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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

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...
- wishinghorse 7y ago
  Yes, that's the point. Adjust votes' "weight" based on population density.
  - smolsky 7y ago
    ...and adjustments have been happening over many decades. That's why, say, California has many more electoral votes (55) than Montana (3). Yet it's still not completely proportional as California has about 40M people while Montana has just over 1M.
    - adolph 7y ago
      Yes, any state always gets a minimum of three since the number of senators is two and representatives is one (the minimum). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Two_of_the_United_States_Constitution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Two_of_the_United_Stat...
  - baddox 7y ago
    Why should equal areas on the map have equal amounts of political influence? That makes absolutely no sense to me.
    - davidw 7y ago
      I am picturing an interview conducted by the 'news team' at The Onion, interviewing a sage brush somewhere in Wyoming, because it's more important that actual people in, say, California.
- JoeAltmaier 7y ago
  In Nevada, they joke that they have "the Senator from Reno" and "the Senator from Los Vegas".
  - atommclain 7y ago
    Just recently I learned that most of the land in Nevada is owned by the federal government (84.9 percent according to https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/heres-how-land-is-used-by-the-federal-government-in-nevada/ https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/heres-how-land-is-used-by...). It's more a federal state, than a state state in a land ownership sense.
btmorex 7y ago
Rural communities are already vastly overrepresented in Congress. They don't need what's effectively extra votes for President too.
acomjean 7y ago
Electoral college is for the presidency. But the political power discrepancy between rural and urban areas is quite stark in other branches of government. For example: Right now in the US there are 2 senators from each state. California with a population of over 39 million has 2 senators, Alaska with a population around 700,000 also has 2 senators.
- flyingfences 7y ago
  That was the explicit purpose of the Senate: each state is equal in the union. Senators weren't even supposed to represent the state's people; they represented the state itself up until the misguided Seventeenth Amendment. Representation proportional to the population is the purpose of the House - that's why our government has two chambers.
  - NoodleIncident 7y ago
    This is a flawed argument, because the House isn't proportional to population, either. It's _still_ weighted towards smaller, emptier states.
    - GeekyBear 7y ago
      All states get at least one House member. Should some states have zero?
      - dragonwriter 7y ago
        No, but the total number should not have been fixed in 1929 to stop continued increase (and thereby accelerate inequality in representation.)
    - LargeWu 7y ago
      Also, the two chambers are not equal. The Senate is very clearly the upper chamber.
      - 7y ago
tryptophan 7y ago
We could implement a proportional representation system, which would make sure that their voices are represented in a far way. If people vote 30/60/10 for parties A/B/C, 30/60/10% of candidates elected would be of that party. Now its more like 45/55/0 or some other random result, based on gerrymandering.
- dwd 7y ago
  As a thought - what if you gave up The Great Experiment and implemented a Westminster system instead... The President would become a ceremonial figurehead (directly elected by popular vote or a McGarvie model -see below), sign the bills and maybe still hold but rarely use veto power. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGarvie_Model https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGarvie_Model Disclaimer: Australian so obviously biased
chuckdries 7y ago
Right now it's the opposite > People who want to get away from the ~big cities~ small towns 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~ rural area, I wouldn't want to feel pressured to due so due to lack of political stake if I move elsewhere. who's to say one direction is more important than the other? At least if we ditch the electoral college, individual voices always have the same volume
- jonathankoren 7y ago
  To reinforce this idea, my city has 3x the population of Wyoming. I grew up rural, but I long ago moved to an urban life. Politicians — and to be honest rural folk themselves — often try to enforce the idea that rural life is somehow more genuine. You’ll hear this as “Real America”, or how city folks don’t understand how “the Real World works”, or are some how “out of touch”. Which is fundamentally a completely bizarre idea when the majority of Americans (and I believe the world in general now) live an urban life. While there are unique and legitimate concerns that may need to be addressed for rural life, they are not mainstream concerns. Similarly, allowing rural politics and social mores to dominate national politics is as absurd as saying the Sentinelese[0] should dominate world culture because they’re more in touch with the land or something. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese
  - input_sh 7y ago
    > when the majority of Americans (and I believe the world in general now) live an urban life. I think you're underestimating the figures. 80.7% of Americans lived in urban areas according to the 2010 census. Estimates for the entire world are over 50% for over a decade now (since 2007, to be more accurate). It increases slowly but steadily, so we were at about 55.27% in 2018. It's going to be about 68% by 2050 and about 85% by 2100.
    - MadWombat 7y ago
      "It's going to be about 68% by 2050 and about 85% by 2100" If the trend doesn't change for the next 80 years. Which is a big if.
outside1234 7y ago
