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The electoral college is designed (from the start) to prevent the larger, more populous states from dominating the country. Seems to be working as designed. And

The electoral college is designed (from the start) to prevent the larger, more populous states from dominating the country. Seems to be working as designed. And doing a good job as a system. Politics is extremely broken, yes. But I don’t think the electoral college is the fault.

bobthepanda 6y ago
What is broken is not the number of electoral votes per state but the winner takes all allocation system of the EC. As it stands today winner takes all makes big states like California and small states like Wyoming equally uncompetitive since there’s a snowball’s chance in hell they will ever flip majority the other direction. Proportionally allocating a state’s electoral votes would level the state by state playing field and align with popular vote, but you’d need either every state to agree or an amendment.
- bryanlarsen 6y ago
  Another solution with potentially a clearer path: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta... What's really annoying is how close we came to abolishing the electoral college, that 3 segregationists were able to halt almost univeral consensus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_abolition_amendment#Bayh%E2%80%93Celler_amendment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_abolition_am...
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    The biggest problem with the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is that in order to get a majority of the electoral college delegates into it, you would need states to sign on who benefit from the existing arrangement. You can't get the swing states because the existing system makes them the focus of national politics and you can't get always-red states because the party that controls them benefits from the extra two delegates per state which go predominantly to that party. And together they're the majority of the electoral college delegates. What you could do is do something like national popular vote weighted by electoral college delegates, because then you could get everyone but the swing states, and that would represent a majority. And then you're not disenfranchising half of both California and Texas.
    - jfengel 6y ago
      It's not impossible that some swing state would get a blue-leaning legislature to pass the NPVIC. That would cost the state some attention for the benefit of a better chance in close elections at the top. Twice in the past two decades, the Electoral College has gone red when the popular vote would have gone blue, by a nontrivial margin. That leaves an avenue open whereby some state's legislators fall on their swords to fix that problem. Whether it would stick is an open question -- they'd almost certainly face an angry campaign against them, and the swing back could undo it. So it's unlikely. But there is a route by which it could happen, since the state's benefit from the EC is mitigated by the distortion it causes.
      - bobthepanda 6y ago
        This already happened. Colorado is suspended from the NPVIC pending a referendum to overturn its membership.
    - therealjumbo 6y ago
      The biggest problem with it is that it's unconstitutional. States are not allowed to make agreements with each other parallel to the system. EDIT: if you can get that many states to agree to it, then you could have just done a constitutional amendment. since all you need for that is for the states to agree, and the senate to agree. Senators come from the states. So... if you can't get it passed that way, it doesn't pass the smell test.
      - srtjstjsj 6y ago
        Which part of the constitution says that?
        therealjumbo 6y ago
        https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-1/section-10/clause-3 https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-1/sec... Specifically: >No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, ... , enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State In this case, since such a deal is changing how the president is elected, and changing the balance of power between states and the fed, it could probably be seen as encroaching on federal power. So simply getting congress to pass a resolution approving it (which in theory would solve the "consent of congress") wouldn't fly like it would with an interstate compact dealing with something more mundane and less political like water rights, or mutual deal on air pollution between several neighboring states. Disclaimer: IANAL, this is not legal advice etc.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > What is broken is not the number of electoral votes per state but the winner takes all allocation system of the EC. No, what is broken is indirect election with voting power distributed by state (no matter how you allocate the electoral votes based on the popular vote in the state, whether its winner-take-all, by-congressional-district with winner-take-the-extra-two, or proportional allocation), since the basic model, irrespective of allocation, creates a intense systemic incentive for voter disenfranchisement within states, since by disenfranchising people in your state that aren't likely to vote like you, you not only nullify their vote (but reduce your states overall vote) as you would with direct election, but seize their voting power for yourself (well, at least, redistribute it among those you do not disenfranchise within your state.) This is, of course, the intended effect of the EC and 3/5 compromise, with the original focal disenfranchisement being chattel slavery. But it works even more powerfully without chattel slavery, because then you don't have the voting power from the disenfranchised population deweighted the way the 3/5 compromise did.
  - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
    Lots of negative descriptions there. But even with one-man-one-vote, the winning side seizes the voting power of those voting for the loser(s). They're all ways of making a decision. In the end the votes are tallied somehow, to some goal. We used to have different goals 100 years ago.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    > This is, of course, the intended effect of the EC and 3/5 compromise, with the original focal disenfranchisement being chattel slavery. Distributing electors by state wasn’t the “intended effect” of the EC. Nobody proposed direct election of the President. The choices were between having Congress elect the President, and having a separate Electoral College. It arises out of the fact that the framers viewed us as a collection of separate states and so it made sense to do everything at the granularity of the state. The executive branch of the European Union is indirectly selected for the same reason. As to the intended effect of the 3/5 compromise—what would have produced the result that some people want is for slaveholding Virginia to have won that debate, because it was the one that wanted proportional representation in both houses.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  > you’d need either every state to agree or an amendment. Neither of those is actually necessary because the states decide on their own how their electoral college votes are allocated. In principle Texas or California could allocate their delegates proportional to the popular vote of the people in that state. Which might be in the interests of the people in that state, because then candidates would actually bother to solicit votes there. But you'd have to convince a local government controlled by one party to give about a third of the state's electoral college delegates to the other party.
  - bobthepanda 6y ago
    Well no state would actually do that of its own free will because it would disadvantage what parties they actually voted for. If two states with 10 electoral votes each are both currently winner takes all, but one votes green and one votes purple; and if only the green state changes to proportional allocation, you move from a scenario where both parties got 10 votes each to a scenario where the green state went 6/4 for green and the purple state is still all 10 votes purple, basically kneecapping the green party.
    - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      But it would benefit the people of that state, because it would force both of the candidates to give the people of that state more of what they want, since that can now make the difference between California's 55 electoral votes going 30 to one candidate and 25 to the other, or 45 to one candidate and 10 to the other. And Presidential elections have been decided by less. Moreover, both of the parties are a product of the election map. If the map changes, it doesn't destroy one of the parties, it changes both of them, to get the balance back. If Republicans started getting 20 of California's delegates, Democrats would change their policies until they were getting those 20 back somewhere else. They'd stop pussyfooting around on climate change so they can save Florida from ending up underwater and put those 29 in the solid blue column, or dump a big jobs program in Ohio and get those, or start paying attention to the plight of the rural poor. Or the Republicans would realize they could stand to lose some votes they currently have to get, stop being so inconsistent about at the same time claiming to want smaller government while never actually making it smaller, and actually gore somebody's ox. You need 270 to win. 300 means you gave somebody something you didn't have to. 240 means you didn't give somebody something you did have to.
krapp 6y ago
>The electoral college is designed (from the start) to prevent the larger, more populous states from dominating the country. Seems to be working as designed. And doing a good job as a system. Only if one prefers that the election always be decided by a margin of votes in a few rural swing states, rendering most voting irrelevant. A system where all of the votes in all of the states mattered would be infinitely preferable.
alistairSH 6y ago
Not quite. The EC (along with the 3/5 compromise) was designed to protect the interests of slave-holding states, while also avoiding direct election of the president (ie, the people were too stupid to elect directly). And now, instead of tyranny of the majority, we have tyranny of the minority. Due to capping the number of members of the House, those small-population states have disparate impact on federal issues.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- gen220 6y ago
