4 ms·

Most of the country doesn't live in high-density areas. If you only catered to urban voters, you'd lose in a huge landslide.

by raldi 14y ago

rayiner 14y ago
More than half the population lives in an urbanized area of > 200,000. This includes suburbs of larger cities but not rural areas or small cities.
thaumaturgy 14y ago
You aren't kidding! I was skeptical about this, so I checked. Given the list of urban population areas from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_areas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_are... and a U.S. population estimate of ~312m, you run out of urban centers with >1m people (at #42, Salt Lake City) before even reaching half of the U.S. population (131,980,346)! To put this into some perspective, San Juan, Puerto Rico would be an attractive stop for an aspiring U.S. President (at 2.1m people), if they had the right to vote! Suddenly, U.S. transportation & communications infrastructure problems make a lot more sense. I knew the U.S. was a big place, but I vastly underestimated how spread out our population was.
gwright 14y ago
I think the problem would be that the focus would not necessarily be on urban voters (they are pretty dependable Democratic votes) but on very specific swing-voter geographies. This is also an issue with the existing Electoral College but is mediated by the fact that the smallest geographical unit (in most cases) is an entire state. The Electoral College also helps to avoid a national recount should the popular vote be very close.
- raldi 14y ago
  Statistically, the odds of an election being close enough to require a recount is infinitesimally smaller with a single nationwide pool of 300 million voters than it is with 50 smaller pools. In other words, getting rid of the Electoral College would make recounts far less likely.
  - gwright 14y ago
    You are assuming that votes are randomly distributed, they are not. In fact the majority of votes are fixed (reliable Republican or Democratic votes). Even so, you really want to consider the 'pain' associated with the unlikely event not the probability of the event itself. The pain associated with the recount within a single state is much less than the pain associated with a recount for the entire country, even if the national recount scenario is less likely (even much less likely).

Most of the country doesn't live in high-density areas. If you only catered to urban voters, you'd lose in a huge landslide.

by raldi 14y ago

Most of the country doesn't live in high-density areas. If you only catered to urban voters, you'd lose in a huge landslide.

rayiner 14y ago

More than half the population lives in an urbanized area of > 200,000. This includes suburbs of larger cities but not rural areas or small cities.

thaumaturgy 14y ago

You aren't kidding! I was skeptical about this, so I checked. Given the list of urban population areas from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_areas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_are... and a U.S. population estimate of ~312m, you run out of urban centers with >1m people (at #42, Salt Lake City) before even reaching half of the U.S. population (131,980,346)! To put this into some perspective, San Juan, Puerto Rico would be an attractive stop for an aspiring U.S. President (at 2.1m people), if they had the right to vote! Suddenly, U.S. transportation & communications infrastructure problems make a lot more sense. I knew the U.S. was a big place, but I vastly underestimated how spread out our population was.

gwright 14y ago

I think the problem would be that the focus would not necessarily be on urban voters (they are pretty dependable Democratic votes) but on very specific swing-voter geographies. This is also an issue with the existing Electoral College but is mediated by the fact that the smallest geographical unit (in most cases) is an entire state. The Electoral College also helps to avoid a national recount should the popular vote be very close.

raldi 14y ago
Statistically, the odds of an election being close enough to require a recount is infinitesimally smaller with a single nationwide pool of 300 million voters than it is with 50 smaller pools. In other words, getting rid of the Electoral College would make recounts far less likely.
- gwright 14y ago
  You are assuming that votes are randomly distributed, they are not. In fact the majority of votes are fixed (reliable Republican or Democratic votes). Even so, you really want to consider the 'pain' associated with the unlikely event not the probability of the event itself. The pain associated with the recount within a single state is much less than the pain associated with a recount for the entire country, even if the national recount scenario is less likely (even much less likely).