They still have 1 person 1 vote. There are a lot of people in rural areas and if one politician shows up there more the will get more of their votes. Its sort of like the analogous effect showing up in Michigan in the auto manufacturing areas had for Trump. He showed up, Hillary did not, and he won more of those votes.
r00fus 7y ago
> if abolished, politicians won't have incentives to campaign in rural territories That's one take. Another take is that urban centers are being actively disenfranchised. Btw, those politicians who benefit from the EC are the ones creating policies that are destroying the rural populace at the same time.
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  I’ve often wondered how much knowing that the electoral college is in place drives voter turnout: how many conservatives in New York or California (or liberals in Texas) don’t bother to go to the hassle of showing up to the polls because they know their state won’t win anyway? In most presidential races, the race is called before the polls even close in Hawaii, so I’m sure an awful lot of people don’t bother to show up there.
  - smolsky 7y ago
    CA voter here - I believe that's correct to an extent. This is a blue state so you cannot influence presidential election here. However, there are local policies/measures/propositions and that is why people turn up to vote.
  - danaris 7y ago
    It even works both ways. I know people here in NYS who don't go to the polls to vote Democrat because they know they don't have to—the state as a whole voting Democrat is a foregone conclusion, so what does their vote matter?
    - mamon 7y ago
      Which is also why trying to question, say, Trump win based on popular vote is stupid: yes, he got 46% of votes vs 48% for Clinton, but if there was no Electoral College and every vote counted people would probably have voted differently. How differenlty? We'll never know until we try :)
      - 7y ago
chrischen 7y ago
Territories aren't people. People are people. By granting more power to "territories" what you're really doing is over-representing people who hold land.
LargeWu 7y ago
Counter arguments to that: 1. Rural places do have representation, through Congress. Abolishing the EC will not change that. 2. Rural areas already have outsized representation due to how the Senate is set up. 3. The electoral college only matters for presidential candidates, during the general election, and they aren't spending a lot of time in rural areas already anyway. I grew up in North Dakota, and no presidential candidates ever wasted their time campaigning there.
UncleMeat 7y ago
This cannot be true. Right now in order to win Florida you must win a popular vote in Florida. There is no internal electoral college in Florida. Winning Florida is incredibly important for presidential candidates. Where do they campaign in Florida? Everywhere. They don't just hang out in Miami. If candidates do not avoid less populated areas when aiming to win a popular vote in a state, why would they do so for the nation?
- ekimekim 7y ago
  There could be a risk that if they did so, they'd get a reputation as "only caring about urban people" and lose votes in majority-rural states outside of Florida.
- zhoujianfu 7y ago
  Exactly.. what a smart candidate does is spend their next dollar on whatever is the best bang for the buck in getting elected. So an NPV would mean figuring out where the undecided voters are, nation-wide, and figuring out the cheapest ones to go after first, and working your way up the low-hanging fruit. If it was much cheaper to convince undecided voters in urban areas, they’d go there first... but the competition among candidates spending would start to drive up the cost per voter to an equilibrium where it started to make sense to go to rural areas, and if that started to drive prices up, maybe next is suburban. But it’s everywhere, all over the country, appealing to everybody as effectively as you can, to win. And since the president affects everybody, it only seems right they should be elected by 1 person, 1 vote, across all citizens.
bdcravens 7y ago
The flip side is that candidates ignore large states that are unlikely to change (think California for Republicans or Texas for Democrats), even though both states have a ton of people who don't have the same ideologies and values as their state is stereotyped. > 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. Imagine a developer in San Francisco tempted to move to Austin, but who won't because the state as a whole will always go Republican even though Austin tends to be more liberal.
- francisofascii 7y ago
  Due to rapidly changing demographics, Texas will soon be in play. (I certainly hope people don't move for fear the new state may not vote their candidate of choice.)
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    Why not? You have one life to live, and laws certainly impact it. If you’re a young adult interested in having children, and not blessed with working at the handful of companies with generous parental leave laws, why live in a state that doesn’t have paid parental leave laws? Or if you want access to assisted suicide, or marijuana, or abortion, or proper sex education for kids, etc.
TenaciousValor 7y ago
Perhaps those who live in urban areas may want to consider moving to a rural area so their vote can matter more. Living in a large urban area and voting Democratic is generally meaningless. Move to a rural area (or a small city), and the game's different. The political implications of showing urbanites that (some) rural areas are better places to live than is currently being preached could get interesting.
thomascgalvin 7y ago
