7 ms·

Why the Electoral College Will Be Banished

24 points by chrisabraham 6y ago

anewaccount2021 6y ago
Zero chance, if only because the resulting chaos would put the assets of the wealthy at risk.
- emphatizer2000 6y ago
  ???
projectileboy 6y ago
I get where this comes from, but it’s very obviously wrong. It acts like media is the only group with money and influence. Many, many, many interests depend on the voting power that the Electoral College supplies to resource-rich states out west. I’d bet my left arm that the Electoral College will not disappear in my lifetime.
- cafard 6y ago
  According to something in the papers recently, the idea gained some popularity about 1970, but it was the Southern Democrats who were down on the idea. I am not holding my breath.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  The beef about the electoral college is similar to the beef about the Senate filibuster -- terrible when it benefits the other guy. Modern marketing for political campaigns will adapt either way. It's pretty easy for campaigns to target demographics, and I'm sure that a GOP candidate could pull the right strings to get a plurality vote. Hispanics, for example, are the weak link in the Democratic tent, as are asians who vote democratic but live in a fairly conservative way.
  - war1025 6y ago
    > I'm sure that a GOP candidate could pull the right strings to get a plurality vote There was a bunch of hubub on the Right in the fall about a Democrat win leading to Democrats tilting the tables in all sorts of ways that would lead to a "permanent Democrat majority". I always came back to the same point as you, two-party politics will naturally self-balance at a pretty even split. At a city / state level, you might be able to maintain one-party control through various levels of corruption / influence, but the nation itself is way too fickle to put up with that for long. The weak link in the current majority will always tend to switch sides as soon as it appears that they might gain an advantage by doing so.
    - Spooky23 6y ago
      It’s not all right people, it’s the more reactionary racist types, who inhabit the right wing media outlets.... end of the day, those folks don’t want certain people voting.
- darth_avocado 6y ago
  ^this. Yes while it may be true that media will benefit from this, it almost virtually guarantees no more Republican presidents. Given that the House is also trending in that direction, the only real place where power still remains with the Republicans is the Senate. Too many mega corporations benefit from keeping the Dems out, (taxes, employee rights, minimum wage, etc.) and they will fight tooth and nail to maintain the status quo.
  - pmoriarty 6y ago
    "the only real place where power still remains with the Republicans is the Senate" And the Supreme Court, and many lower courts, which have been packed with Republicans. Not to mention the military and the police, and probably the intelligence agencies too.
    - yokaze 6y ago
      Technically, they are judges at court and should rule according to the law not their political leanings. I am aware that is not necessarily true, but it is also in the self-interest of the judges to be perceived as impartial, otherwise they loose their authority. Police, military and intelligence agencies are government agencies, and are part of the executive. They should do their job irregardless of who is in power. A lot of high ranking people have worked through several administrations because they simply do their job, irregardless of their political leanings. Partisanship is harmful for those people, as it threatens their job security.
      - pmoriarty 6y ago
        "Technically, they are judges at court and should rule according to the law not their political leanings." If that were true you wouldn't have liberals appointing liberal judges and conservatives appointing conservatives, and fighting tooth and nail over it. Also, the Supreme Court effectively makes the law, not just follows it, and that's true to some extent of lower courts as well, as most cases never make it to the SC. It's not a coincidence that now that we have a conservative Supreme Court it's widely expected that Roe v Wade is going to get overturned soon. The law didn't change, but who's on the SC did. "They should do their job irregardless of who is in power." They have a lot leeway as to how to do their job, and many of them will use their power to pursue vendettas against people they don't like, as we saw with Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, Bagram, black sites around the world, and all the torture and murder that the police engage in. Prison guards and employees of ICE and Homeland Security are also probably mostly Republicans, and it's hard to argue that their politics and world view doesn't affect the way they do their job or why they are in those jobs in the first place.
jacinabox 6y ago
NPVIC is state level-electoral meddling exactly on a par with what 45 tried in Michigan and Georgia, and aiming for the same outcome. The democrats pushing for it are not trying to correct some abstract statistical imbalance or make it easier for third party candidates to get seats: they are trying to swing elections in those states democratic, pure and simple.
- gameswithgo 6y ago
  Any change to any voting system is likely going to benefit one party more than others, and said party will always be motivated for that reason. This is a given. This should not then imply that we never change how voting works. When republicans want to do the right thing for bad reasons, and when democrats want to do the right thing for bad reasons, roll with it.
- yokaze 6y ago
  How is it state level meddling? It is up to the states to legislate how to appoint their electors: https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S1-C2-1-2-1/ALDE_00001121/ https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S1-C2-1... Trump was not trying to change the respective laws in the states, but to get someone to change the outcome where they were not in his favour. _After the fact_. The NPVIC is designed that any change can only come in effect well before an election.
zhoujianfu 6y ago
Nationalpopularvote.com is the (exhaustive) website for the interstate compact, which has an actual chance of enactment by 2024..
- anewaccount2021 6y ago
  No, zero chance. There is no way you will get states to agree to forever nullify their electoral influence. If you really want perpetual one-party rule, granting DC and PR statehood are also unlikely but far more realistic than abolishing the electoral college, which will literally only happen when the US itself is dissolved.
