> because most individuals have virtually no influence on national outcomes.
How can you say this after Trump was elected?
How can you say this after Trump was elected?
He's not an outsider. He's absolutely a member of the elite.
But I never said I was compared to Trump, I was stating that common people absolutely made a significant impact to this election against the wishes of the incumbents
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_Unit...
Ahh, yeah. That's the point. So America isn't CaliforNewYork.
The electoral college isn't a scam, it exists to bring balance, so your hipster javascript developer gets the same weight as a coal miner in rural Ohio.
They both get to vote on their state, city, and county stuff. Why should the guy who lives in the middle of nowhere get to say "my vote's worth 50x what yours is, sucker!!"?
Getting a way-outsized vote in federal elections is undemocratic, and doesn't protect the minority from "tyranny" so much as give it outsized power, just as a quirk of geography.
It doesn't reassure me that we give much more weight to a minority of voters just because they live in less densely populated areas. That's completely arbitrary.
But there's only one President for the whole country, for better or for worse. It doesn't make sense to me to apply this idea here.
I guess another way to look at it is that the president is responsible for such a large area, that population is far less of a concern (in my view). S/he should know not to set laws that focus on a locality, because the states can do a far better job at that.
I don't want the president to set laws for me (just an example) focusing on people in downtown LA or NYC - i don't live there, my world is very different. I want my president to consider the whole country, and let the states/counties handle raw locality.
But that's not the alternative proposed. The alternative proposed is that a human in a sparsely populated area gets MORE influence than a human in a densely populated area. If you go with the national popular vote idea, the President should be the candidate who got the most votes by humans without regard for the population density where they live.
> I guess another way to look at it is that the president is responsible for such a large area, that population is far less of a concern (in my view).
Population density is an extremely meaningless demographic to adjust for. Seriously, why does that matter? Sure, you can show a map of the US and see that most land area went Republican even when the Democratic candidate wins, but if you think about it for a moment, why does land area matter? Surely no one would go so far as to suggest that every unit of land area should have the same influence on the election (i.e. you get to vote once for every acre of land you own).
> I don't want the president to set laws for me (just an example) focusing on people in downtown LA or NYC - i don't live there, my world is very different. I want my president to consider the whole country, and let the states/counties handle raw locality.
That's a reasonable desire, but how does giving people in sparsely populated areas MORE influence help this? It may help you if you live in a sparsely populated area, but it doesn't help the goal of having the president consider the entire country.
If I moved out to the countryside, should I suddenly get 10x more voting power over you, for decisions about running the country?
Cause that's what's happening.
Except it doesn't do that. It gives the farmer in Wyoming more power than either.
And no, it wasn't designed to be this way. Not to this extent.
Except we're not pretending like they don't matter. We're pretending they have a proportionate say. Regardless of wether your hypothetical proportion would be sound or not the proportion just isn't based on the size of the economy of a state.
Businesses work that way though.
You're free to petition for a CAexit or NYexit if you desire. Not that that'd happen either...
Well... they don't have a proportionate say, if by "proportionate" you mean "in proportion to their population". They have less say then that.
But they also don't have a proportionate say if you mean "in proportion to their only being one state out of fifty". They have more say than that.
All of which is by design. Whining about it now is just sour grapes. Now, if people had been complaining about it since they first learned about it in junior high civics class, then I'd be more inclined to grant them that they have a principled position...
If elections were based on the popular vote, then the candidates would have been here campaigning, which might have dramatically changed the vote in WA. Not enough to turn it red, but a big chunk.
My point is that changing the rules on how Presidents are elected will change how they are campaigned, the platforms of the candidates, etc. One cannot assume a voter tally under one scheme will be the same as the tally under another - not at all.
Power, I'll grant you. They've been "exporting pollution" by having power plants built in other states for a while now...
Well I would imagine that deal would have to be revisited in light of a secession, no?
There is no winning here. You either ignore the voice of CA or the voice of less populated states. You're arguing to ignore a voice, just the same as it is now.
States are arbitrary dividers, it's silly to think there's some great reason for allowing people in some random groups (states) have much more voting power than others. What if the dividers were based on income, race, etc? Wouldn't even that be more reasonable?
It's only when we all vote together that there is power.