The counterpoint to that is that the Electoral College has transferred so much power to rural areas that we are no longer an actual representative democracy. For example, a vote in Wyoming counts 3.6 times more than a vote in California.[1] The people in California are not represented in the Presidential election; it would be more accurate to say that one-quarter of the people in California are represented. "Rural issues" do not deserve special protection if that protection results in a tyranny of the minority. People are choosing to actively leave rural communities and congregate in urban areas; this does not on its face mean that their concerns have become less important. Moreover, people congregating in urban areas tend to be center- and left- leaning, so skewing the Presidential vote towards urban areas also results in US politics as a whole shifting to the right. It also results in a judiciary that is more conservative than the population as a whole. There are only eight states in America that have more people than Los Angeles county.[2] Why are the concerns of the people living in LAC less important than the concerns of the people in Nevada or Arkansas? What is it about their geography that makes their issues unimportant? [1] http://theconversation.com/whose-votes-count-the-least-in-the-electoral-college-74280 http://theconversation.com/whose-votes-count-the-least-in-th... [2] http://www.laalmanac.com/population/po04a.php http://www.laalmanac.com/population/po04a.php
- zaroth 7y ago
  Conversely, there are many issues where California can wag the dog by instituting state-specific policies which effectively drag the whole country with it. Some people like what California does with its state-specific policies. Some people even choose to live there. If the Executive branch was less powerful and the States retained more of what they were originally intended to oversee for themselves, I might have less of a problem with California liberals electing the Executive for the whole country. As it is, California has 53 of 435 seats in Congress and 55 electoral votes. The disparity with Wyoming is just because the minimum is 3 per state, and Wyoming’s population is minuscule. If you eliminate the per-state minimum I expect there would be large geographical areas of the country which would eventually become uninhabitable / unsustainable.
  - pfisch 7y ago
mshirley 7y ago
Why should people residing in any geographic group intentionally be given outsized political power when picking the president? Giving equal input to every voter is not advantaging non-rural people over rural people, it's advantaging more popular political policies over less popular ones. While people living in rural areas may have distinct cultural values and may face real inequities when it comes to infrastructure, economic opportunity, education, health care access, etc., this seems completely unrelated to deciding the fairest way to pick a president.
- prepend 7y ago
  It’s pretty simple that the reason to give disproportionate power to small states was to get them to join the USA. I’m not sure it’s possible to convince small states to give up power now that they have it. Although I’m sure they may want to cecede. Can you imagine the immense power that Wyoming would have as a sovereign nation? Or Delaware? They would be protected from threat by being surrounded by the US and could become havens for activities not allowed in the US. Basically become super Switzerlands.
jayd16 7y ago
Even if you took the side that disproportional voting power to rural voters was a just goal, does this argument even make sense? The electoral college leads to winner take all situations such that many states are not contested and thus not catered to. If you're a swing voter in a heavily partisan district, it doesn't matter how dense the district is, you won't be campaigned for.
_ph_ 7y ago
The problem is not rural vs. high population states. It is whether a state has a strong party lead or not. Those who have not are the so-called "battleground" states. So some rural states get a lot of attention, where the outcome of the election is not already decided, while other states are completely ignored in campaigning. This is not bound to the size of the state.
baddox 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. I don't see a problem with that if we confront and dismiss the notion that certain individuals (e.g. individuals who live in rural areas) should have more political influence than certain other individuals (e.g. individuals who live in urban areas). Something as arbitrary as the amount of unpopulated land around a person's home should not affect how much political influence that person receives.
aabeshou 7y ago
> 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. This makes no sense. You've just made an error in thinking. The pro-EC argument is people who tend to live rural have a different set of issues, and also tend to be a relative minority of people, and thus those issues aren't given due weight with 1-person-1-vote. Deciding to move to a rural area does not decrease the power of your vote in a non-EC system - your vote has equal power.
ojbyrne 7y ago
There will still be the Senate - 2 senators per state regardless of population.
takeout 7y ago
There's a great reply to this in Pod Save America, the gist of which is: politicians ALREADY don't go to Wyoming or Montana or Central California or Upstate New York. Presidential hopefuls, especially in the GE, go to swing states. The question we should be asking is, why are Ohio, PA, Michigan and Florida more important than any other state?
mikeash 7y ago
Why doesn’t this same logic also apply to, say, black people? The percentages are about the same. Why do we dedicate the entire shape of our system to ensuring that rural Americans aren’t forgotten, as opposed to any other group of that size?
ur-whale 7y ago
That's the wrong way to look at the problem. 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 policies for both rural and urban communities. 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.
Gibbon1 7y ago
The argument against that is under the current system if you're voting in a hard blue or red (spit) state, your vote doesn't matter in practice. Because the amount of 'swing' isn't enough to change the outcome. If you get rid of the electoral college then no matter where you live your vote would count. At least for President.
