Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 932 posts

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

#91

Post by m0zg »

outside1234 wrote: post #63
m0zg wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would lead to e.g. Wyoming being run by California though. I'm sure Wyomingites would totally love that.

Wyoming would still have a state legislature - I am not sure I see your point. If you are saying that each person in Wyoming would have 1 vote towards the presidency and each person in California would have 1 vote towards the presidency, then I agree.

The point is, Wyoming and many other less populated states, would then have very, very limited say in who becomes the head of the executive branch, and therefore holds the veto power over whatever the legislative branch is able to put together whenever they feel like actually doing any work. That's the whole idea: no matter how sparsely populated, each state has at least _some_ say when electing the dude (or dudette) who runs the country, and that say is deliberately disproportionate to its population. Were it up to me, I'd let the smaller states have a larger number of representatives as well. E pluribus unum and all that.

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

#92

Post by chrisseaton »

jjeaff wrote: post #60
chrisseaton wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you have multiple presidents? How would you break their roles up? Which one gets the nuclear code or do they all?

Winner takes all refers to the fact that in most states, the winning candidate gets 100% of the electoral college votes. Even though the candidate may have gotten just 50% plus 1 of the votes. This is the main reason a popular vote winner can still lose. You could be the 51% winner in most states but lose by nearly 100% in the more populous states and still win. Which is why this keeps happening to Democrats. They wi…

I don't understand how you can have all electors voting for the national popular winner, and also somehow not have first-past-the-post?

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

#93

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

>On Tuesday, Nevada became the latest state to pass a bill that would grant its electoral votes to whoever wins the popular vote across the country, not just in Nevada. The movement is the brainchild of John Koza, a co-founder of National Popular Vote, an organization that is working to eliminate the influence of the Electoral College.

I don't think this will survive constitutional challenge, because it is not the voters of the state who are deciding how the state's electors are decided. For example, would it be allowed for a swing state such as Florida which now has a Republican governor and state legislature, to pass a law stating that their state's electors would be allocated based on how Alabama votes? That way, even if the Democratic candidate won a majority of votes in Florida, the electors would still go to the Republican candidate if the Republican candidate wins in Alabama.

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

#94

Post by cletus »

The electoral college achieves one very useful function thats ignored by everyone calling for its abolition in favour of the popular vote: it produces a clear winner and contains the contagion of litigating and delegitimizing the outcome of an election.

Think about this: there are a number of elections that have a very small popular vote margin. What if this gets less than, say, 20,000? That's entirely possible. In a strictly popular vote election, what's to stop each side from scrounging up votes or invalidating votes in every county in the country?

The most contentious and litigated election is probably the 2000 election. The electoral college contained those shenanigans to Florida alone (and largely to Miami-Dade and Broward countries, specifically).

There are four main problems with the US election system as I see it:

1. Voting needs to be mandatory. Americans who love "freedom" chafe against this but optional voting undermines democracy. You can see this in the organized efforts to suppress voting and disqualify voters by US political parties.

2. The US needs preferential voting. Third-party votes are otherwise largely a waste.

3. Paper ballots with optical recognition only. No punch cards, certainly no electronic voting. You need the paper trail of actual ballots. This could be filling in a ballot and validating it with a machine or using a machine to print out a ballot. These have an exceptionally low error rate.

4. Stop politicizing the election process. Like, why is the supervisor for elections an elected political position? This is the case in Florida, for example. Likewise, you have the Senate majority holding up election reform because of there is suspicion this will help the Democrats in the House who passed it. Seriously, Mitch McConnell needs to go to jail.

5. I'm fine with states being represented in the US system. The problem is that this system was designed at a time when populations were rural and cities were small. I don't think anyone predicted the disparity between ~40M people in California and ~150k people in Vermont having 2 Senators each.

You'll note that none of these are having the popular vote. IMHO that's fixing the wrong problem.

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

#95

Post by [deleted] »

pchristensen wrote: post #48
chrisseaton wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you have multiple presidents? How would you break their roles up? Which one gets the nuclear code or do they all?