  Post-Civil War, it also incentivized voter suppression. The southern states benefited from emancipation, insofar as they gained seats in the house and electoral college (they got a 5/3 multiple on their prior proportions, which had only narrowly elected Lincoln pewar). This redistribution of postwar power led to the disaster of 1877 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compromise_of_1877 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compromise_of_1877, something we're still grappling with to this day. One motivation for Jim Crow laws was to keep the southern voting-sampled portion of the south white and segregationist (in spite of the true distribution of local sentiment), while simultaneously benefiting from the larger population in magnifying their representation in national politics. ... If I were dictator for a day, I'd make the number of house and electoral college seats directly proportional to the last-n-election-cycle-average of number of participating voters (not population!). This change would flip the voter suppression script, which I think has been one of the more troubling developments in the last 100 years of our republic. It would also rightfully suppress the influence of the regions in this country that wish it was still the 1830s, but give them a path to return to influence that's contingent on uniting their polities. We'd see states competing to make voting more accessible in a nonpartisan manner, because every state wants to have more representation in the electoral college and the congress, regardless of which party is in power. This would force parties to actually represent their neighbors, whom they can safely ignore and suppress today. With this change as an example, I think the Electoral College could actually be leveraged to steer our system in more inclusive direction. I'd love to simulate this version of history.
bleepblorp 6y ago
Protecting against the tyranny of the majority is just a politer term for enabling the tyranny of the minority. The systemic disenfranchisement of the majority of the American population--through the electoral college, senate, and supreme court--is precisely why so much of American politics is broken. Forcing the the majority to live under the rules set by a minority that has a completely different way of life does not lead to good outcomes.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  In this case, yes. But other rules like "60% to pass a law" are not tyranny of the majority. (Might be tyranny of the status quo, though.)
- refurb 6y ago
  This arguement honestly sounds like “we need to change the system so my side isn’t denied power”. No doubt if the situation was reversed you’d be arguing for them.
  - bleepblorp 6y ago
    The United States was founded on rejecting a system that vested lawful power with the British government and denied power to the colonists. Were the founding fathers wrong to declare independence to ensure that their 'side' was not denied power? The entire principle of popular sovereignty, as exercised through representative democracy, is that leaders are selected according to the wishes of the the majority of the people. Minority rule--no matter how it is codified or how long it has been in effect--is incompatible with this principle. America can be either a country ruled by a Republican party answerable accountable only to rural interests or it can be a democracy. It cannot be both.
    - refurb 6y ago
      leaders are selected according to the wishes of the the majority of the people That's clearly not the case as many systems (not just the US) seek to avoid "tyranny of the majority" and to protect the interests of minorities. Canada's senate does not use proportional representation either - that avoids the country being run by Ontario and Quebec at the expense of the other 8 provinces and 3 territories. The designs you argue against were specifically implemented to provide a system of checks and balances to avoid a simply majority from unchecked rule. And this is doubly true in the US, where it's a "union of states", not just one massive country. A lot of those rules were put into place in order to get the states to join the US because otherwise they would have had zero say in the affairs of the country. Those checks you want to remove are not a bug but a feature.
rsynnott 6y ago
> The electoral college is designed (from the start) to prevent the larger, more populous states from dominating the country. You're probably thinking of the senate. While very small states do have an advantage in the electoral college, it's not very big at all. The electoral college is largely an artifact of a time when the electors were directed by state governments, not state populations. The brokenness of the electoral college is more about the winner-takes-all allocation of electors that is (usually) practiced. This makes the votes of people who live in divided states far more relevant than those of people who live in states where most people vote the same way.
bryanlarsen 6y ago