  - yokaze 6y ago
    You need only the states which hold a majority of the electoral votes. The only states with electoral influence are swing-states. Every "blue" and "red" state has practical zero "electoral" influence, meaning their topics will never be as important as the swing state ones.
    - Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
      Any state can become a swing state, it just needs to vote less decively in favour of one party. Do that, and it'll suddenly start mattering more on the national scale.
    - zhoujianfu 6y ago
      Exactly.. it can eventually pass because there are (way) more states that gain from an NPV than lose from it.
r00fus 6y ago
While I'd like to agree with him here, if John C Dvorak says it's true, you can bet against it nearly 100% successfully. Look at some of these doozies... [1] [1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_C._Dvorak https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_C._Dvorak
- war1025 6y ago
  It's amazing how many "media personalities" are basically always wrong on the subject they "specialize" in, and yet they get invited back again and again. I guess that's the whole Gell-Mann Amnesia thing.
  - r00fus 6y ago
    Just the face of media disinformation being more apparent for industry practitioners. Society as a whole has a major dearth of healthy skepticism - perhaps because a consumerist economy doesn't benefit from skeptics, and more from true believers.
- hdivider 6y ago
  Sadly, you might be right. E.g. in another post he discusses the "mass hysteria" of covid...."psychogenic" illness, and this: "The severity of the virus from country to country is a reflection of media coverage, not the other way around." https://dvorak.substack.com/p/mass-hysteria-and-covid-19 https://dvorak.substack.com/p/mass-hysteria-and-covid-19
trident5000 6y ago
This article says nothing about how it will be banished and is more like a wish. You need 2/3 of states to change and ratify the constitution. Its not even close to being banished.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  This is exactly what I was thinking. Though I suspect any changes are likely to happen on the state level. More likely is individual states switch to splitting their electoral votes based on actual vote counts. Thats a bit fraught though since unless you have some kind of parity it would instantly screw up the current balance.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- ortusdux 6y ago
  I think they are indirectly referring to the NPVIC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta... So banished - no, circumvented - possibly.
  - trident5000 6y ago
    Why would any red state join this pact though?
    - taylodl 6y ago
      There has been a lot of talk about working from home becoming the new norm and living within 1-2 time zones of your work. It's possible in that scenario for a lot of heavily-populated blue cities to disperse, even if it's only 10%-15% of their population, into what are now known as the 'Red States' and make them 'Blue.' I know I'm interested in doing that. I can move someplace where my quality of life is better and I can afford a better home. It's going to be interesting to see how the demographics change at the end of this pandemic.
pmoriarty 6y ago
Now if only they could do away with gerrymandering
raiyu 6y ago
Given that republicans have lost the popular vote in every election since 2000 I don't see them getting on board with going to a straight popular vote anytime in the near future to determine the Presidential election.
- war1025 6y ago
  > Given that republicans have lost the popular vote in every election since 2000 They also just don't devote resources in heavily blue states for the Presidential race. Why work to gain votes in a race you will lose anyway? Particularly given that you can win without putting in that effort. Campaigns are optimized for the rules as they exist. Changing the rules changes the game. Just because the proposed rules look favorable to one side doesn't mean that they would remain that way if the changes took place.
  - kosievdmerwe 6y ago
    Exactly. "But I had more pieces left! Just because I was checkmated doesn't mean I should have lost." Strategy is informed by the victory conditions.
- rascul 6y ago
  George Bush (Republican) won the popular vote in 2004. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_presidential_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_presidentia...
  - raiyu 6y ago
    Ahh - touche - one time out of 6 - not looking like good odds for Republicans to be in favor of going the popular vote route.
IncRnd 6y ago
I think that people aren't addressing the root cause. The existence of a two-party system is intended to keep parties in power. Yes, there are other parties, such as Constitution or Libertatian, but until things change they are inconsequential. People should elect candidates, not parties. If we do not stop electing parties, we will continue to elect gatekeepers and politicians who spend all their time creating and then pretending they can't solve wedge issues, while spending money frivolously to bribe people and pay-off the corporations who later hire them. These politicians, who all seem to hate each other, are friends with each other, and they play citizens for fools. Why don't we all take a step back and stop playing _their_ game? The problem isn't the electoral college, it's the people who we let matriculate and the party system.
lern_too_spel 6y ago
It won't happen until foreign actors deliberately exploit the electoral college by taking actions that harm the GOP specifically in swing states. As long as the electoral college gives an edge to the GOP, none of the reliably red states will want to abolish it, and together with the swing states benefiting directly from the electoral college, there aren't enough votes to get rid of it.
jmclnx 6y ago
The issue is not with the Electoral College, but with the artificial limit on the House of Representatives. The limit of 435 Reps skews the numbers. House of Representatives is suppose to be 1 Rep per a fixed number of people. But Congress put a hard limit of 435, that means Small States have more people per Rep than Large States. For example, Wyoming has 1 Rep for 480900 people. California has 1 rep per 736000 people. To be fair and agree with the original intent of the US Constitution, California should have about 82 Reps instead of 53. Texas for that matter should really have 52 Reps instead of 36 as it as now. The way it is now it has one rep per 700279 people. Fixing that limit should solve a lot of problems
