There are discussions about the electoral college favoring small states. Some people think that's bad, some people think it's good.
However, there's a more important issue: that's not really what the electoral college does. It gives a small edge to small states[0]. The much bigger effect is that in every given election, it favors a handful of battleground states over all the rest.
If you live in Wyoming, the electoral college does not help you, because your vote is secure. Ditto for Vermont. But if you live in Ohio or Florida, presidential candidates will spend all their time in your state, trying to get your vote.
While you can concoct a semi-coherent case for rural voters needing special protection, no one can explain why Ohio is more or less important than North Carolina, or Florida than Texas.
[0] Which, if you're paying attention, is at least correlated with being rural, but only partially--another lazy generalization that surrounds this subject.
I'm not in favor of the electoral college, but wouldn't its elimination merely shift this problem to politicians only visiting the most poulated states (e.g. California) anyway?
You should be careful about the word "small" here. What you mean is least populous, but geographically, they are large.
Thus, the question is: Do you want the majority of the USA geography being controlled by the will of people least knowledgeable about it?
If you eliminate the electoral college you give political control of resources to those who have absolutely NO physical control of those resources and yet still suffer the impact of their environmental influence.
What I mean is, people in California, Texas, and New York would push all the bad things to the rural states and take all the good parts, leaving those who live in the rural areas to feel the full brunt of those decisions. Take Louisiana as an example. It's been decimated by everyone who doesn't live there.
It also makes many votes useless. I live in California, it has gone to a Democrat every time since I've been a voter. For president, I can't affect California, and I can't affect the national election either, due to the EC. Not that I'd vote for Trump, but there's no practical reason to vote for president in that circumstance.
Swing states shift, though. California was basically solid red from the 1950s through the 1980s. Until 2016, few people would have called Wisconsin or Michigan "swing states" judging from their voting in the past few elections. People move, demographics change.
Why aren't we talking about the Cambridge Analytica scandal example? Another issue of the Electoral colleges is that a candidate could target only a few amount of people (70k according to the documentary) for changing the course of the election.
Even if this has been fixed by Facebook. Shouldn't it be considered as a major flaw of the election system?
> If you live in Wyoming, the electoral college does not help you, because your vote is secure.
For now. But if Wyoming doesn't like what happens with Republican party, it can change. There's a huge inertia in large parties, so probably won't happen overnight, but it's not a law of nature. From what I've heard, one of the reasons 2016 election went the way it did because Democrats considered certain states (not Wyoming) "secure" and didn't campaign there, while Republicans did, and turned out they've been not as secure as it seemed. The margins of victory in many states are not that wide, and the margins of uncertainty in any polls are wide, so it's never certain forever.
The electoral college most certainly favors small states but I agree with you it also creates battleground states and I agree that is the more important effect.
It’s not a matter of whether battleground states deserve special protection, it’s a matter of whether or not the battleground states in any given election serve as a good representation of the nation as a whole? Are they a better representation than a popular vote which would consistently favor coastal urban centers?
Is visiting really the problem? I get the impression that issues that are huge for non-swing states, like housing, can be easily ignored despite the fact that they impact millions more people.
Here is a fun thought exercise: why group by state?
A person's political views is not just shaped by where they live, but their race, gender, sexual orientation, education etc etc. If "location" is just another column in the table properties that describe a person, what if we had a "college" or "senate" based on some other property of an individual?
How about we give all citizens who identify as straight 2 seats and all those who identify as gay 2 seats in this imaginary senate?
Or a college roughly based on race, but for some reason the smaller races are grossly over represented?
How about by religion? As an atheist myself, I'd love to get in on some of that sweet over-representation-of-minorities mojo that Ohioans get.
My point is, cut this along any other descriptive property of an individual other than what state they live in and you get all sorts of colorful results that I'm sure would appall all the conservative proponents of the Electoral college or the Senate.
Is state or location really the most important a property when it comes to deciding whether or not you are a "minority?" When it comes to national issues, do you think a gay black man in Nebraska has more in common with a striaght white man in Nebraska? Or another gay black man in New York? Why does the one in Nebraska get to be an overrepresented minority, yet the one in New York get to be an underrepresented majority?
