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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

#421

Post by CptFribble »

The Electoral college exists because of slavery.

The original idea going into the Constitutional Convention was to have Congress pick the president. A majority of delegates going into the Convention supported this, but discarded it after debates established it would violate the separation of powers.

The popular vote wasn't an option, however, because it would mean the southern states with their large, non-voting slave populations would have vastly reduced influence. The southern delegates would have never supported a popular vote. Thus, the electoral college.

Madison wrote about it here: http://memory.loc.gov/ll/llfr/002/0000/00610057.tif

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

#422

Post by dragonwriter »

TylerE wrote: post #410
gshubert17 wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An early primary, I believe.

Yes, but if it's really about ad spend and not being physically present, why do they spend so much time being physically present in a tiny state?

Because of primary campaign dynamics where those are literally the only stayed voting at the time, and underperforming there means you have no money, no positive news coverage and no reason to campaign anywhere else. So all energy goes into them at a certain point in the nomination campaign. (As a rough approximation.)

Totally different dynamic than general elections, which happen all at once rather than different dates in different states.

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

#423

Post by fzeroracer »

dgzl wrote: post #411
fzeroracer wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've been giving up control to the federal government because more often than not, the local and state governments have failed [1]. Political corruption, corporate interests etc somehow don't just vanish and go away when you give power to the states. There's a balance to be made between federal and state government powers. And ultimately the electoral college is one of the things that needs to go, because it unfairl…

The point isn't that corruption goes away when power is given to the states, the point is that the state is easier to protest than the federal government. I can get to my state capital in ~4 hours of driving, but it would take me >40 hours to get to DC. The electoral college is better than straight democracy.

It should be obvious by now that if that were the case, scenarios like what happened in Flint, Michigan should've ended with Rick Snyder in jail and more action taken.

And in cases like these, the federal government is needed in order to apply some culpability to times when the local government behaves negligently. Not to mention this only really works if the state government actually cares about local issues, otherwise you end up with cases such as states vying to ban gay marriage because there's a tyranny of the majority at the local state level and a tyranny of the minority at the federal level.

It's a lose-lose situation because then the rural votes dictate not only the things within their state but the things that are completely outside of their purview.

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

#424

Post by jonas21 »

dmix wrote: post #398
jonas21 wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wyoming gets 7 electoral votes per million people, while New York gets only 1.9. That's a 3.6x difference -- I would hardly call that a "small" edge.

Those aren't static numbers though. California used to have 4 electoral votes in 1850s (edit) and now they have 55 (Wyoming has always had 3, New York has 29 today down from a peak of 47 in the 1940s). The ratio of votes per capita is relatively consistent - assuming a baseline level of votes so individual states aren't totally excluded - and is more a sign of a potential problem with the distribution not the system…

> California used to have 4 electoral votes in 1950s

California had 32 electoral votes in the 1950s. You may have meant the 1850s, when California did have only 4 electoral votes. That's because California was tiny back then, with a population of under 100,000 in 1850.

The electoral votes per capita has always been heavily skewed in favor small states. While it's true that some formerly small states have grown into large states, I don't see how that's relevant.

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

#425

Post by anon1m0us »

CptFribble wrote: post #421

The Electoral college exists because of slavery. The original idea going into the Constitutional Convention was to have Congress pick the president. A majority of delegates going into the Convention supported this, but discarded it after debates established it would violate the separation of powers. The popular vote wasn't an option, however, because it would mean the southern states with their large, non-voting slav…

Actually, or perhaps also, the electoral college exists because the founding fathers didn't trust the people to make good decisions. This is discussed at length in the letters the founding fathers wrote about their political opinions.

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

#426

Post by hyperpape »

jonas21 wrote: post #392
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…

Wyoming gets 7 electoral votes per million people, while New York gets only 1.9. That's a 3.6x difference -- I would hardly call that a "small" edge.

True, at that extreme, it's big, and I probably could state my claim more precisely.

Here's my claim: if you drew a curve of electoral votes per person by percentile, there would be a very small area that was significantly elevated, and the remaining portion would be moderately flat.

Because Wyoming's population is so small, the absolute impact isn't that big. Go up just a few spots to Hawaii and it's more like a 2:1 ratio. Yet still, substantially less than 10% of the population lives in such small states. So there's a very small minority of people who have a proportionally larger impact (but still a small impact in absolute terms).

To be clear, I think that's a bad result. So far as the democratic process can allow it, our votes should have equal weight. But it's somewhat exaggerated how systematic of an effect it has. In the same vein, I've argued that the best defense of the electoral college is that it only errs by giving the wrong result in elections that were already very close. In contrast, the Senate is thoroughly anti-democratic, unsalvagably so.

(Btw: I can't replicate your math. New York had 19,378,102 people in 2010, and 29 votes = 1.49 votes / million. Wyoming had 563,626 and 3 votes = 5.32 votes / million).

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

#427

Post by DenseComet »

cletus wrote: post #94

The electoral college achieves one very useful function thats ignored by everyone calling for its abolition in favour of the popular vote: it produces a clear winner and contains the contagion of litigating and delegitimizing the outcome of an election. Think about this: there are a number of elections that have a very small popular vote margin. What if this gets less than, say, 20,000? That's entirely possible. In a…

The electoral college doesn't necessarily help the voting process produce a clear winner, nor does it necessarily stop each side from scrounging votes.

As you mentioned, in the 2000 election, the outcome came down to Florida, specifically two counties. The electoral college helps create situations like this. The officials and what happened that election in those two counties essentially set the pace of America for the next decade. If they did fudge the numbers, the electoral college did not do anything to make the vote safer.

The electoral college causes there to be very specific places that can be targeted to swing the entire election. Those places must be secured, but in the end, it makes more sense to take the secure voting practices and apply them everywhere, not just to the places the electoral causes the votes to matter.

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

#428

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#429

Post by Redoubts »

eropple wrote: post #331
pdonis wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one mentioned federal benefits. Sure you did; you said LAC voters don't have their concerns addressed as well because they are part of a large, populous state whose EC votes count for less per capita. My question is, if LAC is capable of managing its own affairs, why does it care? In other words, you're assuming that the President's job is to "take care of everyone's concerns", so everyone needs an equal vote to…

Even when you take for granted--and we shouldn't, but just for funsies we will--that the whole point of the thing is to make executive decisions about national needs... why the heck should Nevada get a bigger say than Los Angeles County? It has become evident that the federalist experiment has failed; because an integrated modern society cuts across state lines, while land can't vote and people matter more than land.…

> It has become evident that the federalist experiment has failed

Not so much failed, but massively misaligned after the civil war. The nation made many compromises at every level for slave power, and should have renegotiated everything afterwards.

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

#430

Post by elicash »

CptFribble wrote: post #421

The Electoral college exists because of slavery. The original idea going into the Constitutional Convention was to have Congress pick the president. A majority of delegates going into the Convention supported this, but discarded it after debates established it would violate the separation of powers. The popular vote wasn't an option, however, because it would mean the southern states with their large, non-voting slav…

> The popular vote wasn't an option, however, because it would mean the southern states with their large, non-voting slave populations would have vastly reduced influence.

I'm not saying you're wrong, bc clearly you've done at least some research and I've done none. But didn't most states not have anything resembling a "popular" vote at first?

In the first presidential election 43,782 cast a ballot. (Population nearly 4 million in 1790.. so about 1% got a vote.)

When many states didn't even HAVE a popular vote at the state level, is it really true that they were considering using a popular vote rather than state electors based on populations?

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