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if a presidential election can actually be swayed by "people buying ads on Facebook" then the USA has problems much deeper than Facebook How’s this for a root

by ern 9y ago

if a presidential election can actually be swayed by "people buying ads on Facebook" then the USA has problems much deeper than Facebook How’s this for a root cause: the Electoral College means that carefully targeting propaganda at a few voters in swing states can have an outsize influence on the outcome (a reverse “law of large numbers”?) Traditional controls on political advertising were ignored by foreign propagandists buying ads to sow division and political strife. It’s ironic that the US, despite its massive geostrategic advantages, allowed an enemy into its heartland in this way. The Electoral College isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and, regardless, solutions have to found before something worse happens (a faux social-media movement that, say, triggers a Constitutional Convention that leads to the breakup of the US would probably be a wet dream of foreign rivals).

paulmd 9y ago
There is an easy fix to the Electoral College though. The number of electoral votes a state gets is equal to the number of senators plus the number of representatives it gets. The number of representatives has been fixed by statute at 435 for a century now, which has led to drastic decrease in the level of representation (more constituents per representative). All we need to do to fix the Electoral College is to bring those numbers a bit closer to historical norms. If you quadruple the number of reps, then the distribution of Eletoral College votes is going to resemble the underlying distribution of population a lot more closely. It should also help make gerrymandering a bit more difficult as a side benefit. The Senate has always been a poor idea right from the start (especially in its original conception as a body that is appointed by the state legislatures rather than elected) but there's really not a lot we can do about it at this point. It's essentially been a regressive and negative force on American politics right from its conception. The Electoral College, however, is trivially fixable even without an action like the National Popular Vote Compact. We literally just need to crank up the number of reps and it stops being an issue (even if the root problem isn't actually solved).

by ern 9y ago

paulmd 9y ago

There is an easy fix to the Electoral College though. The number of electoral votes a state gets is equal to the number of senators plus the number of representatives it gets. The number of representatives has been fixed by statute at 435 for a century now, which has led to drastic decrease in the level of representation (more constituents per representative). All we need to do to fix the Electoral College is to bring those numbers a bit closer to historical norms. If you quadruple the number of reps, then the distribution of Eletoral College votes is going to resemble the underlying distribution of population a lot more closely. It should also help make gerrymandering a bit more difficult as a side benefit. The Senate has always been a poor idea right from the start (especially in its original conception as a body that is appointed by the state legislatures rather than elected) but there's really not a lot we can do about it at this point. It's essentially been a regressive and negative force on American politics right from its conception. The Electoral College, however, is trivially fixable even without an action like the National Popular Vote Compact. We literally just need to crank up the number of reps and it stops being an issue (even if the root problem isn't actually solved).