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The Electoral College is a terrible system for trying to resist mob rule. It was never designed for such a thing and trying to backport that reason onto it is d

The Electoral College is a terrible system for trying to resist mob rule. It was never designed for such a thing and trying to backport that reason onto it is dumb bullshit.

mfringel 8y ago
I'm inclined to agree, but can you say more about that?
- alistairSH 8y ago
  The EC was arguably created (in it's existing format) to protect the interests of southern, slave-owning states. At the time, roughly analogous to resisting tyranny of the majority (as the urban north had more people, especially as slaves weren't fully recognized as people), but not exactly. And we should not forget that the balance of the EC (as it relates to the ratio of Senators and Congressmen to residents) has swung hugely in favor of rural states. As the number of residents per district has grown, with a capped number of Congressmen, states like CA and TX have effectively lost representation. If we adjusted the size of a Congressional district down to match the population of the smallest state, and increased the size of the house accordingly, the large states would pick up quite a few Congressmen, and therefore Electors.
  - dionidium 8y ago
    1. I take your point regarding the EC's pro-slavery origins, but it doesn't invalidate the larger purpose. People can wield good tools for bad causes. 2. I also take your point about proportionality, but, again, it doesn't invalidate the larger purpose (nor is it an argument for a nationwide popular vote). If the proportions are wrong, then the correction is to adjust the proportions.
  - bobthepanda 8y ago
    At its inception, the EC was a parliament solely elected to pick the president; as a result, not all the electors in a state elected the same person. This started changing in the 1800s; states that wanted to increase campaign time in their state moved toward the winner-takes-all method, which then every state had to move to if they wanted to matter equally. If EC votes in a state were allocated according to popular vote, then the existing system would be a lot fairer. Proportional EC essentially reduces the advantage of campaigning in swing states, since many more states become swing states due to the relative ease of swinging a single EV vs. a whole state. And it manages to do so without completely screwing over smaller states. I did some napkin math a while ago for this, but if this was the case, Bush v Gore would've been decisively for Gore, Bush v Kerry would have been as close as OTL Bush v Gore, and Trump's margin of victory shrinks to about 20 electoral votes from 77.
    - mrgriscom 8y ago
      I explored the same thing but got different results from you. Bush v. Gore almost a dead tie and 2016 a slight Hillary win. http://mrgris.com/blog/2016-12-06-538-problems-but-a-swing-state-aint-one/ http://mrgris.com/blog/2016-12-06-538-problems-but-a-swing-s...
      - bobthepanda 8y ago
        "Back of the napkin" was quite literal. Staring at tables on the internet makes you go blind if you do it hard enough.
  - Spooky23 8y ago
    You pretty much made the case for why claiming that the EC was not intended to prevent the tyranny of the majority is an inaccurate statement. You need the state level contests to moderate elections. Just because reactionaries control one party today doesn't change that. The country would have been a shambles if the northern political machines of the 20th century had unchecked power.
  - vonzeppelin 8y ago
    >The EC was arguably created (in it's existing format) to protect the interests of southern, slave-owning states. At the time, roughly analogous to resisting tyranny of the majority (as the urban north had more people, especially as slaves weren't fully recognized as people), I don't know that this is true. 1789, 1st Congress Slave States (40 representatives) Delaware 1 New Jersey 4 New York 6 Maryland 6 Georgia 3 North Carolina 5 South Carolina 5 Virginia 10 Free States (25 representatives) Connecticut 5 Massachusetts 8 New Hampshire 3 Pennsylvania 8 Rhode Island 1
    - TheCoelacanth 8y ago
      New York and New Jersey had pretty small numbers of slaves, so while they did allow slavery, they were more politically aligned with the free states. Another factor is that there was a much larger disparity in numbers of voters than there was in number of people. Many of the southern states had very restrictive requirements (such as needing to own a large amount of property) to be allowed to vote while while northern states had less restrictive requirements. In the 1789 election[0] Massachusetts had more than four times as many votes cast as Virginia while having fewer electoral votes and New Hampshire had more votes cast than Virginia while having less than half as many electoral vote. Massachusetts and New Hampshire alone had more than half of the votes cast in that election. The biggest reason for the electoral college was to accommodate the aristocratic tendencies of some of the states. Contrary to what is often claimed, it wasn't intended to prevent the large states from dominating the small states; ironically it was the exact opposite. They wanted to prevent a tiny state like New Hampshire from being able to out vote, Virginia, the largest state. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1788%E2%80%9389#Popular_vote_2 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_e...
    - alistairSH 8y ago
