I get that the Electoral College was originally designed to give smaller states an equal say. But, when Los Angeles county has more population than like 10 states combined, things are getting ridiculous.
California has like 67 times the population of Wyoming… yet they each have two senators. And that keeps increasing.
Our government is not a good representation of the populace.
The number of people was a political compromise between individual rights and States rights, but so was a Senate and House.
The electoral college was primarily designed to enable states to vote despite a communication delay that could take months.
It did great at that, actually. How would California have up to date info on what’s going on in Washington when the fastest mode of travel was a horse? It wouldn’t.
Instead of voting based on information that’s outdated and potentially inaccurate, best to pick some people you trust to vote in your interests, and send them to Washington. Let them get caught up, and vote how they will as your representative.
Then States can sort out their own voting time and method, with no real concern for it being simultaneous or consistent because news travels so slow anyway. The important thing was authorized people would show up by the expected federal voting time, and if that happened, everyone did well enough.
Of course, now they can cast their vote without leaving the state, and coordination is possible, but here we are holding the bag on a lack of accounting for technological progress.
I agree with your ultimate premise, that technological advances have all but eliminated the need for the Ec. But, my man, the telegraph predates CA as a state.
The EC was also for many reasons, but pertaining to the point were talking about, it was because they were afraid people would just campaign in cities because that would be the most efficient. The EC forces a wider appeal.
But with the ability to reach everyone, everywhere, instantly, this fear that they only campaign in cities is gone.
Also, the electoral college only shifts the focus from cities to major swing states (and even then, cities within those states).
But more importantly, why the fuck should potential campaign strategies affect the strength of my vote?
It was originally designed to give slave owners a greater say than people in free states, since EC representation is mainly based on the number of representatives you have in the House, and the slave state representative count was inflated by the 3/5 compromise.
California has like 67 times the population of Wyoming… yet they each have two senators.
But they have way more representatives. That was the point of separation of power, to limit federal power, while California does have a state legislature that can do most of what it wants.
The issue is that congress can regulate anything as “interstate commerce”
California has like 67 times the population of Wyoming… yet they each have two senators. And that keeps increasing.
The worst part about the legislative branch is that Congress also acted to handicap the House of Representatives. It was supposed to be the body based on population. And you may say “Well California has 52 and Wyoming only 1 so that’s proportional.” But the original intent was no more than 30,000 constituents per representative. So based on a quick look at the 2020 population figures, Wyoming should have 19 while California should have ~1,317. (That would also be equivalent to California having 69 representatives to Wyoming’s current 1.)
“…designed to give smaller states an equal say…”
Not quite…
Instead of having a forever constitution that was great and new 200 years ago when the internet and modern transportation and communications didn’t exist … they should regularly overhaul the entire government every hundred years to keep up with the times.
I’m in Canada and they should do the same here.
We can’t possibly think that everything we see, think and believe today will be applicable to people living 100, 200 years from now.
We look at 200 year old laws about horses and we laugh at it. 200 years from now, our descendants will laugh at what we’re debating today.
The only reason to maintain the status quo is to protect the power and privilege of a few powerful and wealthy people. It never has anything to do with the goodwill of the people.
- Every fifty years. Jefferson for all his faults thought it should be that frequent.
Gotta refresh that tree of liberty from time to time.
No it was designed by slave holding states to be sure that the free states up north didn’t have the power to end slavery.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/electoral-colleges-racist-origins
It’s wild that if multiple things we implemented republicans would never win the presidency again.
Any anti voter suppression method, like universal mail in voting
Ranked choice voting
Removal of the electoral college
I am sure there are even more.
Remember that republicans are the minority, they just show up to vote more often (and aren’t actively suppressed)
They’d still win the Presidency occasionally. They’d just have to do it by adopting policies that more voters would support.
You know - what they’re supposed to be doing.
Unpopular Fanatics vs Apathetic Majority. Conservatives refuse to change their unpopular policies and with all the crap they pull to make elections favor them, they struggle to get 50/50. If elections were made fair and representative of the population…they would never win. The only way to win in that environment is to have the more popular policies, and that is antithetical to conservativisim.
Man what I’d give for ranked choice voting, it seems like a no-brainer
There are other options as well, approval voting has several advantages over ranked choice voting. It is simpler and it there is no spoiler effect (voting for your favorite candidate will never hurt your second choice)
Some more info: https://electionscience.org/#approval-voting-explained
Thanks this is interesting!
I’ve been working with local groups trying to get it passed. It may be worth investigating if there are some near you. Donate money or time or support.
