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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

#501

Post by smsm42 »

hyperpape wrote: post #457
smsm42 wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you live in Wyoming, the electoral college does not help you, because your vote is secure. For now. But if Wyoming doesn't like what happens with Republican party, it can change. There's a huge inertia in large parties, so probably won't happen overnight, but it's not a law of nature. From what I've heard, one of the reasons 2016 election went the way it did because Democrats considered certain states (not Wyomi…

I think it was pretty systematic. If you look at 538 ( https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/ ), they were pretty accurate predicted which states were most and least likely to vote Trump or Clinton. It's just that in several states where they thought Clinton had a small lead, she lost. Meanwhile, there were no states they thought Trump had a small lead but he lost. The comparative judgments (Wis…

> "all the polls are too positive for you, you don't have a safety margin" they'd have known

On my memory, this is not the first time polls tilt left. Politicians should have already learned that this is possible, especially with such an unorthodox candidate as Trump.

My point also was that not many states are really "safe", yet less - forever. Relatively yes, some are further from the middle than others, but it's not a static picture and it's not a product of some permanent law but only current configuration which should never be taken for granted.

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

#502

Post by pishpash »

dragonwriter wrote: post #409
WarDores wrote: post #338

Earlier 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.

> California was basically solid red from the 1950s through the 1980s Suddenly swung in 1992, and has been seen as solid blue since—not really an example of swing states switching as a state rapidly moving from Republican lock to Democratic lock.

Phase transition is a natural outcome of all-or-nothing elector pledging.

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

#503

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

bendbro wrote: post #475
hyperpape wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two things: 1. I’m gonna take a hard line that people deserve a vote, dirt doesn’t. 2. Louisiana is the 25th most populous state and I think 25th densest. So, I’m not sure the electoral college is protecting those less dense states’ environments. As the sibling points out, sometimes coastal liberals want environmental protection, while natives want to exploit the environment for profit.

And if Louisiana's federal desires are consistently decided by more populous states, what is left that motivates Louisiana to remain a member of the United States?

I don't understand the premise of the question. Why would Louisiana expect to be able to dictate federal policies against the wishes of other states?

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

#504

Post by pishpash »

WarDores wrote: post #362
hyperpape wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

We're witnessing a party re-alignment in real time.

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

#505

Post by AmericanChopper »

thomascgalvin wrote: post #55
not_a_moth wrote: post #15

An 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…

The counterpoint to that is that the Electoral College has transferred so much power to rural areas that we are no longer an actual representative democracy. For example, a vote in Wyoming counts 3.6 times more than a vote in California.[1] The people in California are not represented in the Presidential election; it would be more accurate to say that one-quarter of the people in California are represented. "Rural is…

If you want to look at recent trends, it’s hard to say the electoral college is helping Republicans. A lot of states have only voted in one direction since Bush Sr (the last republican to win CA). If you take those results for granted going forward, a Democrat needs to swing 83 votes to become president, and a Republican needs to swing 173. If Trump hadn’t flipped Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan for the first time since Bush Sr, Democrats would typically only need to swing 44 votes to win.

It’s also hard to say this is even problematic in general. The winner of the popular vote has only lost 5 times in history (or 6 depending on who you ask about 1960), and not by large margins either. But you can’t take this to mean that the results would have been different if the election was to be decided by popular vote to begin with. Currently Republican candidates have little incentive to campaign in CA or NY, and Democrat candidates have little incentive to campaign in TX. If the outcome was to be decided by popular vote to begin with, there’s no way to say that the outcomes would have been any different.

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

#506

Post by gfodor »

outside1234 wrote: post #31
gfodor wrote: post #11

I'm really confused about this because I don't understand the incentives politicians have to adopt this in their own state. It clearly undermines their state's power in national elections. My (cynical) assumption is that this will be obeyed insofar as it helps bring about the desired outcome by those in power. It will be disregarded if it would shift the outcome in the other direction.

Does it? What if there state votes for the popular winner and that popular winner is not the winner? Remember, this will work both ways - eventually we will have a democrat that doesn't win the popular vote as well in the current system.

If a state votes for the popular winner then they are already going to give their electoral votes to that winner, right? For the people of the state, this basically diluted the impact their vote has (kind of self evident, since that is the point of the electoral college)

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

#507

Post by gfodor »

gnulinux wrote: post #281
marpstar wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of people forget that US = United States. That is, states that are united. The electoral college attempts to "balance" the power that each STATE has to elect a president. The election is a state-level function. In my opinion, to switch to a popular-vote-wins system is to basically say "hey everyone in other states, go ahead and decide for our actual citizens".

In that case Federal government has to regulate fewer things and needs to have less power. President's executive order will affect people in California too but somehow people in Wyoming had 2 times more power to elect this said president. I don't think this is fair at all. If you say States are given inalienable right to veto any and all law/executive order passed by the federal government, then you might as well jus…

Not really, it balances the power. The knob that can be turned is the number of electoral votes each state has. Whereas changing it to the popular vote would favor the populous states, and remove the knob completely, so there'd be no path to balancing the power between small and large states in national elections.

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

#509

Post by SmirkingRevenge »

sokoloff wrote: post #469

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 collat…

This is an interesting point. The EC provides a kind of process isolation, in theory.

Election fraudsters and hackers hoping to control the outcome of an election have to make big splashes in small ponds, so to speak. It seems intuitive then, that their shenanigans are more likely to be noticed - and are at least somewhat contained if they aren't.

If we're going down the "1 person, 1 vote" road, that isolation vanishes. No more big splashes needed - only very small droplets in a vast, vast ocean.

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

#510

Post by yks »

anon1m0us wrote: post #358
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…

You should be careful about the word "small" here. What you mean is least populous, but geographically, they are large. Thus, the question is: Do you want the majority of the USA geography being controlled by the will of people least knowledgeable about it? If you eliminate the electoral college you give political control of resources to those who have absolutely NO physical control of those resources and yet still s…

Currently it seems that rural states push all the bad things on themselves, e.g. climate change and other environmental destruction, so how much worse can it be for them?
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