      The southern states were counting 3/5 of each slave. Without the 3/5 Compromise and the EC, the North would have dominated Congress and the WH.
- aurailious 8y ago
  Its a remnant from a time when the US was a collection of states instead of a single country. The proverbial change of "the US are" to "the US is". The President is elected by the States just as Senators used to be. It was not about individual representation in the federal government, but representation by the States. This is what the EC was for. The States elect the President. The US started out as a federation more like how Switzerland is. But over time more and more authority was placed into the federal government and more and more cultural identity was placed there as well. So there are vestiges of government that persist from that earlier time.
  - s3nnyy 8y ago
    Any idea why centralisation happened to the US but not to Switzerland?
  - dionidium 8y ago
    > Its a remnant from a time when the US was a collection of states instead of a single country. This is stated as fact, but it's begging the question, of course, because the tension described is exactly what we're talking about. The United States still are a collection of states, to varying degrees, and the degrees are exactly what's under scrutiny here. That's not a remnant from another time; it's the central conflict, still relevant today.
dionidium 8y ago
Respectfully, the notion that the coasts, by virtue of their larger population, should set policy for smaller, more rural states is dumb bullshit. The Electoral College isn't a perfect system, and I'm not opposed to defining a set of rules to take its place that explicitly codify its federalist intentions. It doesn't have to be the EC. But the alternative is emphatically not a nationwide popular vote, which, again, would be an unmitigated disaster.
- eherot 8y ago
  The question is, if you’re going to design a system where 1 person != 1 vote, how can you argue that it is in any way more fair for someone’s vote to count double (or more) simply because they have chosen to live in a sparsely populated area? Why is basing it on the local population density a good method of deciding the strength of a vote?
  - dionidium 8y ago
    Because the United States is a collection of states. This piece seems to be missing from your analysis. It's not about rural vs urban. It's about being in a different state. That still matters! An analogy: Imagine a subdivision with 10 houses. Nine of those houses have a single person living in them. One house has a family of 15. When we go to vote on new rules in the subdivision, the unit of voting is the house. We don't let the family of 15 control the entire block. It doesn't matter that this means those 15 people get the same vote as all the single people, because that's not the voting unit. The logical unit is the house. They can vote within their house about policy within the house, but they vote as a group on neighborhood policy. This is federalism. The unit is the state. Missourians combine to form a vote, just as Californians combine to form a vote, and so on. Individuals within the state vote individually on issues within the state. But they don't vote as individuals on national policy. Their votes are aggregated by the state in which they reside. If this seems odd, it's only because modern Americans have largely stopped thinking of the United States as, well, a set of united states. But that's exactly what they are.
    - kcorbitt 8y ago
dragonwriter 8y ago
Well, it (along with the structure of the Senate, the 3/5 rule, and other features of the Constitution) was intended to protect the institution of slavery from expected popular moves to abolish it (a role to which the slave states apparently found it inadequate by the mid 19th century). General limits on government protect against mob rule, disenfranchising particular people to overrepresent others just chooses which particular interests are favored, it doesn't protect against mob rule (it makes it easier, so long as the advantaged groups are part of the mob.)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- dionidium 8y ago
  Federalism isn’t disenfranchisement. You’re arriving at false conclusions because you’re starting with the invalid — dare I even say motivated? — premise that a system that groups votes is less fair to people who reside in larger groups. Nobody here is actually making this case. You’re all assuming it.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > Federalism isn’t disenfranchisement. Federalism is not. Unequal representation is. The former does not require the latter; the fact that the two are both present in through US system is the result of a deliberate choice to implement systematic selective disenfranchisement along with federalism, not inherent in the nature of federalism.
    - dionidium 8y ago
      If I'm understanding your argument correctly, then I think you're still smuggling in an assumption about "unequal representation" that doesn't hold. It isn't inherently unfair to group votes in such a way that two groups get the same number of votes in some domain despite size differences between them. [0] I think that's an assumption that needs argued for (and one that ignores powerful cultural, historical, geographical forces). [0] I'm sure we could think of all kinds of situations under which people collectivize precisely because their numbers would be too small to otherwise matter. I wouldn't want to argue that such systems are in principle unfair (and I don't think you would, either).