You're still choosing one president - it refers to how you award a state's electoral votes. CA has 55 electoral votes, all of which went to Hillary. If CA removed winner-take-all, Trump would have received 17 electoral votes, Hillary would only receive 34, Gary Johnson would receive 2, and Jill Stein 1. TX has 36 electoral votes, all of which went to Trump. If TX removed winner-take-all, Trump would only have receive…

[deleted]

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

#96

Post by sp527 »

peapicker wrote: post #71

Firstly, I'm an independent - I actually have a great deal of issues with both major parties. My concern with abandoning the college starts with this observation: Swing states are the states most likely to have divided government. And if divided government is good for anything, it is accountability. So with the Electoral College system, when we do wind up with a razor-thin margin in an election, it is likely to happe…

Nothing you said provides an argument against equally weighting each citizen’s vote at the federal level.

States have select powers over the federal government that are specifically provided by our Constitution: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/States%27_rights. When you vote in local elections, you are in effect in control of certain outcomes within your state, as accorded by our Constitution.

The federal election determines representation for every single person in the United States and, in part, how federal governmental power is exercised on their behalf. There is no conceivable logical reason why citizens in any particular state should have more or less say in such matters than those in any other. The electoral college system is an absolute sham that deprives a significant number of people of their Constitutionally-guaranteed right to fair representation at the federal level.

I’d welcome any well-formed argument to the contrary. I’ve yet to ever hear one.

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

#97

Post by dragonwriter »

eunoia wrote: post #62
acomjean wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electoral college is for the presidency. But the political power discrepancy between rural and urban areas is quite stark in other branches of government. For example: Right now in the US there are 2 senators from each state. California with a population of over 39 million has 2 senators, Alaska with a population around 700,000 also has 2 senators.

> Alaska with a population around 700,000 also has 2 senators As does: 1. Wyoming (Population: 572,381) 2. Vermont (Population: 627,180) 3. Alaska (Population: 735,720) 4. North Dakota (Population: 760,900) 5. South Dakota (Population: 892,631) 6. Delaware (Population: 975,033) 7. Rhode Island (Population: 1,056,738) 8. Montana (Population: 1,074,532) 9. Maine (Population: 1,342,097) 10. New Hampshire (Population: 1,…

> But the House hasn't reapportioned representation by population in a century.

The House reapportions by population after each census (10 years), with the exception of the notable failure after the 1920 Census.

The House hasn't increased total size since the reapportionment after the 1910 census, which is probably what you are thinking of.

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

#98

Post by DataWorker »

r00fus wrote: post #28
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…

> if abolished, politicians won't have incentives to campaign in rural territories That's one take. Another take is that urban centers are being actively disenfranchised. Btw, those politicians who benefit from the EC are the ones creating policies that are destroying the rural populace at the same time.

Can you provide any sources to back that assertion? It seems counterintuitive to me. NAFTA comes to mind as one such policy that was pretty hard on rural areas, but I’m not sure if that’s what you meant?

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

#99

Post by eunoia »

peapicker wrote: post #90
eunoia wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Alaska with a population around 700,000 also has 2 senators As does: 1. Wyoming (Population: 572,381) 2. Vermont (Population: 627,180) 3. Alaska (Population: 735,720) 4. North Dakota (Population: 760,900) 5. South Dakota (Population: 892,631) 6. Delaware (Population: 975,033) 7. Rhode Island (Population: 1,056,738) 8. Montana (Population: 1,074,532) 9. Maine (Population: 1,342,097) 10. New Hampshire (Population: 1,…

"But the House hasn't reapportioned representation by population in a century." Not sure where you live, but since 1914 in Colorado: 1914 - four representatives 1973 - five representatives 1983 - six representatives 2003 - seven representatives So clearly seats are added as population changes in a state. See also: https://www.insightsassociation.org/article/states-expected-...

I stand corrected. Feeling particularly silly as I’m from Colorado and probably should have known that.

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

#100

Post by cybersnowflake »

I wonder how many people arguing for the abolishment of the EC would like it if India and China automatically had the most votes in whatever supranational government arises in the future and got to decide everything that happened across the world. The US is still supposed to be a federation. The EC was part of the deal the US made with smaller states to become part of the Union precisely because they were afraid of being drowned out by the big states. Don't like it? Convince the smaller states. Might not be that hard. There are plenty of dumb people in the smaller states willing to permanently consign their land to irrelevance because they don't like a President who's going to be gone in a handful of years.
Post reply on HN