It is not there to protect small states, it is there to protect from super large states. As in, no matter how big you get or how lopsided your political apparatus is the state cannot absolutely tip the balance.
a popular vote presidency would be a disaster for the US, the illusion that votes matter would be completely destroyed at that level. it is like the difference of comparing a state only lottery to the multi state lottery
What I find interesting is this only came up after Trump got elected. What this says is it’s not about how “broken” the electoral college is and more so trying to elect more liberal presidents, since the densely populated areas tend to hive mind. We would have essentially 2 states voting in the new president, and both of these states are very liberal. Why didn’t this come up during Obama? This is an attempt at the liberal elite to get rid of a system that stops them from winning 100% of the time. This is how civil wars are started
Furthermore: Ohio is the single strongest predictor of the presidential election winner. Ohio is the only state where the local winner has matched the overall winner since 1960.
Very few people care if a candidate visits their state. I know I don't and I would be hard-pressed to list a single person that does. All I care about is if they're willing to answer questions directly and if their policies match my general ideas.
In other words: if a candidate really wants to spend their whole campaign in Ohio, I could give a shit. Go for it.
Debates over the electoral college tend to conflate two different things. The original purpose of the electoral college was a compromise between those who wanted the president directly elected, and those who wanted Congress to elect the president. While very small states have a modest edge as a result of using the number of members of Congress to decide the number of electors, the real purpose of the system is to add a layer of indirection to the election of the President, where the states have a say in their capacity as states.
That layer of indirection continues to exist today. Article II provides that “each state shall appoint” electors “in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” So Minnesota could decide to have the state legislature appoint its electors, without a popular vote. (That would raise the importance of state government elections, which might be a good thing.)
At the same time, that layer of indirection could exist even in a purely proportional system. You could assign electoral votes based on population or number of house members.
So the debate over getting rid of the electoral college actually involves two different issues. Should the number of electors be proportional? And should we reduce the independent status of the states even more by taking away their intermediary role in electing the President?
The founding fathers did not predict that a few states would become hyper-partisan and stop giving EC votes proportionally. The few states, early on, did this because they were decidedly red/blue and wanted a bigger say in who is president. A bunch of other states wound up following suit to level the playing field.
Now, we have winner-takes-all for almost every state. Now, politicians don't spend time pandering for votes they already have locked.
First, the number of House reps is no longer proportionate to the population. Second, the layer of indirection as it exists today does nothing. Electors aren’t free to choose a president. They in most cases must elect the person they pledged to elect and if they don’t they instantly get replaced by a new elector who will. What purpose does that serve? Seems to me like we should either buck up and actually allow these people to elect a president, or abolish the whole institution as it currently is a farce.
>Article II provides that “each state shall appoint” electors “in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” So Minnesota could decide to have the state legislature appoint its electors, without a popular vote.
Technically correct but as per the 13th (?) amendment, when a state denies any male citizen aged 18 or over and not a felon the right to vote, said states representation in the electoral college and congress is recalculated as though they didn't have said residents. Therefore if Minnesota went through with this they would have no more than the baseline 3 electoral votes.
I had believed the original reason was that politicians could not travel to each district/county/state and that it was easier to get a small, informed, educated group together than a large, unfocused, sometimes uneducated group together.
Let the states that will never get their way in a "fixed" elector college, secede.
To mess with the electoral college in this point in time - when its basically 49% vs 51% - and at such a level of divide in the country is not exactly a testament to how empathetic the two sides are. It would be a disaster.
Everyone thinks Trump himself is the problem but this awful idea to change the goalposts literally to win elections would do way more damage than Trump could ever do but I guess it doesn't come in an 'easy to hate' package with agenda serving talking points, etc.
I don't know where these idiots think this whole "OK - we'll follow these laws, but not those" thing is going but it is incredibly damaging and at the moment only one side is picking and choosing which laws to obey and not obey (then writing publicly about it) but soon enough the other side will be picking and choosing which laws to ignore.
Get your helmets on once we are on _that_ slippery slope.
