40 ms·

15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete

• will4274 7y ago
  The electoral college is a fault domain for voter fraud, and scaler to mitigate differences in voter accessibility, which cannot otherwise be fully mitigated given differences in geography.
• rootusrootus 7y ago
  This article is from May. Oregon has since joined, becoming the 16th state to do so.
  • 5555624 7y ago
    The current number is 15. Nevada didn't join. Although passed by the Assembly and the Senate, the Governor vetoed it.
• baggy_trough 7y ago
  Let's imagine a state signs this and is a tipping point state for the presidential election. If this compact has any effect, it will be for the state's electors to vote against the popular vote in that state, resulting in the election of the undesired president according to the state's voters. Nothing wrong with that constitutionally, but I suspect the politicians will feel differently after the voters express their opinion of the matter.
  • jeremysalwen 7y ago
    If this actually does pass the tipping point, nobody will even be counting electors any more, they will only be counting the popular vote. The electors will be considered just a formality.
    • pwinnski 7y ago
      Vote counts will still be reported at every level, but electors will all cast their votes for the national popular vote winner. It will be easy enough to note which states' vote counts favor candidate B, despite the national popular vote favoring candidate A. As parent says, that's the design, but I'm sure there will be upset people in those states.
      • baddox 7y ago
        Well, yeah, people who don't like the winning candidate will be upset. Perhaps some people will be upset that the preferred candidate in their household, neighborhood, city, county, or state didn't win. I don't see how this is an effective argument against this policy.
      • dragonwriter 7y ago
        > As parent says, that's the design, but I'm sure there will be upset people in those states. There are people upset with the plurality winner getting all the states votes, too.
        • baddox 7y ago
          Not to mention a plurality of voters in the entire country in 2000 and 2016.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  • baddox 7y ago
    Yes, of course. If you support the election of President based on national popular vote, then you surely realize that sometimes the President will not be the candidate that was preferred in certain states.
  • andyv 7y ago
    If the popular vote favored, say Trump, and if California could change the election by pulling out of the compact, they would. In a heartbeat. That's why I'm not too worried about it. If it would really change the result, it's easy for a State to hit the pause button.
    • rootusrootus 7y ago
      > it's easy for a State to hit the pause button Is it that easy? It's a compact, not trivial to pull out of.
      • AnimalMuppet 7y ago
        Let's see: - Enough states pass this for it to be in force in 2020. - Trump wins the popular vote in 2020. However, he would not have won an EC vote because of California and New York. - California decides to renege on the compact, and votes for Biden instead. - A bunch of red states sue California. Long before the court cases go anywhere, Biden takes the oath of office. And what then?
        • pseudalopex 7y ago
          Bush v. Gore was decided more than a month before inauguration. Why would this take much longer?
        • zhoujianfu 7y ago
          The compact explicitly requires a much longer notice period than the time between Election Day and Inauguration Day if you want to pull out.
          • AnimalMuppet 7y ago
            And if they don't abide by that? Then what? Who's going to enforce it, and through what mechanism?
      • andyv 7y ago
• reaperducer 7y ago
  Up next: Abolishing the World Series. Make it one big, long game and count only the total number of runs.
  • pwinnski 7y ago
    If the results of presidential elections lasted a single year and had stakes as low as the poorly-named "World Series," that would be fine.
  • currymj 7y ago
    this is the cricket approach. baseball typically plays multi-game series instead. i agree in spirit though. i have long thought it would make sense to abolish the playoffs. give the pennants to the teams with the best records. then, have them play a 21-game World Series in the fall.
    • bdcravens 7y ago
      That's closer to how baseball used to be, but there were also less teams at that time.
      • dwighttk 7y ago
        yeah, they never had 21 games, but the winningest team from each league played in the World Series until 1969. They did have a few 9 game World Series, but most were 7.
  • gnulinux 7y ago
    Surely you must be joking to relate a sports game with American democracy.
• shmerl 7y ago
  Another thing to abolish - winner-takes-all system, which prevents wider parties variety.
  • chrisseaton 7y ago
    Would you have multiple presidents? How would you break their roles up? Which one gets the nuclear code or do they all?
    • kaishiro 7y ago
      No, I believe the OP is referring to abolishing the "first past the post" system that the US currently has in place.
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    • pchristensen 7y ago
      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 received 19, Hillary would receive 16, and Gary Johnson 1. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidential_election#Results_by_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia...
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    • jjeaff 7y ago
      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 win by landslides in NY and CA but then eek out a loss in some of the swing States.
• gfodor 7y ago
  I'm really confused about this because I don't understand the incentives politicians have to adopt this in their own state. It clearly undermines their state's power in national elections. My (cynical) assumption is that this will be obeyed insofar as it helps bring about the desired outcome by those in power. It will be disregarded if it would shift the outcome in the other direction.
  • outside1234 7y ago
    Does it? What if there state votes for the popular winner and that popular winner is not the winner? Remember, this will work both ways - eventually we will have a democrat that doesn't win the popular vote as well in the current system.
    • rootusrootus 7y ago
      It will only ever tip that way for a Democrat when Democrats become the party of rural voters.
      • outside1234 7y ago
        Why? There are plenty of small democratic states too - Rhode Island, Hawaii, etc. etc.
        • throwaway2048 7y ago
          They are vastly outnumbered by rural republican states.
      • hannasanarion 7y ago
        The urban/rural thing is a red herring. The Electoral college doesn't give more power to rural areas. It gives power to purple states, where the election is close. How many people are in the state doesn't matter.
    • gfodor 7y ago
      If a state votes for the popular winner then they are already going to give their electoral votes to that winner, right? For the people of the state, this basically diluted the impact their vote has (kind of self evident, since that is the point of the electoral college)
• not_a_moth 7y ago
  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 life with different priorities (and different legislative interests), shouldn't be totally shut out, should they? Even though I live in a giant urban area, I wouldn't want to feel pressured to due so due to lack of political stake if I move elsewhere.
  • pchristensen 7y ago
    This is an innumerate talking pointing point repeated endlessly by Republican talking heads. There is somewhat of a numerical advantage to small states, but it helps Vermont, Delaware, Rhode Island, New Mexico etc for Democrats, and it hurts Texas, Florida, Ohio, Georgia etc for Republicans. With winner-take-all allocation of states' electoral votes, politicians are incentivized to put all of their effort into battleground/swing states, regardless of size. Presidential candidates spend 99% of their time in swing states, except for when they go to NY/CA/TX/FL to fundraise. Iowa gets attention because it's the earliest primary, not because it's rural.
  • henryfjordan 7y ago
    I understand pre-industrial revolution why we needed to make sure rural voters got a little boost. Back then 50%+ of the population was agrarian. Now it's 0.3%. You can go to wal-mart anywhere. The main difference in your lifestyle across regions is determined by local politics, not national ones. Since almost everyone lives in a quasi-suburbia in america now, who exactly needs protecting? Why does someone in North Dakota deserve more of a say than someone in california these days?
  • dlbucci 7y ago
    I'm all for rural representation, but people in rural areas essentially have their vote count more than people in cities, right? Cause that's the current system for us: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/map_of_the_week/2012/11/presidential_election_a_map_showing_the_vote_power_of_all_50_states.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/map_of_the_w...
• innocentoldguy 7y ago
  This is stupid. The entire point of the electoral college is to ensure small states have a say and the country isn’t ruled by the majority mob. Small states would have to be pretty ignorant to make themselves irrelevant like that.
  • jeanperrot 7y ago
    Are you thinking of the US Senate? The electoral college is not meant to give a proportionally larger weight to small states.