godelski 6y ago
Why is the conversation always "abolish vs keep as is?" The EC seems like a good idea that brings equity to a diverse nation but needs some updating as things have changed dramatically since its creation. There are other possible changes that might help, like removing the winner take all situation. But just basing on popular vote alone creates the same problem we're in but from the other direction. We need cities but we also need the rural areas (like our farm lands) and we need to represent both. But rural areas will never have the population size/density of cities. We shouldn't let fly over states decide the elections just the same way we shouldn't let California and New York decide them. There's got to be a better solution here that provides good equity.
- mreome 6y ago
  While I understand your point, the counter argument to this is "Land doesn't vote, people do." Why does someone deserve to have greater representation because they live on a larger plot of land in a different part of the country? Why does someone in a big city deserve to have less representation?
  - yters 6y ago
    It seems like geographical proximity influences votes. I am not sure why cities tend to lean so heavily dem, but they do. So if it were just raw vote count the cities would control the whole country. Not sure that is preferable. Then it starts to look like a serfdom, where cities gain wealth through taxing the poor rural areas.
    - mreome 6y ago
      I'm not disagreeing that right now there is strong ideological divide between a majority of people in rural and urban populations, that's patently obvious. But what is the justification for providing someone with a larger representation per-individual based on what are largely arbitrary boundaries? Why should votes from Massachusetts for a Republican president and votes from Arkansas for a Democratic president be rendered meaningless?
welcometomiami 6y ago
> This dichotomy between the two types of states along with constant usage of the terms "divisive" and "divisiveness" by the media (and now the politicians themselves) promotes the notion that we are splitting apart along political lines in ways that we've never witnessed before. This is hardly true as any history professor will attest. Citation needed
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  Well, there was that whole Civil War thing. We are less divided than that, at a minimum.
yters 6y ago
The elephant in the room is voter fraud. If we switch to raw vote count then it takes just one loosely regulated precinct to flood the election with fraudulent votes to win the election, and anyone can do this. Sure, this time around one group may win the fraud vote, but next time it will be another group, and the the best fraudsters will conspire to run the country and we will cease to be a democracy and become a kleptocracy. At least with the electoral college the fraud has to be much better organized and spread more across the country.
- IneffablePigeon 6y ago
  Carrying out voter fraud is pointless unless you can do it without being detected. If you flood one precinct with enough votes to swing an entire election it becomes very obvious that something fishy went on there. The only way to rig the election with voter fraud and get away with it is exactly the same - by spreading your fraudulent votes thinly so that no one area is too suspicious.
  - yters 6y ago
    Even so, eliminating the college makes it easier. We need defense in depth to maintain rule of the people.
- zhoujianfu 6y ago
  It seems like it’d be a lot harder to swing a National popular vote election fraudulently, where you’d need to register millions of fraudulent votes, than an electoral college vote where at times you’d only need a few thousand? Or even just a couple high-pressure phone calls...
  - yters 6y ago
    That's a good point. There would be fewer votes required. My thinking is when spread across more distinct political regions a greater amount of collusion is required across a more diverse political body, even if the raw vote count is smaller. In my mind this seems harder to pull off, but I can see where you are coming from.
AnimalMuppet 6y ago
If the president is elected by popular vote, then significant amounts of voting fraud in any one state becomes a national issue. So does significant amounts of voter suppression. Opening that can of worms to be fought on a national scale... well, be careful what you wish for.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > If the president is elected by popular vote, then significant amounts of voting fraud in any one state becomes a national issue. So does significant amounts of voter suppression. If the President is elected by the Electoral College and the parties aligned to near electoral parity, then it often doesn't even take significant fraud or suppression to swing the national election, as long as you target easily-identifiable swing states.
tmaly 6y ago
I think a better intermediate step would be to get rid of winner take all electoral college votes. Do it by county. This would move closer to a democracy but still retain the form of a republic.
leroy_masochist 6y ago
Here's what I don't understand - this is is constantly framed as a matter of reforming Federal law, when the states could remedy this themselves by changing from a winner-gets-all paradigm to a Maine- or Nebraska-like system that allocates delegates proportionally. The proximate reason why they don't do this, I would imagine, is that in the short term a party-controlled state wouldn't want a bunch of its Presidential vote delegates to go to the other party; e.g., California Democrats, who currently have the political power to change how their state awards delegates, don't want dozens of delegates going to the GOP and vice versa for Texas Republicans not wanting a bunch of Texas delegates going to the Democrats. On the other hand, states like Ohio and Florida want to keep the influence they have as swing states -- they want presidential candidates to spend an insanely disproportionate amount of time campaigning there and making promises about future policy decisions that disproportionately affect local industries. If they awarded delegates proportionally, they'd lose the attention they enjoy every four years. I'm not sure what the way to break the equilibrium would be, but do think that the solution to this is action on the state level rather than Federal. Am I missing anything?

