15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete | Hacker News Reader

15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete

nytimes.com

502 pointscar900 comments

There are discussions about the electoral college favoring small states. Some people think that's bad, some people think it's good.

However, there's a more important issue: that's not really what the electoral college does. It gives a small edge to small states[0]. The much bigger effect is that in every given election, it favors a handful of battleground states over all the rest.

If you live in Wyoming, the electoral college does not help you, because your vote is secure. Ditto for Vermont. But if you live in Ohio or Florida, presidential candidates will spend all their time in your state, trying to get your vote.

While you can concoct a semi-coherent case for rural voters needing special protection, no one can explain why Ohio is more or less important than North Carolina, or Florida than Texas.

[0] Which, if you're paying attention, is at least correlated with being rural, but only partially--another lazy generalization that surrounds this subject.

I'm not in favor of the electoral college, but wouldn't its elimination merely shift this problem to politicians only visiting the most poulated states (e.g. California) anyway?

> I'm not in favor of the electoral college, but wouldn't its elimination merely shift this problem to politicians only visiting the most poulated states (e.g. California) anyway?

“Politicians”, no, it only effects Presidential (and Vice-Presidential) candidates. It has no direct effect on other politicians.

Would it make them more likely to visit densely populated areas (where you can influence more poeple per unit time)? Yeah, probably. Right now, they focus on “swing states”, but within those states, on densely populated areas, for just that reason.

But as long as there is a Senate, they'd be encouraged to visit small states (where a small number of voters determine a large share of power in the Senate, which can block both laws and Presidential appointments) for coattail effects.

And they’d still be encouraged to spend efforts on campaigning in low-cost media markets where small money reaches lots of voters (even ones that would currently be neglected because the states aren't viewed as swingable), just probably not with personal visits as much, without some kind of broader free media exposure opportunities, because the candidates themselves can't be in more than one place at once.

I've seen this pointed out, and absolutely do not see it as a problem. What's wrong with politicians paying more attention to the needs of more people?

They're going to campaign somewhere, why should they pay more attention to Cleveland, Ohio (metro area population ~2m) than Los Angeles (city population 3m, metro population over 13m)?

The answer is probably complicated. Game theoretically, they’ll pay attention[0] to the places where their campaigning has the biggest marginal impact, but that doesn’t immediately tell us much.

That will make big urban areas appealing. However, if you think there are diminishing returns, it should cause them to spread that attention more, avoiding the last month where they repeatedly visit the same state over and over again.

[0] This might or might mean visiting those states.

I think the whole “visiting” thing is overblown. We have TV and the Internet. This isn’t the 19th century when the only way the average American might EVER see or hear a President would be a short speech off the back of a train car.

Not if you make the votes proportional.

There are a huge number of Republicans in California that would have just as much of a say than Florida/Ohio/etc.

No, politicians would not need to visit California because the way in which the electoral college is being eliminated is by keeping it intact, but forcing the state electors to follow the federal trend instead of the local one. The result will be ALL of California's electors going "blue" regardless of how the individual people vote. If we figured out a way of actually eliminating the electoral college, then it's entirely possible that a presidential election would result in no candidate winning more than 50% of the popular vote, and there would need to be some way to conduct a run-off election. If this scenario had unfolded in the 1992 election, Bush would have won instead of Clinton.

What it shifts is advertising from expensive media markets with small geographical boundaries (NY, LA) to less expensive ones that have large boundaries (Kansas City, Raleigh.) It works out that, because of the large boundaries, the cost to reach each consumer is far lower.

Moreover, I'd wager that the stumps that stump speeches occur on will go to more places with more concentrated populations - there are more butts within n square miles to put in seats, as well as the most-watched news media.

My opinion is that both outcomes are preferable to stumps AND media going to half a dozen battleground states.

At least then they'd be representing the concerns of a larger number of people which is arguably what they should be doing as representatives.

We already have a problem with politicians getting the majority of their donations from people out of their district and even have very low approval ratings in their district.

Something needs to be done to ensure all districts are equally represented and the representatives work for their constituents, not benefactors from out of state.

Shouldn't politicians generally spend time and attention on the problems that affect the most people?

This site has good responses for that question here: https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/section_9.5

But that's where the people are. What's the problem?