    • mikelyons 7y ago
      Are you sure that that's not exactly what it's designed to do? Can you explain what it _is_ designed to do? (edit: I'm not claiming either way, but would like to understand what you're claiming) (edit: hmmm, a single downvote ...)
    • bdcravens 7y ago
      Except it does. Smaller states do get more votes per capita than larger states. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_College#Advantage_based_on_state_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_Colleg...
  • dbuxton 7y ago
    However, it's not clear there's anything that small states can do about this (other than make sure that this doesn't get passed in states making up a majority of EC votes). The states that would arguably be stupid to go for this are actually the purple ones rather than the large or small ones, because they are the ones that are currently the focus of presidential campaigning but they would no longer be if there was a mechanism for making the EC reflect popular vote. That's perhaps why Colorado may remove itself (see https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-movement-to-skip-the-electoral-college-may-take-its-first-step-back/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-movement-to-skip-th...)
  • jjeaff 7y ago
    I'm not sure the electoral college does that except when successfully gerrymandered. Electoral college votes are applied on a population basis. So small states get less votes. Without the electoral college, "states" collectively don't get any say at all. Only citizens of those states.
• sevenf0ur 7y ago
  The democrats crucified Trump in 2016 for not accepting the outcome of the election. Today they want to amend the constitution to abolish the electoral college. Maybe it's a good thing that we can't change these things on a whim.
  • nlh 7y ago
    Your first two sentences are both accurate, but I don't think your third necessarily follows. There are strong arguments for getting rid of the Electoral College and they should be (and are being) debated.
  • clintonb 7y ago
    This campaign doesn't require changing the constitution. States can decide how to divide their electors, which is exactly what is going on here. See https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/written-explanation https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/written-explanation.
• m0zg 7y ago
  News flash: Trump would still have won, just with a different campaign strategy and a different platform. Promise a little more of what CA and NY want, and a little less of what everybody else wants, and he'd get the popular vote, too. In fact I think this would make it _easier_ for a populist to win, not harder, because all they'd have to worry about is crafting a campaign message that resonates with the majority and portrays their opponent as Satan in the flesh.
  • jayd16 7y ago
    Good. Then partisanship shouldn't matter when it comes to the merit of this proposal.
  • jeanperrot 7y ago
    That's exactly the goal. The point is not to pick a different winner, it is to re-enfranchise voters in states that are strongly 'red' or strongly 'blue'
  • outside1234 7y ago
    I mean, if he had won the popular vote, then fine, he is the winner. All this is asking is 1 person 1 vote.
    • m0zg 7y ago
      This would lead to e.g. Wyoming being run by California though. I'm sure Wyomingites would totally love that.
      • outside1234 7y ago
        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.
        • m0zg 7y ago
• ryanmarsh 7y ago
  Anyone proposing this is doing so in the blind. Nobody knows how this would change the complex executive and legislative systems we have. Nobody could know, for decades. So why the confidence that this is the right thing to do?
• ultrablack 7y ago
  Most modern countries have similar systems, where smaller areas are disproportionally represented in the legislative power. Its only when you loose that is a problem?
  • hannasanarion 7y ago
    The President is not a legislative body.
• akulbe 7y ago
  I could not be more opposed to the abolishment of the Electoral College. The founders had a very good rationale for putting it in. That said... I think there's a solution for this. Hard term limits for everyone, in all the branches. It already exists for the Executive branch. I think it should be instituted for both Legislative and Judicial as well.
  • creaghpatr 7y ago
    Definitely, for the Senate, I don't mind unlimited in the house since they are up for reelection every two years.
    • AnimalMuppet 7y ago
      No, there are several members of the House that have passed their sell-by date.
  • dragonwriter 7y ago
    > The founders had a very good rationale for putting it in. Well, it had a reason: like the per-state represt in the Senate which was locked in against amendment, like the 3/5 compromise, like the prohibition locked against amendment protecting the slave trade for a set time period, and probably like a handful of other things I'm probably not remembering off the top of my head, it was a mechanism of politically securing slavery and reassuring the slave states that the more populace free states, where ethical objections to slavery were already common, would not be able to band together and demand that all people be treated as people rather than some being treated as property. (Before anyone starts quoting the Federalist Papers, I'll point out that those weren't working documents that the Constitutional Convention made decisions based on, but campaign literature to sell ratification particularly in New York. So they weren't going to say “A lot of this document is about mollifying the slave states to get them to stay by giving them as much assurance as possible that it will never be structurally possible to abolish slavery.” But, not saying it when selling the document in New York doesn't stop it from being true.)
    • javagram 7y ago
• crb002 7y ago
  This is absurd populism. IMHO electoral college votes should come from US House district winners instead of winner takes all.
  • bdcravens 7y ago
    Probably a move in the right direction, but then the issues of gerrymandering come into play.
• frankbreetz 7y ago
  I turned 30 this year,and the Republican candidate has won the popular vote once in my life,and he was an incumbent. There has been a Republican president 14 of the 30 years of my life. Now,the first president of my life ( Bush 1) won the popular vote before I was born, but if we don't count him, no Republican has entered office with the popular vote in my life. Regardless of political beliefs does this seem right to everyone?
  • furgooswft13 7y ago
    GWB won the popular vote in 2004.
    • hannasanarion 7y ago
      The only time a Republican has won the support of most Americans since 1988.
      • frankbreetz 7y ago
        And he didn't enter the White House with the popular vote
  • philliphaydon 7y ago
    If you removed only California from the popular vote then Hillary lost. The share number of people there still cause Hillary to get the popular vote. Is it fair that 1 state has a controlling share over every other state?
    • frankbreetz 7y ago
      If California was 6 different states,do they deserve more power?
    • hannasanarion 7y ago
      And if you remove Texas, Hillary would have won by an even larger margin. What is your point?
• peapicker 7y ago
  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 happen in a state where both parties hold some power, rather than in a state controlled by one party. The Electoral college system focuses a great deal of energy on states in this condition when an election is close. National Popular Vote (NPV) rewards states with high population - the higher the turnout, the more power for that state. Additionally, under NPV, each state would certify its own "national" vote total. What would happen when there are charges of skullduggery? Would states really trust, with no power to verify, other state’s returns? I have other concerns as well but feel the EC system is superior. Just as an observation, the parliamentary systems of the UK, Canada, Israel, (& others) have the parliament elect the Prime Minister and likewise don't elect their leaders by popular vote. [edited: removing poor wording about 'lax laws', seems I implied things in a FUD way that I didn't mean to]
  • sp527 7y ago
    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 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.
    • peapicker 7y ago
• 033803throwaway 7y ago
  If trump is re-elected it may be the last time a republican wins a presidential election in the current system, due to demographic changes in key states (FL, TX, NC, etc.) If the electoral college is abolished, it could actually end up getting another few republicans elected, since it would incentivize republican turnout in solidly democratic states like California.
  • AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    I doubt it. The Republicans will just have to move their platform just enough to the left to appeal to whichever state has the 270th vote.
    • whenchamenia 7y ago
      The left has gone so authoritarian they may not have to. Left and right are illusion. Freedom and despotism are what you experince as a citizen.
      • AnimalMuppet 7y ago
        All right, the Republicans have to move their position just enough to appeal to the median electoral vote just a bit more than the Democrats do. If the Democrats go full off-the-deep-end leftist (as seen by the bulk of the voters), then the Republicans may not have to move at all.
• RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
  >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.
  • cybersnowflake 7y ago
    Technically every single voter in Nevada could vote for one candidate yet under certain circumstances all their votes would go to the the opposing candidate under the Compact. Yeah, I don't think all the people in smaller states falling over themselves to join the Compact are really thinking this through.
