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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 observati

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
  "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." Yet the constitution defines the presidential election as being done by the representatives of the state's electoral college: "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors." The NPV interstate pact may not even itself be constitutional as it ignores the Article I, Section 10 requirement that interstate compacts receive congressional consent.
  - car 7y ago
    https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/section_9.16 https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/section_9.16
- wolco 7y ago
  In Canada we do this because it allows more representation in minority populations provinces. Very small provinces or Quebec get slightly overrepresented in seats. Rural areas have less people per riding but greater distances makes it logical to do that. If the person who represents you has to travel 100 miles by plane to meet up with small 500 people villiages compared to walking a few blocks in a big city to reach everyone. It doesn't make sense to make them ridings/counties equal. On that same note the 500 person community will have different needs compared to other 500 person communities in the same riding. In a big city the issues will be very similiar citywide.
- hnburnsy 7y ago
  > 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. So should we abolish the senate too? Not being snarky just wondering what those who support NPV think.
  - chillwaves 7y ago
    Mitch McConnell represents 6.8M people in TN and he is the most powerful man in the Senate, and one of the most powerful people in the country. How difficult is it to corrupt a man like Mitch McConnell? How robust is our system of representation when one senator holds so much power?
danaris 7y ago
> the higher the turnout, legal or not, the more power for that state Every actual study of the matter I've seen or heard of has shown no evidence of any significant fraudulent voting, particularly not systemic fraudulent voting. While there might be a theoretical concern about incentives here, there's a lot of problems we know are happening right now with voter suppression under the system that we have.
- whateveracct 7y ago
  Yep - illegal voting is straight up FUD.
  - peapicker 7y ago
    Conceded, and removed that wording.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  That context for those statements is the voter ID boogeyman, which is 100% bullshit. Machine politics and the nonsense behind it is a form of vote fraud. While southern states have a long history of denying African Americans the ability to vote, states where county politics controls voting like New York are also problematic. More directly, there are plenty of schemes to fraudulently get votes counted, from absentee ballot fraud in nursing homes to voting irregularities in religious communities.
- drak0n1c 7y ago
  From the perspective of systems security -- there are too many security vulnerabilities regardless of whether or not they are being actively exploited to centralize national elections to a couple heavily populated states. These are states that have a bad track record of internal governance, and abolishing the EC will provide ample additional motivation to abuse those vulnerabilities if they aren't already. California recently had to be forced by lawsuit to remove 5 million invalid voter registrations. Multiple counties have more registered voters than they have age 18+ citizens. It is unclear how often these registrations were actually used to vote, but isn't it possible that ballots could be printed and filled surreptitiously for these registrations in the future? https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/06/20/calif_begins_removing_5_million_inactive_voters_on_its_rolls__140602.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/06/20/calif_...
jeanperrot 7y ago
I like your point about incentivizing high turnout (and the resulting inter-state race for turnout). I wouldn't necessarily equate it with lax election laws though. Oregon (where I live) is blessed with vote-by-mail -- it affords high turnout with high vote verifiability. Being able to consider & research arguments on both sides of the issues and candidates in detail before voting is fantastic.
- dane-pgp 7y ago
  > vote-by-mail -- it affords high turnout with high vote verifiability Even if you could verify that a given vote is counted, it's much harder to verify that the voter's choice was not made under duress, or influenced by a bribe. There are methods for mitigating these problems (like allowing an in-person vote to override your postal vote), but these have their own issues, and I worry that becoming accustomed to vote-by-mail will increase the calls for online-voting.
baddox 7y ago
> National Popular Vote (NPV) would reward states with lax election laws - the higher the turnout, legal or not, the more power for that state. Illegal voting is already illegal, and states can already in theory do shady things in their elections (and some probably already do). The courts should absolutely go after this, and I don't see NPV really changing this. > The NPV system focus the most energy on states with a high population in this condition. Perhaps so, but the one of the main points of NPV is for state boundaries to be meaningless for campaigning. Maybe politicians should spend more time in densely populated areas because, well, there are more people there. > What would happen when there are charges of skullduggery? Would states really trust, with no power to verify, other state’s returns? Do states currently trust that other states hold fair elections to determine how their electors vote? I don't see any change here.