The Electoral College is a terrible system for trying to resist mob rule. It was never designed for such a thing and trying to backport that reason onto it is dumb bullshit.

mfringel 8y ago

I'm inclined to agree, but can you say more about that?

alistairSH 8y ago
The EC was arguably created (in it's existing format) to protect the interests of southern, slave-owning states. At the time, roughly analogous to resisting tyranny of the majority (as the urban north had more people, especially as slaves weren't fully recognized as people), but not exactly. And we should not forget that the balance of the EC (as it relates to the ratio of Senators and Congressmen to residents) has swung hugely in favor of rural states. As the number of residents per district has grown, with a capped number of Congressmen, states like CA and TX have effectively lost representation. If we adjusted the size of a Congressional district down to match the population of the smallest state, and increased the size of the house accordingly, the large states would pick up quite a few Congressmen, and therefore Electors.
- dionidium 8y ago
  1. I take your point regarding the EC's pro-slavery origins, but it doesn't invalidate the larger purpose. People can wield good tools for bad causes. 2. I also take your point about proportionality, but, again, it doesn't invalidate the larger purpose (nor is it an argument for a nationwide popular vote). If the proportions are wrong, then the correction is to adjust the proportions.
- bobthepanda 8y ago
  At its inception, the EC was a parliament solely elected to pick the president; as a result, not all the electors in a state elected the same person. This started changing in the 1800s; states that wanted to increase campaign time in their state moved toward the winner-takes-all method, which then every state had to move to if they wanted to matter equally. If EC votes in a state were allocated according to popular vote, then the existing system would be a lot fairer. Proportional EC essentially reduces the advantage of campaigning in swing states, since many more states become swing states due to the relative ease of swinging a single EV vs. a whole state. And it manages to do so without completely screwing over smaller states. I did some napkin math a while ago for this, but if this was the case, Bush v Gore would've been decisively for Gore, Bush v Kerry would have been as close as OTL Bush v Gore, and Trump's margin of victory shrinks to about 20 electoral votes from 77.
  - mrgriscom 8y ago
    I explored the same thing but got different results from you. Bush v. Gore almost a dead tie and 2016 a slight Hillary win. http://mrgris.com/blog/2016-12-06-538-problems-but-a-swing-state-aint-one/ http://mrgris.com/blog/2016-12-06-538-problems-but-a-swing-s...
    - bobthepanda 8y ago
      "Back of the napkin" was quite literal. Staring at tables on the internet makes you go blind if you do it hard enough.
- Spooky23 8y ago
  You pretty much made the case for why claiming that the EC was not intended to prevent the tyranny of the majority is an inaccurate statement. You need the state level contests to moderate elections. Just because reactionaries control one party today doesn't change that. The country would have been a shambles if the northern political machines of the 20th century had unchecked power.
- vonzeppelin 8y ago
  >The EC was arguably created (in it's existing format) to protect the interests of southern, slave-owning states. At the time, roughly analogous to resisting tyranny of the majority (as the urban north had more people, especially as slaves weren't fully recognized as people), I don't know that this is true. 1789, 1st Congress Slave States (40 representatives) Delaware 1 New Jersey 4 New York 6 Maryland 6 Georgia 3 North Carolina 5 South Carolina 5 Virginia 10 Free States (25 representatives) Connecticut 5 Massachusetts 8 New Hampshire 3 Pennsylvania 8 Rhode Island 1
  - TheCoelacanth 8y ago
    New York and New Jersey had pretty small numbers of slaves, so while they did allow slavery, they were more politically aligned with the free states. Another factor is that there was a much larger disparity in numbers of voters than there was in number of people. Many of the southern states had very restrictive requirements (such as needing to own a large amount of property) to be allowed to vote while while northern states had less restrictive requirements. In the 1789 election[0] Massachusetts had more than four times as many votes cast as Virginia while having fewer electoral votes and New Hampshire had more votes cast than Virginia while having less than half as many electoral vote. Massachusetts and New Hampshire alone had more than half of the votes cast in that election. The biggest reason for the electoral college was to accommodate the aristocratic tendencies of some of the states. Contrary to what is often claimed, it wasn't intended to prevent the large states from dominating the small states; ironically it was the exact opposite. They wanted to prevent a tiny state like New Hampshire from being able to out vote, Virginia, the largest state. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1788%E2%80%9389#Popular_vote_2 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_e...
  - alistairSH 8y ago
    The southern states were counting 3/5 of each slave. Without the 3/5 Compromise and the EC, the North would have dominated Congress and the WH.
aurailious 8y ago
Its a remnant from a time when the US was a collection of states instead of a single country. The proverbial change of "the US are" to "the US is". The President is elected by the States just as Senators used to be. It was not about individual representation in the federal government, but representation by the States. This is what the EC was for. The States elect the President. The US started out as a federation more like how Switzerland is. But over time more and more authority was placed into the federal government and more and more cultural identity was placed there as well. So there are vestiges of government that persist from that earlier time.
- s3nnyy 8y ago
  Any idea why centralisation happened to the US but not to Switzerland?
- dionidium 8y ago
  > Its a remnant from a time when the US was a collection of states instead of a single country. This is stated as fact, but it's begging the question, of course, because the tension described is exactly what we're talking about. The United States still are a collection of states, to varying degrees, and the degrees are exactly what's under scrutiny here. That's not a remnant from another time; it's the central conflict, still relevant today.

