How to Fix the Electoral College

Historically the electoral college was a compromise that allowed for the counting of slaves as 3/5 of a person for the purpose of taxation and voting without having them vote. Consider a state like South Carolina which at the time had about 50% of its population as black. How could the 3/5 of the 50% of the people get added to the total otherwise? Any method would be a hack, but this one had the benefit of being able to create a justification that it protected small states from being dominated by large states.

If you're American living in one of the majority of states that aren't "swing" states, I don't think you can escape the feeling when you vote for president that you're going through a kind of charade since the winner is going to be determined by some small number of voters in 6 states.

But it should be and we can change it

> Although the current electoral college doesn't work well, I'm not sure the Americans would prefer to remove it completely

I think the electoral college is working as intended to balance out power between larger more powerful states and less powerful states. Though I also don’t believe the popular vote is necessarily ideal from the perspective of maintaining more diversity of thoughts and opinions which is useful for a healthy republic.

As someone who’s lived in mostly rural states I’m glad because it prevents places like California with large populations with pretty homogeneous opinions and world views to dominate the nations elections. I get folks in those larger states would also feel equally left out as well.

I view the electoral college as a means of accounting for the “entropy” of votes among states. There’s more diversity of thought and opinion between say a rural Wyoming farmer and a worker in Hawaii than there is among most Californians living in say the 50 square miles of Hollywood.

In a fashion it’s similar to how network effects dominate large in markets where companies lucky to get a market first or to grow first get an unfair network advantage. Antitrust and tax laws ideally gently balance out this winner-takes-effects to provide more diverse and robust markets. Most hyper successful companies aren’t necessarily better at what they do and there’s a large amount of luck in success. Of course they still have to work hard and be effective to capitalize on the opportunities. Similar things happen among states in the USA.

Giving some people more votes than others "prevents" tyranny of the majority by substituting it with tyranny of the minority.

And the Founders had far more nuanced opinions on this subject than modern right-wing politics tends to imply. Consider Federalist Papers #22:

"The right of equal suffrage among the States is another exceptionable part of the Confederation. Every idea of proportion and every rule of fair representation conspire to condemn a principle, which gives to Rhode Island an equal weight in the scale of power with Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York; and to Deleware an equal voice in the national deliberations with Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or North Carolina. Its operation contradicts the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail. Sophistry may reply, that sovereigns are equal, and that a majority of the votes of the States will be a majority of confederated America. But this kind of logical legerdemain will never counteract the plain suggestions of justice and common-sense. It may happen that this majority of States is a small minority of the people of America3; and two thirds of the people of America could not long be persuaded, upon the credit of artificial distinctions and syllogistic subtleties, to submit their interests to the management and disposal of one third. The larger States would after a while revolt from the idea of receiving the law from the smaller. To acquiesce in such a privation of their due importance in the political scale, would be not merely to be insensible to the love of power, but even to sacrifice the desire of equality. It is neither rational to expect the first, nor just to require the last. The smaller States, considering how peculiarly their safety and welfare depend on union, ought readily to renounce a pretension which, if not relinquished, would prove fatal to its duration."

Despite the criticism of the two party system, I nevertheless wonder whether or not the American public actually wants to have third parties. Even in states that are solidly red or blue, third parties never manage to gain a substantial (beyond 3-5%) of the vote. I would think that in a solidly blue state, the greens (or any on-the-left third party) would see a much better showing. Same for libertarians in red states. I imagine that the whole spoiler vote phenomenon would not be an issue in these states’ races.

I’m curious about what other people think of this. I was once of the opinion that ranked choice voting (in the states that passed this reform) would lead to a renaissance in the viability of third parties there, but it hasn’t come to fruition. It led me to think that many Americans are actually content with having two parties.