Should the not focus their attention on the centers with the highest population?

Isn’t that how a functioning democratic republic is supposed to work?

If 40 times as many people stay in California, it makes sense that they would go there 40 times more often.

Why should people living dense regions be punished for it ?

They would go to places where people are. Particularly the sort of people who might be amenable to changing their mind. It's true that because more people are in populated states, they would go to populated states more, but that's just fairness. See also https://xkcd.com/1138/

I predict a presidential popular vote would have a moderating effect. Meaning more voters would be targeted.

With FPTP, each side tries to have the smallest winning coalition. This results in more competitive races. So every vote would matter.

Said another way, our current unfair gerrymandering worsens partisanship.

Said yet another, when my local city council went from at-large positions to districts based, so kinda the opposite of from electoral college to presidential popular vote, candidate platforms went from "appeal city wide" mush to "better appeal to my district".

(A better moderator would be to change from FPTP to approval voting or ranked choice voting. But that's another thread.)

But to your point, in practical terms, with modern get out the vote (GOTV) technology and strategies, most every voter is already targeted. They're certainly accounted for.

As the de facto head of their parties, presidential candidates are expected to do well every where, to help with down ballot races.

As an extreme example, HRC 2016 was criticized for running up her margin in "safe" areas. But that's expected (demanded) of national (and statewide) candidates by the locals.

...is that bad? Why shouldn't the most populated areas be priority?

They'd still visit the places where they're most likely to gain votes. These places just won't be limited to a select few states any more.

You should be careful about the word "small" here. What you mean is least populous, but geographically, they are large.

Thus, the question is: Do you want the majority of the USA geography being controlled by the will of people least knowledgeable about it?

If you eliminate the electoral college you give political control of resources to those who have absolutely NO physical control of those resources and yet still suffer the impact of their environmental influence.

What I mean is, people in California, Texas, and New York would push all the bad things to the rural states and take all the good parts, leaving those who live in the rural areas to feel the full brunt of those decisions. Take Louisiana as an example. It's been decimated by everyone who doesn't live there.

Weighting "resources" is not a good thing. In the past it's been used to justify some of the most horrific policies in the U.S.

The U.S. constitution counted slaves at 60% of a person. Some of the arguments for the three fifths compromise were that slaveholders didn't want people who weren't "knowledgable" about slaveholding to be meddling in slaveholder's business. This is essentially one of the causes that sparked the Civil War.

I don't understand why Americans are so against becoming a full democracy. It's not like the current system benefits anyone. Congress, presidents and our courts are dysfunctional. The government is becoming the laughingstock of the world. At least in a democracy there's more chances of unified rule instead of 6 years of gridlock followed by 2-years of whiplash changes.

I’m not following your example. You clarified in another comment that Louisiana is environmentally decimated due to the actions or votes of the blue states. However Louisiana typically goes hard red, and the GOP is very much opposed to environmental protections.

Also I’m not sure what you mean by them pushing all the bad stuff to Louisiana and what that has to do with presidential elections (aside from that the president sets EPA policy, but again, Louisiana voted for trump so I don’t get it)

To be fair, the primary cause of the decimation of Louisiana is it’s state government.

I would also add that the resources of the country belong to all of us, not just those who live in close proximity (aka the same state).

> Do you want the majority of the USA geography being controlled by the will of people least knowledgeable about it?

Land doesn't vote.

> Do you want the majority of the USA geography being controlled by the will of people least knowledgeable about it?

Your question presumes quite a lot. I'll start with "what makes you think people who don't live in Wyoming are incapable of understanding Wyoming?"

Two things:

1. I’m gonna take a hard line that people deserve a vote, dirt doesn’t.

2. Louisiana is the 25th most populous state and I think 25th densest. So, I’m not sure the electoral college is protecting those less dense states’ environments. As the sibling points out, sometimes coastal liberals want environmental protection, while natives want to exploit the environment for profit.

> Do you want the majority of the USA geography being controlled by the will of people least knowledgeable about it?

Well, if you want to propose a system where Alaska (area 570,640.95 sq mi) gets the same representation as Rhode Island, Delaware, Connecticut, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Hawaii, Maryland, West Virginia, South Carolina, Maine, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama combined (area ~525,000 sq mi),

...then I'm all ears...

* Please don't tell me "But Alaska has so few people!"