> the real purpose of the system is to add a layer of indirection to the election of the President, where the states have a say in their capacity as states.
The real purpose of the system was to balance the interests of states who had as many slaves as free people with the interests of states who would have dominated the legislature if representation were determined only by the number of citizens within the state.
It's not about division of power between rural/urban or big states/small states. The Electoral College is about buffering purely democratic power. The President doesn't represent "the people." He/she represents the interests of the states. The Legislative Branch represents the will of the people (most directly through the House of Representatives). One of the biggest problems is vesting too much power and importance in the Executive, which was never intended. Throw the balance of power out of whack, and we get these conversations (the President has to represent "the people" and therefore should be elected by popular vote)
Firstly, I'm an independent - I actually have a great deal of issues with both major parties. My concern with abandoning the college starts with this observation:
Swing states are the states most likely to have divided government. And if divided government is good for anything, it is accountability. So with the Electoral College system, when we do wind up with a razor-thin margin in an election, it is likely to happen in a state where both parties hold some power, rather than in a state controlled by one party. The Electoral college system focuses a great deal of energy on states in this condition when an election is close.
National Popular Vote (NPV) rewards states with high population - the higher the turnout, the more power for that state. Additionally, under NPV, each state would certify its own "national" vote total. What would happen when there are charges of skullduggery? Would states really trust, with no power to verify, other state’s returns?
I have other concerns as well but feel the EC system is superior. Just as an observation, the parliamentary systems of the UK, Canada, Israel, (& others) have the parliament elect the Prime Minister and likewise don't elect their leaders by popular vote.
[edited: removing poor wording about 'lax laws', seems I implied things in a FUD way that I didn't mean to]
I want to point out this article was written in May, and is a bit out of date. For example, Nevada (heavily mentioned in the article) never adopted the National Popular Vote compact because the governor vetoed the bill after the legislature passed it.
An argument I heard recently against this is, if abolished, politicians won't have incentives to campaign in rural territories, and they won't be accountable to rural territories. That basically makes sense. The EC is the only thing that really gives rural territories any stake, as the majority population has shifted to larger urban centers.
People who want to get away from the big cities and live a different kind of life with different priorities (and different legislative interests), shouldn't be totally shut out, should they? Even though I live in a giant urban area, I wouldn't want to feel pressured to due so due to lack of political stake if I move elsewhere.
>On Tuesday, Nevada became the latest state to pass a bill that would grant its electoral votes to whoever wins the popular vote across the country, not just in Nevada. The movement is the brainchild of John Koza, a co-founder of National Popular Vote, an organization that is working to eliminate the influence of the Electoral College.
I don't think this will survive constitutional challenge, because it is not the voters of the state who are deciding how the state's electors are decided. For example, would it be allowed for a swing state such as Florida which now has a Republican governor and state legislature, to pass a law stating that their state's electors would be allocated based on how Alabama votes? That way, even if the Democratic candidate won a majority of votes in Florida, the electors would still go to the Republican candidate if the Republican candidate wins in Alabama.
The original idea going into the Constitutional Convention was to have Congress pick the president. A majority of delegates going into the Convention supported this, but discarded it after debates established it would violate the separation of powers.
The popular vote wasn't an option, however, because it would mean the southern states with their large, non-voting slave populations would have vastly reduced influence. The southern delegates would have never supported a popular vote. Thus, the electoral college.
I'm really confused about this because I don't understand the incentives politicians have to adopt this in their own state. It clearly undermines their state's power in national elections.
My (cynical) assumption is that this will be obeyed insofar as it helps bring about the desired outcome by those in power. It will be disregarded if it would shift the outcome in the other direction.
The electoral college achieves one very useful function thats ignored by everyone calling for its abolition in favour of the popular vote: it produces a clear winner and contains the contagion of litigating and delegitimizing the outcome of an election.
Think about this: there are a number of elections that have a very small popular vote margin. What if this gets less than, say, 20,000? That's entirely possible. In a strictly popular vote election, what's to stop each side from scrounging up votes or invalidating votes in every county in the country?