    • standardUser 7y ago
      What you described is precisely the intended effect of the pact.
      • cybersnowflake 7y ago
        I know the designers of the Pact understand this, I'm just not so sure about all the voters in smaller states signing on to the Compact.
        • chipotle_coyote 7y ago
          The argument "but the majority of people in Nevada could vote for candidate X and candidate Y could still carry their state?" is true, yet a little misleading; the net effect of the Pact is to effectively weight all votes equally at a national level rather than a state level. If you believe that the condition we have now -- that the majority of people in the United States could vote for candidate X and candidate Y could still win the election -- then this is an improvement, even if it's effectively a hack of the electoral college system to make it behave as if it wasn't there at all.
• cletus 7y ago
  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.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    > Stop politicizing the election process. Like, why is the supervisor for elections an elected political position? The alternative is that it's an appointed position. That won't be less political.
• cybersnowflake 7y ago
  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.
  • komali2 7y ago
    That only matters if our international government gets an elected god emperor. The president is one of three branches of government. Congress/Senate balances the power across states.
• tmux314 7y ago
  "Legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests." - Justice Earl Warren There's a long history of the US electoral system favoring rural areas over urban areas. Typically, the courts had to intervene in order to remedy an issue where clearly the legislature has a conflict of interest. The most famous is Reynolds v Sims (1964), which stated that electoral districts of state legislative chambers must be roughly equal in population [1]. Hopefully, we can see similar change happen in the Electoral College. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynolds_v._Sims https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynolds_v._Sims
• mshirley 7y ago
  I want to point out this article was written in May, and is a bit out of date. For example, Nevada (heavily mentioned in the article) never adopted the National Popular Vote compact because the governor vetoed the bill after the legislature passed it. FiveThirtyEight published an article last week on the current state of the compact: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-movement-to-skip-the-electoral-college-may-take-its-first-step-back/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-movement-to-skip-th...
  • Izkata 7y ago
    > Unsurprisingly, given that almost every state government to pass the National Popular Vote compact was completely controlled by Democrats, It kinda feels like this part keeps getting glossed over when people talk about this. I don't think those signing on have really thought it through, and are just reacting to the 2016 election results. Of course the party that lost wants to change the system in a way that, that time, they may have ended up winning - especially with all the open hate for Trump.
    • chipotle_coyote 7y ago
      The NPVIC was introduced into state legislators in 2006, so it's pretty hard to write off as just a reaction to Trump. And while there certainly is a lot of open hate for Trump, it's the fact that he lost the popular vote and won anyway that kicked this back up again. The Bush election in 2000 was the first time that'd happened since 1888. Having it happen again just 16 years later -- and with Clinton winning the popular vote by a bigger margin than Gore did in 2000 or Cleveland did in 1888! -- and this is to be expected. And, sure, it benefits the Democrats -- but given that population trends over the last few decades have all been about migration to urban areas from rural ones, I think it's at least worth asking whether keeping the electoral college and giving ever fewer voters a disproportionately ever-greater say over the country is truly what we want. If another national election goes the "lose popular election, win election anyway" route within the next few cycles, this is going to start getting a lot of noise around it.
    • cosmobot 7y ago
      It's worth noting that the same thing happened to the Democrats in 2000, and hadn't happened in the US at that point for over 100 years. Looked at from the perspective of the Democratic party: they have won the popular vote 4 out of the last 5 elections, but only won the presidency twice. It's not surprising the party's frustration with the Electoral College would continue to grow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_elections_in_which_the_winner_lost_the_popular_vote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
• JakeAl 7y ago
  I think before we change the system we might want to get politicians to actually do their job and represent the people in their district. With all these people voting by mail and all these government provided or subsidized phones and internet connections it's not only trivial but should be mandatory to quantify and qualify what each person who votes wants as a matter of a public record of accountability rather than having some party line being towed. If the politicians were doing their job and not serving some party or political agenda, the electoral college I think would work just fine. Popular vote/mob rules? I don't think so. The majority should never rule over the minority, and the only good government is a democracy where the majority vote in the best interest of all citizens and compromise in order to do so. Or as I like to sum it up, don't confuse a coop game with a competitive game.
• munk-a 7y ago
  The Connecticut Compromise is good and all, but I think it's about time we discard it as an artifact of the days when communication was difficult and states had expectations around operating as semi-autonomous bodies. States used to be a strong identity tie than the nation but our general mindset has shifted toward identifying as Americans before Delawareans.
  • thwythwy 7y ago
    Long live Delaware! You otherins shant try to come on err land and regalate err corporate forms.
  • human20190310 7y ago
    In a related anachronism... > In [Republican CO State Senator Sonnenberg's] view, the Electoral College was created so that “people in rural areas did not get overrun by the masses.” This can't be true since in 1790 (roughly the same time period the EC was created), "the masses" were rural; at that point only about 5% of the population was urban[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta...
    • Scramblejams 7y ago
      In the US they were rural. The founders and early lawmakers took much inspiration from the histories and travails of other governments around the world.
      • hannasanarion 7y ago
        Which were also predominantly rural. There was no country on earth with a majority urban population until well into the 20th century.
        • Scramblejams 7y ago
          Nobody said cities needed a majority to inspire fear of the way they concentrated political power. The founders’ concerns about that are well-documented. A cursory search yielded a decent starting point: https://www.planetizen.com/node/18841 https://www.planetizen.com/node/18841
• fag_tits 7y ago
  Nice liberal shithole you have here
• ur-whale 7y ago
  The real core issue is the president and the federal govt has way too much power. There is no reason why a centralized authority should decide on policy for both rural and urban communities and for states as deeply different as Louisiana and Washington state. If political power was surrendered back down to where it naturally belongs, i.e. to the state, or even better to the city level, and the fed was stripped and left with little to no political power, this whole electoral college charade would become entirely moot.
• tedmcory77 7y ago
  Democratic candidates have won the popular vote 4/5 times in the most re ent elections, but only won the Presidency 2/5. That’s an issue.
  • mieseratte 7y ago
    It’s not an issue at all, the system does not regard popular vote by design.
    • hannasanarion 7y ago
      That isn't true. The system was intended to be more democratic, the current winner-take-all norm came long after the constitution was written.
  • AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    Teams with the most yards lose some football games, too. Is that an issue? Run to win the election under the rules that are in force.
    • gnulinux 7y ago
      This does not make any sense to me. Elections is not a game, it is people's inalienable right to have equal representation compared to others. If politicians decide that State X doesn't matter since it's not powerful with respect to EC, this is blatantly undemocratic and needs to be fixed asap.
    • tedmcory77 7y ago
      I’m oddly of the opinion that anything that makes someones vote worth more than another's isnt a good system.
• tgafpg 7y ago
  If this happens, Democrats will be very unhappy with how many Republicans there are in Upstate New York, Southern Illinois and Rural California who's vote now counts for something.
  • _bxg1 7y ago
    It'll mostly balance out I think, and even if it doesn't, that's hardly the point
    • AnimalMuppet 7y ago
      No, it kind of is the point. Democrats aren't doing this because it's more fair, they're doing it because they think they'll win more elections.
      • _bxg1 7y ago
        But regardless of what forces are actually pushing for it, it is more fair.
        • AnimalMuppet 7y ago
          Perhaps. But when I know that there are people with a partisan axe to grind pushing for it, I think arguments for "fair" should be regarded with a certain amount of skepticism...