> The electoral college is designed (from the start) to prevent the larger, more populous states from dominating the country. Seems to be working as designed. And doing a good job as a system. Not really. The college disenfranchises Wyoming Democrats and California Republicans a similar amount. It's the Senate that protects smaller states, since each state gets two senators.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > The college disenfranchises Wyoming Democrats and California Republicans a similar amount. No, the States of California and Wisconsin do that; the Constitution and the design of the electoral college do not mandate winner-take-all allocation, and not all states choose to do that. (The EC structurally incentivizes it, perhaps, in the same way that it definitely incentivizes doing everything that the rest of the Constitutiona and laws let you get away with to more literally disenfranchise people by preventing them from being eligible or practically able to vote at all, but it doesn't actually do either of those things, it leaves it to the states to choose to do them or not.)
pjc50 6y ago
Instead it allows the smaller, less populous states to have outsizes influence. Possibly the systemic cause is the excessive influence of the presidency.
6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
there are a few factors. there is the weighting ( how many electoral college votes per citizen) as well as how they get allocated. If California has a single voter more for Biden and Trump, it's the same as if nobody in California voted for Trump. If your state has 100 electoral votes and the voters are split 50-50, the fair thing to do would be to allocate those electoral votes 50-50. Instead it's all winner take all, making people further feel like their vote doesn't matter. The probability that your vote is the swing vote is so low compared to a simple popular vote for the vast vast majority of voters, so at least with regards to the presidency, they have a lot less reason to even vote.
- 205guy 6y ago
  But the electors of the electoral college are still not aligned with equal representation because of the various state populations. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact would turn the mechanism of the electoral college into a result equivalent to a national popular vote. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta... The wikipedia article doesn't go into details about resolving issue around disenfranchised voters and vote counting, such as hanging chads or uncounted mail-in ballots. In other words, the compact states are binding themselves to a popular vote count that non-compact states have no incentive to get accurate.
  - dane-pgp 6y ago
    Under the current system, aren't states binding themselves to an electoral college vote count that unscrupulous states have no incentive to get accurate?
confidantlake 6y ago
This argument never made sense. In a one person one vote system, the concept of a state never comes into play. It is a national election, states are irrelevant. Under the electoral college system, states actually come into play. There could be a case where a state grows large enough in population to get 51% of the electoral votes. If that state had a winner take all system, then that state would choose every president. It would 100% dominate, non of the other states would matter. The electoral college is truly a terrible system, unless the founders wanted Florida to decide every election.
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  Eh, we had a bifurcation of slave states and free states, and a legacy of that in the segregated south. Do you know what would have happened if the majority of the population lived in those states? You’d have a racist executive branch for decades. Popular vote working exactly as you want, but you wouldn’t be singing the popular vote tune when what’s popular is not stuff you believe in. Just some quick googling, not a vetted source: http://inside.sfuhs.org/dept/history/US_History_reader/Chapter5/slavestatedemog.html http://inside.sfuhs.org/dept/history/US_History_reader/Chapt... Those populations looked similar and could have gone either way earlier (hindsight being 20/20, major industrial centers could have emerged in the south). The popular vote in that case may have never led to a Lincoln. In other words, just because there’s a giant population in South with certain regional values, doesn’t mean you get to win every election. The same is true for coastal cities in America now. I do think certain states need more electoral votes added at this point like New York and California. The same way you can fuck them with the popular vote today is the same way they can fuck you with it in the future.
  - jhallenworld 6y ago
    What you say is true, but why do you think the present system is better? Arbitrarily weighting different people doesn't really make any sense unless you think it somehow gives more weight to correct or better people.
  - bradleyjg 6y ago
    > Popular vote working exactly as you want, but you wouldn’t be singing the popular vote tune when what’s popular is not stuff you believe in. I’m reminded of Churchill’s famous aphorism that Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others which have been tried. Yes, it can go badly but it’s still the least bad choice.

