The Case for Dumping the Electoral College

Discussing a better electoral system is not inherently partisan. Any electoral reform that ends up with America still having to pick between Republicans and Democrats would be a failure in my books.

America needs a better electoral system so that it can finally move on from a 2 party system and move towards better representation.

> The EC isn't inherently broken, most critiques of it miss the point that it was explicitly designed so that the states, and not the people, elect the president

Do you think that's something worth keeping? Honest question.

There were parties in the UK by the time of the revolution. By the 1790s there were warnings being emitted about their potential toxicity in the US. But there's nothing done to formally recognize political parties or manage their risk

I always theorized the two-party system on a national level was less a function of first-past-the-post and more a function of a presidential, rather than prime-ministerial system. You need a political machine capable of running a national campaign, and the ones that are big enough to do that will also likely conquer down-ballot elections.

If you no longer have to run a national campaign, you'd end up with primarily state-level parties. The California Democrats and the Illinois Democrats would have about as much in common as the current US and German Green parties. Each state may have two main parties due to FPTP still, but they'd likely be less coordinated and financially linked, forced to form blocs and consensuses at the federal level.

In your vision... which I'm not arguing for or against - I can't fathom a reason in which we don't just break up into countries.

As it stands, the states with the highest levels of education and economic output in the U.S. truly do tend to prop up the states with the lowest levels of education and output. However, the states being propped up also seem to actively disagree and attempt to impose their own preferences onto the very states that prop them up. There's no logical reason to not just be your own country at that point. Maybe even then going on to steamroll over the arguably weaker countries for their natural resources, as humanity has throughout most of history.

I don't care about favoring my idea of good or bad. The education mandated by nearly all states and the fed government has been teaching all students about equality and a standard level of defined human decency that should be seen to ensure a prosperous nation. The imposed curriculum showed us other variants of government that didn't include these basics leading to failed states/failed other forms of government throughout the centuries. However, even though this is what was mandated to be taught to us, we're growing up and being thrown into a system in which we see what we were forcibly taught in the mandated gov education system... simply isn't applied in some places. Whether or not this is "good" or "bad" - they forcibly taught us this... so it think there's a general consensus of surprised pikachu face to be had as to why things are different.

I personally think we're to far accelerated towards great filtering ourselves either way, to be honest. Very pessimistic view point, I know.

Aside from that - the majority of the U.S. population cannot just decide to move elsewhere. Therein lies the issue. If we grow up being taught that we're a United nation, though for some reason something is legal/enforced in one place and not in the other despite being under the same "Unity" - and we don't even have the choice to go to the place we would personally prefer... Where is the incentive to care much about anything? Any when there's no incentive to care much about anything... how well does the prosperity of the nation fare?

1. The Peter Principle seems to be in action in government-- the guys who are too insane, too openly crooked, to incompetent to get into the federal government, seem to be welcomed into our state houses.

2. It encourages arbitrage and race-to-the-bottom on regulatory and economic issues. I'm sure we have states bidding against each other to attract economic boons, even with their limited current tools. If you denationalized OSHA or minimum-wage standards, the future is obvious.

In the US, we do in fact have parties that are dramatically different across state lines at the state level. This is changing a bit in the last few years, but it used to be only at the national level that the parties were internally homogenous. And even in Congress, except on the hot-button issues, there is some diversity across delegations from different states. Elizabeth Warren and Doug Jones are not the same.

The problem is, if you go to a prime minister (e.g., if Speaker of the House got the powers of the President), then the individual state elections effectively become the national election. Imagine that there are no parties, but you and your friends have a few billion dollars to throw around, and want to make sure that the Prime Speaker is Nancy Pelosi. You'll do that by supporting politicians who would vote for her (donating, but also organizing get-out-the-vote drives, etc. - campaign finance laws can't prevent this). If anyone new wants to enter politics, they'll want to take advantage of your machine, which means that if they're on the fence about a policy they'll default to agreeing with you to make sure you pick them, and oops now you've reinvented parties. It's just an inevitable consequence of two facts put together: (1) FPTP voting, and (2) campaign organization having economies of scale, both in terms of money and in terms of voter attention span.