The electoral college was just a kludge to allow elections before modern instant long distance communication became a thing. The gold standard for democracy was always "one person, one vote", but nowadays there's a lot of people that consider their personal gain more important than being democratic and those people (the Republican party mostly) will try to hang on to the electoral college, no matter the cost apparently.
15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete
361–370 of 932 posts
Re: 15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
Swing states shift, though. California was basically solid red from the 1950s through the 1980s. Until 2016, few people would have called Wisconsin or Michigan "swing states" judging from their voting in the past few elections. People move, demographics change.
This is true, but I’m not sure having your vote count for a decade, then not count, then count again is all that much better. Note that going in to an election, the potential battleground states are usually known. Some states haven’t been swing states for a long time, too.
I'm not sure what the correct answer is. Winning a national contest is always going to be about coalition-building all said and done. Trump changed the calculus on the traditional GOP coalition (going after unions -- once considered a Democrat lock), and won states he "shouldn't" have. Coalitions line up with states in a lot of cases. If Democrats started pandering to farmers (I can see this happening), the midwest might look different.
I don't see this as a "states not counting" problem as much as the issues that come up in national elections affect different populations in different ways.
If there was a national popular vote, there would still be people who feel disenfranchised because the candidates don't see their chosen issues as vital to their coalition.
Re: 15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
To get the benefits that you would get from such a union (whether they see those as benefits is up to them): * access to single market and currency * federal loans/money * territory protection from other countries military intervention * freedom of movement (including study, work, living, etc) within all the other states of the union If states want to do some things differently that's why there are state level laws.…
They aren’t free to leave the union though. The last time the states disagreed on this a rebellion was put down violently by the north.
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Re: 15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete
#364I 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 t…
It's worth noting that the same thing happened to the Democrats in 2000, and hadn't happened in the US at that point for over 100 years.
Looked at from the perspective of the Democratic party: they have won the popular vote 4 out of the last 5 elections, but only won the presidency twice. It's not surprising the party's frustration with the Electoral College would continue to grow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
Re: 15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete
#365Firstly, 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…
> the higher the turnout, legal or not, the more power for that state Every actual study of the matter I've seen or heard of has shown no evidence of any significant fraudulent voting, particularly not systemic fraudulent voting. While there might be a theoretical concern about incentives here, there's a lot of problems we know are happening right now with voter suppression under the system that we have.
From the perspective of systems security -- there are too many security vulnerabilities regardless of whether or not they are being actively exploited to centralize national elections to a couple heavily populated states. These are states that have a bad track record of internal governance, and abolishing the EC will provide ample additional motivation to abuse those vulnerabilities if they aren't already.
California recently had to be forced by lawsuit to remove 5 million invalid voter registrations. Multiple counties have more registered voters than they have age 18+ citizens. It is unclear how often these registrations were actually used to vote, but isn't it possible that ballots could be printed and filled surreptitiously for these registrations in the future?
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/06/20/calif_...
Re: 15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Eeeeh... Texan's have a lot of state pride - but try confusing a Texan for a Delawarean vs. confusing a Texan with a Canadian or Kiwi - pretty sure the Texan will be more offended with either of those later confusions if they've got that weird patriotism streak.
As an American and a Texan, I find it sad you think patriotism is weird.
Re: 15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete
#367Why 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?
Yes, I also think this is the simplest way to make it more fair. States can do this unilaterally without pact. That's why I feel the pact is not about fairness.
Re: 15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Cons…
> Oh, I thought you were saying this was the mechanism for deciding how to change the rules.
That too. This "compact" approach bugs me partly because it's a hack to get around the appropriate way of doing this, which they know they can't get enough support to do.
> The Constitution allows states to cast their votes as they see fit.
That may be correct. But the Wikipedia article on this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...) indicates that the constitutionality is at least in question. I'd really like to see the Supreme Court decide on the constitutionality of this approach before the first election where it would be in force.
Re: 15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Nobody cares about visiting. They can craft their policies to entirely exclude or screw over states that aren't worth their time. For example, favor specific industries over others that are heavy in one state vs another. They'll do that anyway, but may think twice if they need to build a coalition of smaller states vs just winning the popular vote.
This idea doesn’t seem obvious to me. The biggest states are:
California
Texas
Florida
New York
Pennsylvania
Ohio
Illinois
Georgia
North Carolina
Michigan
Re: 15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete
#370Great. With no electoral college, Wyoming would have 1.44% of the weight California would have towards who was elected. The only thing keeping Wyoming in the Union would be their two senators. Maybe then Wyoming folks should have to pay 1.44% of the Federal Income Tax that Californians pay. Campaigning for President? Just go to New York, LA, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, and maybe a few other cities. Maybe city folks ca…
Guess what? Wyoming pays less than 1.07% of the federal income tax that California does so you have gotten your wish.
Also California grows about 100x the food of Wyoming so yeah we can eat our own food, thank you.
The most important reason the electoral college was invented was so that states with large slave populations could count 60% of them for representation without actually giving them the vote. You don't hear about it that much anymore for obvious reasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_tax_revenue_by_state
https://www.farmprogress.com/management/what-us-states-produ...