4 ms·

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 t

by 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?
  - yters 6y ago
    It is not the land voting, but political municipalities which are tied by common culture and people. I think it makes sense to try and give smaller municipalities equal footing with larger municipalities. E.g. in the global scheme we think it is a bad thing when super powers stomp all over the little guy. Same thinking applies internally. Each state is sort of like a mini country. In general our country seems to try and prevent a tyranny of the majority, which is one of the historical flaws of pure democracy. E.g. see kulaks in USSR, jews in Nazi germany, other minority groups in the US etc.
    - mreome 6y ago
      Part of my point is that states, and often congressional districts, do not really represent a "common culture and people" in a lot of cases. NY for example is a Blue state, but is Red by area. Those same boundaries can also introduce arbitrary borders that divide people with a common culture and life experience. The problem with the Electoral College is that it's just become a set of meaningless rules and lines that the political parties game to their advantage. I'd be less opposed if it weren't winner take all by state, and even less opposed if the electoral college districts ignored state lines and actually represented real cultural and environmental boundaries (instead of gerrymandered puzzle pieces) while trying to strike a reasonable balance between population and area. Given the virtual impossibility of that, I think that a popular vote is more reasonable then the Electoral College.
      - yters 6y ago
        Let's take your NY example. What do you think is the fairest way to represent the people in the state? The current setup, or something else?
godelski 6y ago
That's because it isn't the land that is voting. You're trying to represent a diverse set of people and industries. We shouldn't screw over farmers because laws that work in cities are disastrous in rural areas and we shouldn't screw over cities because of laws that work well in rural areas. We need the farms, mining, energy (solar and wind as well as coal and natural gas), fishing, etc that comes with rural areas. They provide us with food and many of our essential resources. Similarly we need cities and the resources they bring us: tech, finance, logistics, etc. We need both for a highly functioning state. So it isn't so much land as voting but labor and utility. And I want to be clear, I'm talking about equitable not equal. It seems weird to me that we don't talk about it this way when we do in so many other conventionally left topics (race, gender, culture, religion, etc). So why screw over the other side just because they disagree with us politically? I'm all for proportionate representation but at some point you have to strike a balance. You need both sides of the country to be operating as efficiently as possible and while now we favor the rural states swinging in the opposite direction isn't a balance, it is still a skew. Fairness doesn't always mean equality because the nature of reality isn't equal. Pretending that doesn't exist just creates inequality.
- maxerickson 6y ago
  It's weird to divide the 300 million people that live in urban conditions and the 60 million people that live in rural conditions into 2 sides (that's using the statistical definition of urban that counts many small towns as urbanized areas, not the definition of urban that means super-dense megalopolis). And then Kansas actually has cities in it. Why does a resident of Kansas City (Kansas) get more national voting power than a resident of Los Angeles?
  - mreome 6y ago
    In my mind one of the biggest negative effects of the Electoral College is that it doesn't just provide more/less national voting power, but in many cases effectively strips voters of any power over the Presidential election. Unless you live in a swing state, you generally know how the Presidential election will turn out in your state. So if you're in the minority in a non-swing state, you know going in that your vote will have no effect on the outcome, it's effectively just going to get discarded. If you're in the majority, your individual vote still doesn't have a lot of power, anything over the 51% is irreverent and effectively discarded. With a popular vote, every single vote counts. No matter how big the majority or how small the minority in a state, every vote still has power. Nobody's vote is invalidated by where they happen to live.
JPKab 6y ago
This discussion was had when the original 13 colonies made a decision, for the second time, to unify under a single federal umbrella government. After the complete failure of the Articles of Confederation, a second initiative was created to desperately try to get the 13 states to subjugate themselves to a collective government. They all wanted the benefits of this shared collective, but had various gripes about joining it. The biggest gripe: At the time of the drafting of the Constitution, Virginia alone had over 20% of the entire population of the US. New York and Pennsylvania were also populous, compared to states like Delaware, Connecticut, South Carolina, etc. The original design of just having a purely population-based House of Representatives (and Presidency) was immediately rejected by all of the smaller states. Only the big states were ok with that. The smaller states were unwilling to join under an umbrella government that could be fully controlled by two or three populous states, at the expense of the interests of their own citizens. They immediately rejected the Constitution. This resulted in the creation of the Senate, and it's role as being the UPPER body of Congress, with more power than the House of Rep. Without removing the pure popular vote, the union could have never been created in the first place, because it was immediately viewed as a way for populous states to subjugate less populous states. And those states and their citizens were unwilling to take that risk. When you understand that this system was DEMANDED by smaller states before they were willing to join the union, you quickly realize why removal of such a system would likely result in some form of gradual disintegration of the union. The system now makes it so liberals in Mass and rednecks in Wyoming occasionally get people that match their beliefs running the Federal government, with cycles of fury from the losing side every election. Abolishing the EC would have the near-term effect of having one of those groups, the one that dominates large, sparsely populated states that control most food production, become perennial losers, in a permanent and unending fury at a government that doesn't listen to or care about them. If you want to understand what this looks like, go talk to your average voter in upstate New York, whose state government and tax policies are dictated by NYC voters who are mostly renters. Do you think upstate New York has similar needs to NYC? I can guarantee they don't, and those needs are unaddressed. Ditto for voters in southern Illinois. The animosity is palpable, and that's for neighbors a hundred miles away. Eventually, states will secede. And in a modern world like ours, I don't think it would be dramatic and violent. Likely just modern secession referendums. The current conversation about abolishing the EC has always been a partisan power-game, just like giving DC statehood. If the conversation around DC statehood were actually about representation, rather than 2 new Senate seats that are guaranteed to represent city-dweller interests, the Congressional Act that allocated land from Maryland to be DC would simply be reversed, with the land ceded back to Maryland, and the addition of two new Congressional representatives to Maryland. This is exactly what was done in the 1800s with the unused portion of land Virginia allocated to form DC with Maryland. (the Virginia side of the Potomac was ignored by Fed gov, so the residents demanded to be rejoined with Virginia, and they were.)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

