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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

#471

Post by knolax »

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…

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?

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

#472

Post by hyperpape »

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 think this is anachronistic. Yes, there are places where the founders suggested that there would be a conflict between large and small states.

But can we point to any reasonably non-controversial case where the electoral college has acted to safeguard the "American republic"? There are two points here.

First: the Supreme Court has many controversies, but also many decisions that seem very compelling in hindsight. I tend to vote for Democrats, and I'm not entirely convinced I'd disagree with the median Scalia decision (I can remember agreeing with several). It seems to fare better as an anti-majoritarian institution.

Second: suppose, for the sake of argument, that you think that Trump and Bush are great examples favoring the electoral college. In both cases, the results are extremely fragile. Either candidate could've easily lost, and the electoral college was a small bit of noise in the result (some early predictions suggested Obama would win the 2012 electoral college, but lose the popular vote). The fact that a mechanism has given you results you like in two cases, by chance, is not the same as saying that it's an important constitutional safeguard.

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

#473

Post by FireBeyond »

smsm42 wrote: post #434
thomascgalvin wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> we are no longer an actual representative democracy. Claiming that because California has 57 votes and Wyoming a whopping 3 votes, instead of California having 70 and Wyoming one (if at all), we "no longer have representative democracy" is nonsense. California still have wastly more votes. Yes, Wyoming also gets some, otherwise it why bother voting at all if everything is essentially decided by the most populous st…

> everything is essentially decided by the most populous states anyway?

The state isn't voting homogenously. Just like Eastern Washington could vote differently to the Puget Sound with more direct representation.

The key word in your argument is 'populous'. Thinking in terms other than people, be it states/counties/acreage is another version of putting "landowners" in charge.

> Why people leaving in LAC should be in virtually full control (with the current power of federal government it's very close to that)

Which explains why politicians spend so much time in Election season in LAC. Except they don't. They are instead in Ohio, Montana, NH, Wyoming, Iowa, Florida.

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

#474

Post by zdragnar »

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.

> This policy was enacted by a President that lost the popular vote in California, and lost the popular vote nationwide.

Remember that picture of the children in cages floating around the news? That wasn't our current president. That was during the time of a president elected by both the popular vote in Cali and the national vote.

Also remember that those detention centers are literally that- short term holding. The intended duration for a stay is max 72 hours, and rarely exceeds a week- and that's only because HHS literally can't find suitable places fast enough with how many are entering the country.

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

#475

Post by bendbro »

hyperpape wrote: post #380
anon1m0us wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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?

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

#476

Post by dwighttk »

danek wrote: post #310
dwighttk wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Are you saying you want to go back to when your state's House Reps decided your state's Senators? I would not mind that

This would give even more power to special interests, as they only need to influence a governor (or a small number of state reps) to get their senate choice, rather than all the voters in the state. I can’t see why that’s better, since at least now senators have to pretend to represent constituents.

oh good... pretending to represent constituents... holding the bulwark against special interests.

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

#477

Post by krapp »

nilkn wrote: post #470
thomascgalvin wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 mu…

>but the solution here is to understand and address why so many millions of people voted for him,

Why? They elected Trump to address those concerns. If he can't or won't, the rest of the country is under no obligation to do so on his behalf.

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

#478

Post by fzeroracer »

malandrew wrote: post #466
fzeroracer wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The answer is that we have a system of checks and balances in the federal government which are meant to ensure that one branch doesn't overshadow another. The states and the electoral college were supposed to add another layer of said balance, but what they've done is shifted power further towards the federal government advancing rural interests.

Many of those rural areas could not survive without the federal government's aid because they already suffer from dwindling infrastructure and population. Now if you want to break apart the federal government entirely from the equation, then you would also have to agree to let those rural areas die out instead of being propped up through subsidy and taxes from the urban taxpayer's pocket. Otherwise you would be arguing that not only do the rural states get to dictate policy, but they also get to benefit from the GDP generated by the urban states. Why is it fair then, for the federal government to give preferential treatment?

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

#479

Post by awinder »

gthaman wrote: post #461
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 electio…

This movement predates Donald Trump by decades, I don’t really think you can paint it in that light UNLESS you are putting him up as a strawman, as the legislator quoted in the article clearly was.

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

#480

Post by nilkn »

krapp wrote: post #477
nilkn wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mu…

>but the solution here is to understand and address why so many millions of people voted for him, Why? They elected Trump to address those concerns. If he can't or won't, the rest of the country is under no obligation to do so on his behalf.

The above poster is saying that Trump shouldn't have been allowed to be president because he didn't win the popular vote. This means that, under the above poster's scheme, they wouldn't have any president fighting for them at all, and I doubt CA would suddenly start caring about them were that the case. I see this as an abandonment of the poor in favor of the rich and powerful.

If Trump fails, then he fails. But that's a lot different from completely disenfranchising many states when it comes to the presidency.

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