- cheez 7y ago
  The reason the United States are United is because there was a uniform consideration. You'll be seeing states secede as there will be no benefit for them to remain.
  - dymk 7y ago
    No state will ever actually secede from the US. Period.
  - baddox 7y ago
    It would be unfortunate if states felt they wanted to secede because their citizens were given the same political influence over presidential election as citizens of other states.
    - s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago
      It would be California and New York deciding the fate of all other states. You would definitely see a mass succession.
      - dragonwriter 7y ago
walshemj 7y ago
The MP's in the UK are elected by popular vote though. I agree you would have to have the same standard for voter registration. One way of improving the current system (from an outsiders pov) would be to make electors all faithless and having parties switch to One member one vote and do a way with registering.
- peapicker 7y ago
  And the electors of a congressional district are elected by popular vote of their state already. Kind of like an MP.
komali2 7y ago
Reward how? The electoral college system determines the election of president. How does one state being more populated matter? Votes are distributed equally across all citizens.
- TylerE 7y ago
  No they aren't, that's the whole problem! http://theconversation.com/whose-votes-count-the-least-in-the-electoral-college-74280 http://theconversation.com/whose-votes-count-the-least-in-th... Look at the huge disparity towards small rural states. This is bad, but it's even worse because due to the effect of the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 (https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1901-1950/The-Permanent-Apportionment-Act-of-1929 https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1901-1950/Th...) the number of Represenatives has been fixed at 435 for almost 100 years, and since the smallest number of electoral votes a state can have is 3, this makes the small states even more overpowered than they would be in a "fair" electoral college system. Why should a voter in Wyoming have 3.71x as much weight (effectively) as mine does a North Carolinian?
  - komali2 7y ago
    Sorry, I meant in a universal vote program, i.e if there's no electoral college.
tareqak 7y ago
What about something like a tax rebate for high voter turnouts as percentage of the state's total eligible voter population? The amount would have to be large enough to be consequential. Making it based on a percentage of population would give small states a good chance. It might also end up being an extra pressure on states to open more polling stations nearer to voters. If a percentage of total eligible voter population is skewed too far in favor towards smaller states (easier to organize, less polling stations, or whatever else), then some combination of that plus total voter turnout might be more fair. This idea might also take advantage of the love that team sports receive.
radicalbyte 7y ago
the parliamentary systems of the UK ... have the parliament elect the Prime Minister and likewise don't elect their leaders by popular vote. This isn't totally accurate: the leader of the winning party is basically the Prime Minister. You vote for the party & leader together, you can't have one and not the other. The system is otherwise just as broken as the US; meaning that outcomes are decided by a small number of "rural" people combined with gerrymandering.
sparrc 7y ago
> National Popular Vote (NPV) rewards states with high population - the higher the turnout, the more power for that state Without EC presidential candidates wouldn't be focused on states at all, they would be focused on large demographics of the US population, which is exactly what they should be focused on.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> National Popular Vote (NPV) rewards states with high population - the higher the turnout, the more power for that state. Well, it rewards people who vote. If more people in my state turn out to vote for the candidate that I didn't vote for, and who didn't get the majority of the states votes, I and most of the people that voted in my state are not rewarded by NPV. OTOH, getting more Democratic votes in a Red state, or more Republican votes in a Blue state suddenly makes a difference in the national outcome; national elections no longer are about doing the minimum necessary to keep a majority in party-dominated states while focussing primarily on narrow appeal to the particular perceived interests of “swing state” voters, but about getting as much support as possible nationally.
Marazan 7y ago
NPV doesn't reward states at all, it rewards concentrations of people. States become irrelevant under the NPV.
justin66 7y ago
> Swing states are the states most likely to have divided government. And if divided government is good for anything, it is accountability. Based on what we've seen in the midwest, what you're actually saying here is that divided government isn't good for anything.

