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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

#291

Post by gnulinux »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #226
tedmcory77 wrote: post #175

Democratic candidates have won the popular vote 4/5 times in the most re ent elections, but only won the Presidency 2/5. That’s an issue.

Teams with the most yards lose some football games, too. Is that an issue? Run to win the election under the rules that are in force.

This does not make any sense to me. Elections is not a game, it is people's inalienable right to have equal representation compared to others. If politicians decide that State X doesn't matter since it's not powerful with respect to EC, this is blatantly undemocratic and needs to be fixed asap.

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

#292

Post by krapp »

positr0n wrote: post #268
zaroth wrote: post #250

A hypothetical situation; An amendment is proposed on the floor of the House to change the formula in a bill for how funding is allocated. The amendment presents a pro-urban allocation which provides a greater share of funding for larger cities compared to a baseline per-capita allocation. Urban center representatives stand up and argue how their cities need a higher reimbursement rate because the issue at hand is co…

The thing I've never understood about this argument is why the urban/rural divide is so special that it needs special rules? There are a bajillion other types of ways to categorize people that there is a majority and a minority besides the population density of their state.

The city/rural divide in American political rhetoric is mostly a populist dog-whistle for the conflict between secular progressivism and Christian conservative identity politics.

There are legitimate issues with agricultural funding, infrastructure and whatnot that fall along those lines but mostly when people say they don't want "small state X run by California" or "New York" what they mean is they don't want Federal laws passed which force those small states to adopt more progressive or leftist policies than their local culture would be comfortable with.

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

#293

Post by lonelappde »

umvi wrote: post #67
dlbucci wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm all for rural representation, but people in rural areas essentially have their vote count more than people in cities, right? Cause that's the current system for us: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/map_of_the_w...

> I'm all for rural representation, but people in rural areas essentially have their vote count more than people in cities, right? Yeah but maybe that's a good thing. Otherwise you have a situation like New York where NYC gets to dictate everything since it's super high population density even though the majority of geographical NY state is farmers. So the farmers get screwed over by the interests of the city folk wh…

The government is by, of, and for the People, not the dirt they walk on.

The tyranny of the minority who sit on emptier ground is not a sacred value.

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

#294

Post by AnimalMuppet »

cletus wrote: post #274
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stop politicizing the election process. Like, why is the supervisor for elections an elected political position? The alternative is that it's an appointed position. That won't be less political.

Patenntly false. Chairman of the Federal Reserve is largely apolitical. Judges have philosophies that tend to reflect the wishes of the President who nominated them but other than that are largely independent. Look at how other countries handle election. In Australia the Australian Electoral Commission ("AEC") is responsible for running elections and I can tell you that none of the problems with politicized elections…

Very well. Appointed people are not always political. I bet that an appointed election supervisor would be political at least some of the time, though. (Source: human nature.)

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

#295

Post by theli0nheart »

d1zzy wrote: post #199
theli0nheart wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are only eight states in America that have more people than Los Angeles county.[2] Why are the concerns of the people living in LAC less important than the concerns of the people in Nevada or Arkansas? What is it about their geography that makes their issues unimportant? Why would Arkansas or Nevada have joined a union of states where their votes mean essentially nothing?

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.…

Good points!

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

#296

Post by [deleted] »

kevinh wrote: post #149
akulbe wrote: post #43

I could not be more opposed to the abolishment of the Electoral College. The founders had a very good rationale for putting it in. That said... I think there's a solution for this. Hard term limits for everyone, in all the branches. It already exists for the Executive branch. I think it should be instituted for both Legislative and Judicial as well.

> The founders had a very good rationale for putting it in. Yeah, slavery. How would you have a popular vote if you're allowing slaves to count as 3/5ths of a person for vote share? They obviously wouldn't have allowed them to vote. Fortunately, we no longer have slavery as an official institution, so it may be time to revise why we're doing it.

[deleted]

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

#297

Post by [deleted] »

JshWright wrote: post #205
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the problem here is that you're portraying it as if cities or states are the agents making decisions, rather than individuals. That was exactly the point of the Electoral College - that states would elect the president. You may think that's a bad idea. That's fine. You may want to change it. But it's a really fundamental change to the architecture. If it's to be changed, it should be changed by a constituti…

So... the EC empowers the states, but the states shouldn't have power?

[deleted]

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

#298

Post by mikeash »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #240
mikeash wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rationale for the EC and every other compromise in the Constitution was simple: it’s what was required to get the states to actually sign up. There was the very real possibility that the individual states would go their own way if they didn’t like the proposed Constitution. Larger states could have easily decided that they didn’t need to be part of a larger country. Smaller states could have easily decided that t…

That's fair. We have a set of rules, and the rationale for many of them is gone. Therefore... what? Throw them all out? If so, replace them with what? Worse: How do you get everyone to agree on what to replace them with? As it turns out, there's a mechanism for getting everyone to agree, and to prevent changes that everyone does not agree with (for certain values of "everyone"): Amend the Constitution.

It turns out that there’s another mechanism to accomplish this: a collection of states adding up to a majority of electoral votes can agree to cast all of their votes to the winner of the national popular vote. Hence the subject of the article.

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

#299

Post by klyrs »

Mirioron wrote: post #154
sacheendra wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The property taxes example doesn't seem right. Cost of a small apartment in NYC is equal to the cost of several acres of farmland. Proportional property taxes would impact both demographics similarly.

The city dweller isn't earning money off of their land.

Naturally, this means that farmland should be taxed more, not less. /s

But no. Land owners make money extracting rent. The difference is that farming is subsidized.

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

#300

Post by lonelappde »

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.

Great example. Cities are prevented from having sensible gun control because rural voters who don't care about their needs* prevent it.

* But love cashing their welfare checks sent from urban citizens.

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