petmon 7y ago
The EC supports battleground states, NOT rural states. Maine is very rural, Florida is not, but Florida is where the campaigning occurred. This distorts our national priorities. For example ethanol subsidies are so high because Iowa is a battleground state. We could conduct a popular vote where a Wyoming resident gets 3x the vote of a California resident. This would be an enormous improvement over the EC and I would support it.
trhway 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. With the modern ratio of the voting to the total populations being about the same across rural and city populations the EC doesn't do that much for the rural territories. The EC was specifically made to give huge political weight to the very specific rural demography back then - plantation owners in the South states - i.e. the time and place of extremely low ratio of voting to total populations. Without EC the south states would back then have political weight of about 0, ie. equal to its share of voting population - white male landowners; with EC - the political weight of those states was its share of all the white population plus 3/5 of the slaves. Of course with universal voting rights and slavery abolishment the EC is just an obsolete undemocratic remnant of those old times.
Aunche 7y ago
This would make a lot more sense of the federal government were a lot weaker and state government a lot stronger, like it was originally. As it stands now, the President governs over the people far more than it governs over the state, so the people should get to choose the President, not the states.
sparrc 7y ago
rural territories still have the senate to balance things out. counter-point is that the political stake is currently being taken away from people who live in large states, and is thus negatively affecting the most amount of people possible.
_bxg1 7y ago
> the only thing that really gives rural territories any stake Whatever percentage of the population they make up, that's the stake they'll get (and the amount of accountability the politicians will have to them). What's wrong with that? I guess when we're talking about actual campaign tours there might be some neglect that happens because of the logistics of physical travel. Although I have to question the real benefit of those visits to the citizens. They benefit the politicians themselves, but they aren't exactly a vital source of information in a world with the internet.
dragonwriter 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. This doesn't effect politicians other than Presidential candidates, and doesn't effect territories (rural or otherwise) because those get no votes in Presidential elections. Though moving to a national popular votes in the states proper could be the first step to a national popular vote of US Citizens, which would give Presidential candidates a reason to campaign in territories. Also, as long as there is a Senate and Presidential candidates are seen to have electoral coattails, there will be an incentive for Presidential candidates to campaign in low-population states. Also, the association of low-population states with “rural areas” is wrong: California has a rural population about equal to the total population of South Dakota; Texas—the second most populated state—has the largest rural population, bigger than the total population of South Dakota and the four smaller states; North Carolina and Pennsylvania (also top 10 population states) have rural populations that also each exceed the total population of several of the smallest states combined.
ridewinter 7y ago
No, you shouldn’t count for 50 Californians or whatever. The few hundred thousand people in Wyoming could care less that millions of people in big cities live under the threat of gun violence. That’s highly unfair and a big reason for the disfunction in the US today.
rconti 7y ago
The majority population has shifted to larger urban centers, whose votes don't matter one bit anymore.
knolax 7y ago
Why should 'rural' be a protected minority as opposed to any other minority? Should African Americans ger 3.6x the vote as White Americans because there are fewer of them?
- newfriend 7y ago
  'Rural' is not a protected minority. States, however, are an important part of the United States of America. > Should African Americans ger 3.6x the vote as White Americans because there are fewer of them? Because it's not the United Races of America.
  - knolax 7y ago
    > States, however, are an important part of the United States of America The current system claims to be a Union of States, but the current system also defines a goal of a more perfect Union . The Constitution was meant to be a living document, IIRC Jefferson himself believed that it should be rewritten every generation. If the right to govern comes from the mandate of the people, then does the creation of a more perfect Union not entail representation of people not states? From first principles it still doesn't make sense to me why we should privilege the rights of states over the rights of people.
zhoujianfu 7y ago
Some people have wondered whether candidates might concentrate on big cities or ignore rural areas in an election in which the winner is the candidate receiving the most popular votes. If there were any such tendency, it would be evident from the way real-world presidential candidates campaign today inside battleground states. Every battleground state contains big cities and rural areas. Presidential candidates—advised by the country’s most astute political strategists—necessarily allocate their candidate’s limited time and money between different parts of battleground states. The facts are that, inside battleground states, candidates campaign everywhere—big cities, medium-sized cities, and rural areas. Far from concentrating on big cities or ignoring rural areas, they hew very closely to population in allocating campaign events.