24 points by chrisabraham 6y ago

anewaccount2021 6y ago

Zero chance, if only because the resulting chaos would put the assets of the wealthy at risk.

emphatizer2000 6y ago
???

projectileboy 6y ago

I get where this comes from, but it’s very obviously wrong. It acts like media is the only group with money and influence. Many, many, many interests depend on the voting power that the Electoral College supplies to resource-rich states out west. I’d bet my left arm that the Electoral College will not disappear in my lifetime.

cafard 6y ago
According to something in the papers recently, the idea gained some popularity about 1970, but it was the Southern Democrats who were down on the idea. I am not holding my breath.
Spooky23 6y ago
The beef about the electoral college is similar to the beef about the Senate filibuster -- terrible when it benefits the other guy. Modern marketing for political campaigns will adapt either way. It's pretty easy for campaigns to target demographics, and I'm sure that a GOP candidate could pull the right strings to get a plurality vote. Hispanics, for example, are the weak link in the Democratic tent, as are asians who vote democratic but live in a fairly conservative way.
- war1025 6y ago
  > I'm sure that a GOP candidate could pull the right strings to get a plurality vote There was a bunch of hubub on the Right in the fall about a Democrat win leading to Democrats tilting the tables in all sorts of ways that would lead to a "permanent Democrat majority". I always came back to the same point as you, two-party politics will naturally self-balance at a pretty even split. At a city / state level, you might be able to maintain one-party control through various levels of corruption / influence, but the nation itself is way too fickle to put up with that for long. The weak link in the current majority will always tend to switch sides as soon as it appears that they might gain an advantage by doing so.
  - Spooky23 6y ago
    It’s not all right people, it’s the more reactionary racist types, who inhabit the right wing media outlets.... end of the day, those folks don’t want certain people voting.
darth_avocado 6y ago
^this. Yes while it may be true that media will benefit from this, it almost virtually guarantees no more Republican presidents. Given that the House is also trending in that direction, the only real place where power still remains with the Republicans is the Senate. Too many mega corporations benefit from keeping the Dems out, (taxes, employee rights, minimum wage, etc.) and they will fight tooth and nail to maintain the status quo.
- pmoriarty 6y ago
  "the only real place where power still remains with the Republicans is the Senate" And the Supreme Court, and many lower courts, which have been packed with Republicans. Not to mention the military and the police, and probably the intelligence agencies too.
  - yokaze 6y ago
    Technically, they are judges at court and should rule according to the law not their political leanings. I am aware that is not necessarily true, but it is also in the self-interest of the judges to be perceived as impartial, otherwise they loose their authority. Police, military and intelligence agencies are government agencies, and are part of the executive. They should do their job irregardless of who is in power. A lot of high ranking people have worked through several administrations because they simply do their job, irregardless of their political leanings. Partisanship is harmful for those people, as it threatens their job security.
    - pmoriarty 6y ago
      "Technically, they are judges at court and should rule according to the law not their political leanings." If that were true you wouldn't have liberals appointing liberal judges and conservatives appointing conservatives, and fighting tooth and nail over it. Also, the Supreme Court effectively makes the law, not just follows it, and that's true to some extent of lower courts as well, as most cases never make it to the SC. It's not a coincidence that now that we have a conservative Supreme Court it's widely expected that Roe v Wade is going to get overturned soon. The law didn't change, but who's on the SC did. "They should do their job irregardless of who is in power." They have a lot leeway as to how to do their job, and many of them will use their power to pursue vendettas against people they don't like, as we saw with Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, Bagram, black sites around the world, and all the torture and murder that the police engage in. Prison guards and employees of ICE and Homeland Security are also probably mostly Republicans, and it's hard to argue that their politics and world view doesn't affect the way they do their job or why they are in those jobs in the first place.

