New Mexico Is Latest State to Join National Popular Vote Compact
usatoday.com
usatoday.com
Doesn’t this kind of make complete landslides even more possible? Reagan I think almost had a complete victory but for one state which went for his challenger.
In any case the campaigns will be forced to run in like four states, CA, TX, FL and NY. The rest will be bystanders, no?
Landslides aren’t a bad thing if that’s what people want. I’m not sure why you phrased it as if they were.
The ideal would be for national popular vote using an instant runoff system (single transferable vote or ranked choice voting).
In lieu of that the next best is plain first past the post with popular vote which this would gives when it reaches the required number. Now that way no matter where you live in the country your vote will still count. At the moment if you’re a blue voter in a predominantly red state or vice versa there is no reason for you to leave the house on Election Day. Under this system your vote still matters so you have a reason to cast it.
More importantly presidential politics stops being beholden to the wishes of a minority in a few swing states and now has to consider the wishes of the whole national population everywhere.
Currently only people in swing states have influence which is clearly stupid.
30 states/regions have more weight than the national average, and 20 have less weight. Louisiana is right at the national average.
I think that's a beautiful way to describe democracy, though I know you didn't quite intend it that way.
You're right that these proposals seem to run against everything game theory and rational voter models would suggest. But I think there's a way to couch this in terms of rational preferences, if you extend this beyond any one particular race.
The setup:
The fear is that in future elections, most of your state citizens might vote for the "popular" but not "electoral" winner. Flipping this would come at some other state's expense.
Moreover, in every future contest with an electoral and popular vote split, the new system flips every state either from "winner" to "loser" or vice versa.
You are essentially trading away all future elections where your state would back the unpopular electoral winner, and gaining all the future elections where your state would back the popular candidate with a bad map.
That's not an even trade.
Popular winners have more political capital. They can get more done than contentious winners.
So swapping out all of your unpopular winners for popular winners in other elections nets your electorate more of its preferred policies in the long run.
* *
Slight tangent --
Former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo recently explained why Mexico agreed to international dispute resolution, even though that constrained its government. Zedillo said, roughly, "We wanted to be part of a rules-based system because it works both ways. If you don't want to be subject to arbitrary actions, then you have to give assurances that you won't impose arbitrary actions on others."
I know that's a really rough analogy, but this discussion reminded me of it, and I like the quote.
https://www.tradetalkspodcast.com/podcast/79-a-president-exp... Setup around ~9'50"
EDIT: Some key assumptions required to make this work- a) your state is about equally or more likely to support unpopular electoral winners as it is to support popular losers, b) passing policies you support is better than avoiding policies you oppose.
Those are pretty fragile assumptions, but they wouldn't be crazy to entertain for some fair chunk of the electorate.
I suspect the more likely explanation is just that people think a national popular vote is more "fair" and aren't really methodically calculating self-interest in these contests, rational voter models be damned.
So we'd be electing someone against whom the actual majority of voters voted. Not really an improvement, since either way a minority of voters ends up winning the election.
> the compact us tying it to the national - as opposed to state-level - popular vote
In other words: the states are completely ignoring the voices of their own citizens and completely defeating the whole point of the Electoral College (especially in cases where, say, the majority or plurality of the state's voters voted against the plurality nationwide, in which case the state would be actively betraying its own citizens).
There are surely better ways to fix our political system than to defenestrate what semblance of democracy we actually have (though I will admit that it's a good demonstration of the flaws of the Electoral College - in particular, the flaw that states are apparently not required to actually cast their votes according to the wishes of the citizens of those states).
No. The 2000 & 2016 elections—along with 3 others since 1824—saw a person elected despite the majority of voters who cast ballots voting against that individual—52% voted against Bush, 54% voted against Trump. Both elections saw the US electing someone against whom the actual majority of voters voted.
The compact is essentially an agreement to make presidential elections match up with the person who secures the most votes nationwide, which sure seems to be far closer to a democratic election than the indirect EC system which has, twice in recent memory, awarded the presidency against the wishes of the majority of voters who cast votes. No more playing the EC game—you either win the election with the most votes cast, or you don't win. The only other options would be far heavier overhauls of the voting system—ditching SMDP, and implementing a two-round system whereby we eventually end up with one person who gets >50% of the vote. That's unlikely to ever happen, as it would rely on a constitutional amendment, so the compact is leveraging the power states have to determine how they award their electoral votes—awarding them based on who secures the most votes nationwide so the elected president always matches the popular vote. Again, since US national elections already rely on getting the most votes, and not a true >50% majority of votes cast, this is likely the closest the US can get to a purely democratic presidential election without an amendment that removes the EC entirely and establishes a TRS election in its place to ensure there is always an undeniable majority winner.
And with the proposal here we would still end up with the US electing someone against whom the actual majority of voters voted. This proposal fixes nothing. In fact, it makes things even worse, since - again - the state might very well be actively going against its own voters.
> The only other options would be far heavier overhauls of the voting system
There are plenty of other options that are just as possible:
- Allocating electors by congressional district (this is what Maine and Nebraska already do)
- Allocation electors by electoral district
- Allocating electors proportionally (e.g. if - state-wide - 60% of voters vote for A and 40% vote for B, then 60% of EC electors will vote for A and 40% of EC electors will vote for B)
Proportional allocation of EC votes would be gerrymandering-resistant (since there'd be no creatively-drawn districts involved) and would be a more accurate representation of the will of the people of that state. It would allow, for example, Democrats in otherwise-Republican-dominated states (e.g. Houston v. the rest of Texas) to be represented electorally (and likewise allow the same for Republicans in otherwise-Democrat-dominated states like California). If an actual "fix" for our electoral system is what you seek, then that'd be the best option by pretty much every metric.
Given Trump has publicly come out against this, it seems unlikely Congress will give assent to this anytime soon.