dionidium 8y ago

Respectfully, the notion that the coasts, by virtue of their larger population, should set policy for smaller, more rural states is dumb bullshit. The Electoral College isn't a perfect system, and I'm not opposed to defining a set of rules to take its place that explicitly codify its federalist intentions. It doesn't have to be the EC. But the alternative is emphatically not a nationwide popular vote, which, again, would be an unmitigated disaster.

eherot 8y ago
The question is, if you’re going to design a system where 1 person != 1 vote, how can you argue that it is in any way more fair for someone’s vote to count double (or more) simply because they have chosen to live in a sparsely populated area? Why is basing it on the local population density a good method of deciding the strength of a vote?
- dionidium 8y ago
  Because the United States is a collection of states. This piece seems to be missing from your analysis. It's not about rural vs urban. It's about being in a different state. That still matters! An analogy: Imagine a subdivision with 10 houses. Nine of those houses have a single person living in them. One house has a family of 15. When we go to vote on new rules in the subdivision, the unit of voting is the house. We don't let the family of 15 control the entire block. It doesn't matter that this means those 15 people get the same vote as all the single people, because that's not the voting unit. The logical unit is the house. They can vote within their house about policy within the house, but they vote as a group on neighborhood policy. This is federalism. The unit is the state. Missourians combine to form a vote, just as Californians combine to form a vote, and so on. Individuals within the state vote individually on issues within the state. But they don't vote as individuals on national policy. Their votes are aggregated by the state in which they reside. If this seems odd, it's only because modern Americans have largely stopped thinking of the United States as, well, a set of united states. But that's exactly what they are.
  - kcorbitt 8y ago

dragonwriter 8y ago

Well, it (along with the structure of the Senate, the 3/5 rule, and other features of the Constitution) was intended to protect the institution of slavery from expected popular moves to abolish it (a role to which the slave states apparently found it inadequate by the mid 19th century). General limits on government protect against mob rule, disenfranchising particular people to overrepresent others just chooses which particular interests are favored, it doesn't protect against mob rule (it makes it easier, so long as the advantaged groups are part of the mob.)

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
dionidium 8y ago
Federalism isn’t disenfranchisement. You’re arriving at false conclusions because you’re starting with the invalid — dare I even say motivated? — premise that a system that groups votes is less fair to people who reside in larger groups. Nobody here is actually making this case. You’re all assuming it.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > Federalism isn’t disenfranchisement. Federalism is not. Unequal representation is. The former does not require the latter; the fact that the two are both present in through US system is the result of a deliberate choice to implement systematic selective disenfranchisement along with federalism, not inherent in the nature of federalism.
  - dionidium 8y ago
    If I'm understanding your argument correctly, then I think you're still smuggling in an assumption about "unequal representation" that doesn't hold. It isn't inherently unfair to group votes in such a way that two groups get the same number of votes in some domain despite size differences between them. [0] I think that's an assumption that needs argued for (and one that ignores powerful cultural, historical, geographical forces). [0] I'm sure we could think of all kinds of situations under which people collectivize precisely because their numbers would be too small to otherwise matter. I wouldn't want to argue that such systems are in principle unfair (and I don't think you would, either).