> Do you want the majority of the USA geography being controlled by the will of people least knowledgeable about it?

So you prefer that the majority of the USA population is being controlled by the will of people least knowledgeable about the issues faced by the most populous and developed regions of the USA?

In what way has Louisiana been decimated?

Currently it seems that rural states push all the bad things on themselves, e.g. climate change and other environmental destruction, so how much worse can it be for them?

Wyoming gets 7 electoral votes per million people, while New York gets only 1.9.

That's a 3.6x difference -- I would hardly call that a "small" edge.

True, at that extreme, it's big, and I probably could state my claim more precisely.

Here's my claim: if you drew a curve of electoral votes per person by percentile, there would be a very small area that was significantly elevated, and the remaining portion would be moderately flat.

Because Wyoming's population is so small, the absolute impact isn't that big. Go up just a few spots to Hawaii and it's more like a 2:1 ratio. Yet still, substantially less than 10% of the population lives in such small states. So there's a very small minority of people who have a proportionally larger impact (but still a small impact in absolute terms).

To be clear, I think that's a bad result. So far as the democratic process can allow it, our votes should have equal weight. But it's somewhat exaggerated how systematic of an effect it has. In the same vein, I've argued that the best defense of the electoral college is that it only errs by giving the wrong result in elections that were already very close. In contrast, the Senate is thoroughly anti-democratic, unsalvagably so.

(Btw: I can't replicate your math. New York had 19,378,102 people in 2010, and 29 votes = 1.49 votes / million. Wyoming had 563,626 and 3 votes = 5.32 votes / million).

Those aren't static numbers though. California used to have 4 electoral votes in 1850s (edit) and now they have 55 (Wyoming has always had 3, New York has 29 today down from a peak of 47 in the 1940s).

The ratio of votes per capita is relatively consistent - assuming a baseline level of votes so individual states aren't totally excluded - and is more a sign of a potential problem with the distribution not the system itself. But there's plenty of arguments which favour both ways.

Much like gerrymandering, which both sides have a long legal record of accusing the other of taking advantage of as the last two Supreme Court cases on the matter clearly demonstrates - each by the other, this seems to be a who's on the "winning" side motivation which misses the bigger picture.

In this case it's the smaller states who have been basically given a guaranteed entrance ticket to play the game, which is different than simply giving the state extra votes relative to their size. It functions almost as a social safety net which gives you a shot, not a good shot at that, but only if you'd otherwise have no other shot. If it was only per capita (even with balancing for size) the numbers would look a lot different.

Wyoming is a state and this country is a union of states, not acres, or arbitrary units of population. We've failed to communicate the actual point of all this, which is to make sure each state--and not population districts--get representation at the federal level. If you have a problem with all this you should be asking: why do we need states?

Ahh but WY has 0.577M people while NY has 8.623M! Thus, NY still has more "pull" than WY. Electoral college just helps level the field a bit.

It also makes many votes useless. I live in California, it has gone to a Democrat every time since I've been a voter. For president, I can't affect California, and I can't affect the national election either, due to the EC. Not that I'd vote for Trump, but there's no practical reason to vote for president in that circumstance.

Swing states shift, though. California was basically solid red from the 1950s through the 1980s. Until 2016, few people would have called Wisconsin or Michigan "swing states" judging from their voting in the past few elections. People move, demographics change.

This is true, but I’m not sure having your vote count for a decade, then not count, then count again is all that much better. Note that going in to an election, the potential battleground states are usually known.

Some states haven’t been swing states for a long time, too.

I'm not sure that's actually true. There was a great graphic a few years back that showed party allegiance by state over time. You could see how most states used to be fairly split between both parties and how they frequently swung from party to party between elections. However, in the 80s or so many states started to align more closely with one party. Given the duration for which that has been going on, I wonder if that's the natural end state of a defacto two party system.

> California was basically solid red from the 1950s through the 1980s

Suddenly swung in 1992, and has been seen as solid blue since—not really an example of swing states switching as a state rapidly moving from Republican lock to Democratic lock.

Why aren't we talking about the Cambridge Analytica scandal example? Another issue of the Electoral colleges is that a candidate could target only a few amount of people (70k according to the documentary) for changing the course of the election. Even if this has been fixed by Facebook. Shouldn't it be considered as a major flaw of the election system?