by mreome 6y ago

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?
- yters 6y ago
  It is not the land voting, but political municipalities which are tied by common culture and people. I think it makes sense to try and give smaller municipalities equal footing with larger municipalities. E.g. in the global scheme we think it is a bad thing when super powers stomp all over the little guy. Same thinking applies internally. Each state is sort of like a mini country. In general our country seems to try and prevent a tyranny of the majority, which is one of the historical flaws of pure democracy. E.g. see kulaks in USSR, jews in Nazi germany, other minority groups in the US etc.
  - mreome 6y ago
    Part of my point is that states, and often congressional districts, do not really represent a "common culture and people" in a lot of cases. NY for example is a Blue state, but is Red by area. Those same boundaries can also introduce arbitrary borders that divide people with a common culture and life experience. The problem with the Electoral College is that it's just become a set of meaningless rules and lines that the political parties game to their advantage. I'd be less opposed if it weren't winner take all by state, and even less opposed if the electoral college districts ignored state lines and actually represented real cultural and environmental boundaries (instead of gerrymandered puzzle pieces) while trying to strike a reasonable balance between population and area. Given the virtual impossibility of that, I think that a popular vote is more reasonable then the Electoral College.
    - yters 6y ago
      Let's take your NY example. What do you think is the fairest way to represent the people in the state? The current setup, or something else?

godelski 6y ago

That's because it isn't the land that is voting. You're trying to represent a diverse set of people and industries. We shouldn't screw over farmers because laws that work in cities are disastrous in rural areas and we shouldn't screw over cities because of laws that work well in rural areas. We need the farms, mining, energy (solar and wind as well as coal and natural gas), fishing, etc that comes with rural areas. They provide us with food and many of our essential resources. Similarly we need cities and the resources they bring us: tech, finance, logistics, etc. We need both for a highly functioning state. So it isn't so much land as voting but labor and utility. And I want to be clear, I'm talking about equitable not equal. It seems weird to me that we don't talk about it this way when we do in so many other conventionally left topics (race, gender, culture, religion, etc). So why screw over the other side just because they disagree with us politically? I'm all for proportionate representation but at some point you have to strike a balance. You need both sides of the country to be operating as efficiently as possible and while now we favor the rural states swinging in the opposite direction isn't a balance, it is still a skew. Fairness doesn't always mean equality because the nature of reality isn't equal. Pretending that doesn't exist just creates inequality.

