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

691–700 of 932 posts

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

#691

Post by ascorbic »

hannasanarion wrote: post #630
brigandish wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because, without embarrassment at the facetiousness of the straightforward answer, it's a tyranny i.e. it (possibly) restricts or removes the liberty of individuals, sometimes with a big dollop of direct harm like violence. Do you disagree?

And why do you think that tyranny of the minority is better?

That's a false dichotomy. The alternative isn't tyranny of the minority, it's a system that takes account of the views of everyone, by forcing candidates to appeal to a wide spectrum of the electorate.

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

#692

Post by knolax »

newfriend wrote: post #613
knolax wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should 'rural' be a protected minority as opposed to any other minority? Should African Americans ger 3.6x the vote as White Americans because there are fewer of them?

'Rural' is not a protected minority. States, however, are an important part of the United States of America. > Should African Americans ger 3.6x the vote as White Americans because there are fewer of them? Because it's not the United Races of America.

> States, however, are an important part of the United States of America

The current system claims to be a Union of States, but the current system also defines a goal of a more perfect Union . The Constitution was meant to be a living document, IIRC Jefferson himself believed that it should be rewritten every generation. If the right to govern comes from the mandate of the people, then does the creation of a more perfect Union not entail representation of people not states? From first principles it still doesn't make sense to me why we should privilege the rights of states over the rights of people.

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

#693

Post by kd5bjo »

dahart wrote: post #520
vturner wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish someone with $$ would start plastering this message everywhere the absurd "get rid of the elctoral college" debate comes up. We are not a democracy, seriously no one wants a democracy of 300 million plus. We are a federation of states that is supposed to have most of the control in their region and sacrifice a little bit of control to the federal government for purposes of defense and commerce. Your "democracy…

Your argument seems confused to me, but maybe I don’t quite understand, can you elaborate? We do have state level democracy. The electoral college’s purpose is solely for presidential elections, not for local elections. Why shouldn’t we have a democracy for presidential elections? Your reasons given (local control) don’t apply to federal elections. Even with the electoral college, we’re pretty close to democratic rep…

The structure of the Federal government is fundamentally geared towards mediating the relationships between the various states, as that was its original purpose. Actual governance of the populace was the purview of state government.

Over time, however, decisions about domestic law have increasingly been made at the Federal level. At this point, the interstate commerce clause in the Constitution is used to justify almost any regulation that the Federal government wants to pass. When that doesn’t work, availability of Federal tax money is made contingent on states aligning their laws with whatever national policy is.

Also, the legislature has been ceding its rule-making authority to the executive by passing broadly-worded legislation and leaving the details to administrative rules committees that work for the executive.

I suspect that ‘vturner is suggesting the correct fix is to shift the overall balance of power back towards the more democratic parts of government instead of reforming the election process of the government’s chief clerk.

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

#694

Post by Scramblejams »

hannasanarion wrote: post #621
Scramblejams wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US they were rural. The founders and early lawmakers took much inspiration from the histories and travails of other governments around the world.

Which were also predominantly rural. There was no country on earth with a majority urban population until well into the 20th century.

Nobody said cities needed a majority to inspire fear of the way they concentrated political power.

The founders’ concerns about that are well-documented. A cursory search yielded a decent starting point: https://www.planetizen.com/node/18841

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

#695

Post by twblalock »

caseysoftware wrote: post #685
daleco wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why aren't we talking about the Cambridge Analytica scandal example? Another issue of the Electoral colleges is that a candidate could target only a few amount of people (70k according to the documentary) for changing the course of the election. Even if this has been fixed by Facebook. Shouldn't it be considered as a major flaw of the election system? Source: "The great Hack" - Netflix doc.

One aspect of the Electoral College is that it's a built in corruption firewall. Right now, if an election system is "compromised" (electronically, corrupt officials, etc), it will affect that precinct, the local elections, possibly the state-wide races, and rarely the Presidential. With a simple majority vote, a compromise anywhere in the system - adding or removing votes - impacts the system as a whole.

Other democratic countries are doing just fine without an electoral college.

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

#696

Post by zaphirplane »

hinkley wrote: post #620
exclusiv wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's great about the electoral college is you need to have cross-regional appeal to win. So its less about which states are going to be battleground but that you generally can't just appeal to 1 or 2 regions and win. In a goal of preserving the union, it's better to have a system that pushes cross-regional appeal than a system based strictly on number of votes IMO.

My recollection from civics was that the college is to prevent populist candidates from winning. Someone very popular only in densely populated areas may have an agenda that hurts rural ones (eg, noting that federal taxes disproportionately go to rural areas for things like maintaining highways, make it “fair” and leave rural people with shit roads and diminished services).

I thought it was to help make sure presidents are elected by hmm not elected by poor bellow average educated people. Back then

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

#697

Post by input_sh »

jdminhbg wrote: post #436
input_sh wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when the majority of Americans (and I believe the world in general now) live an urban life. I think you're underestimating the figures. 80.7% of Americans lived in urban areas according to the 2010 census. Estimates for the entire world are over 50% for over a decade now (since 2007, to be more accurate). It increases slowly but steadily, so we were at about 55.27% in 2018. It's going to be about 68% by 2050 and ab…

The Census's definition of "urban area" doesn't quite match what most people think of, I don't think. It's any area of over 50k people. If you reverse sort the list provided on Wikipedia[0], you'll find a lot of places that aren't top of mind when people think about "urban life:" Grand Island, NE; Hazleton, PA; Albany, OR. Edit: I'm not disputing the larger point. I just think the number is probably a little lower th…

Yeah, I was thinking about adding that there's some talk about what constitutes as "urban area", but thought it wasn't relevant enough for the context of my comment.

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

#698

Post by kingkawn »

danieltillett wrote: post #575
big_chungus wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think adding more people to the room in an already-dissonant chamber will make thing more coherent? We moved to a modified republic precisely because a huge-scale town meeting isn't practical.

You are not going to be able to buy off 30,000 reps if you are a lobyist. More reps and less staff are the way to win back democracy.

It is probably cheaper to buy off a large number of low-power reps than a smaller number of high power ones

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

#700

Post by SyneRyder »

ananonymoususer wrote: post #634
daleco wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why aren't we talking about the Cambridge Analytica scandal example? Another issue of the Electoral colleges is that a candidate could target only a few amount of people (70k according to the documentary) for changing the course of the election. Even if this has been fixed by Facebook. Shouldn't it be considered as a major flaw of the election system? Source: "The great Hack" - Netflix doc.

Why is it that the Cambridge Analytica "hack" is even an issue? The reason is because the data was used to get an "evil" republican elected. The exact same tactics were used to get Obama elected, and nobody seems to be complaining.

Indeed, the system Harper Reed built for the 2012 Obama campaign was widely hailed at the time for how it personalized campaigns to each individual voter, by building a big data store about every voter in the US:

"Those apps include sophisticated analytics programs like Dreamcatcher, a tool developed to "microtarget" voters based on sentiments within text."

"All of the data collected through various volunteer interactions and other outreach found its way into Narwhal's data store, where it could be mined for other purposes. Much of the data was streamed into Dreamcatcher and into a Vertica columnar database cluster used by the analytics team for deep dives into the data."

[1] from Ars Technica: Built to win: Deep inside Obama’s campaign tech https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/built...

Post reply on HN