          • _bxg1 7y ago
            Sure, but I think they hold up to skepticism
          • zhoujianfu 7y ago
            The NPVIC board actually has more Republicans than Democrats on it. https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/about https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/about
  • 7y ago
• _bxg1 7y ago
  > Jerry Sonnenberg, a Republican state senator in Colorado who opposed the bill, said he believed the change would weaken the electoral power of sparsely populated rural states like Wyoming and Utah, while strengthening states like California and New York. States. Are. Not. People.
  • AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    No. But states' representatives will often work together across party lines to try to do something that benefits the state. "Political power of a state" is not a totally idiotic concept.
• paco_sinbad 7y ago
  Isn't it interesting that minority opinions matter and must be treated equally, until your state has the minority of the population...
• huffmsa 7y ago
  1) the presidency has grown too powerful and imperial with a bureaucracy so massive the Qing emperor would be jealous. 2) 15 States can do what they want, but unless they meet the provisions in Article 5, the college is here to stay. Thank goodness the Framers had the foresight to include the process for amending the Constitution in the document.
  • hannasanarion 7y ago
    The states have the absolute right to assign their electors as they see fit. The framers intended for them to be locally elected or proportional, like Maine and Nebraska today.
    • huffmsa 7y ago
      Oh I know. There is no Federal notion of a popular vote for the presidency. It's entirely up to each state how they wish to nominate their Electors.
• Spooky23 7y ago
  I think this is both a dumb move and unconstitutional. Present day politics aside, allowing for pure demographic voting in this day and age is even more dangerous than it was in the early days of the republic. States and regions have different needs that need to be considered in the governance of the nation. You can already see warning signs, the Democratic Party platform has been so brain dead, they even managed to marginalize union voters. Kansas and Wisconsin were progressive strongholds. Changing the way we count isn’t a fix for that issue — fixing how candidates and parties approach the people is. A more productive approach would be to reduce the carnival nature of the election process... candidates shouldn’t be picked based on their ability to shuck and jive in Iowa and New Hampshire. Direct popular vote is basically a beacon for reactionary politics. It’s easy to churn out old people to vote.
  • lonelappde 7y ago
    What is unconstitutional about a state using its constitutional authority to cast its votes for President? Why should fictional state borders take precedence over actual humans when allocating voting blocs? If different states have difference needs, then those states residents will vote for leaders who serve them. Your problem seems to be that that giving supreme power to an arbitrary majority is flawed. And it surely is. But giving supreme power to an arbitrary minority is surely as bad or worse. Old people live in every state. If you have a problem with old people exercising their sacred voting right too much, surely the solution is to enable young people to vote, not give rural state citizens extra vote weight?
    • Spooky23 7y ago
      Don’t put words in my mouth. My problem is that this is a solution looking for a problem. In fact, it’s a solution that will make the problem that some people want to solve far worse.
• zaroth 7y ago
  A hypothetical situation; An amendment is proposed on the floor of the House to change the formula in a bill for how funding is allocated. The amendment presents a pro-urban allocation which provides a greater share of funding for larger cities compared to a baseline per-capita allocation. Urban center representatives stand up and argue how their cities need a higher reimbursement rate because the issue at hand is costlier to fix or more prevalent in their environment. Rural representatives stand up and argue they need the baseline funding to run an effective program. A vote is taken, and 54% of votes approve the amendment, urban center reps effectively pooling their votes to enact the funding paradigm that most benefited their constituents. —— The moral of the story is that it’s a lot more complicated than 1 person 1 vote. Often times policies may benefit a rural area over and urban environment or vice versa. One type of community benefiting and the expense of another. Cities already carry a massive voting advantage, because, that’s where most people live! When bills pass on a majority vote, urban already wins over rural every time. The rural areas maybe can form blocks to help push otherwise divided city reps one way or another, but policy debate is already dominated by urban voters, despite the claim of urban votes “counting less”. The simple math belies the reality that urban center reps vote for pro-urban national policies and the rural states with 1 rep sit on the sidelines. The last place these votes matter, even in the slightest, is in the EC in a closely contested election, and in the Senate. Frankly I’m not convinced more populism is any benefit, or that cities are particularly hurting from a lack of representation.
  • positr0n 7y ago
    The thing I've never understood about this argument is why the urban/rural divide is so special that it needs special rules? There are a bajillion other types of ways to categorize people that there is a majority and a minority besides the population density of their state.
    • adamson 7y ago
      Right? As I was reading GP, all I could think is that there are a million other instances of an issue having two interested but opposed parties, one being larger than the other, and in advanced pluralistic democracies, we generally find ways to balance the two interests that don’t involve completely hosing one party. I recognize that the Electoral College was developed in a context where people were very concerned about tyranny of the majority, but it’s a drastic solution to a not altogether exceptional problem.
• cgb223 7y ago
  Why cant states just give out percents of electoral votes based on who voted? Example: Lets say CA has 10 Electoral Votes (for easy math) 60% vote Dem, 40% vote Republican. California then Gives 6 Electoral Votes to the Democrat and 4 to the Republican instead of all 10 to the Democrat. Feels like that would more fairly represent the voters of each state no?
  • captncraig 7y ago
    I feel like I've seen some maps for past elections done hypothetically like this. I can't recall the conclusions though. I think the Senate situation still gives disproportionate power to small states in that model, even if it is slightly less dramatic than the winner take all in each state we have now.
  • LanceH 7y ago
    Why can't one party campaign like the rules were written down beforehand, instead of hanging out running up the score in California? Getting rid of the electoral college won't necessarily make Hilary win this time around. It will be a different vote entirely. Republicans will actually contest California and some others. They'll try to run up the score in Texas. They'll shift a couple issues left. The only sure thing from this change would be ignoring the spread out population.
  • sanxiyn 7y ago
    Yes, I also think this is the simplest way to make it more fair. States can do this unilaterally without pact. That's why I feel the pact is not about fairness.
    • hannasanarion 7y ago
      The pact is necessary because whoever changes the system first loses out on influence. You never hear of presidential candidates appealing to Maine or Nebraska. It only works if everyone does it together.
• gamechangr 7y ago
  Wouldn't that push housing up in big cities?
• chkaloon 7y ago
  > "Sanford Levinson, a constitutional law scholar at the University of Texas at Austin, is sharply critical of the Electoral College system, but does not believe the interstate pact would solve all of the problems inherent to America’s election design." Same argument as we can't try any gun restrictions because none of them will stop all shootings.
• hyperpape 7y ago
  There are discussions about the electoral college favoring small states. Some people think that's bad, some people think it's good. However, there's a more important issue: that's not really what the electoral college does. It gives a small edge to small states[0]. The much bigger effect is that in every given election, it favors a handful of battleground states over all the rest. If you live in Wyoming, the electoral college does not help you, because your vote is secure. Ditto for Vermont. But if you live in Ohio or Florida, presidential candidates will spend all their time in your state, trying to get your vote. While you can concoct a semi-coherent case for rural voters needing special protection, no one can explain why Ohio is more or less important than North Carolina, or Florida than Texas. [0] Which, if you're paying attention, is at least correlated with being rural, but only partially--another lazy generalization that surrounds this subject.
  • ShamelessC 7y ago
    I'm not in favor of the electoral college, but wouldn't its elimination merely shift this problem to politicians only visiting the most poulated states (e.g. California) anyway?
    • zik 7y ago
      At least then they'd be representing the concerns of a larger number of people which is arguably what they should be doing as representatives.
    • TylerE 7y ago
      I think the whole “visiting” thing is overblown. We have TV and the Internet. This isn’t the 19th century when the only way the average American might EVER see or hear a President would be a short speech off the back of a train car.
      • jeremyjh 7y ago
        That's right. Whats at stake is in which markets and demographics the ad spend goes.
