Hacker News Reader

Comment by kem | Hacker News Reader

This is why to me the electoral college is the weak point of the US political system. Twice in recent memory, the majority winner was not put in office. So it's a double whammy: not only is the government not representing the majority of the citizens, it adds to a sense of futility among the citizens that even when they do their duty to vote, and a majority agrees with them, that it's not enough.

The electoral college needs to go. It should have gone before. What is the point of a popular vote if the majority outcome is ignored?

View on HN

>This is why to me the electoral college is the weak point of the US political system. Twice in recent memory, the majority winner was not put in office.

When the pedants tell you the US isn't a democracy, but rather a republic... well, they're right. The electoral college is working as intended.

As to the "point" of the popular vote: there isn't one. The national popular vote plays no role whatsoever in the US federal system. It's just a set of numbers to fill time during election coverage.

Sure. The electoral college needs to go. Pointing to the popular vote can show reinforce how close the vote was. That said, the plurality winner in a system that uses the electoral college isn't by itself evidence that the same result would be obtained in an election without the electoral college.

Campaigns are run knowing the electoral votes are what matter. Voters vote knowing the electoral college is in place. We know some voters stay home because of the EC. We also know people trade votes because of the EC.

I repeat: I'm not arguing to keep the electoral college in place. I think it's highly likely it should be removed for a lot of other reasons (disproportionate elector/population ratios being a good one). I'm pushing back on the idea that we'd necessarily see the same result in an election without it.

The electoral college isn't a bug, it's a design feature. Cf The Federalist Papers.

A fundamental problem for democracy is how to keep it from degenerating into mob rule. The EC is one of those "checks and balances" mechanisms for a country that is, after all, a collection of individual states.

In its current form, the electoral college does not perform its original role of preventing mob rule. Electors vote in accordance with the popular vote of their state (this is only required by some states; but still almost never happens, as the parties pick their electors).

What ends up happening is that the electoral college just turns into a weird way of counting the popular votes, where some votes count more then others (specifically, voters in less populace states have a bigger vote; and voters in more divided states are more likely to have a meaningful vote).

Many (including myself) would argue that Donald Trump is precisly the failure mode that the electoral collage was designed to prevent.

I disagree. The fact is that Trump convinced a lot of people in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to vote for him in what Democrats thought was their "firewall". Firewall appears to be political jargon for "we can take those people's votes for granted." Former President Bill Clinton thought that strategy was insane but his concerns were dismissed. Sic transit gloria pooheads.

Realistically, Clinton was always going to carry California. If she had made fewer fundraising trips to the west coast and more campaign visits to the Rust Belt states (without calling people there "deplorables") she might have won convincingly. Instead we got an electoral college message from the Rust Belt telling CA, MA, & NY that despite their population advantage they don't get to dictate for the rest of the country. That's pretty much the way it's supposed to work.

The Federalist Papers are propaganda; the design of the electoral college -- like the per-state representation in the Senate, and the 3/5 compromise in apportionment of House seats, on top of both of which the EC rested -- was to protect slavery by overrepresenting slave states. But that's not the kind of thing you put in the marketing material.

Insofar as it was to prevent "mob rule", it was to prevent the values of the majority of voting citizens from overwhelming the particular minority that was keeping humans as chattels.

It's funny that people who have no problem treating modern campaign ads as self-serving propaganda that needs to be examined critically treat the 18th century equivalent as if it were something more noble.

The Federalist Papers (and the Anti-Federalist Papers for that matter) were public attempts to persuade people it's true. At the time they were aimed at the people of New York on the issue of ratifying the Constitution -- arguably a moot issue given that by the time New York voted 9 other states had already settled the issue.

Casting the arguments as propaganda in favor of slavery seems a reach.

The Federalist papers were trying to sell the whole Constitution -- including bits like the Electoral College and the unequal representation in both houses of Congress that were sops to the slave stakes at the expense of states like New York -- to the people of New York. Needless to say, it would have been an extremely poor sales technique to advertise that the elements that were designed to advantage themail slave states at the expense of states like New York were designed for that purpose.

It just so happened that slave states were lower in population. As slavery waned in terms of population, a mechanism to equalize this was still seen as needed.

Eliminating the electoral collage wouldn't change things at all. Obama got the popular vote, and roughly half the country saw an existential threat take power. An extra 2.2 million votes for Trump, giving him the popular vote, wouldn't change the fact that the other half of the country sees an existential threat with him taking power. The country is split into two factions that hate each other, and neither side likes democracy when they lose. Winning the battle is too important to leave up to democracy.

Winning the battle is too important to leave up to democracy.

What would recommend in it's place? That quote attributed to Churchill comes to mind: "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

It is not ignored. It is biased into a structure that gives more weight to how people in smaller states vote.

Yes, states used to really be a thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com