Comment by drzaiusapelord | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drzaiusapelord | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The 2016 polling models were pretty good, or at least, as good as they are usually[1]. The problem is, it was a very close race by electoral college standards. Trump ultimately won by 80,000 votes in three states in an election with 136m votes cast[2]. So the 'deciding' votes were just 0.06% of the vote total.

I think we can have it both ways. Voter suppression is being done and we have statistical heats in competitive races due to how poorly designed the Electoral College is. This mix is pretty tough to work with.

Probably more reason to abandon the Electoral College outright. The popular candidate lost even though she have 3m more votes. How can pollsters be expected to work properly with such an irrational system? How can they predict where .06% percent of a vote will swing spread across three competitive states?

[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-state-of-the-polls-...

[2] http://www.weeklystandard.com/the-election-came-down-to-7774...

It would take a Constitutional Amendment to get rid of the Electoral College. That’s 2/3rd of both houses of Congress and 2/3rds of the State legislatures.

Better to call a third Constitutional Convention.

There is another way to get a similar effect.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...

has something changed since a bunch of ladies got a constitutional amendment passed banning everyone's favorite beverage and the federal government's main source of income?

say what you will about the temperance movement, they made shit happen.

Lawrence Lessig is trying to challenge not the Electoral College directly but the winner-takes-all way of selecting electors in court, arguing that the Bush v Gore precedent of equal protection taking precedent over the states right to run elections as they see fit should apply also to the winne-takes-all selection of electors.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-time-has-come-reform-the-e...

I have no idea what the chances of success are, but it's an interesting argument.

The unfortunate irony is that 2/3 of state legislatures will never vote to abolish the electoral college in favor of the popular vote, because a vast majority of states get relatively more voting power than they would with the popular vote, since every state gets a minimum of 3 electoral votes no matter how small their population is. This comes at the expense of the few most populous states (e.g. California), which are severely disenfranchised.

I wonder if we will ever see an effort to exploit this by having the ruling party start splitting the states friendly to them into multiple smaller states in order to get more electoral votes and more senate seats on their side. It seems that creating a new state requires a 2/3 majority in both houses and the signature of the president [1], so this seems unlikely to come into play any time soon.

[1]: https://people.howstuffworks.com/new-state-in-us.htm

My own state of Vermont has signed on to this [1] particular proposition, so no, not every tiny state demands that it have a voice disproportionate with its size.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...

Hawaii, too.

If the electoral college did go away, I wonder if it would end up actually increasing the animosity between the coasts and 'fly over country'. Fair or not, the current system does appear to serve as a bit of a pressure relief valve. Allowing things to escalate to the level where the urban/rural divide becomes so great that one or both sides decides it's time to break the country apart is unlikely to have a better outcome than the last time we arrived at this point, even if on a different path and for different reasons.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com