• squirrelicus 7y ago
  The electoral college was created to strike a balance between valuing a diversity of perspectives and popularity of perspectives. The probability that a geographically restricted monoculture gets it right is very close to zero.
  • paggle 7y ago
    The electoral college gives extra votes to certain people. Why stop at rural vs urban? Why not give extra votes to people shorter than 5 feet? To people with black hair and blue eyes? To people who can wiggle their ears and roll their tongues at the same time?
    • koboll 7y ago
      The only people who say that are those who want rural people's values to have an outsized influence in our elections. That is, conservatives.
      • squirrelicus 7y ago
        I certainly am conservative but the things I said are not false. The USA government is not merely a representative democracy, it's more formally a republic. Consider this: the purpose behind the bicameral legislature is that in order for the federal government to act, it requires the consent of both the majority of the population and the majority of the states subject to it. If the population and the states can't agree, then we shouldn't do it at the federal level. It's foundational to the structure, and it's a process of slowing down the system against them whims of both the elite and the masses. If you disagree with this, that's perfectly fine. I don't know a conservative that isn't in favor of CA and NY seceding. After all, most of the wealthy people live there anyway. Conduct the Marxist cleansing behind the border wall, but don't bring the rest of us into the shit. Let CA burn itself to the ground, we don't have a problem with that. Don't bring the rest of us down with you. We shouldn't have to support the insanity.
        • koboll 7y ago
• crusso 7y ago
  The states agreed to the Constitution with the Electoral College provision. If there's national will to change it, it should be through the amendment process described in the Constitution. Having some states band together to subvert the intention of the EC fundamentally breaks the compact of the Constitution. What is the authority of a President chosen through subversion of the Constitution?
  • sanxiyn 7y ago
    Constitution does not specify how states should implement EC. In fact, Maine and Nebraska do not use winner-take-all used by other states.
• will_pseudonym 7y ago
  If people are up in arms about the electoral college giving small states outsized influence, wait until they hear about the senate.
  • WarDores 7y ago
    That's the literal point of the Senate, though, to be fair.
    • will_pseudonym 7y ago
      Yes, and it's part of the point of the electoral college. It's a weighted average of the number of congress members from your state* *and also includes Washington D.C.
  • hannasanarion 7y ago
    The "electoral college helps small states" thing isn't true. It's a convenient justification that high school teachers repeat without thinking. It makes no sense. If the EC helps small states, then why has there never been a presidential visit to Wyoming? The answer is that the electoral college doesn't empower small or large states, it empowers battleground states. This is dumb, undemocratic, and contrary to the framers intentions.
• RyanAF7 7y ago
  No he isn't and he won't. But, it's a good social engineering mechanism to discuss these issues so the next gen and others who don't understand the US thanks to pop culture can learn why the EC is important. Repeal the 17th Amendment while you're at it and then increase the house reps to 5000 and triple the senators. Then we'll see how effective or profitable lobbying, campaign finance or gerrymandering is.
• WarDores 7y ago
  It's not about division of power between rural/urban or big states/small states. The Electoral College is about buffering purely democratic power. The President doesn't represent "the people." He/she represents the interests of the states. The Legislative Branch represents the will of the people (most directly through the House of Representatives). One of the biggest problems is vesting too much power and importance in the Executive, which was never intended. Throw the balance of power out of whack, and we get these conversations (the President has to represent "the people" and therefore should be elected by popular vote)
  • vturner 7y ago
    I wish someone with $$ would start plastering this message everywhere the absurd "get rid of the elctoral college" debate comes up. We are not a democracy, seriously no one wants a democracy of 300 million plus. We are a federation of states that is supposed to have most of the control in their region and sacrifice a little bit of control to the federal government for purposes of defense and commerce. Your "democracy" should be your state legislature, but sadly authoritarians of the past have taken that away.
    • fzeroracer 7y ago
      We've been giving up control to the federal government because more often than not, the local and state governments have failed [1]. Political corruption, corporate interests etc somehow don't just vanish and go away when you give power to the states. There's a balance to be made between federal and state government powers. And ultimately the electoral college is one of the things that needs to go, because it unfairly tips the system in favor of extremely rural areas whom influence policy that then directly harm those living in more urban environments. [1] https://www.insider.com/what-us-cities-looked-like-before-epa-regulated-pollution-2019-8 https://www.insider.com/what-us-cities-looked-like-before-ep...
      • dgzl 7y ago
        The point isn't that corruption goes away when power is given to the states, the point is that the state is easier to protest than the federal government. I can get to my state capital in ~4 hours of driving, but it would take me >40 hours to get to DC. The electoral college is better than straight democracy.
• waynecochran 7y ago
  Great. With no electoral college, Wyoming would have 1.44% of the weight California would have towards who was elected. The only thing keeping Wyoming in the Union would be their two senators. Maybe then Wyoming folks should have to pay 1.44% of the Federal Income Tax that Californians pay. Campaigning for President? Just go to New York, LA, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, and maybe a few other cities. Maybe city folks can start making their own food while they're at it.
  • georgeecollins 7y ago
    Guess what? Wyoming pays less than 1.07% <1> of the federal income tax that California does so you have gotten your wish. Also California grows about 100x <2> the food of Wyoming so yeah we can eat our own food, thank you. The most important reason the electoral college was invented was so that states with large slave populations could count 60% of them for representation without actually giving them the vote. You don't hear about it that much anymore for obvious reasons. <1> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_tax_revenue_by_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_tax_revenue_by_state <2> https://www.farmprogress.com/management/what-us-states-produce-most-food-ranking-1-50 https://www.farmprogress.com/management/what-us-states-produ...
    • waynecochran 7y ago
      Nice response. With actual data. Of course I am not sure the folks in the San Jaoquin Valley (who produce all that food) would be colored blue if they were an independent state. I don't buy the slave argument -- I think the electoral college was created for the same reason we have two senators per state. Of course those states with large slave populations would have been colored blue, but that is another history folks ignore.
      • georgeecollins 7y ago
        And if the San Jaoquin Valley became its own state conservative votes in San Jaoquin valley and San Fransico would count more if they were seperate states. Which is the whole point. It's telling that my point about economics and representation got turned into a blue / red thing. >> I don't buy that slave arguement.. And you are a historian? The slave states that were large like Virginia wanted the electoral college, contradicting your argument. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/electoral-college-slavery-constitution https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/electoral-college-slav... https://time.com/4558510/electoral-college-history-slavery https://time.com/4558510/electoral-college-history-slavery https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/opinion/electoral-college-slavery.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/opinion/electoral-college...
• Schnitz 7y ago
  The electoral college was just a kludge to allow elections before modern instant long distance communication became a thing. The gold standard for democracy was always "one person, one vote", but nowadays there's a lot of people that consider their personal gain more important than being democratic and those people (the Republican party mostly) will try to hang on to the electoral college, no matter the cost apparently.
  • 0xB31B1B 7y ago
    “The gold standard for democracy has always been one person one vote”: it’s much more complicated than that. At least for US legal history, the idea of “who has the right to vote” has changed significantly, from land owning white males to citizens who haven’t committed felonies (and a few other exceptions like residents of Puerto Rico or citizens who live abroad and a few more). If you look even further back, Athens, the creator of democracy, would generally view our government as oligarchy (rule by the few) as popular vote elections were viewed as possible to be games/bought by the wealthy or connected. You can see echoes of that in today’s politics with dynastic families (Clintons, Bushes). To solve the problem, the Athenians employed the concept of “sortion” or essentially a civil service lottery where the ruling council of the city was chosen at random from all eligible citizens. A modern example of something close to sortition today is Jury Duty.
    • baggy_trough 7y ago
      If the House was chosen randomly from the population, it would be a big improvement.