Source: "The great Hack" - Netflix doc.

Why is it that the Cambridge Analytica "hack" is even an issue? The reason is because the data was used to get an "evil" republican elected. The exact same tactics were used to get Obama elected, and nobody seems to be complaining.

> The Great Hack

I found the title to be self-fulfilling. That documentary was awful! It's just a tag along the journey of a smart narcissist to cover her ass.

One aspect of the Electoral College is that it's a built in corruption firewall.

Right now, if an election system is "compromised" (electronically, corrupt officials, etc), it will affect that precinct, the local elections, possibly the state-wide races, and rarely the Presidential.

With a simple majority vote, a compromise anywhere in the system - adding or removing votes - impacts the system as a whole.

Because using psychology to manipulate voters isn't new. And all of a sudden we're supposed to find it outrageous?

> If you live in Wyoming, the electoral college does not help you, because your vote is secure.

For now. But if Wyoming doesn't like what happens with Republican party, it can change. There's a huge inertia in large parties, so probably won't happen overnight, but it's not a law of nature. From what I've heard, one of the reasons 2016 election went the way it did because Democrats considered certain states (not Wyoming) "secure" and didn't campaign there, while Republicans did, and turned out they've been not as secure as it seemed. The margins of victory in many states are not that wide, and the margins of uncertainty in any polls are wide, so it's never certain forever.

I think it was pretty systematic.

If you look at 538 (https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/), they were pretty accurate predicted which states were most and least likely to vote Trump or Clinton.

It's just that in several states where they thought Clinton had a small lead, she lost. Meanwhile, there were no states they thought Trump had a small lead but he lost.

The comparative judgments (Wisconsin is easier for Clinton to win than North Carolina, which is easier than Alabama) were right. The absolute judgments (Clinton will win Wisconsin) were wrong.

If you had gone back in time and told Clinton's team "all the polls are too positive for you, you don't have a safety margin" they'd have known that Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania were at risk.

The electoral college most certainly favors small states but I agree with you it also creates battleground states and I agree that is the more important effect.

It’s not a matter of whether battleground states deserve special protection, it’s a matter of whether or not the battleground states in any given election serve as a good representation of the nation as a whole? Are they a better representation than a popular vote which would consistently favor coastal urban centers?

Is visiting really the problem? I get the impression that issues that are huge for non-swing states, like housing, can be easily ignored despite the fact that they impact millions more people.

Here is a fun thought exercise: why group by state?

A person's political views is not just shaped by where they live, but their race, gender, sexual orientation, education etc etc. If "location" is just another column in the table properties that describe a person, what if we had a "college" or "senate" based on some other property of an individual?

How about we give all citizens who identify as straight 2 seats and all those who identify as gay 2 seats in this imaginary senate?

Or a college roughly based on race, but for some reason the smaller races are grossly over represented?

How about by religion? As an atheist myself, I'd love to get in on some of that sweet over-representation-of-minorities mojo that Ohioans get.

My point is, cut this along any other descriptive property of an individual other than what state they live in and you get all sorts of colorful results that I'm sure would appall all the conservative proponents of the Electoral college or the Senate.

Is state or location really the most important a property when it comes to deciding whether or not you are a "minority?" When it comes to national issues, do you think a gay black man in Nebraska has more in common with a striaght white man in Nebraska? Or another gay black man in New York? Why does the one in Nebraska get to be an overrepresented minority, yet the one in New York get to be an underrepresented majority?

It is not there to protect small states, it is there to protect from super large states. As in, no matter how big you get or how lopsided your political apparatus is the state cannot absolutely tip the balance.

a popular vote presidency would be a disaster for the US, the illusion that votes matter would be completely destroyed at that level. it is like the difference of comparing a state only lottery to the multi state lottery

a popular vote presidency would be a disaster for the US, the illusion that votes matter would be completely destroyed at that level.

This is completely false. Having a popular vote would at least adequately represent, mathematically, the demographics of the US citizenry and what they want in a candidate. Now, FPTP is not the greatest voting scheme, I would prefer some sort of rank choice voting, but at least you would get a statistical representation of the populace with FPTP.

The electoral college is such an antiquated, outdated system that only favors fringe views.

Isn't that the whole point of the Senate?