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...

wishinghorse 7y ago
Yes, that's the point. Adjust votes' "weight" based on population density.
- smolsky 7y ago
  ...and adjustments have been happening over many decades. That's why, say, California has many more electoral votes (55) than Montana (3). Yet it's still not completely proportional as California has about 40M people while Montana has just over 1M.
  - adolph 7y ago
    Yes, any state always gets a minimum of three since the number of senators is two and representatives is one (the minimum). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Two_of_the_United_States_Constitution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Two_of_the_United_Stat...
- baddox 7y ago
  Why should equal areas on the map have equal amounts of political influence? That makes absolutely no sense to me.
  - davidw 7y ago
    I am picturing an interview conducted by the 'news team' at The Onion, interviewing a sage brush somewhere in Wyoming, because it's more important that actual people in, say, California.
JoeAltmaier 7y ago
In Nevada, they joke that they have "the Senator from Reno" and "the Senator from Los Vegas".
- atommclain 7y ago
  Just recently I learned that most of the land in Nevada is owned by the federal government (84.9 percent according to https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/heres-how-land-is-used-by-the-federal-government-in-nevada/ https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/heres-how-land-is-used-by...). It's more a federal state, than a state state in a land ownership sense.

btmorex 7y ago

Rural communities are already vastly overrepresented in Congress. They don't need what's effectively extra votes for President too.

acomjean 7y ago

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

flyingfences 7y ago
That was the explicit purpose of the Senate: each state is equal in the union. Senators weren't even supposed to represent the state's people; they represented the state itself up until the misguided Seventeenth Amendment. Representation proportional to the population is the purpose of the House - that's why our government has two chambers.
- NoodleIncident 7y ago
  This is a flawed argument, because the House isn't proportional to population, either. It's _still_ weighted towards smaller, emptier states.
  - GeekyBear 7y ago
    All states get at least one House member. Should some states have zero?
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      No, but the total number should not have been fixed in 1929 to stop continued increase (and thereby accelerate inequality in representation.)
  - LargeWu 7y ago
    Also, the two chambers are not equal. The Senate is very clearly the upper chamber.
    - 7y ago

tryptophan 7y ago

We could implement a proportional representation system, which would make sure that their voices are represented in a far way. If people vote 30/60/10 for parties A/B/C, 30/60/10% of candidates elected would be of that party. Now its more like 45/55/0 or some other random result, based on gerrymandering.

dwd 7y ago
As a thought - what if you gave up The Great Experiment and implemented a Westminster system instead... The President would become a ceremonial figurehead (directly elected by popular vote or a McGarvie model -see below), sign the bills and maybe still hold but rarely use veto power. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGarvie_Model https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGarvie_Model Disclaimer: Australian so obviously biased

chuckdries 7y ago

Right now it's the opposite > People who want to get away from the ~big cities~ small towns 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~ rural area, I wouldn't want to feel pressured to due so due to lack of political stake if I move elsewhere. who's to say one direction is more important than the other? At least if we ditch the electoral college, individual voices always have the same volume

jonathankoren 7y ago
To reinforce this idea, my city has 3x the population of Wyoming. I grew up rural, but I long ago moved to an urban life. Politicians — and to be honest rural folk themselves — often try to enforce the idea that rural life is somehow more genuine. You’ll hear this as “Real America”, or how city folks don’t understand how “the Real World works”, or are some how “out of touch”. Which is fundamentally a completely bizarre idea when the majority of Americans (and I believe the world in general now) live an urban life. While there are unique and legitimate concerns that may need to be addressed for rural life, they are not mainstream concerns. Similarly, allowing rural politics and social mores to dominate national politics is as absurd as saying the Sentinelese[0] should dominate world culture because they’re more in touch with the land or something. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese
- input_sh 7y ago
  > when the majority of Americans (and I believe the world in general now) live an urban life. I think you're underestimating the figures. 80.7% of Americans lived in urban areas according to the 2010 census. Estimates for the entire world are over 50% for over a decade now (since 2007, to be more accurate). It increases slowly but steadily, so we were at about 55.27% in 2018. It's going to be about 68% by 2050 and about 85% by 2100.
  - MadWombat 7y ago
    "It's going to be about 68% by 2050 and about 85% by 2100" If the trend doesn't change for the next 80 years. Which is a big if.