That’s awesome! I’ll have to look into it
Gotta remember this system was setup by literal slavers.
The electrical collage is way overdue to be retired. I wonder if we will have the means to actually do it.
Actually, it would be better for Republicans to try to convince the population their solutions are better instead of the BS we have now. It might help the Republican Party become somewhat normal again and then get more votes. I would love it if we could have real debates on real issues, instead of the BS we have now. I might even be a tad conservative in some areas… But right now, the choice is between Dems or Crazy Town. I think a popular vote would change politics and strategy so that you couldn’t have a Trump anymore.
I think it’s important to point out that strategies would change if the system changed so we can’t predict what the results would be.
Gerrymandering
They would still win, but they would have to shift their platform to capture the true political center rather than the center right.
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The way elections are run Is mostly up to the states. The electoral college, though, is stipulated in the Constitution.
So is a method to change the Constitution.
That really is the only way to get rid of the electoral college.
That’s not exactly true. Each state could choose to give their votes to the candidate that wins the national vote. Then the electoral college system would still exist on paper but in reality wouldn’t be relevant to the outcome.
I think it would be better to amend the Constitution. But it’s not the only way to make popular vote reality.
The states changing their electors outside their popular vote is exactly what Trump was trying to do.
That sounds scary, but you gotta be precise. Trump was trying to do that after the fact, which would be a coup d’etat. In reality, many states have reasonably made changes over time before elections. Did you know that two states aren’t winner-take-all, and that this has changed over time? Wild!
Nice try
And they’re gearing up for version 2.0. Shit’s gonna get weird in a few months.
Are you suggesting with say…an amendment?
Or we could ratio it out of existence. If we had 10,000 representatives then the EC would match the popular vote results.
Can we please just get ranked choice voting
Would be nice, but I can’t see either major political party actually following through with something that hurts their power.
Let me happily inform you that several states have varying versions of RCV.
Maine and Alaska got there through a Democratic government and a voter referendum, respectively.
Highly recommend reading this Wikipedia page.
You’ll notice a trend of Democrats and voter referendums driving RCV, and on the other hand, Republicans fighting to reverse or delay RCV laws, and entire conservative states that have BANNED it.
This isn’t a “both sides” thing.
I agree Dems are pushing it more right now
What I would hope is that ranked choice would give rise to more parties/policies/options - people running on actual platforms, not just a two party system. Then we could actually start to push the country more to the left, because as it is, the US government is generally centre right and getting dangerously close to far right.
What I worry about though is that the second the Democratic party in it’s current state sees that they are pushing far more left than they want, they’ll try to put the brakes on it again because they don’t want to lose their power.
Both sides are not the same, and I’m not trying to say they are. But pretending the Democrats are a left wing or liberal party is just not true - they have been going more to the right than the left for decades.
Either way though, if we can get ranked choice all across the US, I think that would be a phenomenal start to actually being a democracy
I’m aware of the progress, I am stating that I believe it to be a carrot that will get pulled away before it can actually make major impact on who controls the government.
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They did it in alaska very recently and now they can undo it
Yep, as soon as it became a risk to power it got taken away. It’s a treat that will always be dangled and pulled away before it can do anything major.
I meant to write they cant* undo it. They tried already but it didnt work, although there is a repeal effort that has survived some legal challeneges so it will be on the ballot in november, although i doubt it will pass
You may know this already but, in case you don’t, you can edit comments even after submitting them.
I do but you had already replied and context is important if an outside reader came along
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If you have any questions or comments about me, you can make a post to LW Support lemmy community.How we did this
In 2000 and 2016, the winners of the popular vote lost their bids for U.S. president after receiving fewer Electoral College votes than their opponents. To continue tracking how the public views the U.S. system for presidential elections, we surveyed 8,480 U.S. adults from July 10 to 16, 2023.
Everyone who took part in the current survey is a member of Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology.
Here are the questions used for this analysis, along with responses, and its methodology.
Problem is that “Majority” isn’t gonna get rid of the Electoral College. Because Electoral College. Unpopulated states still have excess control.
I wonder if Work-From Home culture might someday shift demographics of some of these small states.
I can already hear it…
wEr,E a REpUbLiC nOt A dEMoCrOcy111
Alternatively, with a simple bill we can establish an EC so large or doesn’t effectively matter. We would just repeal the inter-war bill freezing the size of the House of Representatives and set the ratio to something that means even Montana gets 20 EC votes.
Alternatively, with a simple bill we can establish an EC so large or doesn’t effectively matter.
