Comment by criley2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by criley2 | Hacker News Reader

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>For the land of the free, some US rules are a shock to me.

A few things.

1. We are the Land of Liberty, and liberty is described by our founders as "Freedom from onerous government intrusion", not anarchy. People get hung-up on 'freedom' and don't understand that Liberty is the core American value, which is called "freedom" but which is really Liberty.

2. US Freedom is misinterpreted to mean individual freedom at all costs. US Freedom is not just individual freedom, it's local rule and local soverignity. People often don't realize that the US has a dual-sovereign system where States and the Federal government share soverignity. This is a critical factor in "freedom".

Going further, counties, towns and local governments have a lot more freedom to rule as they please than you might think. You'd think, it should all be top down federal law to ensure equity, but in reality, every county is it's own fiefdom, especially in more lax states, as it is states that reign in local governments, not the feds.

So, when you consider American liberty to mean respecting individual, local, state and federal authority, and not just individual total freedom, you can see a system designed to put lots of power in the hands of local governments, which actually creates localized zones of not-so-freedom!

After all, the US is free enough where counties and cities can enforce a lot of silly things!

> US Freedom is misinterpreted to mean individual freedom at all costs. US Freedom is not just individual freedom, it's local rule and local soverignity.

Not even that local. With the few exceptions from the Constitution, U.S. states wield supreme power and can override any actual local attempt at governing.

Freedom is freedom for the States, not the people.

This is correct. Or was, until article 1 section 8 and the 14th amendment were reinterpreted to mean the 10th amendment de facto obsolete.

Which is crazy btw. I hear a lot of people saying "I'm not a tenther". Like, oh really, I didn't know I could own slaves again just by being "not a thirteenther"

Humans are weird.

> Not even that local. With the few exceptions from the Constitution

Disagree. A perfect example is the subject of the article you're commenting on - zoning laws.

Zoning power is delegated from states to municipalities, but this is not required. States can and do impose limits.

> People often don't realize that the US has a dual-sovereign system where States and the Federal government share soverignity. This is a critical factor in "freedom".

Every complaint about the Electoral College is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of this aspect of our system of government.

Living in NYC now after 30+ years in Missouri, I'm more convinced than ever that this is a critically important check on mob rule and that the implementation of a nationwide popular vote would be a disaster for our democracy.

The Electoral College is a terrible system for trying to resist mob rule. It was never designed for such a thing and trying to backport that reason onto it is dumb bullshit.

I'm inclined to agree, but can you say more about that?

The EC was arguably created (in it's existing format) to protect the interests of southern, slave-owning states. At the time, roughly analogous to resisting tyranny of the majority (as the urban north had more people, especially as slaves weren't fully recognized as people), but not exactly.

And we should not forget that the balance of the EC (as it relates to the ratio of Senators and Congressmen to residents) has swung hugely in favor of rural states. As the number of residents per district has grown, with a capped number of Congressmen, states like CA and TX have effectively lost representation. If we adjusted the size of a Congressional district down to match the population of the smallest state, and increased the size of the house accordingly, the large states would pick up quite a few Congressmen, and therefore Electors.

1. I take your point regarding the EC's pro-slavery origins, but it doesn't invalidate the larger purpose. People can wield good tools for bad causes.

2. I also take your point about proportionality, but, again, it doesn't invalidate the larger purpose (nor is it an argument for a nationwide popular vote). If the proportions are wrong, then the correction is to adjust the proportions.

At its inception, the EC was a parliament solely elected to pick the president; as a result, not all the electors in a state elected the same person. This started changing in the 1800s; states that wanted to increase campaign time in their state moved toward the winner-takes-all method, which then every state had to move to if they wanted to matter equally.

If EC votes in a state were allocated according to popular vote, then the existing system would be a lot fairer. Proportional EC essentially reduces the advantage of campaigning in swing states, since many more states become swing states due to the relative ease of swinging a single EV vs. a whole state. And it manages to do so without completely screwing over smaller states.

I did some napkin math a while ago for this, but if this was the case, Bush v Gore would've been decisively for Gore, Bush v Kerry would have been as close as OTL Bush v Gore, and Trump's margin of victory shrinks to about 20 electoral votes from 77.

I explored the same thing but got different results from you. Bush v. Gore almost a dead tie and 2016 a slight Hillary win.

http://mrgris.com/blog/2016-12-06-538-problems-but-a-swing-s...

"Back of the napkin" was quite literal. Staring at tables on the internet makes you go blind if you do it hard enough.

You pretty much made the case for why claiming that the EC was not intended to prevent the tyranny of the majority is an inaccurate statement.

You need the state level contests to moderate elections. Just because reactionaries control one party today doesn't change that. The country would have been a shambles if the northern political machines of the 20th century had unchecked power.

