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Conversely, there are many issues where California can wag the dog by instituting state-specific policies which effectively drag the whole country with it. Som
by 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 agoBecause of the EC I would argue that in most states, including California, your vote effectively doesn't matter at all. Unless you are in a purple state you basically don't have a vote, and politicians can ignore your entire State. So while the EC does empower some rural voters, in reality it effectively disenfranchises most of the country.
- zaroth 7y agoBut this proves the point. The issue you are having at the state level is a dominant majority makes the views of the minority irrelevant. And to be clear, the EC does not disenfranchise all the voters in states like CA, just the minority voters. This is actually precisely what the Senate and the Electoral College is designed to mitigate.
- chillwaves 7y agoit invalidates all voters. Overvotes are a thing. You can have 90% of CA vote against a candidate and it won't mean anything more than 51% voting against. So roughly half of the votes in all non competitive states do not count.
- jakelazaroff 7y agoExactly. I live in NYC. I still vote, but really it doesn't matter whom I vote for since there's an approximately 100% chance of New York's electoral votes going to the Democratic candidate. On the other hand, Kansas hasn't voted for a Democrat since Lyndon B. Johnson; I'm sure people there don't feel particularly enfranchised either.
- vonmoltke 7y agoThat's not an argument against the Electoral College per se, but rather an argument against letting states allocate all of their Electoral College votes to the winner of the popular vote. This particular problem could be solved by forcing all states to apportion their Electoral College votes based on the distribution of the popular vote.
- wyldfire 7y agoIIRC this behavior is per-state and some (Maine or NH maybe?) do just that.
- khuey 7y agoMaine and Nebraska apportion their electoral votes on a per-Congressional district basis. But because Congressional districts can be heavily gerrymandered this is not a substitute for a truly proportional allocation scheme.
- pfisch 7y ago> This particular problem could be solved by forcing all states to apportion their Electoral College votes based on the distribution of the popular vote. That is not a realistic proposal. Political gridlock will never allow a change like this. Doing it state by state is even worse because it just creates a system where dems try to do it to only red states and the GOP tries to do it to only blue states. It would just further skew the outcomes away from a democratic result.
- zhoujianfu 7y agoThis is exactly what the article is about, and 16 states with 194 votes have already done it. It will eventually pass 270 because most states (all non-swing states) have a lot to gain from it.
- pfisch 7y agoI'm pretty sure the poster I responded to was talking about doing this on a per state basis. Not the national popular vote.
- d1zzy 7y agoSo those people in California are citizens just like you who pay the same federal taxes and have the same rights yet when it comes to voting for the President they do not have have those same rights. It might be annoying to us that they are all "liberals" or whatever you like to brand them with but they are people with equal rights and deserve equal vote. If it means that the majority of the country is made of these "liberals" that we dislike or disagree with then so be it, but that's what it means to have a representative democracy.
- zaroth 7y agoA representative democracy by definition means that each vote does not count exactly equally. My point is that while the current setup probably dilutes CA liberals voting power the most in terms of the EC, there are other ways the system works that is particularly empowering to CA liberals.
- devdas 7y agoSuch as?
- zaroth 7y agoI don’t want to be repetitive with my other comments, but I think a good example is environmental regulations CA passes for automobiles effectively setting standards for the country.
- travisjungroth 7y agoThat’s the free market, not government. Companies choose to make vehicles CA compliant. Any other examples?