  • SamReidHughes 7y ago
    This is not true. Go read about the formation of the Constitution. It doesn't even make any sense. States were just as capable of holding elections and sending six-digit numbers to Washington as they were holding elections and sending two-digit numbers to Washington.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• garrickvanburen 7y ago
  My issue with the electoral college is that winner take all - rather than each electoral vote being counted and rolled up, only the winner is. There are a couple states that do this, I’d like to see the others adopt this.
• achenatx 7y ago
  Right or wrong, the only thing that matters is the constitution. It is easy to imagine that a purely democratic system would be better, but I find it easy to imagine that it would be substantially worse. The founding fathers rightly believed that most people were ignorant and relatively stupid so the people vote for the house, but senators and electors were appointed. The agreement to get small states to join was that they would have an equal number of senators. If you want a different system change the constitution. Im skeptical that a democratic system would be better. They setup the system to be a collection of states with a weak federal govt with limited power. The federal govt over time has taken more and more power from the states. When california joined the union it had 33X less population than the most populous state (new york). Californians were happy to have the overrepresentation when it benefitted them. Overall a strongly federal system is worse than a system where 50 states each try something different. In a 50 state system we get many chances to find the best policies. For example when marijuana is illegal at the federal level the antis predicted wholesale mayhem. There was no way to test to see what would happen until some states defied federal law. Once one state showed that it was fine others could come on board. The same goes for open carry. Antis claimed there would massive increases in crime and shootings. It turns out not to be the case.
  • crooked-v 7y ago
    This is states taking the entirely constitutional action of deciding who to give their votes to: in this case, whoever wins the popular vote.
  • throwaway827364 7y ago
    My problem with the electoral college is that it doesn’t seem to matter who I vote for or which way my state goes. The election comes down to some key battleground states, which is where the candidates spend the vast majority of their time campaigning. The constitution shouldn’t be put on a pedestal. The men who wrote that document were flawed just like any other human. Many of them owner slaves. I’m not saying we should disregard our laws but I am saying we should keep an open mind to amending the constitution as needed.
• rayiner 7y ago
  Debates over the electoral college tend to conflate two different things. The original purpose of the electoral college was a compromise between those who wanted the president directly elected, and those who wanted Congress to elect the president. While very small states have a modest edge as a result of using the number of members of Congress to decide the number of electors, the real purpose of the system is to add a layer of indirection to the election of the President, where the states have a say in their capacity as states. That layer of indirection continues to exist today. Article II provides that “each state shall appoint” electors “in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” So Minnesota could decide to have the state legislature appoint its electors, without a popular vote. (That would raise the importance of state government elections, which might be a good thing.) At the same time, that layer of indirection could exist even in a purely proportional system. You could assign electoral votes based on population or number of house members. So the debate over getting rid of the electoral college actually involves two different issues. Should the number of electors be proportional? And should we reduce the independent status of the states even more by taking away their intermediary role in electing the President?
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • IgorPartola 7y ago
    First, the number of House reps is no longer proportionate to the population. Second, the layer of indirection as it exists today does nothing. Electors aren’t free to choose a president. They in most cases must elect the person they pledged to elect and if they don’t they instantly get replaced by a new elector who will. What purpose does that serve? Seems to me like we should either buck up and actually allow these people to elect a president, or abolish the whole institution as it currently is a farce.
    • harryh 7y ago
      First, the number of House reps is no longer proportionate to the population. Yes they are. Each house district has about 750,000 people. You get a bit of deviation because states don't necessarily have a precise multiple of 750k people. Also we only redraw districts every 10 years, so things have drifted a bit since 2010. But it's pretty close.
• CptFribble 7y ago
  The Electoral college exists because of slavery. The original idea going into the Constitutional Convention was to have Congress pick the president. A majority of delegates going into the Convention supported this, but discarded it after debates established it would violate the separation of powers. The popular vote wasn't an option, however, because it would mean the southern states with their large, non-voting slave populations would have vastly reduced influence. The southern delegates would have never supported a popular vote. Thus, the electoral college. Madison wrote about it here: http://memory.loc.gov/ll/llfr/002/0000/00610057.tif http://memory.loc.gov/ll/llfr/002/0000/00610057.tif
  • anon1m0us 7y ago
    Actually, or perhaps also, the electoral college exists because the founding fathers didn't trust the people to make good decisions. This is discussed at length in the letters the founding fathers wrote about their political opinions.
  • elicash 7y ago
    > The popular vote wasn't an option, however, because it would mean the southern states with their large, non-voting slave populations would have vastly reduced influence. I'm not saying you're wrong, bc clearly you've done at least some research and I've done none. But didn't most states not have anything resembling a "popular" vote at first? In the first presidential election 43,782 cast a ballot. (Population nearly 4 million in 1790.. so about 1% got a vote.) When many states didn't even HAVE a popular vote at the state level, is it really true that they were considering using a popular vote rather than state electors based on populations?
  • twblalock 7y ago
    That page you linked (http://memory.loc.gov/ll/llfr/002/0000/00610057.tif http://memory.loc.gov/ll/llfr/002/0000/00610057.tif) contains that argument from Madison followed by a non-slavery based argument made by someone else. To say that the electoral college exists "because of slavery" is an oversimplification. It ignores the misgivings about a popular vote that are mentioned in the page you linked, and it also ignores the desire of the state governments to exert control over their representation in the Federal government -- senators were not directly elected for the same reason. If you want to point to part of the Constitution that exists purely because of slavery, the 3/5 compromise is a better example. The decision to adopt an electoral college was certainly influenced by complications introduced by slavery, but there were a lot of other arguments in favor of an electoral college that were persuasive at the time.
• Consultant32452 7y ago
  I'm interested in hearing arguments from anyone who genuinely believes that California and New York are over all politically underprivileged.
  • zhoujianfu 7y ago
    Every non-swing state (including Texas and Wyoming) is when it comes to electing the president.
• car 7y ago
  The National Popular Vote (NPV) initiatives website has a lot of good info and background on the issue, and takes on the myths around it. - https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/ https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/ Explanation - https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/written-explanation https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/written-explanation Myths - https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/answering-myths https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/answering-myths As for the compact being a partisan issue, losing the presidency despite winning the popular vote can happen in either direction: A shift of 59,393 votes in Ohio in 2004 would have elected John Kerry despite President Bush’s nationwide lead of over 3,000,000 votes. Edit: C-SPAN interview with NPV co-founder John Koza from March 2019: https://www.c-span.org/video/?458502-6/washington-journal-john-koza-discusses-popular-vote-movement https://www.c-span.org/video/?458502-6/washington-journal-jo...
• wmgries 7y ago
  What if Congress revoked all (or nearly all) implicitly and explicitly delegated powers to the Executive? The jockeying over who runs for President and how we elect them always seems to miss the point that the modern Executive is much too powerful. Make the Presidency weaker, and then let's have this discussion about how we elect them.
• sokoloff 7y ago
  The electoral college also serves as a “firewall” of sorts to contain any local election fraud to that state (such that the will of the voters in that state is compromised, but the compromise doesn’t extend beyond that). For all I care, CA could pick their votes out of a lotto machine and it wouldn’t affect the power of my vote (as a non-CA resident). The fact that my vote is meaningless (deep blue state) is a collateral issue, perhaps.
  • SmirkingRevenge 7y ago
    This is an interesting point. The EC provides a kind of process isolation, in theory. Election fraudsters and hackers hoping to control the outcome of an election have to make big splashes in small ponds, so to speak. It seems intuitive then, that their shenanigans are more likely to be noticed - and are at least somewhat contained if they aren't. If we're going down the "1 person, 1 vote" road, that isolation vanishes. No more big splashes needed - only very small droplets in a vast, vast ocean.