>The EC was arguably created (in it's existing format) to protect the interests of southern, slave-owning states. At the time, roughly analogous to resisting tyranny of the majority (as the urban north had more people, especially as slaves weren't fully recognized as people),

I don't know that this is true.

1789, 1st Congress

Slave States (40 representatives)

Delaware 1

New Jersey 4

New York 6

Maryland 6

Georgia 3

North Carolina 5

South Carolina 5

Virginia 10

Free States (25 representatives)

Connecticut 5

Massachusetts 8

New Hampshire 3

Pennsylvania 8

Rhode Island 1

New York and New Jersey had pretty small numbers of slaves, so while they did allow slavery, they were more politically aligned with the free states.

Another factor is that there was a much larger disparity in numbers of voters than there was in number of people. Many of the southern states had very restrictive requirements (such as needing to own a large amount of property) to be allowed to vote while while northern states had less restrictive requirements. In the 1789 election[0] Massachusetts had more than four times as many votes cast as Virginia while having fewer electoral votes and New Hampshire had more votes cast than Virginia while having less than half as many electoral vote. Massachusetts and New Hampshire alone had more than half of the votes cast in that election.

The biggest reason for the electoral college was to accommodate the aristocratic tendencies of some of the states. Contrary to what is often claimed, it wasn't intended to prevent the large states from dominating the small states; ironically it was the exact opposite. They wanted to prevent a tiny state like New Hampshire from being able to out vote, Virginia, the largest state.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_e...

The southern states were counting 3/5 of each slave. Without the 3/5 Compromise and the EC, the North would have dominated Congress and the WH.

Its a remnant from a time when the US was a collection of states instead of a single country. The proverbial change of "the US are" to "the US is". The President is elected by the States just as Senators used to be. It was not about individual representation in the federal government, but representation by the States. This is what the EC was for. The States elect the President.

The US started out as a federation more like how Switzerland is. But over time more and more authority was placed into the federal government and more and more cultural identity was placed there as well. So there are vestiges of government that persist from that earlier time.

Any idea why centralisation happened to the US but not to Switzerland?

> Its a remnant from a time when the US was a collection of states instead of a single country.

This is stated as fact, but it's begging the question, of course, because the tension described is exactly what we're talking about. The United States still are a collection of states, to varying degrees, and the degrees are exactly what's under scrutiny here.

That's not a remnant from another time; it's the central conflict, still relevant today.

Respectfully, the notion that the coasts, by virtue of their larger population, should set policy for smaller, more rural states is dumb bullshit.

The Electoral College isn't a perfect system, and I'm not opposed to defining a set of rules to take its place that explicitly codify its federalist intentions. It doesn't have to be the EC.

But the alternative is emphatically not a nationwide popular vote, which, again, would be an unmitigated disaster.

The question is, if you’re going to design a system where 1 person != 1 vote, how can you argue that it is in any way more fair for someone’s vote to count double (or more) simply because they have chosen to live in a sparsely populated area? Why is basing it on the local population density a good method of deciding the strength of a vote?

Because the United States is a collection of states. This piece seems to be missing from your analysis. It's not about rural vs urban. It's about being in a different state. That still matters!

An analogy:

Imagine a subdivision with 10 houses. Nine of those houses have a single person living in them. One house has a family of 15. When we go to vote on new rules in the subdivision, the unit of voting is the house. We don't let the family of 15 control the entire block.

It doesn't matter that this means those 15 people get the same vote as all the single people, because that's not the voting unit. The logical unit is the house. They can vote within their house about policy within the house, but they vote as a group on neighborhood policy.

This is federalism.

The unit is the state. Missourians combine to form a vote, just as Californians combine to form a vote, and so on. Individuals within the state vote individually on issues within the state. But they don't vote as individuals on national policy. Their votes are aggregated by the state in which they reside.

If this seems odd, it's only because modern Americans have largely stopped thinking of the United States as, well, a set of united states. But that's exactly what they are.

In 1850, the year California became a state, its population made up 0.4% of the country.

Today, Californians are 12% of the US population. It's just an accident of history that all those people happen to count as one "state" – if it were to join the union today as a collection of states of the same relative size as 1850 California, that would be 30 states. If it were to split into individual states each with the population of today's Wyoming, that would be 67 states.

So yes, the unit of federalism is the state. But the way state lines are drawn are largely an accident of history, so state-based representation feels pretty arbitrary.

This is a bad analogy on so many levels:

- The direct proximity and very small population allows changes to be discussed in person and in detail. A citizen of a nation is not able to discuss changes with his/her fellow citizens and develop anything meaningful out of those discussions due to this inability.

- The types of policy changes a small block of houses would vote on is almost NIL, with maybe an exception for HOAs.

