Hacker News Reader

Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

One of the arguments in favor of the electoral college is that it boosts the voice of people who are in areas with lower population density. This is to ensure that minority interests are respected and taken into account by presidential hopefuls.

Without this protection the voices of people who live outside the 5 major metropolitan areas simply wouldn't matter and candidates would have no reason to listen to their issues and have no repercussions for hurting them to favor city-dwellers.

This would be bad. Very bad. A straight population vote ends up being a scheduling algorithm for issues where rural interests have unbounded wait time.

One could say that the solution of weighting rural votes higher is a clunky system but any replacement voting system needs to take this into account as those small towns are where almost all of our primary industry is.

View on HN

If this is the issue, the electoral college doesn't solve this. Because what happens is the campaigning for the general election is usually dictated by swing state status and when the caucus or primary takes place in the election calendar. If you look at the distribution of states visited during the campaigning for the general election, it backs this up.

Also, the Senate is supposed to combat the House in this instance. That's what it's there for, and frankly, because of the importance of the Senate, a voter in Wyoming has more voting power than a voter in California. This isn't good either as you mention in your last statement.

yep, and i would posit that hanging everything off of swing states gyrates the presidential debates into wild swings in extreme directions which possibly further divide the population against each other over time

This is why we have the senate, two votes per state even though alaska has less people than the city of Seattle.

The point of the electoral college was that news travels slowly so voting for a rep to vote for you to represent your district was the right thing to do. Now, everyone can vote for themselves and probably should and we can have it counted in a day or two.

I am not sure I agree with you on this. Although the Senate indeed has two per State, the House seats is by population. Correct me if I am wrong, but the US House the exclusive power to "initiate revenue bills, impeach federal officials, and elect the President in the case of an electoral college tie".

Because bills are _always_ full of pork (Gov funded projects that are specific to the representative's district), there is nothing that would stop a highly populated region representatives to divert all funds to their district, while taxing an other region higher. In essence, diverting not only shared funds, but levy punitive taxes on other regions.

The original intent of the two chambers of congress was that the Senate would represent the state (government) itself, and the House would represent the people living in the state. It wasn't until later that senators were elected by the people rather than appointed by the governor.

If the electoral college was apportioned correctly and the size of the house not artificially capped, there wouldn't be any reason to compare "voting power" of low-population vs high-population states.

Why are people so keen on evening out geographical representation, why not age, or gender, or sexual orientation, able bodiedness or some other arbitrary measure like left handedness?

I think if any measure should be focused on getting equal representation its class. But guess which class is both by far the largest, but still has the least representation. Perhaps it is the purpose of arbitrary drawing of districts to keep it that way.

Except this is blatantly not supported by evidence.

Presidential candidates want to win Florida. Badly. The state has a popular vote for the presidential candidate. If "popular vote encourages candidates to ignore everything except for population centers" then we'd see candidates campaigning in Florida exclusively target major cities. But we don't. The candidates themselves show up in small towns in Florida as part of their campaign efforts.

If we don't see this behavior at the state level, then why would we expect to see if at the national level?

Can't we make the exact opposite argument?

In the unbalanced system which currently exists in the USA, rural voters are given huge, disproportionate advantage in electoral power, leading to national decisions being made that favor them (have some more farm subsidies!) and ignoring the voices of the millions of citizens who happen to live in large cities and populous states.

Why are rural people better than city people? Shouldn't it be.. equal?

If you look at educational attainment, health, poverty rates, and other factors it doesn’t seem to biased towards rural communities. They fall behind in all those measures.

It is interesting to read one significant thread here discussing gerrymandering starting as an effort to increase minority representation. Otherwise, minority blocs can be overridden by a majority and diluted into have no representation.

Then another thread discussing rural voters being given excessive representation. Why shouldn't the cities dominate, they ask?

Rural voters comprise a minority.

How consistent should these threads be in terms of the arguments and what is seen as good? How consistent are they in practice?

This is untrue, in a national popular vote scenario, politicians would spend an equal amount of time and effort on winning each vote, regardless of location. And each person’s vote would be worth the same, regardless of location, as every other election in the U.S. works.

>One of the arguments in favor of the electoral college is that it boosts the voice of people who are in areas with lower population density

Why should people get more say because they live more spread out? Why do 100k people living across the countryside get more say than 100k people living in a city?

If 5 million people live in a city and 2 million people live in the countryside, the people in the city should have 5 reps to the rural 2.

Density is a completely arbitrary metric to use. Why not use race? Why not income levels? Why does density demand electoral privilege but no other metric?

The only actual answer is "status quo". They are overrepresented now, so there is a retroactive justification that somehow balanced representation is "unfair", when in fact it is only "unfair" because it is less than they already have.

I think that the idea is that as much as possible everyone's preferences should be heard and allowed for. The preferences and priorities of people living in cities tends to be dramatically different than those of people living in rural areas. The concern is that a scenario where cities have enough higher population that their preferences are advanced to the exclusion of the priorities of people in rural areas, while more democratic, would undermine ideals of freedom, equality, self determination, etc.

The real answer is because we’re a union of states, many of which would not have joined under that representation scheme.

You need to amend the constitution to change that. It’s hard to do, but again that was intentional.

America was originally a union of colonies separated by economic focuses and communication difficulties - those concerns are no longer relevant in the modern world and sticking to a tradition because "that's what it's always been" isn't a good general policy.

It's not just tradition, it's law written into the kernel of the country. Changing it is possible, it's just not easy, and requires the support of those who would "lose" under the arrangement proposed. Some compromise will have to be made to do so.

I thought that the electoral college and gerrymandering were to separate issues, how are they related?

They are, although you could consider the electoral college as an unintended gerrymander for president...

To be fair, Western Australia has this problem. 10% of the population but 15-20% (depending on boom status) of the export revenue. Politically irrelevant, but the source of all the mining royalties. It causes problems.

All but two state's electoral votes are decided by the result of the popular vote in that state, congressional districts have no effect on that.

Local and proportional representation is the main reason for having the house of representatives, while the reason for Gerrymandering is to disproportionately favor one party or another.

There is no justifiable reason why one person's vote should be worth more than another.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com