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Why the Electoral College Will Be Banished

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Re: Why the Electoral College Will Be Banished

#71

Post by mreome »

godelski wrote: post #52
mreome wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I understand your point, the counter argument to this is "Land doesn't vote, people do." Why does someone deserve to have greater representation because they live on a larger plot of land in a different part of the country? Why does someone in a big city deserve to have less representation?

That's because it isn't the land that is voting. You're trying to represent a diverse set of people and industries. We shouldn't screw over farmers because laws that work in cities are disastrous in rural areas and we shouldn't screw over cities because of laws that work well in rural areas. We need the farms, mining, energy (solar and wind as well as coal and natural gas), fishing, etc that comes with rural areas. T…

We're trying to represent a diverse set of people and industries by dividing them into a false binary partitioned by largely arbitrary state lines, many of which were defined over 200 years ago, and leaving the vote for the presidency up to a tiny fraction of the population in a few of those arbitrary partitions. How is that equal or equitable? All states have some combination of rural, urban, and all the shades of gray in-between. Texas has Austin, Massachusetts is over half rural, NY is a Blue state that's mostly Red by area. Why should someone's vote have no weight because of where they live? I'm not saying that a popular vote would be perfect, I'm just saying that the Electoral College is absurd.

Re: Why the Electoral College Will Be Banished

#72

Post by patmorgan23 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #20
darth_avocado wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

^this. Yes while it may be true that media will benefit from this, it almost virtually guarantees no more Republican presidents. Given that the House is also trending in that direction, the only real place where power still remains with the Republicans is the Senate. Too many mega corporations benefit from keeping the Dems out, (taxes, employee rights, minimum wage, etc.) and they will fight tooth and nail to maintai…

> it almost virtually guarantees no more Republican presidents. No, it doesn’t, unless the Republican Party doesn’t adapt to changing conditions as it has continuously since it’s founding. It probably guarantees the Republican Party will realign slightly around some peripheral issues to shift it's geographic focus slightly while retaining it's core economic message, and continue on without breaking stride.

This urban republicians and rual democrats are under represented in our current system. They have some what depressed turn out because of this. Changing to a popular vote empowers them on the national stage and will likely lead to increased turn out, shifting the Ballance.

Re: Why the Electoral College Will Be Banished

#74

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

yokaze wrote: post #37
anewaccount2021 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, zero chance. There is no way you will get states to agree to forever nullify their electoral influence. If you really want perpetual one-party rule, granting DC and PR statehood are also unlikely but far more realistic than abolishing the electoral college, which will literally only happen when the US itself is dissolved.

You need only the states which hold a majority of the electoral votes. The only states with electoral influence are swing-states. Every "blue" and "red" state has practical zero "electoral" influence, meaning their topics will never be as important as the swing state ones.

Any state can become a swing state, it just needs to vote less decively in favour of one party. Do that, and it'll suddenly start mattering more on the national scale.

Re: Why the Electoral College Will Be Banished

#75

Post by derision »

trident5000 wrote: post #55
ortusdux wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my link: Some supporters and opponents of the NPVIC believe it gives one party an advantage relative to the current Electoral College system. Former Delaware Governor Pete du Pont, a Republican, has argued that the compact would be an "urban power grab" and benefit Democrats.[19] However, Saul Anuzis, former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party, wrote that Republicans "need" the compact, citing what he beli…

Got it. I think thats going to be a hard sell though especially as the population trajectory favors urban areas regardless of the past.

Will be interesting to see how that trajectory changes post-COVID with so many companies forced into remote. For me, my company moved full-time remote and because of that my home search has expanded outward

Re: Why the Electoral College Will Be Banished

#76

Post by taylodl »

trident5000 wrote: post #38
ortusdux wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they are indirectly referring to the NPVIC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta... So banished - no, circumvented - possibly.

Why would any red state join this pact though?

There has been a lot of talk about working from home becoming the new norm and living within 1-2 time zones of your work. It's possible in that scenario for a lot of heavily-populated blue cities to disperse, even if it's only 10%-15% of their population, into what are now known as the 'Red States' and make them 'Blue.' I know I'm interested in doing that. I can move someplace where my quality of life is better and I can afford a better home. It's going to be interesting to see how the demographics change at the end of this pandemic.