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
"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." Yet the constitution defines the presidential election as being done by the representatives of the state's electoral college: "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors." The NPV interstate pact may not even itself be constitutional as it ignores the Article I, Section 10 requirement that interstate compacts receive congressional consent.
- car 7y ago
  https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/section_9.16 https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/section_9.16
wolco 7y ago
In Canada we do this because it allows more representation in minority populations provinces. Very small provinces or Quebec get slightly overrepresented in seats. Rural areas have less people per riding but greater distances makes it logical to do that. If the person who represents you has to travel 100 miles by plane to meet up with small 500 people villiages compared to walking a few blocks in a big city to reach everyone. It doesn't make sense to make them ridings/counties equal. On that same note the 500 person community will have different needs compared to other 500 person communities in the same riding. In a big city the issues will be very similiar citywide.
hnburnsy 7y ago
> 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. So should we abolish the senate too? Not being snarky just wondering what those who support NPV think.
- chillwaves 7y ago
  Mitch McConnell represents 6.8M people in TN and he is the most powerful man in the Senate, and one of the most powerful people in the country. How difficult is it to corrupt a man like Mitch McConnell? How robust is our system of representation when one senator holds so much power?

danaris 7y ago

> the higher the turnout, legal or not, the more power for that state Every actual study of the matter I've seen or heard of has shown no evidence of any significant fraudulent voting, particularly not systemic fraudulent voting. While there might be a theoretical concern about incentives here, there's a lot of problems we know are happening right now with voter suppression under the system that we have.

whateveracct 7y ago
Yep - illegal voting is straight up FUD.
- peapicker 7y ago
  Conceded, and removed that wording.
Spooky23 7y ago
That context for those statements is the voter ID boogeyman, which is 100% bullshit. Machine politics and the nonsense behind it is a form of vote fraud. While southern states have a long history of denying African Americans the ability to vote, states where county politics controls voting like New York are also problematic. More directly, there are plenty of schemes to fraudulently get votes counted, from absentee ballot fraud in nursing homes to voting irregularities in religious communities.
drak0n1c 7y ago
From the perspective of systems security -- there are too many security vulnerabilities regardless of whether or not they are being actively exploited to centralize national elections to a couple heavily populated states. These are states that have a bad track record of internal governance, and abolishing the EC will provide ample additional motivation to abuse those vulnerabilities if they aren't already. California recently had to be forced by lawsuit to remove 5 million invalid voter registrations. Multiple counties have more registered voters than they have age 18+ citizens. It is unclear how often these registrations were actually used to vote, but isn't it possible that ballots could be printed and filled surreptitiously for these registrations in the future? https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/06/20/calif_begins_removing_5_million_inactive_voters_on_its_rolls__140602.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/06/20/calif_...

jeanperrot 7y ago

I like your point about incentivizing high turnout (and the resulting inter-state race for turnout). I wouldn't necessarily equate it with lax election laws though. Oregon (where I live) is blessed with vote-by-mail -- it affords high turnout with high vote verifiability. Being able to consider & research arguments on both sides of the issues and candidates in detail before voting is fantastic.

dane-pgp 7y ago
> vote-by-mail -- it affords high turnout with high vote verifiability Even if you could verify that a given vote is counted, it's much harder to verify that the voter's choice was not made under duress, or influenced by a bribe. There are methods for mitigating these problems (like allowing an in-person vote to override your postal vote), but these have their own issues, and I worry that becoming accustomed to vote-by-mail will increase the calls for online-voting.

baddox 7y ago

> National Popular Vote (NPV) would reward states with lax election laws - the higher the turnout, legal or not, the more power for that state. Illegal voting is already illegal, and states can already in theory do shady things in their elections (and some probably already do). The courts should absolutely go after this, and I don't see NPV really changing this. > The NPV system focus the most energy on states with a high population in this condition. Perhaps so, but the one of the main points of NPV is for state boundaries to be meaningless for campaigning. Maybe politicians should spend more time in densely populated areas because, well, there are more people there. > What would happen when there are charges of skullduggery? Would states really trust, with no power to verify, other state’s returns? Do states currently trust that other states hold fair elections to determine how their electors vote? I don't see any change here.