jacinabox 6y ago

NPVIC is state level-electoral meddling exactly on a par with what 45 tried in Michigan and Georgia, and aiming for the same outcome. The democrats pushing for it are not trying to correct some abstract statistical imbalance or make it easier for third party candidates to get seats: they are trying to swing elections in those states democratic, pure and simple.

gameswithgo 6y ago
Any change to any voting system is likely going to benefit one party more than others, and said party will always be motivated for that reason. This is a given. This should not then imply that we never change how voting works. When republicans want to do the right thing for bad reasons, and when democrats want to do the right thing for bad reasons, roll with it.
yokaze 6y ago
How is it state level meddling? It is up to the states to legislate how to appoint their electors: https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S1-C2-1-2-1/ALDE_00001121/ https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S1-C2-1... Trump was not trying to change the respective laws in the states, but to get someone to change the outcome where they were not in his favour. _After the fact_. The NPVIC is designed that any change can only come in effect well before an election.

zhoujianfu 6y ago

Nationalpopularvote.com is the (exhaustive) website for the interstate compact, which has an actual chance of enactment by 2024..

anewaccount2021 6y ago
No, zero chance. There is no way you will get states to agree to forever nullify their electoral influence. If you really want perpetual one-party rule, granting DC and PR statehood are also unlikely but far more realistic than abolishing the electoral college, which will literally only happen when the US itself is dissolved.
- yokaze 6y ago
  You need only the states which hold a majority of the electoral votes. The only states with electoral influence are swing-states. Every "blue" and "red" state has practical zero "electoral" influence, meaning their topics will never be as important as the swing state ones.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
    Any state can become a swing state, it just needs to vote less decively in favour of one party. Do that, and it'll suddenly start mattering more on the national scale.
  - zhoujianfu 6y ago
    Exactly.. it can eventually pass because there are (way) more states that gain from an NPV than lose from it.

r00fus 6y ago

While I'd like to agree with him here, if John C Dvorak says it's true, you can bet against it nearly 100% successfully. Look at some of these doozies... [1] [1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_C._Dvorak https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_C._Dvorak

war1025 6y ago
It's amazing how many "media personalities" are basically always wrong on the subject they "specialize" in, and yet they get invited back again and again. I guess that's the whole Gell-Mann Amnesia thing.
- r00fus 6y ago
  Just the face of media disinformation being more apparent for industry practitioners. Society as a whole has a major dearth of healthy skepticism - perhaps because a consumerist economy doesn't benefit from skeptics, and more from true believers.
hdivider 6y ago
Sadly, you might be right. E.g. in another post he discusses the "mass hysteria" of covid...."psychogenic" illness, and this: "The severity of the virus from country to country is a reflection of media coverage, not the other way around." https://dvorak.substack.com/p/mass-hysteria-and-covid-19 https://dvorak.substack.com/p/mass-hysteria-and-covid-19

trident5000 6y ago

This article says nothing about how it will be banished and is more like a wish. You need 2/3 of states to change and ratify the constitution. Its not even close to being banished.