Well it’s still up to the states to determine how electors are determined. That’s because the president was intentionally designed to not be a prime minister (speaker of the house) because they are intentionally not elected in the same way as the house
In theory a state could decide to just have the legislature vote. But in reality most, if not all states, have constitutional rules about having to have an election.
But that’s a tangential consideration to expanding the EC. If someone needed 5,000 votes for the EC then it would be very hard for the middle states to swing that election with their land, no matter how they selected their electors. And at the end of the day, that’s the point. People should vote, not land. We already have the Senate that gives equal representation to each state and acts as a representative for land. There’s no reason to have the EC doing the same and it wasn’t the EC’s original purpose.
I admit I have a ideological bias in favor of the current system because it makes a full sweep more difficult, limiting the federal government.
But,
There’s no reason to have the EC doing the same and it wasn’t the EC’s original purpose.
Yes it partially was. The point was to have the president basically be the middle point between state representation in the Senate, and popularish representation in the House.
It was a compromise but not between the Senate and House. Otherwise they wouldn’t have involved the people and states at all. It was a compromise between the House and a popular election. Between Congress and the President being too close and a democratic mob running things. It was also part of their idea that land ownership mattered.
But nothing in the Constitution requires us to remain tied to the land and the house was supposed to keep expanding. It expanded slower and slower over time though until it straight up stopped expanding in the 1930’s. Representation in the house was supposed to be far more personal, you were supposed to be able to sit down and talk with your rep.
That’s why the EC has started diverging from the popular ballot. We’re too big for the current cap on representatives to effectively represent. With the original ratio we’d have around 10,000 members of Congress. Even a tenth of that would go a long way to restoring the electoral system and breaking the power dynamics in Congress that favor mega donors.
It was a compromise but not between the Senate and House.
I wasn’t saying it was. I was saying it was designed to be representative of the people(also represented by the house) and the states(also represented by the senate).
You’re thinking of the 3/5ths and the large state / small state compromises. At no point did the founders want the state interests to vote for president. It was either the people directly or the people indirectly.
At no point did the founders want the state interests to vote for president.
No, you’re simply wrong
This is exactly where we should be focusing when this pops up. If PA decided and the pending states go through, that’s all you need. Hell, with the pending states, you only need 11 more electoral votes for it to to be enacted.
and it would come into effect only when it would guarantee that outcome
And it will never budge above that line. They should have just done it anyways. Most of the votes to decide is better than all of them.
They should do it anyway, but limit it to the winner of the popular vote within the states that are part of the pact.
Then there’d be several states that would realize they’d have more influence by contributing their popular votes to the pact than by sending their electors to the College independently (and in any case a candidate would still have to virtually sweep all the non-pact states to win the College without winning the pact).
I think enacting it early would just make it look like a Democratic party alliance. That’s roughly who the enacted states are currently and it would dissuade other states who might benefit or believe in the popular vote from joining.
Right now, it’s in the abstract interest of Texas to join the Compact, because a popular vote would increase their influence, but if the Compact involved just being forced to vote blue indefinitely without gaining any influence, then it’s a bad deal. “Doing what the majority of the people” want is a lot easier a concept to sell than “doing what the majority of blue states want”.
You could make the argument that if it was solely down to the popular vote, the last Republican president would have been George Bush in 1988.
The only Republican since then to win the popular vote was Bush II for his second term in 2004, but it’s arguable that since Gore would have been the incumbent he might not have won that one. Plus there are a lot of hypotheticals like whether 9/11 could have been prevented under Gore, or if it had happened if the response was less aggressive, or if Bush II would have even run again after losing the first time etc. So it’s impossible to say but certainly conceivable that Gore would have gone for two terms IMO.
I wonder who would have been the opponent in 2004 if Gore had won? This was back when losers didn’t try running for election again, so not Dubya. Maybe McCain since he did in 2008?
Yeah I think McCain would be a likely candidate, he was the runner-up in the primaries in 2000 against Bush II so he was definitely thinking about it back then.
Maybe Mitt Romney? He was pretty popular for a while iirc. I think if 9/11 still happened in that timeline though, it probably would be McCain due to his military proximity. Hard to say if Gore’s presidency would have caught/prevented 9/11 or not. It’s possible flying alone would have been impacted by the climate portion of his platform.
Gore won twice in the good timeline. Sucks we have to live in this one.
You march to infinity in the timeline you’ve got, not the one you want.
I could make an argument that the conservatives could still be competitive in this alternate timeline, and would not necessarily need to fear the popular vote pact.
All they would need to do is change up their platform to capture more votes from outside their current demographic. But that might require them to stop being cartoon villains, and I’m not sure they’re capable of taking their party back from the Trump ideology.