This. Living in a rural area on the border between a solid Blue and solid Red state, no one cares.

Well, there's a potential "easy" way of solving this: making votes in the electoral college proportional to how the electorate voted in the state

Yes. You don't need to abolish the whole college, just do this. And states can do it on their own and immediately, no need to sign a pledge only takes effect at some possible future time.

The problem with this, and with the pledge, is that it requires the states that benefit from the current system to voluntarily decrease their own influence. Which won't happen.

Alternatively, have each congressional district elect its own elector instead of a statewide pool. It gets even more interesting if the ballot only shows the potential electors’ names, without any party affiliation.

What I find interesting is this only came up after Trump got elected. What this says is it’s not about how “broken” the electoral college is and more so trying to elect more liberal presidents, since the densely populated areas tend to hive mind. We would have essentially 2 states voting in the new president, and both of these states are very liberal. Why didn’t this come up during Obama? This is an attempt at the liberal elite to get rid of a system that stops them from winning 100% of the time. This is how civil wars are started

Furthermore: Ohio is the single strongest predictor of the presidential election winner. Ohio is the only state where the local winner has matched the overall winner since 1960.

Very few people care if a candidate visits their state. I know I don't and I would be hard-pressed to list a single person that does. All I care about is if they're willing to answer questions directly and if their policies match my general ideas.

In other words: if a candidate really wants to spend their whole campaign in Ohio, I could give a shit. Go for it.

Abolish the electoral college. Now.

Debates over the electoral college tend to conflate two different things. The original purpose of the electoral college was a compromise between those who wanted the president directly elected, and those who wanted Congress to elect the president. While very small states have a modest edge as a result of using the number of members of Congress to decide the number of electors, the real purpose of the system is to add a layer of indirection to the election of the President, where the states have a say in their capacity as states.

That layer of indirection continues to exist today. Article II provides that “each state shall appoint” electors “in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” So Minnesota could decide to have the state legislature appoint its electors, without a popular vote. (That would raise the importance of state government elections, which might be a good thing.)

At the same time, that layer of indirection could exist even in a purely proportional system. You could assign electoral votes based on population or number of house members.

So the debate over getting rid of the electoral college actually involves two different issues. Should the number of electors be proportional? And should we reduce the independent status of the states even more by taking away their intermediary role in electing the President?

The founding fathers did not predict that a few states would become hyper-partisan and stop giving EC votes proportionally. The few states, early on, did this because they were decidedly red/blue and wanted a bigger say in who is president. A bunch of other states wound up following suit to level the playing field.

Now, we have winner-takes-all for almost every state. Now, politicians don't spend time pandering for votes they already have locked.

It created the concept of "battle ground states".

First, the number of House reps is no longer proportionate to the population. Second, the layer of indirection as it exists today does nothing. Electors aren’t free to choose a president. They in most cases must elect the person they pledged to elect and if they don’t they instantly get replaced by a new elector who will. What purpose does that serve? Seems to me like we should either buck up and actually allow these people to elect a president, or abolish the whole institution as it currently is a farce.

>Article II provides that “each state shall appoint” electors “in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” So Minnesota could decide to have the state legislature appoint its electors, without a popular vote.

Technically correct but as per the 13th (?) amendment, when a state denies any male citizen aged 18 or over and not a felon the right to vote, said states representation in the electoral college and congress is recalculated as though they didn't have said residents. Therefore if Minnesota went through with this they would have no more than the baseline 3 electoral votes.

I had believed the original reason was that politicians could not travel to each district/county/state and that it was easier to get a small, informed, educated group together than a large, unfocused, sometimes uneducated group together.

Let the states that will never get their way in a "fixed" elector college, secede.

To mess with the electoral college in this point in time - when its basically 49% vs 51% - and at such a level of divide in the country is not exactly a testament to how empathetic the two sides are. It would be a disaster.

Everyone thinks Trump himself is the problem but this awful idea to change the goalposts literally to win elections would do way more damage than Trump could ever do but I guess it doesn't come in an 'easy to hate' package with agenda serving talking points, etc.

I don't know where these idiots think this whole "OK - we'll follow these laws, but not those" thing is going but it is incredibly damaging and at the moment only one side is picking and choosing which laws to obey and not obey (then writing publicly about it) but soon enough the other side will be picking and choosing which laws to ignore.