The most contentious and litigated election is probably the 2000 election. The electoral college contained those shenanigans to Florida alone (and largely to Miami-Dade and Broward countries, specifically).
There are four main problems with the US election system as I see it:
1. Voting needs to be mandatory. Americans who love "freedom" chafe against this but optional voting undermines democracy. You can see this in the organized efforts to suppress voting and disqualify voters by US political parties.
2. The US needs preferential voting. Third-party votes are otherwise largely a waste.
3. Paper ballots with optical recognition only. No punch cards, certainly no electronic voting. You need the paper trail of actual ballots. This could be filling in a ballot and validating it with a machine or using a machine to print out a ballot. These have an exceptionally low error rate.
4. Stop politicizing the election process. Like, why is the supervisor for elections an elected political position? This is the case in Florida, for example. Likewise, you have the Senate majority holding up election reform because of there is suspicion this will help the Democrats in the House who passed it. Seriously, Mitch McConnell needs to go to jail.
5. I'm fine with states being represented in the US system. The problem is that this system was designed at a time when populations were rural and cities were small. I don't think anyone predicted the disparity between ~40M people in California and ~150k people in Vermont having 2 Senators each.
You'll note that none of these are having the popular vote. IMHO that's fixing the wrong problem.
I always hear people complain about the electoral college, but I've never once heard a detailed, objective argument as to why they think a popular vote would be a better system.
Friends I've talked to about just seem to default to a majority system because it seems more 'fair', or its easier to understand? I dont know.
In the USA, I think we are conditioned to belive in the democratic process, so I guess it feels 'natural' to just tally up the votes, & majority wins.
We've done it countless times in our personal lives. Anytime there's a disagreement, or a group decision to be made, "Ok, lets vote on it". Majority wins. Simple.
This is a fine & easy way to decide things in small groups, but is it really the best way to decide something among 300 million?
I'm not convinced. I'm not saying the EC is perfect, I just suspect a simple majority wins vote could cause other serious problems that are not immediately obvious.
The Connecticut Compromise is good and all, but I think it's about time we discard it as an artifact of the days when communication was difficult and states had expectations around operating as semi-autonomous bodies. States used to be a strong identity tie than the nation but our general mindset has shifted toward identifying as Americans before Delawareans.
It's in the Constitution.
If you don't like the Constitution:
--amend it.
--call for a Constitutional Convention.
These are the agreed methods to change the document.
"End runs," state compacts and attempts to game the system are unconstitutional and doomed.
The electoral college was just a kludge to allow elections before modern instant long distance communication became a thing. The gold standard for democracy was always "one person, one vote", but nowadays there's a lot of people that consider their personal gain more important than being democratic and those people (the Republican party mostly) will try to hang on to the electoral college, no matter the cost apparently.
I have often thought that part of the rationale for the electoral college was that in the 18th century they did not have the internet, TV, Radio, even newspapers were pretty scarce. So it just wasn't all that practical for a candidate to ride a horse around all 13 colonies to meet each voter. The logical solution would have been to have a parliamentary system whereby the congress would select the president for you. The problem there was that the president would be beholden to the congress and you would lose some of the checks and balance features because he would be less likely to veto something. So they developed a "shadow congress" that did not have law making responsibilities but sole purpose was to travel to Philadelphia or DC and hear the speeches and so forth and select the president for you as your representative.
Looking at it from this 18th century perspective highlights why it is completely unnecessary today. Obviously the voter has many ways of getting to know the positions of the candidates themselves and hence able to elect the president directly. There is no need for it today.
Why cant states just give out percents of electoral votes based on who voted?
Example: Lets say CA has 10 Electoral Votes (for easy math)
60% vote Dem, 40% vote Republican. California then Gives 6 Electoral Votes to the Democrat and 4 to the Republican instead of all 10 to the Democrat.
Feels like that would more fairly represent the voters of each state no?
Most modern countries have similar systems, where smaller areas are disproportionally represented in the legislative power. Its only when you loose that is a problem?
"Legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests." - Justice Earl Warren
There's a long history of the US electoral system favoring rural areas over urban areas. Typically, the courts had to intervene in order to remedy an issue where clearly the legislature has a conflict of interest. The most famous is Reynolds v Sims (1964), which stated that electoral districts of state legislative chambers must be roughly equal in population [1].
Hopefully, we can see similar change happen in the Electoral College.
[+] [-] hyperpape|6 years ago|reply
However, there's a more important issue: that's not really what the electoral college does. It gives a small edge to small states[0]. The much bigger effect is that in every given election, it favors a handful of battleground states over all the rest.
If you live in Wyoming, the electoral college does not help you, because your vote is secure. Ditto for Vermont. But if you live in Ohio or Florida, presidential candidates will spend all their time in your state, trying to get your vote.
While you can concoct a semi-coherent case for rural voters needing special protection, no one can explain why Ohio is more or less important than North Carolina, or Florida than Texas.
[0] Which, if you're paying attention, is at least correlated with being rural, but only partially--another lazy generalization that surrounds this subject.
[+] [-] ShamelessC|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anon1m0us|6 years ago|reply
Thus, the question is: Do you want the majority of the USA geography being controlled by the will of people least knowledgeable about it?
If you eliminate the electoral college you give political control of resources to those who have absolutely NO physical control of those resources and yet still suffer the impact of their environmental influence.
What I mean is, people in California, Texas, and New York would push all the bad things to the rural states and take all the good parts, leaving those who live in the rural areas to feel the full brunt of those decisions. Take Louisiana as an example. It's been decimated by everyone who doesn't live there.
[+] [-] jonas21|6 years ago|reply
That's a 3.6x difference -- I would hardly call that a "small" edge.
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WarDores|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daleco|6 years ago|reply
Source: "The great Hack" - Netflix doc.
[+] [-] smsm42|6 years ago|reply
For now. But if Wyoming doesn't like what happens with Republican party, it can change. There's a huge inertia in large parties, so probably won't happen overnight, but it's not a law of nature. From what I've heard, one of the reasons 2016 election went the way it did because Democrats considered certain states (not Wyoming) "secure" and didn't campaign there, while Republicans did, and turned out they've been not as secure as it seemed. The margins of victory in many states are not that wide, and the margins of uncertainty in any polls are wide, so it's never certain forever.
[+] [-] Monroe13|6 years ago|reply
It’s not a matter of whether battleground states deserve special protection, it’s a matter of whether or not the battleground states in any given election serve as a good representation of the nation as a whole? Are they a better representation than a popular vote which would consistently favor coastal urban centers?
[+] [-] rcpt|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notSupplied|6 years ago|reply
A person's political views is not just shaped by where they live, but their race, gender, sexual orientation, education etc etc. If "location" is just another column in the table properties that describe a person, what if we had a "college" or "senate" based on some other property of an individual?
How about we give all citizens who identify as straight 2 seats and all those who identify as gay 2 seats in this imaginary senate?
Or a college roughly based on race, but for some reason the smaller races are grossly over represented?
How about by religion? As an atheist myself, I'd love to get in on some of that sweet over-representation-of-minorities mojo that Ohioans get.
My point is, cut this along any other descriptive property of an individual other than what state they live in and you get all sorts of colorful results that I'm sure would appall all the conservative proponents of the Electoral college or the Senate.
Is state or location really the most important a property when it comes to deciding whether or not you are a "minority?" When it comes to national issues, do you think a gay black man in Nebraska has more in common with a striaght white man in Nebraska? Or another gay black man in New York? Why does the one in Nebraska get to be an overrepresented minority, yet the one in New York get to be an underrepresented majority?
[+] [-] Shivetya|6 years ago|reply
a popular vote presidency would be a disaster for the US, the illusion that votes matter would be completely destroyed at that level. it is like the difference of comparing a state only lottery to the multi state lottery
[+] [-] the6threplicant|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fomite|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] raverbashing|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tekknik|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] _pmf_|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] lagadu|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dclowd9901|6 years ago|reply
In other words: if a candidate really wants to spend their whole campaign in Ohio, I could give a shit. Go for it.
Abolish the electoral college. Now.