  • travisjungroth 7y ago
    And if Ohio or Florida has election fraud? The electoral college doesn’t firewall off election fraud. It creates vulnerabilities by concentrating voting power.
• mythrwy 7y ago
  I'd be curious how this holds up to court challenges because it seems like a deliberate circumvention of the constitution. Not that the current system is completely equitable.
• dkraft 7y ago
  This nonsense needs to stop.
• cabaalis 7y ago
  The United States bases way too much of its identity on who is its president.
  • hannasanarion 7y ago
    Because the United States invests way too much power in who is President.
• zw123456 7y ago
  I have often thought that part of the rationale for the electoral college was that in the 18th century they did not have the internet, TV, Radio, even newspapers were pretty scarce. So it just wasn't all that practical for a candidate to ride a horse around all 13 colonies to meet each voter. The logical solution would have been to have a parliamentary system whereby the congress would select the president for you. The problem there was that the president would be beholden to the congress and you would lose some of the checks and balance features because he would be less likely to veto something. So they developed a "shadow congress" that did not have law making responsibilities but sole purpose was to travel to Philadelphia or DC and hear the speeches and so forth and select the president for you as your representative. Looking at it from this 18th century perspective highlights why it is completely unnecessary today. Obviously the voter has many ways of getting to know the positions of the candidates themselves and hence able to elect the president directly. There is no need for it today.
  • fastball 7y ago
    On the other hand, the electoral college, like congress, gives actual weight to the idea that a state is more than just the sum of its population, by automatically getting two votes for being a state. Whether or not that is necessary is a different conversation from the information dissemination purpose of the EC.
    • ianai 7y ago
      That isn’t a reason for a single state to be able to hold the entire progress of the majority back.
      • fastball 7y ago
        How can a single state hold back progress in this case? Individual states can apportion their EC votes however they want. 48/50 states are all-or-nothing states (arguably the actual problem), which is decided at the state level.
        • 7y ago
• IG_Semmelweiss 7y ago
  There are 2 major data points that are forgotten in this discussion #1 The founding fathers responsible for the american revolution risked everything by creating the constitution and the electoral college. They literally went against the most powerful empire in the world. They determined that the electoral college was the best system to defend the freedom of the naescent Republic. Then on the other side, you have a bunch of armchair bureaucrats and talking heads trying to change the system they inherited thanks to the blood of others. They want the benefits from the change ("more votes") but should the system implode, they will surely socialize losses among USA (they wont even join the army , let alone fight for what they believe in ). Then you have switzerland. The longest continuous government in the world operates as an extreme version of Republic, giving ample powers to small groups, where they can undo anything enacted by the majority. Nothing gets done as people bicker about small things. Majority does not get its sat. Yet the country is the most stable in the world. Maybe its time to consider what is the price for changing something that was forged with the blood of tears of more brave men, and has proven to stand the test of time.
• whenanother 7y ago
  the electoral college system has become a scam to give the presidential election to the wealthy. they can, during the election year establish residency in the swing states and in affect have more of a say as to who becomes president. people here claiming that it gives the rural population more of a say, that's a lot of bs. with national popular vote the urban and rural states will have just as much of a say as each vote will count for one vote. none of this crap of increasing the representative count and taking advantage of the numbers being rounded in favor of one party vs the other. now if a party wants to rig the election, they will have a much harder time.
• turk73 7y ago
  The electoral college system isn't working that badly and the only people who want to change it are Democrats because they think they can sway the election if they do. If it was going the other way the would be all "we must retain the sanctity of the electoral college at all costs!" I don't want big cities deciding anything more than they already do. Big cities are all run by Democrats 100% and have been for decades and they are all failing.
• fastball 7y ago
  https://i.imgur.com/wpOIGxq.png https://i.imgur.com/wpOIGxq.png That's a nice number of comments.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• jacobsimon 7y ago
  You misspelled obsolete :)
• pseingatl 7y ago
  It's in the Constitution. If you don't like the Constitution: --amend it. --call for a Constitutional Convention. These are the agreed methods to change the document. "End runs," state compacts and attempts to game the system are unconstitutional and doomed.
  • hannasanarion 7y ago
    Winner take all is not in the constitution. When states started arranging their elections this way in the early 1800s, the chief creators of the Electoral College Madison and Hamilton, called it an abomination and sued, and when that failed, tried to amend the constitution to get rid of winner-take-all. The constitution says that states can apportion their votes however they want. If they want to give them to the national popular winner, that's their prerogative.
• PorterDuff 7y ago
  re: California It's also worth considering the distortions that illegal aliens put on electoral college numbers.
  • hannasanarion 7y ago
    If there was any evidence at all, the administration would have presented it.
• freen 7y ago
  About the same number of people live in public housing in NYC as Wyoming. Either land area matters or people matter. Choose.
• 40four 7y ago
  I always hear people complain about the electoral college, but I've never once heard a detailed, objective argument as to why they think a popular vote would be a better system. Friends I've talked to about just seem to default to a majority system because it seems more 'fair', or its easier to understand? I dont know. In the USA, I think we are conditioned to belive in the democratic process, so I guess it feels 'natural' to just tally up the votes, & majority wins. We've done it countless times in our personal lives. Anytime there's a disagreement, or a group decision to be made, "Ok, lets vote on it". Majority wins. Simple. This is a fine & easy way to decide things in small groups, but is it really the best way to decide something among 300 million? I'm not convinced. I'm not saying the EC is perfect, I just suspect a simple majority wins vote could cause other serious problems that are not immediately obvious.
  • hannasanarion 7y ago
    If majority rule is a bad thing, why do you think minority rule is better? What if I told you that the framers Hamilton and Madison were appalled by winner-take-all laws passed by states in the early 1800s, and tried to change the constitution to abolish the Electoral College, it having become an abomination completely unlike their intent?
  • zhoujianfu 7y ago
    There’s a lot of reasons for it on the movements official site: https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/written-explanation https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/written-explanation
    • 40four 7y ago
      Thanks, I'll check it out. This is the group from the article? I admittedly didn't read it because of the paywal. Just lurking in the comments :)
    • 40four 7y ago
      So after looking it over, the idea is to eliminate get rid of the 'winner take all' system in the participating states. Seems fine to me. It's definitely hard to argue for winner takes all electoral votes. I'm not really a history guy, but I wonder why states decided to move in that direction to begin with? Guess I'll have to look into it. What I don't get is if there are this many states trying to push this idea, why do they need a bill like this to do it. Why don't those states just take it upon themselves to change their laws individually. What's stopping them right now? Moreover, it seems one of the main points is that the current system causes candidates to only focus their campaign in a few battleground states. I'm struggling to see how the National Popular Vote system would change this. Maybe it would break up the current pattern, if so, I have a feeling another similar pattern would emerge. The battlegrounds would just shift. For example, it might just redistribute the candidates focus to the greater metro areas where 2/3 of the population lives, and republican/ democrat distributions are more even (according to the site). If the city centers are strongly democrats, and rural strongly republican, the I imagine the same problem emerging since those areas are a 'done deal'. Why would the candidates spend any resources there is there is no chance of swaying them?
• calimac 7y ago
  Mob rule
• smsm42 7y ago
  Wake me up when it's 35 states. Before that, it's just a political stunt - blue states promise to vote for popular vote winner, thinking it would be a Democrat, which they'd be voting for anyway.