Get your helmets on once we are on _that_ slippery slope.

> the real purpose of the system is to add a layer of indirection to the election of the President, where the states have a say in their capacity as states.

The real purpose of the system was to balance the interests of states who had as many slaves as free people with the interests of states who would have dominated the legislature if representation were determined only by the number of citizens within the state.

It's not about division of power between rural/urban or big states/small states. The Electoral College is about buffering purely democratic power. The President doesn't represent "the people." He/she represents the interests of the states. The Legislative Branch represents the will of the people (most directly through the House of Representatives). One of the biggest problems is vesting too much power and importance in the Executive, which was never intended. Throw the balance of power out of whack, and we get these conversations (the President has to represent "the people" and therefore should be elected by popular vote)

I wish someone with $$ would start plastering this message everywhere the absurd "get rid of the elctoral college" debate comes up. We are not a democracy, seriously no one wants a democracy of 300 million plus. We are a federation of states that is supposed to have most of the control in their region and sacrifice a little bit of control to the federal government for purposes of defense and commerce. Your "democracy" should be your state legislature, but sadly authoritarians of the past have taken that away.

Your argument seems confused to me, but maybe I don’t quite understand, can you elaborate? We do have state level democracy. The electoral college’s purpose is solely for presidential elections, not for local elections. Why shouldn’t we have a democracy for presidential elections? Your reasons given (local control) don’t apply to federal elections. Even with the electoral college, we’re pretty close to democratic representation for president anyway, and the discrepancy between what we have, a federal republic, and a pure democracy doesn’t serve the same purpose that it used to. So why should we keep it? Why is the proposal to get rid of the electoral college “absurd”? What do you mean about authoritarians taking away state level democracy?

> We are not a democracy, seriously no one wants a democracy of 300 million plus.

I do. This sounds much better than a federation of states with weird layers of indirection based on borders drawn by historical accident or anachronistic geographic boundaries like rivers.

A federation would be fine if it was a proper one. One where cities have an equal position against their state inasmuch as they represent their residents and those residents have more say over the state government as a result. Today, we have a dated system which refuses to update its political infrastructure where it's needed. Now, more than ever, there's a need to make more direct levers of power to the citizens of a given location and less power to the technocrats and bureaucrats which 'represent' them.

Do you think any reform is ill-advised? What would for instance be wrong with giving each state 1 vote in the EC? Upon naive inspection, that would at least get rid of battleground/swing states somewhat.

We've been giving up control to the federal government because more often than not, the local and state governments have failed [1]. Political corruption, corporate interests etc somehow don't just vanish and go away when you give power to the states.

There's a balance to be made between federal and state government powers. And ultimately the electoral college is one of the things that needs to go, because it unfairly tips the system in favor of extremely rural areas whom influence policy that then directly harm those living in more urban environments.

[1] https://www.insider.com/what-us-cities-looked-like-before-ep...

All the real money is already on the side of preserving the electoral college. You should examine why this is and reassess.

I don't know about that, specifically this part:

> He/she represents the interests of the states

This assumes that states in America have some sort of distinct cultural/political interests, divided along state lines. This isn't really the case. For example there are no significant cultural differences between North Dakota and South Dakota. The dividing line there is pretty arbitrary.

Similarly, some places that have very significant cultural/political differences are lumped together, like the Bay Area and the Central Valley in California.

Your argument would make more sense if applied to a political arrangement like the EU. Each member of the EU has a long history as a sovereign, distinct political and cultural entity. The border between, for example, Hungary and Romania is much much more significant than that between Colorado and Arizona.

I can't speak specifically to North and South Dakota, but having lived in both Arizona and Colorado I can tell you they absolutely are different places culturally and politically.

Speaking to your second point, even in the EU this can be the case. Look at Wallonia and Flanders in Belgium. Spain is also a good example, Catalonia especially.

California and Alabama are basically the same.

But every state does have a long history of sovereignty. Your point of view would require completely redefining what the US is as a nation.

>The President doesn't represent "the people."

Isn't that obvious by the fact that the electors are under no legal obligation to choose the candidate they were voted to do?

I think this is anachronistic. Yes, there are places where the founders suggested that there would be a conflict between large and small states.