[+] [-] rayiner|6 years ago|reply
That layer of indirection continues to exist today. Article II provides that “each state shall appoint” electors “in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” So Minnesota could decide to have the state legislature appoint its electors, without a popular vote. (That would raise the importance of state government elections, which might be a good thing.)
At the same time, that layer of indirection could exist even in a purely proportional system. You could assign electoral votes based on population or number of house members.
So the debate over getting rid of the electoral college actually involves two different issues. Should the number of electors be proportional? And should we reduce the independent status of the states even more by taking away their intermediary role in electing the President?
[+] [-] pknopf|6 years ago|reply
Now, we have winner-takes-all for almost every state. Now, politicians don't spend time pandering for votes they already have locked.
It created the concept of "battle ground states".
[+] [-] IgorPartola|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IIAOPSW|6 years ago|reply
Technically correct but as per the 13th (?) amendment, when a state denies any male citizen aged 18 or over and not a felon the right to vote, said states representation in the electoral college and congress is recalculated as though they didn't have said residents. Therefore if Minnesota went through with this they would have no more than the baseline 3 electoral votes.
[+] [-] czbond|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] gthaman|6 years ago|reply
To mess with the electoral college in this point in time - when its basically 49% vs 51% - and at such a level of divide in the country is not exactly a testament to how empathetic the two sides are. It would be a disaster.
Everyone thinks Trump himself is the problem but this awful idea to change the goalposts literally to win elections would do way more damage than Trump could ever do but I guess it doesn't come in an 'easy to hate' package with agenda serving talking points, etc.
I don't know where these idiots think this whole "OK - we'll follow these laws, but not those" thing is going but it is incredibly damaging and at the moment only one side is picking and choosing which laws to obey and not obey (then writing publicly about it) but soon enough the other side will be picking and choosing which laws to ignore.
Get your helmets on once we are on _that_ slippery slope.
[+] [-] justin66|6 years ago|reply
The real purpose of the system was to balance the interests of states who had as many slaves as free people with the interests of states who would have dominated the legislature if representation were determined only by the number of citizens within the state.
[+] [-] WarDores|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peapicker|6 years ago|reply
Swing states are the states most likely to have divided government. And if divided government is good for anything, it is accountability. So with the Electoral College system, when we do wind up with a razor-thin margin in an election, it is likely to happen in a state where both parties hold some power, rather than in a state controlled by one party. The Electoral college system focuses a great deal of energy on states in this condition when an election is close.
National Popular Vote (NPV) rewards states with high population - the higher the turnout, the more power for that state. Additionally, under NPV, each state would certify its own "national" vote total. What would happen when there are charges of skullduggery? Would states really trust, with no power to verify, other state’s returns?
I have other concerns as well but feel the EC system is superior. Just as an observation, the parliamentary systems of the UK, Canada, Israel, (& others) have the parliament elect the Prime Minister and likewise don't elect their leaders by popular vote.
[edited: removing poor wording about 'lax laws', seems I implied things in a FUD way that I didn't mean to]
[+] [-] mshirley|6 years ago|reply
FiveThirtyEight published an article last week on the current state of the compact: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-movement-to-skip-th...
[+] [-] not_a_moth|6 years ago|reply
People who want to get away from the big cities and live a different kind of life with different priorities (and different legislative interests), shouldn't be totally shut out, should they? Even though I live in a giant urban area, I wouldn't want to feel pressured to due so due to lack of political stake if I move elsewhere.
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|6 years ago|reply
I don't think this will survive constitutional challenge, because it is not the voters of the state who are deciding how the state's electors are decided. For example, would it be allowed for a swing state such as Florida which now has a Republican governor and state legislature, to pass a law stating that their state's electors would be allocated based on how Alabama votes? That way, even if the Democratic candidate won a majority of votes in Florida, the electors would still go to the Republican candidate if the Republican candidate wins in Alabama.
[+] [-] CptFribble|6 years ago|reply
The original idea going into the Constitutional Convention was to have Congress pick the president. A majority of delegates going into the Convention supported this, but discarded it after debates established it would violate the separation of powers.
