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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

> That we should ignore the votes of two of the largest states because they don't agree with you?

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.

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Why should the coal miner get more of a voice than the guy who lives in a city? They're both citizens, right?

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!!"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

So the alternative is tyranny of the minority?

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.

Lots of decisions in life are arbitrary, or based on fuzzy moral standings.

The U.S. should move to a political system where coastal city-dwelling individuals have 4x the voting power of people who live inland and in rural areas.

It could be argued that 100 people living in 3 counties have a greater diversity of concerns and opinions than 100 people sharing an apartment complex.

Is "diversity of concerns" a primary goal of democracy? Obviously for issues that directly affect a local region, I do think those should be handled by a local government. The people in the apartment complex probably ought to have different rules than people in rural counties, each reflecting the concerns of the local population.

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.

From your description it sounds like thats the only time it makes sense, to me at least. Ie, the President should hopefully be working for the whole country, not just the most dense areas.

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.

> From your description it sounds like thats the only time it makes sense, to me at least. Ie, the President should hopefully be working for the whole country, not just the most dense areas.

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.

Who cares how diverse their opinions are?

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.

It's not arbitrary, or about whose votes matter more or population density at all. It's because the United States is actually a union of what was, before the founding of the country as we know it, relatively sovereign states. By joining the union they were giving up much of that sovereignty. It was good for the union that more states joined, so the great compromise was to allow states who were fearful of being dominated by foreign opinions to be granted additional votes just for being 1 state. So Rhode Island residents don't just vote as individuals - they get some votes proportionally and some votes for being a member state of the union. How do so many people educated in the United States not know about that compromise?

I know the reasons the electoral college was chosen. I still don't think it's necessarily a good idea, especially given the modern role of the President.

Oh I thought you had an erroneous understanding since, you know, you posted an inaccurate strawman in your previous comment.

The minority already has constitutional protections to live, love, worship, engage in commerce, employ speech and association, without interference from the majority. Their rights are already guaranteed by the constitution.

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.

Why draw the lines by state? Wouldn't income or race be better dividers?

The design of the electoral college was not to prevent influence by larger states. That's the function of the Senate. The electoral college exists in part to enable the 3/5ths compromise and in part to allow the vote of the people to be changed by someone who is theoretically more sophisticated.

So then, America now is TexasOklahoma? If those two states went blue, Hillary would have won. This argument is extremely weak.

> so your hipster javascript developer gets the same weight as a coal miner in rural Ohio

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.

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