cheez 7y ago
The reason the United States are United is because there was a uniform consideration. You'll be seeing states secede as there will be no benefit for them to remain.
- dymk 7y ago
  No state will ever actually secede from the US. Period.
- baddox 7y ago
  It would be unfortunate if states felt they wanted to secede because their citizens were given the same political influence over presidential election as citizens of other states.
  - s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago
    It would be California and New York deciding the fate of all other states. You would definitely see a mass succession.
    - dragonwriter 7y ago

walshemj 7y ago

The MP's in the UK are elected by popular vote though. I agree you would have to have the same standard for voter registration. One way of improving the current system (from an outsiders pov) would be to make electors all faithless and having parties switch to One member one vote and do a way with registering.

peapicker 7y ago
And the electors of a congressional district are elected by popular vote of their state already. Kind of like an MP.

komali2 7y ago

Reward how? The electoral college system determines the election of president. How does one state being more populated matter? Votes are distributed equally across all citizens.

TylerE 7y ago
No they aren't, that's the whole problem! http://theconversation.com/whose-votes-count-the-least-in-the-electoral-college-74280 http://theconversation.com/whose-votes-count-the-least-in-th... Look at the huge disparity towards small rural states. This is bad, but it's even worse because due to the effect of the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 (https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1901-1950/The-Permanent-Apportionment-Act-of-1929 https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1901-1950/Th...) the number of Represenatives has been fixed at 435 for almost 100 years, and since the smallest number of electoral votes a state can have is 3, this makes the small states even more overpowered than they would be in a "fair" electoral college system. Why should a voter in Wyoming have 3.71x as much weight (effectively) as mine does a North Carolinian?
- komali2 7y ago
  Sorry, I meant in a universal vote program, i.e if there's no electoral college.

tareqak 7y ago

What about something like a tax rebate for high voter turnouts as percentage of the state's total eligible voter population? The amount would have to be large enough to be consequential. Making it based on a percentage of population would give small states a good chance. It might also end up being an extra pressure on states to open more polling stations nearer to voters. If a percentage of total eligible voter population is skewed too far in favor towards smaller states (easier to organize, less polling stations, or whatever else), then some combination of that plus total voter turnout might be more fair. This idea might also take advantage of the love that team sports receive.

radicalbyte 7y ago

the parliamentary systems of the UK ... have the parliament elect the Prime Minister and likewise don't elect their leaders by popular vote. This isn't totally accurate: the leader of the winning party is basically the Prime Minister. You vote for the party & leader together, you can't have one and not the other. The system is otherwise just as broken as the US; meaning that outcomes are decided by a small number of "rural" people combined with gerrymandering.

sparrc 7y ago

> National Popular Vote (NPV) rewards states with high population - the higher the turnout, the more power for that state Without EC presidential candidates wouldn't be focused on states at all, they would be focused on large demographics of the US population, which is exactly what they should be focused on.

dragonwriter 7y ago

> National Popular Vote (NPV) rewards states with high population - the higher the turnout, the more power for that state. Well, it rewards people who vote. If more people in my state turn out to vote for the candidate that I didn't vote for, and who didn't get the majority of the states votes, I and most of the people that voted in my state are not rewarded by NPV. OTOH, getting more Democratic votes in a Red state, or more Republican votes in a Blue state suddenly makes a difference in the national outcome; national elections no longer are about doing the minimum necessary to keep a majority in party-dominated states while focussing primarily on narrow appeal to the particular perceived interests of “swing state” voters, but about getting as much support as possible nationally.

Marazan 7y ago

NPV doesn't reward states at all, it rewards concentrations of people. States become irrelevant under the NPV.

justin66 7y ago

> Swing states are the states most likely to have divided government. And if divided government is good for anything, it is accountability. Based on what we've seen in the midwest, what you're actually saying here is that divided government isn't good for anything.