outside1234 7y ago

They still have 1 person 1 vote. There are a lot of people in rural areas and if one politician shows up there more the will get more of their votes. Its sort of like the analogous effect showing up in Michigan in the auto manufacturing areas had for Trump. He showed up, Hillary did not, and he won more of those votes.

r00fus 7y ago

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

commandlinefan 7y ago
I’ve often wondered how much knowing that the electoral college is in place drives voter turnout: how many conservatives in New York or California (or liberals in Texas) don’t bother to go to the hassle of showing up to the polls because they know their state won’t win anyway? In most presidential races, the race is called before the polls even close in Hawaii, so I’m sure an awful lot of people don’t bother to show up there.
- smolsky 7y ago
  CA voter here - I believe that's correct to an extent. This is a blue state so you cannot influence presidential election here. However, there are local policies/measures/propositions and that is why people turn up to vote.
- danaris 7y ago
  It even works both ways. I know people here in NYS who don't go to the polls to vote Democrat because they know they don't have to—the state as a whole voting Democrat is a foregone conclusion, so what does their vote matter?
  - mamon 7y ago
    Which is also why trying to question, say, Trump win based on popular vote is stupid: yes, he got 46% of votes vs 48% for Clinton, but if there was no Electoral College and every vote counted people would probably have voted differently. How differenlty? We'll never know until we try :)
    - 7y ago

chrischen 7y ago

Territories aren't people. People are people. By granting more power to "territories" what you're really doing is over-representing people who hold land.

LargeWu 7y ago

Counter arguments to that: 1. Rural places do have representation, through Congress. Abolishing the EC will not change that. 2. Rural areas already have outsized representation due to how the Senate is set up. 3. The electoral college only matters for presidential candidates, during the general election, and they aren't spending a lot of time in rural areas already anyway. I grew up in North Dakota, and no presidential candidates ever wasted their time campaigning there.

UncleMeat 7y ago

This cannot be true. Right now in order to win Florida you must win a popular vote in Florida. There is no internal electoral college in Florida. Winning Florida is incredibly important for presidential candidates. Where do they campaign in Florida? Everywhere. They don't just hang out in Miami. If candidates do not avoid less populated areas when aiming to win a popular vote in a state, why would they do so for the nation?

ekimekim 7y ago
There could be a risk that if they did so, they'd get a reputation as "only caring about urban people" and lose votes in majority-rural states outside of Florida.
zhoujianfu 7y ago
Exactly.. what a smart candidate does is spend their next dollar on whatever is the best bang for the buck in getting elected. So an NPV would mean figuring out where the undecided voters are, nation-wide, and figuring out the cheapest ones to go after first, and working your way up the low-hanging fruit. If it was much cheaper to convince undecided voters in urban areas, they’d go there first... but the competition among candidates spending would start to drive up the cost per voter to an equilibrium where it started to make sense to go to rural areas, and if that started to drive prices up, maybe next is suburban. But it’s everywhere, all over the country, appealing to everybody as effectively as you can, to win. And since the president affects everybody, it only seems right they should be elected by 1 person, 1 vote, across all citizens.

bdcravens 7y ago

The flip side is that candidates ignore large states that are unlikely to change (think California for Republicans or Texas for Democrats), even though both states have a ton of people who don't have the same ideologies and values as their state is stereotyped. > 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. Imagine a developer in San Francisco tempted to move to Austin, but who won't because the state as a whole will always go Republican even though Austin tends to be more liberal.

francisofascii 7y ago
Due to rapidly changing demographics, Texas will soon be in play. (I certainly hope people don't move for fear the new state may not vote their candidate of choice.)
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  Why not? You have one life to live, and laws certainly impact it. If you’re a young adult interested in having children, and not blessed with working at the handful of companies with generous parental leave laws, why live in a state that doesn’t have paid parental leave laws? Or if you want access to assisted suicide, or marijuana, or abortion, or proper sex education for kids, etc.

