4 ms·

National popular vote is exactly such a system, and it is being discussed although I think practical people realize this is unlikely to change.

cletus 7y ago
National popular vote has been discussed, is being discussed and will continue to be discussed. It is, however, a terrible system. Imagine a national vote where the margin of victory was 2,000 votes. The entire country would be consumed in a conflagration of litigation. It would be Florida in 2000 but 100 times worse. The electoral college, for all its faults, is designed to create a clear winner and not contain the contagion of a close election to a state. States experiment with alternatives. For example, I believe Vermont distributes its electors proportionally based on the popular vote within the state, which means everyone ignores the state because it makes at most 1 elector difference (to be fair, it's a safe blue state and only has 4 (IIRC) electors anyway).
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  > Imagine a national vote where the margin of victory was 2,000 votes. The entire country would be consumed in a conflagration of litigation. It would be Florida in 2000 but 100 times worse. Except that it would also be far less likely to happen, to the point that it has only happened once in history, in 1880 when the US population was barely five million people. The closest Presidential election since 1888 was Nixon vs. Kennedy and that was a margin of more than a hundred thousand votes. Moreover, if you have a close election then you have a recount. It's sufficiently rare that when it happens you just have to suck it up. And if it was actually a problem then we could address it ahead of time by improving the procedures for elections and recounts so that they take hours rather than weeks. > The electoral college, for all its faults, is designed to create a clear winner and not contain the contagion of a close election to a state. If you really want to do this then you should draw the lines like the delegates are assigned -- two to each state and one to each Congressional district. Then there would be swing districts rather than swing states, but there would be so many of them and they would be spread all over the country which would make it a lot harder to write off entire regions with millions of people in them. The "safe states" could get together as a coalition and agree to vote according to that formula as well. > States experiment with alternatives. For example, I believe Vermont distributes its electors proportionally based on the popular vote within the state, which means everyone ignores the state because it makes at most 1 elector difference (to be fair, it's a safe blue state and only has 4 (IIRC) electors anyway). The reason states assign all their votes to the same candidate is pretty clear. If it's a swing state then it's because it causes candidates to pay disproportionate attention to them, because then it's the full number of delegates on the table and not just a difference of one or two. If it's not a swing state then to assign delegates proportionally you would be taking some from the majority party in that state and giving them to the minority, but the majority party likely controls the state government, so since they're the ones who would have to choose to do it, they typically don't. But national popular vote doesn't have those incentives for the safe states, because the country as a whole is about evenly split, so (modulo the issue about proportionality of electoral college delegates) changing it doesn't inherently benefit one party over the other. Who it benefits is the people in the states that always go for the same party, because then their votes would be worth as much as the people in swing states instead of being completely worthless. And those states, it turns out, have the majority of the electoral votes. If you could get them to come together on this.
roenxi 7y ago
No it isn't. National popular will still have a marginal swing voter who decides the winner, that swing voter will still be pandered to and will still have the power to make about half the voters unhappy with the result. At best, it changes the address of the swing voter. It is basically fiddling around the margins from that perspective. Complaints about the address of the swing voters is not a good reason to switch electoral systems. Saying the swing voter should be in California or Texas rather than Florida is basically just insulting Floridians for no reason (and they are still probably close to holding the opinions of the median voter). There are much better arguments for changing a voting system.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
  I don't understand. In NPV, the marginal voter is any voter, in any state. Or, to put it another way, every voter for the winning side is the marginal voter. You don't pander to a particular geography, you pander to the electorate as a whole, because that's whose votes count.

cletus 7y ago

National popular vote has been discussed, is being discussed and will continue to be discussed. It is, however, a terrible system. Imagine a national vote where the margin of victory was 2,000 votes. The entire country would be consumed in a conflagration of litigation. It would be Florida in 2000 but 100 times worse. The electoral college, for all its faults, is designed to create a clear winner and not contain the contagion of a close election to a state. States experiment with alternatives. For example, I believe Vermont distributes its electors proportionally based on the popular vote within the state, which means everyone ignores the state because it makes at most 1 elector difference (to be fair, it's a safe blue state and only has 4 (IIRC) electors anyway).

AnthonyMouse 7y ago
> Imagine a national vote where the margin of victory was 2,000 votes. The entire country would be consumed in a conflagration of litigation. It would be Florida in 2000 but 100 times worse. Except that it would also be far less likely to happen, to the point that it has only happened once in history, in 1880 when the US population was barely five million people. The closest Presidential election since 1888 was Nixon vs. Kennedy and that was a margin of more than a hundred thousand votes. Moreover, if you have a close election then you have a recount. It's sufficiently rare that when it happens you just have to suck it up. And if it was actually a problem then we could address it ahead of time by improving the procedures for elections and recounts so that they take hours rather than weeks. > The electoral college, for all its faults, is designed to create a clear winner and not contain the contagion of a close election to a state. If you really want to do this then you should draw the lines like the delegates are assigned -- two to each state and one to each Congressional district. Then there would be swing districts rather than swing states, but there would be so many of them and they would be spread all over the country which would make it a lot harder to write off entire regions with millions of people in them. The "safe states" could get together as a coalition and agree to vote according to that formula as well. > States experiment with alternatives. For example, I believe Vermont distributes its electors proportionally based on the popular vote within the state, which means everyone ignores the state because it makes at most 1 elector difference (to be fair, it's a safe blue state and only has 4 (IIRC) electors anyway). The reason states assign all their votes to the same candidate is pretty clear. If it's a swing state then it's because it causes candidates to pay disproportionate attention to them, because then it's the full number of delegates on the table and not just a difference of one or two. If it's not a swing state then to assign delegates proportionally you would be taking some from the majority party in that state and giving them to the minority, but the majority party likely controls the state government, so since they're the ones who would have to choose to do it, they typically don't. But national popular vote doesn't have those incentives for the safe states, because the country as a whole is about evenly split, so (modulo the issue about proportionality of electoral college delegates) changing it doesn't inherently benefit one party over the other. Who it benefits is the people in the states that always go for the same party, because then their votes would be worth as much as the people in swing states instead of being completely worthless. And those states, it turns out, have the majority of the electoral votes. If you could get them to come together on this.

roenxi 7y ago

No it isn't. National popular will still have a marginal swing voter who decides the winner, that swing voter will still be pandered to and will still have the power to make about half the voters unhappy with the result. At best, it changes the address of the swing voter. It is basically fiddling around the margins from that perspective. Complaints about the address of the swing voters is not a good reason to switch electoral systems. Saying the swing voter should be in California or Texas rather than Florida is basically just insulting Floridians for no reason (and they are still probably close to holding the opinions of the median voter). There are much better arguments for changing a voting system.

asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
I don't understand. In NPV, the marginal voter is any voter, in any state. Or, to put it another way, every voter for the winning side is the marginal voter. You don't pander to a particular geography, you pander to the electorate as a whole, because that's whose votes count.