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

461–470 of 932 posts

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

#461

Post by gthaman »

rayiner wrote: post #418

Debates over the electoral college tend to conflate two different things. The original purpose of the electoral college was a compromise between those who wanted the president directly elected, and those who wanted Congress to elect the president. While very small states have a modest edge as a result of using the number of members of Congress to decide the number of electors, the real purpose of the system is to add…

Let the states that will never get their way in a "fixed" elector college, secede.

To mess with the electoral college in this point in time - when its basically 49% vs 51% - and at such a level of divide in the country is not exactly a testament to how empathetic the two sides are. It would be a disaster.

Everyone thinks Trump himself is the problem but this awful idea to change the goalposts literally to win elections would do way more damage than Trump could ever do but I guess it doesn't come in an 'easy to hate' package with agenda serving talking points, etc.

I don't know where these idiots think this whole "OK - we'll follow these laws, but not those" thing is going but it is incredibly damaging and at the moment only one side is picking and choosing which laws to obey and not obey (then writing publicly about it) but soon enough the other side will be picking and choosing which laws to ignore.

Get your helmets on once we are on _that_ slippery slope.

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

#462

Post by dragonwriter »

harryh wrote: post #454
IgorPartola wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, the number of House reps is no longer proportionate to the population. Second, the layer of indirection as it exists today does nothing. Electors aren’t free to choose a president. They in most cases must elect the person they pledged to elect and if they don’t they instantly get replaced by a new elector who will. What purpose does that serve? Seems to me like we should either buck up and actually allow these…

First, the number of House reps is no longer proportionate to the population. Yes they are. Each house district has about 750,000 people. You get a bit of deviation because states don't necessarily have a precise multiple of 750k people. Also we only redraw districts every 10 years, so things have drifted a bit since 2010. But it's pretty close.

> Each house district has about 750,000 people.

It ranges quite a bit above and below that. (About half a million to a million is the range.)

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

#463

Post by eropple »

Redoubts wrote: post #429
eropple wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed. I should have said that American federalism has failed; that misalignment is endemic to America--it goes back as far as the Missouri bleeping Compromise, and that's just the part labeled "America"--and is probably unfixable.

(Though I worry for the EU, too.)

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

#464

Post by FireBeyond »

anon1m0us wrote: post #417
jdavis703 wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weighting "resources" is not a good thing. In the past it's been used to justify some of the most horrific policies in the U.S. The U.S. constitution counted slaves at 60% of a person. Some of the arguments for the three fifths compromise were that slaveholders didn't want people who weren't "knowledgable" about slaveholding to be meddling in slaveholder's business. This is essentially one of the causes that sparked…

All wars throughout all of history have been about resources. In the end, resources are all that matter. The civil war was about resources as well. It was the slaves that helped extract those resources from the land. It wasn't about slavery, it was about what they used the slaves to get . This is really a red state vs blue state debate, but even on a county by county level, the majority of the counties of California,…

> And thus, the electoral college gives those red counties a voice that's ignored in their own states.

And in many cases gives them more of a voice.

There's an irony that the EC more accurately represents votes per acre/square mile than per constituent, and (one of) the reasons for the move to the US was to get away from tyrannical land/owners.

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

#465

Post by AmericanChopper »

marcell wrote: post #456
WarDores wrote: post #333

It's not about division of power between rural/urban or big states/small states. The Electoral College is about buffering purely democratic power. The President doesn't represent "the people." He/she represents the interests of the states. The Legislative Branch represents the will of the people (most directly through the House of Representatives). One of the biggest problems is vesting too much power and importance…

I don't know about that, specifically this part: > He/she represents the interests of the states This assumes that states in America have some sort of distinct cultural/political interests, divided along state lines. This isn't really the case. For example there are no significant cultural differences between North Dakota and South Dakota. The dividing line there is pretty arbitrary. Similarly, some places that have…

But every state does have a long history of sovereignty. Your point of view would require completely redefining what the US is as a nation.

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

#466

Post by malandrew »

fzeroracer wrote: post #423
dgzl wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, otherw…

> the federal government is needed in order to apply some culpability to times when the local government behaves negligently.

And who will apply culpability when the federal government behaves negligently? Creating a higher institution to address the issue just shifts the problem of apply culpability to an institution that you have even less chance of influencing.

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

#467

Post by harryh »

dragonwriter wrote: post #462
harryh wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, the number of House reps is no longer proportionate to the population. Yes they are. Each house district has about 750,000 people. You get a bit of deviation because states don't necessarily have a precise multiple of 750k people. Also we only redraw districts every 10 years, so things have drifted a bit since 2010. But it's pretty close.

> Each house district has about 750,000 people. It ranges quite a bit above and below that. (About half a million to a million is the range.)

Indeed, according to:

https://247wallst.com/special-report/2018/10/26/americas-lar...

the largest is Montana's at large district with 1,050,493 and the smallest is Rhode Island 2 with 520,389. I tried to find a full list but couldn't with a few minutes of Googling. I'm a little surprised that Wikipedia doesn't have a page on this.

Perils of the fact that districts are confined to state borders so you've gotta round up or down for some states.

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

#468

Post by krapp »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #229
CPLX wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should be considered proportionally to the amount of people affected.

But their lives are so different. For instance: gun control. Rules for millions of people crowded into a pressure-cooker city, vs rules for folks living a mile apart with varmints, police protection an hour away, hunting, are reasonably very different. Same for zoning, licensing, inspections, on and on. Rural residents often get saddled with metro rules that make no sense.

Except not every city is midtown Manhattan, and not every rural area is the Ozarks. You can get "varmints" and long police response times in New York and LA. Most people in the "country" don't hunt, fish, or gather firewood, and most people in the "cities" aren't living hyperdense urbane chic lifestyles. In reality, most of the country lives in between these extremes.

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

#469

Post by sokoloff »

The electoral college also serves as a “firewall” of sorts to contain any local election fraud to that state (such that the will of the voters in that state is compromised, but the compromise doesn’t extend beyond that).

For all I care, CA could pick their votes out of a lotto machine and it wouldn’t affect the power of my vote (as a non-CA resident). The fact that my vote is meaningless (deep blue state) is a collateral issue, perhaps.

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

#470

Post by nilkn »

thomascgalvin wrote: post #449
nilkn wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The president is the chief executive of the government, and the government is a union of state governments. The federal government itself was never intended to be all that powerful. Tyranny of the minority is not really a problem in the US because state governments can diverge so much from each other. CA, for instance, is a huge outlier already; there really is no "tyranny" at play here. Residents of CA have a state…

"Our" Federal government is currently imprisoning hundreds or thousands of children in squalid conditions. Some of these children are being held in California. This policy was enacted by a President that lost the popular vote in California, and lost the popular vote nationwide. That is tyranny.

So if he'd won the popular vote nationwide but lost it in CA you'd be okay with that? Moreover, while detention facilities have become more crowded under Trump, he certainly didn't invent them.

The solution here is to understand and address why so many millions of people voted for him, not to give even more power to the most powerful and wealthiest states that hardly need it. One reason Trump managed to drum up so much support is because interior states had been neglected for so many decades. Is neglecting them further your solution? Maybe just completely disenfranchise them on a national level and then you don't have to ever worry about what life is like in most of the country?

Post reply on HN