ogre_codes 6y ago
This is exactly what I was thinking. Though I suspect any changes are likely to happen on the state level. More likely is individual states switch to splitting their electoral votes based on actual vote counts. Thats a bit fraught though since unless you have some kind of parity it would instantly screw up the current balance.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
ortusdux 6y ago
I think they are indirectly referring to the NPVIC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta... So banished - no, circumvented - possibly.
- trident5000 6y ago
  Why would any red state join this pact though?
  - taylodl 6y ago
    There has been a lot of talk about working from home becoming the new norm and living within 1-2 time zones of your work. It's possible in that scenario for a lot of heavily-populated blue cities to disperse, even if it's only 10%-15% of their population, into what are now known as the 'Red States' and make them 'Blue.' I know I'm interested in doing that. I can move someplace where my quality of life is better and I can afford a better home. It's going to be interesting to see how the demographics change at the end of this pandemic.

pmoriarty 6y ago

Now if only they could do away with gerrymandering

raiyu 6y ago

Given that republicans have lost the popular vote in every election since 2000 I don't see them getting on board with going to a straight popular vote anytime in the near future to determine the Presidential election.

war1025 6y ago
> Given that republicans have lost the popular vote in every election since 2000 They also just don't devote resources in heavily blue states for the Presidential race. Why work to gain votes in a race you will lose anyway? Particularly given that you can win without putting in that effort. Campaigns are optimized for the rules as they exist. Changing the rules changes the game. Just because the proposed rules look favorable to one side doesn't mean that they would remain that way if the changes took place.
- kosievdmerwe 6y ago
  Exactly. "But I had more pieces left! Just because I was checkmated doesn't mean I should have lost." Strategy is informed by the victory conditions.
rascul 6y ago
George Bush (Republican) won the popular vote in 2004. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_presidential_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_presidentia...
- raiyu 6y ago
  Ahh - touche - one time out of 6 - not looking like good odds for Republicans to be in favor of going the popular vote route.

IncRnd 6y ago

I think that people aren't addressing the root cause. The existence of a two-party system is intended to keep parties in power. Yes, there are other parties, such as Constitution or Libertatian, but until things change they are inconsequential. People should elect candidates, not parties. If we do not stop electing parties, we will continue to elect gatekeepers and politicians who spend all their time creating and then pretending they can't solve wedge issues, while spending money frivolously to bribe people and pay-off the corporations who later hire them. These politicians, who all seem to hate each other, are friends with each other, and they play citizens for fools. Why don't we all take a step back and stop playing _their_ game? The problem isn't the electoral college, it's the people who we let matriculate and the party system.

lern_too_spel 6y ago

It won't happen until foreign actors deliberately exploit the electoral college by taking actions that harm the GOP specifically in swing states. As long as the electoral college gives an edge to the GOP, none of the reliably red states will want to abolish it, and together with the swing states benefiting directly from the electoral college, there aren't enough votes to get rid of it.

jmclnx 6y ago

The issue is not with the Electoral College, but with the artificial limit on the House of Representatives. The limit of 435 Reps skews the numbers. House of Representatives is suppose to be 1 Rep per a fixed number of people. But Congress put a hard limit of 435, that means Small States have more people per Rep than Large States. For example, Wyoming has 1 Rep for 480900 people. California has 1 rep per 736000 people. To be fair and agree with the original intent of the US Constitution, California should have about 82 Reps instead of 53. Texas for that matter should really have 52 Reps instead of 36 as it as now. The way it is now it has one rep per 700279 people. Fixing that limit should solve a lot of problems

godelski 6y ago

Why is the conversation always "abolish vs keep as is?" The EC seems like a good idea that brings equity to a diverse nation but needs some updating as things have changed dramatically since its creation. There are other possible changes that might help, like removing the winner take all situation. But just basing on popular vote alone creates the same problem we're in but from the other direction. We need cities but we also need the rural areas (like our farm lands) and we need to represent both. But rural areas will never have the population size/density of cities. We shouldn't let fly over states decide the elections just the same way we shouldn't let California and New York decide them. There's got to be a better solution here that provides good equity.