bobthepanda 6y ago

What is broken is not the number of electoral votes per state but the winner takes all allocation system of the EC. As it stands today winner takes all makes big states like California and small states like Wyoming equally uncompetitive since there’s a snowball’s chance in hell they will ever flip majority the other direction. Proportionally allocating a state’s electoral votes would level the state by state playing field and align with popular vote, but you’d need either every state to agree or an amendment.

bryanlarsen 6y ago
Another solution with potentially a clearer path: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta... What's really annoying is how close we came to abolishing the electoral college, that 3 segregationists were able to halt almost univeral consensus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_abolition_amendment#Bayh%E2%80%93Celler_amendment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_abolition_am...
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  The biggest problem with the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is that in order to get a majority of the electoral college delegates into it, you would need states to sign on who benefit from the existing arrangement. You can't get the swing states because the existing system makes them the focus of national politics and you can't get always-red states because the party that controls them benefits from the extra two delegates per state which go predominantly to that party. And together they're the majority of the electoral college delegates. What you could do is do something like national popular vote weighted by electoral college delegates, because then you could get everyone but the swing states, and that would represent a majority. And then you're not disenfranchising half of both California and Texas.
  - jfengel 6y ago
    It's not impossible that some swing state would get a blue-leaning legislature to pass the NPVIC. That would cost the state some attention for the benefit of a better chance in close elections at the top. Twice in the past two decades, the Electoral College has gone red when the popular vote would have gone blue, by a nontrivial margin. That leaves an avenue open whereby some state's legislators fall on their swords to fix that problem. Whether it would stick is an open question -- they'd almost certainly face an angry campaign against them, and the swing back could undo it. So it's unlikely. But there is a route by which it could happen, since the state's benefit from the EC is mitigated by the distortion it causes.
    - bobthepanda 6y ago
      This already happened. Colorado is suspended from the NPVIC pending a referendum to overturn its membership.
  - therealjumbo 6y ago
    The biggest problem with it is that it's unconstitutional. States are not allowed to make agreements with each other parallel to the system. EDIT: if you can get that many states to agree to it, then you could have just done a constitutional amendment. since all you need for that is for the states to agree, and the senate to agree. Senators come from the states. So... if you can't get it passed that way, it doesn't pass the smell test.
    - srtjstjsj 6y ago
      Which part of the constitution says that?
      - therealjumbo 6y ago
        https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-1/section-10/clause-3 https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-1/sec... Specifically: >No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, ... , enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State In this case, since such a deal is changing how the president is elected, and changing the balance of power between states and the fed, it could probably be seen as encroaching on federal power. So simply getting congress to pass a resolution approving it (which in theory would solve the "consent of congress") wouldn't fly like it would with an interstate compact dealing with something more mundane and less political like water rights, or mutual deal on air pollution between several neighboring states. Disclaimer: IANAL, this is not legal advice etc.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> What is broken is not the number of electoral votes per state but the winner takes all allocation system of the EC. No, what is broken is indirect election with voting power distributed by state (no matter how you allocate the electoral votes based on the popular vote in the state, whether its winner-take-all, by-congressional-district with winner-take-the-extra-two, or proportional allocation), since the basic model, irrespective of allocation, creates a intense systemic incentive for voter disenfranchisement within states, since by disenfranchising people in your state that aren't likely to vote like you, you not only nullify their vote (but reduce your states overall vote) as you would with direct election, but seize their voting power for yourself (well, at least, redistribute it among those you do not disenfranchise within your state.) This is, of course, the intended effect of the EC and 3/5 compromise, with the original focal disenfranchisement being chattel slavery. But it works even more powerfully without chattel slavery, because then you don't have the voting power from the disenfranchised population deweighted the way the 3/5 compromise did.
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  Lots of negative descriptions there. But even with one-man-one-vote, the winning side seizes the voting power of those voting for the loser(s). They're all ways of making a decision. In the end the votes are tallied somehow, to some goal. We used to have different goals 100 years ago.
- rayiner 6y ago
  > This is, of course, the intended effect of the EC and 3/5 compromise, with the original focal disenfranchisement being chattel slavery. Distributing electors by state wasn’t the “intended effect” of the EC. Nobody proposed direct election of the President. The choices were between having Congress elect the President, and having a separate Electoral College. It arises out of the fact that the framers viewed us as a collection of separate states and so it made sense to do everything at the granularity of the state. The executive branch of the European Union is indirectly selected for the same reason. As to the intended effect of the 3/5 compromise—what would have produced the result that some people want is for slaveholding Virginia to have won that debate, because it was the one that wanted proportional representation in both houses.
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
> you’d need either every state to agree or an amendment. Neither of those is actually necessary because the states decide on their own how their electoral college votes are allocated. In principle Texas or California could allocate their delegates proportional to the popular vote of the people in that state. Which might be in the interests of the people in that state, because then candidates would actually bother to solicit votes there. But you'd have to convince a local government controlled by one party to give about a third of the state's electoral college delegates to the other party.
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  Well no state would actually do that of its own free will because it would disadvantage what parties they actually voted for. If two states with 10 electoral votes each are both currently winner takes all, but one votes green and one votes purple; and if only the green state changes to proportional allocation, you move from a scenario where both parties got 10 votes each to a scenario where the green state went 6/4 for green and the purple state is still all 10 votes purple, basically kneecapping the green party.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    But it would benefit the people of that state, because it would force both of the candidates to give the people of that state more of what they want, since that can now make the difference between California's 55 electoral votes going 30 to one candidate and 25 to the other, or 45 to one candidate and 10 to the other. And Presidential elections have been decided by less. Moreover, both of the parties are a product of the election map. If the map changes, it doesn't destroy one of the parties, it changes both of them, to get the balance back. If Republicans started getting 20 of California's delegates, Democrats would change their policies until they were getting those 20 back somewhere else. They'd stop pussyfooting around on climate change so they can save Florida from ending up underwater and put those 29 in the solid blue column, or dump a big jobs program in Ohio and get those, or start paying attention to the plight of the rural poor. Or the Republicans would realize they could stand to lose some votes they currently have to get, stop being so inconsistent about at the same time claiming to want smaller government while never actually making it smaller, and actually gore somebody's ox. You need 270 to win. 300 means you gave somebody something you didn't have to. 240 means you didn't give somebody something you did have to.

