The Electoral College Is the Greatest Threat to Our Democracy | Hacker News Reader

The Electoral College Is the Greatest Threat to Our Democracy

nytimes.com

19 pointssmacktoward16 comments

The democratic republics that score the highest/best in things like quality-of-life, income equality, incarceration rate, crime rate, access to healthcare, life expectancy, etc., all have forms of government where the executive is not elected at all by popular vote, but is instead chosen by the legislature.

The only other countries that have a form of government like the US's (a presidential republic) are ones like El Salvador and Turkey.

> The democratic republics that score the highest/best in things like quality-of-life, income equality, incarceration rate, crime rate, access to healthcare, life expectancy, etc., all have forms of government where the executive is not elected at all by popular vote, but is instead chosen by the legislature.

They also have systems where the electoral system for the national legislature produces substantially more proportional results than the US system, which seems to be a more significant factor, as it both means law is more likely to reflect the preferences of the people and the evidence suggests it also creates a more multidimensional space of public discourse and, therefore, considered policy options. In fact, a lot of systems with Presidential and Semi-Presidential systems are better than the US on these measures, and they tend to have more proportional systems for electing the national legislature. (Also, usually the President as well, though that, again, doesn't seem to be as important.)

Also, the US executive isn't elected at all by popular vote, either—at least no more than ones in which the executive is chosen by a parliamentary majority—though the body by which they are elected isn't the legislature and has no other function than electing the President and Vice President.

The US executive is separately elected, but neither directly or popularly elected.

> The only other countries that have a form of government like the US's (a presidential republic) are ones like El Salvador and Turkey

That's...only true if you take “like El Salvador and Turkey” absurdly broadly. There's a pretty wide diversity of Presidential systems (and even more if you include Semi-Presidential systems.)

Yes, I always find it funny when I see just how easy it is to pass a vote of no confidence in parliamentary systems and have a new executive government set up. While in the US you have to wait four years(!) if you want a new government even if the majority of people do not want the current executive government in power.

Even in a parliamentary system the majority of people may not want the current government in power if the parliament they elected years before does.

It's still much better than the presidential system, because you don't get deadlocks between the executive and legislative branches that last indefinite amounts of time. The legislature picks the executive (instead of the voters electing him separately and on a different cycle), so the two branches tend to be in agreement. And the voters are able to change the makeup of parliament to some extent at every election.

Also, parliamentary countries seem to have elections based much more on party rather than actual people, so they have more parties with representation, instead of devolving to just two parties per Duverger's Law.

> It's still much better than the presidential system, because you don't get deadlocks between the executive and legislative branches that last indefinite amounts of time.

Sure, but that's a different argument.

> (instead of the voters electing him separately and on a different cycle)

Nothing prevents having both elections on the same cycle. AFAIK France (which is semi-presidential) somewhat recently aligned their cycles to make that disagreements between president and parliament less likely.

> Also, parliamentary countries seem to have elections based much more on party rather than actual people, so they have more parties with representation, instead of devolving to just two parties per Duverger's Law.

That actually weakens the claim that parliamentary systems are superior, unless presidential systems somehow cause first-past-the-post.

I think they may have a common cause though: If the writers of a country's constitution believe that people should vote for parties, they'll probably chose proportional representation and a parliamentary system. If they want people to vote for individuals, a presidential system with FPTP is the obvious choice.

Are we not a Republic? And the Electoral College was put specifically into place so as to avoid devolving us into a Democracy?

The Electoral College was put into place to avoid the USA devolving from a non-monarchy to a country ruled by its people?

> The Electoral College was put into place to avoid the USA devolving from a non-monarchy to a country ruled by its people?

The US at the time was a slaveowning nation for which voting rights could only be held by white, male, landowning gentry... so yes.

Beyond that, the author has completely missed that the electoral college protects us from things like the five most populous counties in America selecting our President for us and limits the effects of massive voter fraud. cough Illinois cough

> the five most populous counties in America selecting our President for us

The 5 most populous counties have less than 10% of the US population.

Moreover, I have yet to see a good reason it makes sense to prefer tyranny of a minority to tyranny of the majority, where we can't avoid both.

> limits the effects of massive voter fraud

This is an important point that's not often discussed, IME

A counterargument (with a mathematical basis in a paper I could not find) is described at http://discovermagazine.com/2004/sep/math-against-tyranny . The NYT also it in https://www.nytimes.com/1996/11/03/weekinreview/why-the-elec...

It's interesting that each State can choose its electors in whatever way they want and have all (with a few exceptions) converged on the winner-take-all popular vote of the State's voters. I think if a State gives the electors to the national popular vote winner but that State's voters chose another candidate, that policy won't last long in that State.

It seems to me that any effort to subvert the Electoral College will be overturned on constitutional grounds.

If folks want the Electoral College abolished, get an amendment passed... ;-)

So is a massively biased press establishment.

Yeah, but it is an opinion column after all, and labeled as such.

Some (many?) "news" outlets have opinion makers speaking off the cuff all the time and don't bother to label it as such.

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