TenaciousValor 7y ago

Perhaps those who live in urban areas may want to consider moving to a rural area so their vote can matter more. Living in a large urban area and voting Democratic is generally meaningless. Move to a rural area (or a small city), and the game's different. The political implications of showing urbanites that (some) rural areas are better places to live than is currently being preached could get interesting.

thomascgalvin 7y ago

The counterpoint to that is that the Electoral College has transferred so much power to rural areas that we are no longer an actual representative democracy. For example, a vote in Wyoming counts 3.6 times more than a vote in California.[1] The people in California are not represented in the Presidential election; it would be more accurate to say that one-quarter of the people in California are represented. "Rural issues" do not deserve special protection if that protection results in a tyranny of the minority. People are choosing to actively leave rural communities and congregate in urban areas; this does not on its face mean that their concerns have become less important. Moreover, people congregating in urban areas tend to be center- and left- leaning, so skewing the Presidential vote towards urban areas also results in US politics as a whole shifting to the right. It also results in a judiciary that is more conservative than the population as a whole. There are only eight states in America that have more people than Los Angeles county.[2] Why are the concerns of the people living in LAC less important than the concerns of the people in Nevada or Arkansas? What is it about their geography that makes their issues unimportant? [1] http://theconversation.com/whose-votes-count-the-least-in-the-electoral-college-74280 http://theconversation.com/whose-votes-count-the-least-in-th... [2] http://www.laalmanac.com/population/po04a.php http://www.laalmanac.com/population/po04a.php

zaroth 7y ago
Conversely, there are many issues where California can wag the dog by instituting state-specific policies which effectively drag the whole country with it. Some people like what California does with its state-specific policies. Some people even choose to live there. If the Executive branch was less powerful and the States retained more of what they were originally intended to oversee for themselves, I might have less of a problem with California liberals electing the Executive for the whole country. As it is, California has 53 of 435 seats in Congress and 55 electoral votes. The disparity with Wyoming is just because the minimum is 3 per state, and Wyoming’s population is minuscule. If you eliminate the per-state minimum I expect there would be large geographical areas of the country which would eventually become uninhabitable / unsustainable.
- pfisch 7y ago

mshirley 7y ago

Why should people residing in any geographic group intentionally be given outsized political power when picking the president? Giving equal input to every voter is not advantaging non-rural people over rural people, it's advantaging more popular political policies over less popular ones. While people living in rural areas may have distinct cultural values and may face real inequities when it comes to infrastructure, economic opportunity, education, health care access, etc., this seems completely unrelated to deciding the fairest way to pick a president.

prepend 7y ago
It’s pretty simple that the reason to give disproportionate power to small states was to get them to join the USA. I’m not sure it’s possible to convince small states to give up power now that they have it. Although I’m sure they may want to cecede. Can you imagine the immense power that Wyoming would have as a sovereign nation? Or Delaware? They would be protected from threat by being surrounded by the US and could become havens for activities not allowed in the US. Basically become super Switzerlands.

jayd16 7y ago

Even if you took the side that disproportional voting power to rural voters was a just goal, does this argument even make sense? The electoral college leads to winner take all situations such that many states are not contested and thus not catered to. If you're a swing voter in a heavily partisan district, it doesn't matter how dense the district is, you won't be campaigned for.

_ph_ 7y ago

The problem is not rural vs. high population states. It is whether a state has a strong party lead or not. Those who have not are the so-called "battleground" states. So some rural states get a lot of attention, where the outcome of the election is not already decided, while other states are completely ignored in campaigning. This is not bound to the size of the state.

baddox 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. I don't see a problem with that if we confront and dismiss the notion that certain individuals (e.g. individuals who live in rural areas) should have more political influence than certain other individuals (e.g. individuals who live in urban areas). Something as arbitrary as the amount of unpopulated land around a person's home should not affect how much political influence that person receives.

aabeshou 7y ago

> 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. This makes no sense. You've just made an error in thinking. The pro-EC argument is people who tend to live rural have a different set of issues, and also tend to be a relative minority of people, and thus those issues aren't given due weight with 1-person-1-vote. Deciding to move to a rural area does not decrease the power of your vote in a non-EC system - your vote has equal power.

ojbyrne 7y ago

There will still be the Senate - 2 senators per state regardless of population.

takeout 7y ago

There's a great reply to this in Pod Save America, the gist of which is: politicians ALREADY don't go to Wyoming or Montana or Central California or Upstate New York. Presidential hopefuls, especially in the GE, go to swing states. The question we should be asking is, why are Ohio, PA, Michigan and Florida more important than any other state?

mikeash 7y ago

Why doesn’t this same logic also apply to, say, black people? The percentages are about the same. Why do we dedicate the entire shape of our system to ensuring that rural Americans aren’t forgotten, as opposed to any other group of that size?

ur-whale 7y ago

That's the wrong way to look at the problem. 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 policies for both rural and urban communities. 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.