The popular vote wasn't an option, however, because it would mean the southern states with their large, non-voting slave populations would have vastly reduced influence. The southern delegates would have never supported a popular vote. Thus, the electoral college.
Madison wrote about it here: http://memory.loc.gov/ll/llfr/002/0000/00610057.tif
[+] [-] gfodor|6 years ago|reply
My (cynical) assumption is that this will be obeyed insofar as it helps bring about the desired outcome by those in power. It will be disregarded if it would shift the outcome in the other direction.
[+] [-] cletus|6 years ago|reply
Think about this: there are a number of elections that have a very small popular vote margin. What if this gets less than, say, 20,000? That's entirely possible. In a strictly popular vote election, what's to stop each side from scrounging up votes or invalidating votes in every county in the country?
The most contentious and litigated election is probably the 2000 election. The electoral college contained those shenanigans to Florida alone (and largely to Miami-Dade and Broward countries, specifically).
There are four main problems with the US election system as I see it:
1. Voting needs to be mandatory. Americans who love "freedom" chafe against this but optional voting undermines democracy. You can see this in the organized efforts to suppress voting and disqualify voters by US political parties.
2. The US needs preferential voting. Third-party votes are otherwise largely a waste.
3. Paper ballots with optical recognition only. No punch cards, certainly no electronic voting. You need the paper trail of actual ballots. This could be filling in a ballot and validating it with a machine or using a machine to print out a ballot. These have an exceptionally low error rate.
4. Stop politicizing the election process. Like, why is the supervisor for elections an elected political position? This is the case in Florida, for example. Likewise, you have the Senate majority holding up election reform because of there is suspicion this will help the Democrats in the House who passed it. Seriously, Mitch McConnell needs to go to jail.
5. I'm fine with states being represented in the US system. The problem is that this system was designed at a time when populations were rural and cities were small. I don't think anyone predicted the disparity between ~40M people in California and ~150k people in Vermont having 2 Senators each.
You'll note that none of these are having the popular vote. IMHO that's fixing the wrong problem.
[+] [-] 40four|6 years ago|reply
Friends I've talked to about just seem to default to a majority system because it seems more 'fair', or its easier to understand? I dont know.
In the USA, I think we are conditioned to belive in the democratic process, so I guess it feels 'natural' to just tally up the votes, & majority wins.
We've done it countless times in our personal lives. Anytime there's a disagreement, or a group decision to be made, "Ok, lets vote on it". Majority wins. Simple.
This is a fine & easy way to decide things in small groups, but is it really the best way to decide something among 300 million?
I'm not convinced. I'm not saying the EC is perfect, I just suspect a simple majority wins vote could cause other serious problems that are not immediately obvious.
[+] [-] munk-a|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pseingatl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Schnitz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zw123456|6 years ago|reply
Looking at it from this 18th century perspective highlights why it is completely unnecessary today. Obviously the voter has many ways of getting to know the positions of the candidates themselves and hence able to elect the president directly. There is no need for it today.
[+] [-] will_pseudonym|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cgb223|6 years ago|reply
Example: Lets say CA has 10 Electoral Votes (for easy math) 60% vote Dem, 40% vote Republican. California then Gives 6 Electoral Votes to the Democrat and 4 to the Republican instead of all 10 to the Democrat.
Feels like that would more fairly represent the voters of each state no?
[+] [-] ultrablack|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tmux314|6 years ago|reply
There's a long history of the US electoral system favoring rural areas over urban areas. Typically, the courts had to intervene in order to remedy an issue where clearly the legislature has a conflict of interest. The most famous is Reynolds v Sims (1964), which stated that electoral districts of state legislative chambers must be roughly equal in population [1].
Hopefully, we can see similar change happen in the Electoral College.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynolds_v._Sims
[+] [-] larrydag|6 years ago|reply
Here is a conservative or traditionalist political point of view in favor of the Electoral College
https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/danger-attacks-electoral-coll...
Here is a liberal or progressive point of view against the Electoral College
https://harvardpolitics.com/united-states/the-case-against-t...
These are but two opinions. Politics is ultimately creating policy on opinions from a large community.