krapp 6y ago

>The electoral college is designed (from the start) to prevent the larger, more populous states from dominating the country. Seems to be working as designed. And doing a good job as a system. Only if one prefers that the election always be decided by a margin of votes in a few rural swing states, rendering most voting irrelevant. A system where all of the votes in all of the states mattered would be infinitely preferable.

alistairSH 6y ago

Not quite. The EC (along with the 3/5 compromise) was designed to protect the interests of slave-holding states, while also avoiding direct election of the president (ie, the people were too stupid to elect directly). And now, instead of tyranny of the majority, we have tyranny of the minority. Due to capping the number of members of the House, those small-population states have disparate impact on federal issues.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
gen220 6y ago
Post-Civil War, it also incentivized voter suppression. The southern states benefited from emancipation, insofar as they gained seats in the house and electoral college (they got a 5/3 multiple on their prior proportions, which had only narrowly elected Lincoln pewar). This redistribution of postwar power led to the disaster of 1877 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compromise_of_1877 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compromise_of_1877, something we're still grappling with to this day. One motivation for Jim Crow laws was to keep the southern voting-sampled portion of the south white and segregationist (in spite of the true distribution of local sentiment), while simultaneously benefiting from the larger population in magnifying their representation in national politics. ... If I were dictator for a day, I'd make the number of house and electoral college seats directly proportional to the last-n-election-cycle-average of number of participating voters (not population!). This change would flip the voter suppression script, which I think has been one of the more troubling developments in the last 100 years of our republic. It would also rightfully suppress the influence of the regions in this country that wish it was still the 1830s, but give them a path to return to influence that's contingent on uniting their polities. We'd see states competing to make voting more accessible in a nonpartisan manner, because every state wants to have more representation in the electoral college and the congress, regardless of which party is in power. This would force parties to actually represent their neighbors, whom they can safely ignore and suppress today. With this change as an example, I think the Electoral College could actually be leveraged to steer our system in more inclusive direction. I'd love to simulate this version of history.

bleepblorp 6y ago

Protecting against the tyranny of the majority is just a politer term for enabling the tyranny of the minority. The systemic disenfranchisement of the majority of the American population--through the electoral college, senate, and supreme court--is precisely why so much of American politics is broken. Forcing the the majority to live under the rules set by a minority that has a completely different way of life does not lead to good outcomes.

srtjstjsj 6y ago
In this case, yes. But other rules like "60% to pass a law" are not tyranny of the majority. (Might be tyranny of the status quo, though.)
refurb 6y ago
This arguement honestly sounds like “we need to change the system so my side isn’t denied power”. No doubt if the situation was reversed you’d be arguing for them.
- bleepblorp 6y ago
  The United States was founded on rejecting a system that vested lawful power with the British government and denied power to the colonists. Were the founding fathers wrong to declare independence to ensure that their 'side' was not denied power? The entire principle of popular sovereignty, as exercised through representative democracy, is that leaders are selected according to the wishes of the the majority of the people. Minority rule--no matter how it is codified or how long it has been in effect--is incompatible with this principle. America can be either a country ruled by a Republican party answerable accountable only to rural interests or it can be a democracy. It cannot be both.
  - refurb 6y ago
    leaders are selected according to the wishes of the the majority of the people That's clearly not the case as many systems (not just the US) seek to avoid "tyranny of the majority" and to protect the interests of minorities. Canada's senate does not use proportional representation either - that avoids the country being run by Ontario and Quebec at the expense of the other 8 provinces and 3 territories. The designs you argue against were specifically implemented to provide a system of checks and balances to avoid a simply majority from unchecked rule. And this is doubly true in the US, where it's a "union of states", not just one massive country. A lot of those rules were put into place in order to get the states to join the US because otherwise they would have had zero say in the affairs of the country. Those checks you want to remove are not a bug but a feature.