Gibbon1 7y ago

The argument against that is under the current system if you're voting in a hard blue or red (spit) state, your vote doesn't matter in practice. Because the amount of 'swing' isn't enough to change the outcome. If you get rid of the electoral college then no matter where you live your vote would count. At least for President.

petmon 7y ago

The EC supports battleground states, NOT rural states. Maine is very rural, Florida is not, but Florida is where the campaigning occurred. This distorts our national priorities. For example ethanol subsidies are so high because Iowa is a battleground state. We could conduct a popular vote where a Wyoming resident gets 3x the vote of a California resident. This would be an enormous improvement over the EC and I would support it.

trhway 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. With the modern ratio of the voting to the total populations being about the same across rural and city populations the EC doesn't do that much for the rural territories. The EC was specifically made to give huge political weight to the very specific rural demography back then - plantation owners in the South states - i.e. the time and place of extremely low ratio of voting to total populations. Without EC the south states would back then have political weight of about 0, ie. equal to its share of voting population - white male landowners; with EC - the political weight of those states was its share of all the white population plus 3/5 of the slaves. Of course with universal voting rights and slavery abolishment the EC is just an obsolete undemocratic remnant of those old times.

Aunche 7y ago

This would make a lot more sense of the federal government were a lot weaker and state government a lot stronger, like it was originally. As it stands now, the President governs over the people far more than it governs over the state, so the people should get to choose the President, not the states.

sparrc 7y ago

rural territories still have the senate to balance things out. counter-point is that the political stake is currently being taken away from people who live in large states, and is thus negatively affecting the most amount of people possible.

_bxg1 7y ago

> the only thing that really gives rural territories any stake Whatever percentage of the population they make up, that's the stake they'll get (and the amount of accountability the politicians will have to them). What's wrong with that? I guess when we're talking about actual campaign tours there might be some neglect that happens because of the logistics of physical travel. Although I have to question the real benefit of those visits to the citizens. They benefit the politicians themselves, but they aren't exactly a vital source of information in a world with the internet.

dragonwriter 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. This doesn't effect politicians other than Presidential candidates, and doesn't effect territories (rural or otherwise) because those get no votes in Presidential elections. Though moving to a national popular votes in the states proper could be the first step to a national popular vote of US Citizens, which would give Presidential candidates a reason to campaign in territories. Also, as long as there is a Senate and Presidential candidates are seen to have electoral coattails, there will be an incentive for Presidential candidates to campaign in low-population states. Also, the association of low-population states with “rural areas” is wrong: California has a rural population about equal to the total population of South Dakota; Texas—the second most populated state—has the largest rural population, bigger than the total population of South Dakota and the four smaller states; North Carolina and Pennsylvania (also top 10 population states) have rural populations that also each exceed the total population of several of the smallest states combined.

ridewinter 7y ago

No, you shouldn’t count for 50 Californians or whatever. The few hundred thousand people in Wyoming could care less that millions of people in big cities live under the threat of gun violence. That’s highly unfair and a big reason for the disfunction in the US today.

rconti 7y ago

The majority population has shifted to larger urban centers, whose votes don't matter one bit anymore.

knolax 7y ago

Why should 'rural' be a protected minority as opposed to any other minority? Should African Americans ger 3.6x the vote as White Americans because there are fewer of them?

newfriend 7y ago
'Rural' is not a protected minority. States, however, are an important part of the United States of America. > Should African Americans ger 3.6x the vote as White Americans because there are fewer of them? Because it's not the United Races of America.
- knolax 7y ago
  > States, however, are an important part of the United States of America The current system claims to be a Union of States, but the current system also defines a goal of a more perfect Union . The Constitution was meant to be a living document, IIRC Jefferson himself believed that it should be rewritten every generation. If the right to govern comes from the mandate of the people, then does the creation of a more perfect Union not entail representation of people not states? From first principles it still doesn't make sense to me why we should privilege the rights of states over the rights of people.

zhoujianfu 7y ago

Some people have wondered whether candidates might concentrate on big cities or ignore rural areas in an election in which the winner is the candidate receiving the most popular votes. If there were any such tendency, it would be evident from the way real-world presidential candidates campaign today inside battleground states. Every battleground state contains big cities and rural areas. Presidential candidates—advised by the country’s most astute political strategists—necessarily allocate their candidate’s limited time and money between different parts of battleground states. The facts are that, inside battleground states, candidates campaign everywhere—big cities, medium-sized cities, and rural areas. Far from concentrating on big cities or ignoring rural areas, they hew very closely to population in allocating campaign events.