- Your're analogy doesn't consider that that house of 15 people generates 90%[1] of the GPD of the subdivision. This isn't to say votes should be based on wealth generation, but rather to remind you that there's so much wealth generation there because of the larger population, and it's in the interest of everyone to create policies that facilitate the growth of the GPD (and policies that will attract and allow intelligent people of all nationalities and backgrounds)

- A family of 15 is still two parents, who count as two votes, not 15.

[1] 15/24 = 63% --> 63% * 50(states) = 31 states. The top 31 states generates 90% of the GPD

> - A family of 15 is still two parents, who count as two votes, not 15.

As a sort of meta-point: it’s never useful to point out the ways in which analogies fail in this way. [0] You know exactly what is meant by the analogy, as does everyone else. This isn’t responsive or helpful. All analogies are leaky.

In general, I’d encourage you to try to find the ways in which an analogy may elucidate. Anybody with an ounce of motivation can note the ways in which they don’t. If you start with that motivation, you’ll succeed every time, to no particular end.

[0] All this does is send us into a back-and-forth where I shore up the analogy by specifying that the 15 are all adults, and then specifying that, yes, in this neighborhood that's allowed, and so on, until eventually we've hashed out every pointless detail of the electoral system in this fictional town.

> If this seems odd, it's only because modern Americans have largely stopped thinking of the United States as, well, a set of united states. But that's exactly what they are.

Yes, this is exactly my point. The EC comes from an earlier time when the US are instead of the US is. But that has clearly changed. Its a vestige of a different form of governance. The power of government derives from the people, not the past. How people currently view the US is how the government should operate.

So using the EC as some excuse for resistance against mob rule is not only against its original intended purpose but also against what people actually want currently. People want the US to be viewed as the identity of the country, not the individual separate countries. People want to elect the President, they don't want the States to.

Right, but I want to convince people that they're wrong to want this, which is why I'm arguing that they're wrong to want this.

Im not too familiar with politics, so this might be wrong, but I think both systems cause the same problem. With the EC, the vote ends up hinging on a few swing states. AND, since most states use a winner-takes-all arrangement [1], this means the swing states (smaller population) end up the policy makers.

About two thirds of the population lives on the coast, and this grows every year. It doesn't make sense that each coastal person has only 2/3 (and decreasing) of a vote. Or, rather, it doesn't make sense that they don't have any vote because the votes are all in the swing states.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swing_state#Criticism

EDIT: Looks like someone replied with a similar argument while I was typing this up

Well, it (along with the structure of the Senate, the 3/5 rule, and other features of the Constitution) was intended to protect the institution of slavery from expected popular moves to abolish it (a role to which the slave states apparently found it inadequate by the mid 19th century). General limits on government protect against mob rule, disenfranchising particular people to overrepresent others just chooses which particular interests are favored, it doesn't protect against mob rule (it makes it easier, so long as the advantaged groups are part of the mob.)

Federalism isn’t disenfranchisement. You’re arriving at false conclusions because you’re starting with the invalid — dare I even say motivated? — premise that a system that groups votes is less fair to people who reside in larger groups.

Nobody here is actually making this case. You’re all assuming it.

> Federalism isn’t disenfranchisement.

Federalism is not.

Unequal representation is.

The former does not require the latter; the fact that the two are both present in through US system is the result of a deliberate choice to implement systematic selective disenfranchisement along with federalism, not inherent in the nature of federalism.

If I'm understanding your argument correctly, then I think you're still smuggling in an assumption about "unequal representation" that doesn't hold. It isn't inherently unfair to group votes in such a way that two groups get the same number of votes in some domain despite size differences between them. [0]

I think that's an assumption that needs argued for (and one that ignores powerful cultural, historical, geographical forces).

[0] I'm sure we could think of all kinds of situations under which people collectivize precisely because their numbers would be too small to otherwise matter. I wouldn't want to argue that such systems are in principle unfair (and I don't think you would, either).

If states allocated their electors proportional to the popular vote within each state, the results would track national popular vote to within 1%. They don't, and rather use winner-take-all for game theory reasons... swings states weren't part of the original plan, and you can just as easily argue they're the true disaster for democracy.

Also, don't know what mob you're referring to... that NYC and LA would rule the country without the EC is another trope that's easily debunked.

> Every complaint about the Electoral College is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of this aspect of our system of government.

No, you can understand dual sovereignty, and support it and the separate powers of federal and state government, and still prefer both sovereignties be based on equal representation and democratic norms within their respective scopes.

That's an interesting hypothetical, but it's not, by and large, how Americans understand the Electoral College :)

More seriously, I agree with you. As I said below, I have no ideological opposition to adjusting the levers of the EC (or even replacing it with some other system that more explicitly defines its goals within a modern framework), so long as that system is not based on a simple popular vote (which I do oppose).

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