But can we point to any reasonably non-controversial case where the electoral college has acted to safeguard the "American republic"? There are two points here.

First: the Supreme Court has many controversies, but also many decisions that seem very compelling in hindsight. I tend to vote for Democrats, and I'm not entirely convinced I'd disagree with the median Scalia decision (I can remember agreeing with several). It seems to fare better as an anti-majoritarian institution.

Second: suppose, for the sake of argument, that you think that Trump and Bush are great examples favoring the electoral college. In both cases, the results are extremely fragile. Either candidate could've easily lost, and the electoral college was a small bit of noise in the result (some early predictions suggested Obama would win the 2012 electoral college, but lose the popular vote). The fact that a mechanism has given you results you like in two cases, by chance, is not the same as saying that it's an important constitutional safeguard.

Firstly, I'm an independent - I actually have a great deal of issues with both major parties. My concern with abandoning the college starts with this observation:

Swing states are the states most likely to have divided government. And if divided government is good for anything, it is accountability. So with the Electoral College system, when we do wind up with a razor-thin margin in an election, it is likely to happen in a state where both parties hold some power, rather than in a state controlled by one party. The Electoral college system focuses a great deal of energy on states in this condition when an election is close.

National Popular Vote (NPV) rewards states with high population - the higher the turnout, the more power for that state. Additionally, under NPV, each state would certify its own "national" vote total. What would happen when there are charges of skullduggery? Would states really trust, with no power to verify, other state’s returns?

I have other concerns as well but feel the EC system is superior. Just as an observation, the parliamentary systems of the UK, Canada, Israel, (& others) have the parliament elect the Prime Minister and likewise don't elect their leaders by popular vote.

[edited: removing poor wording about 'lax laws', seems I implied things in a FUD way that I didn't mean to]

> National Popular Vote (NPV) would reward states with lax election laws - the higher the turnout, legal or not, the more power for that state.

Illegal voting is already illegal, and states can already in theory do shady things in their elections (and some probably already do). The courts should absolutely go after this, and I don't see NPV really changing this.

> The NPV system focus the most energy on states with a high population in this condition.

Perhaps so, but the one of the main points of NPV is for state boundaries to be meaningless for campaigning. Maybe politicians should spend more time in densely populated areas because, well, there are more people there.

> What would happen when there are charges of skullduggery? Would states really trust, with no power to verify, other state’s returns?

Do states currently trust that other states hold fair elections to determine how their electors vote? I don't see any change here.

> the higher the turnout, legal or not, the more power for that state

Every actual study of the matter I've seen or heard of has shown no evidence of any significant fraudulent voting, particularly not systemic fraudulent voting. While there might be a theoretical concern about incentives here, there's a lot of problems we know are happening right now with voter suppression under the system that we have.

I like your point about incentivizing high turnout (and the resulting inter-state race for turnout). I wouldn't necessarily equate it with lax election laws though.

Oregon (where I live) is blessed with vote-by-mail -- it affords high turnout with high vote verifiability. Being able to consider & research arguments on both sides of the issues and candidates in detail before voting is fantastic.

Nothing you said provides an argument against equally weighting each citizen’s vote at the federal level.

States have select powers over the federal government that are specifically provided by our Constitution: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/States%27_rights. When you vote in local elections, you are in effect in control of certain outcomes within your state, as accorded by our Constitution.

The federal election determines representation for every single person in the United States and, in part, how federal governmental power is exercised on their behalf. There is no conceivable logical reason why citizens in any particular state should have more or less say in such matters than those in any other. The electoral college system is an absolute sham that deprives a significant number of people of their Constitutionally-guaranteed right to fair representation at the federal level.

I’d welcome any well-formed argument to the contrary. I’ve yet to ever hear one.

> National Popular Vote (NPV) rewards states with high population - the higher the turnout, the more power for that state

Without EC presidential candidates wouldn't be focused on states at all, they would be focused on large demographics of the US population, which is exactly what they should be focused on.

> National Popular Vote (NPV) rewards states with high population - the higher the turnout, the more power for that state.

Well, it rewards people who vote. If more people in my state turn out to vote for the candidate that I didn't vote for, and who didn't get the majority of the states votes, I and most of the people that voted in my state are not rewarded by NPV.

