which is arguably what they should be doing as representatives.
Re: 15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete
#327A hypothetical situation; An amendment is proposed on the floor of the House to change the formula in a bill for how funding is allocated. The amendment presents a pro-urban allocation which provides a greater share of funding for larger cities compared to a baseline per-capita allocation. Urban center representatives stand up and argue how their cities need a higher reimbursement rate because the issue at hand is co…
The thing I've never understood about this argument is why the urban/rural divide is so special that it needs special rules? There are a bajillion other types of ways to categorize people that there is a majority and a minority besides the population density of their state.
It’s a hypothetical, of course it’s contrived. Thankfully things break down much more chaotically than just an urban/rural split! That’s not to say there is not a general effect present.
Here’s another way to think of it. How many congressional votes does Los Angeles get before it’s people are adequately represented? Right now I believe it’s 18.
Even at that level their vote per capita is technically 3:1 less powerful than a person in WY. But whose interests are being served better in Congress?
Is the population of LA really disenfranchised in Congress due to WY getting a representative, or because LA didn’t get 30?
There’s a power effect which is very much non-linear due to the individual votes in Congress being decided on a win/loss by majority or super-majority and this effect already greatly benefits these so-called “disenfranchised” voters.
Re: 15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete
#328There 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?
I think the whole “visiting” thing is overblown. We have TV and the Internet. This isn’t the 19th century when the only way the average American might EVER see or hear a President would be a short speech off the back of a train car.
Re: 15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you described is precisely the intended effect of the pact.
I know the designers of the Pact understand this, I'm just not so sure about all the voters in smaller states signing on to the Compact.
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.
Re: 15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.