rsynnott 6y ago

> The electoral college is designed (from the start) to prevent the larger, more populous states from dominating the country. You're probably thinking of the senate. While very small states do have an advantage in the electoral college, it's not very big at all. The electoral college is largely an artifact of a time when the electors were directed by state governments, not state populations. The brokenness of the electoral college is more about the winner-takes-all allocation of electors that is (usually) practiced. This makes the votes of people who live in divided states far more relevant than those of people who live in states where most people vote the same way.

bryanlarsen 6y ago

> The electoral college is designed (from the start) to prevent the larger, more populous states from dominating the country. Seems to be working as designed. And doing a good job as a system. Not really. The college disenfranchises Wyoming Democrats and California Republicans a similar amount. It's the Senate that protects smaller states, since each state gets two senators.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> The college disenfranchises Wyoming Democrats and California Republicans a similar amount. No, the States of California and Wisconsin do that; the Constitution and the design of the electoral college do not mandate winner-take-all allocation, and not all states choose to do that. (The EC structurally incentivizes it, perhaps, in the same way that it definitely incentivizes doing everything that the rest of the Constitutiona and laws let you get away with to more literally disenfranchise people by preventing them from being eligible or practically able to vote at all, but it doesn't actually do either of those things, it leaves it to the states to choose to do them or not.)

pjc50 6y ago

Instead it allows the smaller, less populous states to have outsizes influence. Possibly the systemic cause is the excessive influence of the presidency.

6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago

there are a few factors. there is the weighting ( how many electoral college votes per citizen) as well as how they get allocated. If California has a single voter more for Biden and Trump, it's the same as if nobody in California voted for Trump. If your state has 100 electoral votes and the voters are split 50-50, the fair thing to do would be to allocate those electoral votes 50-50. Instead it's all winner take all, making people further feel like their vote doesn't matter. The probability that your vote is the swing vote is so low compared to a simple popular vote for the vast vast majority of voters, so at least with regards to the presidency, they have a lot less reason to even vote.

205guy 6y ago
But the electors of the electoral college are still not aligned with equal representation because of the various state populations. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact would turn the mechanism of the electoral college into a result equivalent to a national popular vote. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta... The wikipedia article doesn't go into details about resolving issue around disenfranchised voters and vote counting, such as hanging chads or uncounted mail-in ballots. In other words, the compact states are binding themselves to a popular vote count that non-compact states have no incentive to get accurate.
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  Under the current system, aren't states binding themselves to an electoral college vote count that unscrupulous states have no incentive to get accurate?

confidantlake 6y ago

This argument never made sense. In a one person one vote system, the concept of a state never comes into play. It is a national election, states are irrelevant. Under the electoral college system, states actually come into play. There could be a case where a state grows large enough in population to get 51% of the electoral votes. If that state had a winner take all system, then that state would choose every president. It would 100% dominate, non of the other states would matter. The electoral college is truly a terrible system, unless the founders wanted Florida to decide every election.

runawaybottle 6y ago
Eh, we had a bifurcation of slave states and free states, and a legacy of that in the segregated south. Do you know what would have happened if the majority of the population lived in those states? You’d have a racist executive branch for decades. Popular vote working exactly as you want, but you wouldn’t be singing the popular vote tune when what’s popular is not stuff you believe in. Just some quick googling, not a vetted source: http://inside.sfuhs.org/dept/history/US_History_reader/Chapter5/slavestatedemog.html http://inside.sfuhs.org/dept/history/US_History_reader/Chapt... Those populations looked similar and could have gone either way earlier (hindsight being 20/20, major industrial centers could have emerged in the south). The popular vote in that case may have never led to a Lincoln. In other words, just because there’s a giant population in South with certain regional values, doesn’t mean you get to win every election. The same is true for coastal cities in America now. I do think certain states need more electoral votes added at this point like New York and California. The same way you can fuck them with the popular vote today is the same way they can fuck you with it in the future.
- jhallenworld 6y ago
  What you say is true, but why do you think the present system is better? Arbitrarily weighting different people doesn't really make any sense unless you think it somehow gives more weight to correct or better people.
- bradleyjg 6y ago
  > Popular vote working exactly as you want, but you wouldn’t be singing the popular vote tune when what’s popular is not stuff you believe in. I’m reminded of Churchill’s famous aphorism that Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others which have been tried. Yes, it can go badly but it’s still the least bad choice.