Re: Why the Electoral College Will Be Banished

#77

Post by zhoujianfu »

yokaze wrote: post #37
anewaccount2021 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, zero chance. There is no way you will get states to agree to forever nullify their electoral influence. If you really want perpetual one-party rule, granting DC and PR statehood are also unlikely but far more realistic than abolishing the electoral college, which will literally only happen when the US itself is dissolved.

You need only the states which hold a majority of the electoral votes. The only states with electoral influence are swing-states. Every "blue" and "red" state has practical zero "electoral" influence, meaning their topics will never be as important as the swing state ones.

Exactly.. it can eventually pass because there are (way) more states that gain from an NPV than lose from it.

Re: Why the Electoral College Will Be Banished

#78

Post by mreome »

yters wrote: post #61
mreome wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not disagreeing that right now there is strong ideological divide between a majority of people in rural and urban populations, that's patently obvious. But what is the justification for providing someone with a larger representation per-individual based on what are largely arbitrary boundaries? Why should votes from Massachusetts for a Republican president and votes from Arkansas for a Democratic president be ren…

It is not the land voting, but political municipalities which are tied by common culture and people. I think it makes sense to try and give smaller municipalities equal footing with larger municipalities. E.g. in the global scheme we think it is a bad thing when super powers stomp all over the little guy. Same thinking applies internally. Each state is sort of like a mini country. In general our country seems to try…

Part of my point is that states, and often congressional districts, do not really represent a "common culture and people" in a lot of cases. NY for example is a Blue state, but is Red by area. Those same boundaries can also introduce arbitrary borders that divide people with a common culture and life experience. The problem with the Electoral College is that it's just become a set of meaningless rules and lines that the political parties game to their advantage. I'd be less opposed if it weren't winner take all by state, and even less opposed if the electoral college districts ignored state lines and actually represented real cultural and environmental boundaries (instead of gerrymandered puzzle pieces) while trying to strike a reasonable balance between population and area. Given the virtual impossibility of that, I think that a popular vote is more reasonable then the Electoral College.

Re: Why the Electoral College Will Be Banished

#79

Post by zhoujianfu »

yters wrote: post #43

The elephant in the room is voter fraud. If we switch to raw vote count then it takes just one loosely regulated precinct to flood the election with fraudulent votes to win the election, and anyone can do this. Sure, this time around one group may win the fraud vote, but next time it will be another group, and the the best fraudsters will conspire to run the country and we will cease to be a democracy and become a kl…

It seems like it’d be a lot harder to swing a National popular vote election fraudulently, where you’d need to register millions of fraudulent votes, than an electoral college vote where at times you’d only need a few thousand? Or even just a couple high-pressure phone calls...

Re: Why the Electoral College Will Be Banished

#80

Post by mreome »

maxerickson wrote: post #65
godelski wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because it isn't the land that is voting. You're trying to represent a diverse set of people and industries. We shouldn't screw over farmers because laws that work in cities are disastrous in rural areas and we shouldn't screw over cities because of laws that work well in rural areas. We need the farms, mining, energy (solar and wind as well as coal and natural gas), fishing, etc that comes with rural areas. T…

It's weird to divide the 300 million people that live in urban conditions and the 60 million people that live in rural conditions into 2 sides (that's using the statistical definition of urban that counts many small towns as urbanized areas, not the definition of urban that means super-dense megalopolis). And then Kansas actually has cities in it. Why does a resident of Kansas City (Kansas) get more national voting p…

In my mind one of the biggest negative effects of the Electoral College is that it doesn't just provide more/less national voting power, but in many cases effectively strips voters of any power over the Presidential election.

Unless you live in a swing state, you generally know how the Presidential election will turn out in your state. So if you're in the minority in a non-swing state, you know going in that your vote will have no effect on the outcome, it's effectively just going to get discarded. If you're in the majority, your individual vote still doesn't have a lot of power, anything over the 51% is irreverent and effectively discarded.

With a popular vote, every single vote counts. No matter how big the majority or how small the minority in a state, every vote still has power. Nobody's vote is invalidated by where they happen to live.

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