I get it, but then only like 4 counties in the whole country decide an election.
Counties dont vote. Individuals vote. Even if you’re in LA youre still one person that gets one vote regardless of how those around you vote.
…if you batched the popular vote into counties and made each county winner-take-all.
Which is not what anyone is suggesting.
Oh no! The majority of the people get to decide an election in a democracy! The horror!
You just described the system we have now.
Not true, heres the county map from 2016. https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2016_Presidential_Election_by_County.svg
Land can’t vote, people can. Your argument sucks.
So only people that live in large dense cities voice’s count. Got it.
If presidents were elected via popular vote, that would be the literal definition of “we the people”. One person, one vote.
My vote has no practical effect since I’m not in a swing state.
Get rid of the EC and my vote suddenly matters just as much as a vote from PA.
As opposed to now where only like 4 empty plots of dirt decide elections…?
Not only that, but if the election is close, the entire country gets re-counted.
The quickest way to fix the electoral college is not to fix it at all, but to increase the size of Congress. Congress used to increase in size every year, until the 1920s, when they couldn’t decide on how many seats to add. In 1920, there were about 250k people in an average district. Now there are over 750k, which is larger than some of the smallest states.
Congress sets its own size, and this fix can be done without any amendment.
that doesn’t solve the issue with the senate; where every state regardless of size has two.
No, that won’t be solved without a constitutional amendment, though. Increasing the size of Congress can help mitigate the issue, and just takes an act of Congress .
That’s the entire purpose of the Senate. It is functioning as designed and that is not an issue.
Congress is supposed to be two halves, one where every State is on equal footing (Senate), and one half where a larger population gets a larger voice (House).
Just because it’s designed that way doesn’t make it a non-issue. It was designed to be shitty and I’d really like a not-shitty government, thank you.
This doesn’t really fix anything other than the small state counting bias. You still have states that are entirely ignored because they’re reliably >50% red/blue and you still have a small number of close states that are the only ones who matter. There’s still a high likelihood that you’ll have presidents elected who lost the popular vote merely because of inefficient arrangements of voters.
Which 4 counties contain even close to a majority of the population between them?
Ranked choice.
Fix gerrymandering.
Popular vote.
If you don’t want this, you’re simply a sore loser. You dont want democracy, you want a boys club.
Voting holiday and mandatory voting. The second one is a bit much, but it could be heavily incentivised (tax break?).
The issue with gerrymandering is that there is basically no way around it because all borders are arbitrary.
They could be less arbitrary and more mathematical. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mathematicians-who-want-to-save-democracy/
My understanding is that’s just finding how “compact” a shape the districts are. There’s still plenty of gerrymandering to be done in the positioning and the shapes themselves. Furthermore, why does that necessarily make the most sense?
Ie, splitting a city(with a rural area in a crescent shape around it) into two equal districts down the middle each with a sizable urban and rural population(say this gave 45% rural, 55% urban in each of these districts which is pretty reasonable), vs giving the city its own district and the rural area its own district. The first option may be more “compact” but in my opinion would lead to unfair under representation of the rural voters- same as if the demographics were swapped. Districts are supposed to “represent a community” not just be compact.
And urban/rural divide is just an easy example.
This is one of the reasons multi-member, proportional districts make sense. Unfortunately, I think that would take a constitutional amendment for the house of representatives.
Actually, seeing you’re talking about the House elections, yeah I agree that would probably make sense, though it could over-double the size of the House. (And I don’t know that I agree that’s a good thing)
This is one of the reasons multi-member, proportional districts make sense.
Yeah I agree. The issue I have with that is just I don’t think it would be very practical, especially for smaller states. The Kentucky legislature now only has 138 members, and as far as I know nobody knows any of them.The main drawback of the scheme is that you’re usually voting for a party rather than a person. So, not knowing who any of the people actually fits in pretty well into it.
The main drawback of the scheme is that you’re usually voting for a party rather than a person.
Eh, if you had like a “top 3” system then you would be voting for a person. But I agree- voting solely being voting for a party is something I oppose(and why I prefer the US system to parliamentary systems)
We’ve had GIS for decades. This is an easy algorithmic solve.
The simplest is the shortest-straight-line method. Draw district boundaries with the shortest straight line that divides the population appropriately.
Funnily enough, one of the biggest hurdles to algorithmic districting is the Voting Rights Act, which actually requires some level of gerrymandering to ensure representation of minorities. A algorithm may randomly split a community of color into 4 districts in violation of the VRA.