• ananonymoususer 7y ago
  Obviously only the "blue" states want this change. Fortunately there are more "red" states than blue states, so the original purpose of the electoral collage, as created by the founding fathers, will be preserved. Otherwise we would be in "tyranny of the majority" mode, which we are anyway, but at least not with regard to presidential elections.
  • zhoujianfu 7y ago
    It’s really not a blue state vs red state thing as much as a swing state vs non-swing state thing. Right now it’s more blue because trump is in power, but if democrats take the White House (and especially if it’s without winning the popular vote), red states will be jumping on the bandwagon. Before 2016 red states were terrified of the electoral college “blue wall” and many were very close to joining the compact before the 2016 election made it politically infeasible.
• remarkEon 7y ago
  Most of these comments are about the structural issues with the electoral college. I’m not really concerned about that. What concerns me is this insistence that a popular vote for President in a country of 350M people is a good idea. Does anyone actually believe this? The executive branch these days has essentially become a proxy for what laws one wants passed, and you end up voting accordingly. This might be fine, if the results were restricted to being local - and by the way, the original design of this country accented on exactly that point. But we don’t live in that country anymore, I guess. Now we want more democracy, all the time. So I find it really hard to believe that introducing more “democracy” in a nation as divided and diverse as this one is a good idea. This, I thought, was supposed to be one of the reasons that people wanted to move here ... the whole Federalism thing. Taxes can be different between states. So can Social policy. The extension of this is of course the Electoral College. Spare me the criticism of “slippery slope” but getting rid of the Electoral College seems like we’d be on the road to a government “of the majority, by the majority, and for the majority”. That is categorically absurd, at least in my view. The cynic in me says that the only reason we’re even talking about this is because Trump won in 2016 via the EC. Sure. He did. And Clinton won the “popular vote” because of LA, SF, and NYC. For those in SF (or whatever proxy): do you want folks in Sioux Falls or Fargo making your economic and social policy? No? I didn’t think so. So why is it okay to institute the reverse? The point I’m trying to make here is this country, as diverse as it is, is best run as a distributed network. And centralizing the election of the Executive into a singular popular vote will help destroy what’s left of that network.
• EGreg 7y ago
  In much more recent news: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/faithless-elector-a-court-ruling-just-changed-how-we-pick-our-president/ https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/faithless-elector-a-...
• markvdb 7y ago
  Use a condorcet method [0] to elect a US president that represents common ground. Needs of specific groups of people can be taken into account as transparent supplementary conditions. Sparsely populated areas constitute one potential parameter. Maybe the opinions of poor and ill people can also be taken into account for while respecting their privacy. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method
• quaquaqua1 7y ago
  For 32+ years, the fact is that the Democratic candidate has won the popular vote 7 times in the last 8 elections. I am not saying whether this is good or bad. But, I think the two party system would crumble very quickly if the Electoral College were removed, and something else would come into place instead. Disclaimer: I do not vote despite being an American citizen. I am also an anarchist.
  • AsyncAwait 7y ago
    If this means viable 3rd parties, am all for it.
    • quaquaqua1 7y ago
      Personally I think it does, and I also think it means that there would be a spectrum shift among the candidates to more "left of center" positions. For example I think you would still have a broad selection of candidates who differ greatly on economic ideas. But, I think that social ideas that currently are still being debated (abortion, church and state, drugs) would be resolved. I am willing to estimate that maybe 70% of Americans agree on these social issues, compared to economic issues being more 50/50.
• JackFr 7y ago
  It's quite likely that without the electoral college, Donald Trump would have won the popular vote. Republican turnout in NY is terrible for presidential elections, because they all know there vote won't matter. Registered Democrats out number Republicans in NY by more than 2 to 1, and yet there are more Republicans in NY that there are people in New Mexico and Vermont combined. It's definitely not a given, but predicting what would happen is not a clear exercise. You can't change the rules without changing peoples behavior.
• sabana 7y ago
  How is this tech related?
• larrydag 7y ago
  When looking at political methods I like to look a first principals from all points of view. Here is a conservative or traditionalist political point of view in favor of the Electoral College https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/danger-attacks-electoral-college/ https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/danger-attacks-electoral-coll... Here is a liberal or progressive point of view against the Electoral College https://harvardpolitics.com/united-states/the-case-against-the-electoral-college/ https://harvardpolitics.com/united-states/the-case-against-t... These are but two opinions. Politics is ultimately creating policy on opinions from a large community.
• bena 7y ago
  It's like we've been trying to destroy the electoral college almost since it's inception. And every step makes it worse. The electoral college was supposed to be a sort of bulwark between the public and the highest office in the nation. State governments choose their electors. Those electors are supposed to be tasked with choosing the best among the candidates for president and vice-president. But instead, state governments threw that decision to the public. Effectively making the electoral college a proxy popularity vote for a state. And that's a big fucking ask of any person. Choose the person who is capable of running the country and making all these decisions, whose policies will guide your nation to prosperity, etc. Hell man, I'm just trying to get my budget straight. Do I look like I have time in between everything else I do to also seriously investigate every single candidate? And I'm not a complete moron either. And I know I cannot actually make a completely informed decision here. But I know complete morons. And they get a vote just like me.
• bensonn 7y ago
  1. Even if NPV is a good idea, this is the wrong way to do it. Doing it the wrong way means legal chaos. Doing it the wrong way means it can probably be undone or made worse the wrong way. 2. George Mason vs. Elisabeth Warren. James Madison vs. Jay Inslee. These match-ups aren't even close. 3. I don't think the results will match the intentions. For point 1 this seems like parts of Obamacare. Whether you support it or not, enforcing/creating parts of it via executive order means it can be unenforced/dismantled via executive order. This isn't a direct comparison, my point, if you base something on legally weak and questionable methods you will end up with weak and questionable outcomes. Another way I look at point 2, can Justin Beiber rewrite Mozart and improve upon it? There are very few political intellectuals I would put on par with the founding fathers, and sadly most of those are not politicians. The founders' system has worked very well for centuries, the USofA has faults sure, but from ragtag rebel colonies to world super-power, this part is working fine. We have many problems, isolate the variables, I don't think the EC is the cause. Point 3, this is mostly a party issue, Democrats support it, Republicans do not. Of the 16 states to pass it through legislature 15 had Democrat governors, the single Republican governor vetoed. I think it is safe to say the elections of Bush and Trump, without winning the popular vote, are the big driving factors for the NPV. I don't think NPV will have the intended effect. I think people are wrongly taking new rules and applying old stats but if you change the rules of the game you can't expect players (candidates and voters) to play with old strategies. A lot more Republicans will show up to vote in solidly blue states where currently voting for an R is a waste of time.
• lolsal 7y ago
  Every time this debate comes up I can't help but wonder if we are letting the office of the president have too much power. To over-simplify a bit: the president should be executing the will of Congress, right?
• davidf18 7y ago
  The Democrats didn't' lose because of the electoral college. They lost because they had a very, very poor candidate. The 2020 Democratic candidates are hardly any better. They need to focus on a maintaining a good economy, and good for working class as well as those educated. They need to focus on enforcing laws on immigration instead of breaking the laws by providing "sanctuary cities." If they want, Democrats could pass laws in Congress changing immigration -- during Obama's first two years, there were Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, yet, Obama didn't change the immigration laws. Instead of fixing their bad policy which lost out to a candidate like Trump they prefer to criticize Trump and blame Russians and Comey's and electoral college, every, everything but the bad policy.
• amaccuish 7y ago
  Questions like this push me more and more to the idea that places like China have got governance nailed. Why bother about all this? It's disorder for little gain.
• JohnClark1337 7y ago
  Need to make sure the undocumented immigrants have a vote first if you want to prevent the Republicans from ever getting a seat again