maxerickson 6y ago
It's weird to divide the 300 million people that live in urban conditions and the 60 million people that live in rural conditions into 2 sides (that's using the statistical definition of urban that counts many small towns as urbanized areas, not the definition of urban that means super-dense megalopolis). And then Kansas actually has cities in it. Why does a resident of Kansas City (Kansas) get more national voting power than a resident of Los Angeles?
- mreome 6y ago
  In my mind one of the biggest negative effects of the Electoral College is that it doesn't just provide more/less national voting power, but in many cases effectively strips voters of any power over the Presidential election. Unless you live in a swing state, you generally know how the Presidential election will turn out in your state. So if you're in the minority in a non-swing state, you know going in that your vote will have no effect on the outcome, it's effectively just going to get discarded. If you're in the majority, your individual vote still doesn't have a lot of power, anything over the 51% is irreverent and effectively discarded. With a popular vote, every single vote counts. No matter how big the majority or how small the minority in a state, every vote still has power. Nobody's vote is invalidated by where they happen to live.

JPKab 6y ago

This discussion was had when the original 13 colonies made a decision, for the second time, to unify under a single federal umbrella government. After the complete failure of the Articles of Confederation, a second initiative was created to desperately try to get the 13 states to subjugate themselves to a collective government. They all wanted the benefits of this shared collective, but had various gripes about joining it. The biggest gripe: At the time of the drafting of the Constitution, Virginia alone had over 20% of the entire population of the US. New York and Pennsylvania were also populous, compared to states like Delaware, Connecticut, South Carolina, etc. The original design of just having a purely population-based House of Representatives (and Presidency) was immediately rejected by all of the smaller states. Only the big states were ok with that. The smaller states were unwilling to join under an umbrella government that could be fully controlled by two or three populous states, at the expense of the interests of their own citizens. They immediately rejected the Constitution. This resulted in the creation of the Senate, and it's role as being the UPPER body of Congress, with more power than the House of Rep. Without removing the pure popular vote, the union could have never been created in the first place, because it was immediately viewed as a way for populous states to subjugate less populous states. And those states and their citizens were unwilling to take that risk. When you understand that this system was DEMANDED by smaller states before they were willing to join the union, you quickly realize why removal of such a system would likely result in some form of gradual disintegration of the union. The system now makes it so liberals in Mass and rednecks in Wyoming occasionally get people that match their beliefs running the Federal government, with cycles of fury from the losing side every election. Abolishing the EC would have the near-term effect of having one of those groups, the one that dominates large, sparsely populated states that control most food production, become perennial losers, in a permanent and unending fury at a government that doesn't listen to or care about them. If you want to understand what this looks like, go talk to your average voter in upstate New York, whose state government and tax policies are dictated by NYC voters who are mostly renters. Do you think upstate New York has similar needs to NYC? I can guarantee they don't, and those needs are unaddressed. Ditto for voters in southern Illinois. The animosity is palpable, and that's for neighbors a hundred miles away. Eventually, states will secede. And in a modern world like ours, I don't think it would be dramatic and violent. Likely just modern secession referendums. The current conversation about abolishing the EC has always been a partisan power-game, just like giving DC statehood. If the conversation around DC statehood were actually about representation, rather than 2 new Senate seats that are guaranteed to represent city-dweller interests, the Congressional Act that allocated land from Maryland to be DC would simply be reversed, with the land ceded back to Maryland, and the addition of two new Congressional representatives to Maryland. This is exactly what was done in the 1800s with the unused portion of land Virginia allocated to form DC with Maryland. (the Virginia side of the Potomac was ignored by Fed gov, so the residents demanded to be rejoined with Virginia, and they were.)

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]