mreome 6y ago
While I understand your point, the counter argument to this is "Land doesn't vote, people do." Why does someone deserve to have greater representation because they live on a larger plot of land in a different part of the country? Why does someone in a big city deserve to have less representation?
- yters 6y ago
  It seems like geographical proximity influences votes. I am not sure why cities tend to lean so heavily dem, but they do. So if it were just raw vote count the cities would control the whole country. Not sure that is preferable. Then it starts to look like a serfdom, where cities gain wealth through taxing the poor rural areas.
  - mreome 6y ago
    I'm not disagreeing that right now there is strong ideological divide between a majority of people in rural and urban populations, that's patently obvious. But what is the justification for providing someone with a larger representation per-individual based on what are largely arbitrary boundaries? Why should votes from Massachusetts for a Republican president and votes from Arkansas for a Democratic president be rendered meaningless?

welcometomiami 6y ago

> This dichotomy between the two types of states along with constant usage of the terms "divisive" and "divisiveness" by the media (and now the politicians themselves) promotes the notion that we are splitting apart along political lines in ways that we've never witnessed before. This is hardly true as any history professor will attest. Citation needed

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
Well, there was that whole Civil War thing. We are less divided than that, at a minimum.

yters 6y ago

The elephant in the room is voter fraud. If we switch to raw vote count then it takes just one loosely regulated precinct to flood the election with fraudulent votes to win the election, and anyone can do this. Sure, this time around one group may win the fraud vote, but next time it will be another group, and the the best fraudsters will conspire to run the country and we will cease to be a democracy and become a kleptocracy. At least with the electoral college the fraud has to be much better organized and spread more across the country.

IneffablePigeon 6y ago
Carrying out voter fraud is pointless unless you can do it without being detected. If you flood one precinct with enough votes to swing an entire election it becomes very obvious that something fishy went on there. The only way to rig the election with voter fraud and get away with it is exactly the same - by spreading your fraudulent votes thinly so that no one area is too suspicious.
- yters 6y ago
  Even so, eliminating the college makes it easier. We need defense in depth to maintain rule of the people.
zhoujianfu 6y ago
It seems like it’d be a lot harder to swing a National popular vote election fraudulently, where you’d need to register millions of fraudulent votes, than an electoral college vote where at times you’d only need a few thousand? Or even just a couple high-pressure phone calls...
- yters 6y ago
  That's a good point. There would be fewer votes required. My thinking is when spread across more distinct political regions a greater amount of collusion is required across a more diverse political body, even if the raw vote count is smaller. In my mind this seems harder to pull off, but I can see where you are coming from.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago

If the president is elected by popular vote, then significant amounts of voting fraud in any one state becomes a national issue. So does significant amounts of voter suppression. Opening that can of worms to be fought on a national scale... well, be careful what you wish for.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> If the president is elected by popular vote, then significant amounts of voting fraud in any one state becomes a national issue. So does significant amounts of voter suppression. If the President is elected by the Electoral College and the parties aligned to near electoral parity, then it often doesn't even take significant fraud or suppression to swing the national election, as long as you target easily-identifiable swing states.

tmaly 6y ago

I think a better intermediate step would be to get rid of winner take all electoral college votes. Do it by county. This would move closer to a democracy but still retain the form of a republic.

leroy_masochist 6y ago

Here's what I don't understand - this is is constantly framed as a matter of reforming Federal law, when the states could remedy this themselves by changing from a winner-gets-all paradigm to a Maine- or Nebraska-like system that allocates delegates proportionally. The proximate reason why they don't do this, I would imagine, is that in the short term a party-controlled state wouldn't want a bunch of its Presidential vote delegates to go to the other party; e.g., California Democrats, who currently have the political power to change how their state awards delegates, don't want dozens of delegates going to the GOP and vice versa for Texas Republicans not wanting a bunch of Texas delegates going to the Democrats. On the other hand, states like Ohio and Florida want to keep the influence they have as swing states -- they want presidential candidates to spend an insanely disproportionate amount of time campaigning there and making promises about future policy decisions that disproportionately affect local industries. If they awarded delegates proportionally, they'd lose the attention they enjoy every four years. I'm not sure what the way to break the equilibrium would be, but do think that the solution to this is action on the state level rather than Federal. Am I missing anything?