Heres my example from another comment:
Ie, splitting a city(with a rural area in a crescent shape around it) into two equal districts down the middle each with a sizable urban and rural population(say this gave 45% rural, 55% urban in each of these districts which is pretty reasonable), vs giving the city its own district and the rural area its own district. The first option may be more “compact” but in my opinion would lead to unfair under representation of the rural voters- same as if the demographics were swapped. Districts are supposed to “represent a community” not just be compact.
want a boys club.
*white, straight, christian, republican, cis, landowning boys club
See: Jackson Wyoming
Well, and I mean this in the nicest way, duh.
I don’t think there is anything obvious about this, but ok.
Shit. That’s why I can’t buy a home/land. Not a Repugnacan.
How do you achieve this, when by and large neither party seems to want to move in this direction?
I do think it is entirely possible, it just requires money. There is a way to defeat our two-party system and it’s by running a third party that gets the popular vote.
If someone were running on the platforms of:
Corporations can’t own residential real estate.
Members of Congress are not allowed to own or trade stock in any capacity, private or public.
Socialized single payer healthcare. Not rocket science.
Comcast, Verizon, every other ISP gets absolved by the United States government and is no longer a for-profit competitive agency,
CEOs are forbidden by law to be paid more than 1,000 times more than their lowest paid employee.
Minimum wage is $30 an hour. Entry level IT roles, entry level teaching positions now pay about $85,000.
Taxes are now included in sales prices everywhere.
No merchant is allowed to change the price of any product for at least one fiscal quarter.
Buying or purchasing means owning. No company is allowed to tamper with what you own in any way shape or form. They will be held fully liable for the total cost of damages in the form of cash recompense. Damages can exceed the price of the goods themselves and include the luxuries provided by the service if terminated.
No government agency may have any say in an individual’s reproductive rights in any way shape or form.
Individuals earning more than $1 million per year will be taxed at 99.99% of every dollar they earn beyond 1 million.
Corporations are not people. They CAN be tried in the court of law, as people, for crimes that entity committed when it had personhood.
Wealthy individuals without an income will be taxed at a rate of 10% of their calculated net worth as per their assets, annually. These figures will be determined by an average of no fewer than 5 independent auditing firms. These auditors all most be able to show their lack of connection to the taxable entity being audited.
Elected officials are not allowed to have accounts in their own name on private or publicly traded platforms. There will be a government social media platform where these individuals may partake in social media. The public at large is also allowed to be on this platform, but they must register using a government provided email address, which will be provided from now on at birth.
End gerrymandering
End electoral college
Ranked choice for all elections…
What am I missing? Ticketmaster? Probably plenty more…
I guess what I’m saying is the two-party system can be fractured if a large enough amount of the population can wholly agree on policies not being put forth by the two party system. I’d say we’re getting fucking close to critical mass here.
The closest to this is PSL, the issue is that they have to fight against FPTP and moneyed interests.
Yeah, that’s why I opened with saying it just takes money.
The quantity of money owned by the Bourgeoisie is far in excess of the money owned by the Proletariat, unfortunately, and the State won’t willingly concede power
It does not take equal money to spread a message.
The quality of the message carries a lot of weight. How well it resonates with the populace, and how well you can spread it.
By all means, join PSL and try to build that up, then. The good thing about PSL is that they don’t believe Electoralism is the answer, and do other forms of praxis as well.
It’s easier to remove or even modify the Reapportionment Act of 1929 to enlarge the total number of electoral votes in the college than it is to remove the Electoral College itself.
Ah, but is a significant enough amount of that majority located in the lowest population states to make it matter?
Is that a threat? Do we need to have government sponsored people movement into less populated states from left voting cities? Because I’ll fucking vote for that.
You can bus all the immigrants you want to cities in blue states, and in equal exchange, we will bus lefty to sparsely populated states to render your votes blue.
Carpetbaggers of America, do your civic duty!
From the article, maybe not:
Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are far more likely than Republicans and Republican leaners to support moving to a popular vote system for presidential elections (82% vs. 47%).
I think the issue is if we get close to enacting this, partisan politicians will flood the channel with anti-popular vote propaganda, because they know every step towards a fairer system harms their chances.
So how do we get a constitutional amendment passed to do this?
Especially with the republicans only able to win the presidency through the electoral college. They’re gonna cling to that shit with their dying breath.
We actually don’t need a constitutional amendment to do it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
NaPoVoInterCo :3
this poll may show that Americans want electoral college gone, but if you look at where they answered, you can instead count the answers given by state delegates and then it turns out Americans love the electoral college!