OTOH, getting more Democratic votes in a Red state, or more Republican votes in a Blue state suddenly makes a difference in the national outcome; national elections no longer are about doing the minimum necessary to keep a majority in party-dominated states while focussing primarily on narrow appeal to the particular perceived interests of “swing state” voters, but about getting as much support as possible nationally.

  the parliamentary systems of the UK ... have the parliament elect the Prime Minister and likewise don't elect their leaders by popular vote.

This isn't totally accurate: the leader of the winning party is basically the Prime Minister. You vote for the party & leader together, you can't have one and not the other.

The system is otherwise just as broken as the US; meaning that outcomes are decided by a small number of "rural" people combined with gerrymandering.

Reward how? The electoral college system determines the election of president. How does one state being more populated matter? Votes are distributed equally across all citizens.

What about something like a tax rebate for high voter turnouts as percentage of the state's total eligible voter population? The amount would have to be large enough to be consequential. Making it based on a percentage of population would give small states a good chance. It might also end up being an extra pressure on states to open more polling stations nearer to voters. If a percentage of total eligible voter population is skewed too far in favor towards smaller states (easier to organize, less polling stations, or whatever else), then some combination of that plus total voter turnout might be more fair. This idea might also take advantage of the love that team sports receive.

> Swing states are the states most likely to have divided government. And if divided government is good for anything, it is accountability.

Based on what we've seen in the midwest, what you're actually saying here is that divided government isn't good for anything.

The MP's in the UK are elected by popular vote though.

I agree you would have to have the same standard for voter registration.

One way of improving the current system (from an outsiders pov) would be to make electors all faithless and having parties switch to One member one vote and do a way with registering.

NPV doesn't reward states at all, it rewards concentrations of people.

States become irrelevant under the NPV.

I want to point out this article was written in May, and is a bit out of date. For example, Nevada (heavily mentioned in the article) never adopted the National Popular Vote compact because the governor vetoed the bill after the legislature passed it.

FiveThirtyEight published an article last week on the current state of the compact: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-movement-to-skip-th...

> Unsurprisingly, given that almost every state government to pass the National Popular Vote compact was completely controlled by Democrats,

It kinda feels like this part keeps getting glossed over when people talk about this. I don't think those signing on have really thought it through, and are just reacting to the 2016 election results. Of course the party that lost wants to change the system in a way that, that time, they may have ended up winning - especially with all the open hate for Trump.

An argument I heard recently against this is, if abolished, politicians won't have incentives to campaign in rural territories, and they won't be accountable to rural territories. That basically makes sense. The EC is the only thing that really gives rural territories any stake, as the majority population has shifted to larger urban centers.

People who want to get away from the big cities and live a different kind of life with different priorities (and different legislative interests), shouldn't be totally shut out, should they? Even though I live in a giant urban area, I wouldn't want to feel pressured to due so due to lack of political stake if I move elsewhere.

The counterpoint to that is that the Electoral College has transferred so much power to rural areas that we are no longer an actual representative democracy.

For example, a vote in Wyoming counts 3.6 times more than a vote in California.[1] The people in California are not represented in the Presidential election; it would be more accurate to say that one-quarter of the people in California are represented.

"Rural issues" do not deserve special protection if that protection results in a tyranny of the minority. People are choosing to actively leave rural communities and congregate in urban areas; this does not on its face mean that their concerns have become less important.

Moreover, people congregating in urban areas tend to be center- and left- leaning, so skewing the Presidential vote towards urban areas also results in US politics as a whole shifting to the right. It also results in a judiciary that is more conservative than the population as a whole.

There are only eight states in America that have more people than Los Angeles county.[2] Why are the concerns of the people living in LAC less important than the concerns of the people in Nevada or Arkansas? What is it about their geography that makes their issues unimportant?

[1] http://theconversation.com/whose-votes-count-the-least-in-th...

[2] http://www.laalmanac.com/population/po04a.php

I'm all for rural representation, but people in rural areas essentially have their vote count more than people in cities, right? Cause that's the current system for us: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/map_of_the_w...

Right now it's the opposite

> People who want to get away from the ~big cities~ small towns and live a different kind of life with different priorities (and different legislative interests), shouldn't be totally shut out, should they? Even though I live in a ~giant urban area~ rural area, I wouldn't want to feel pressured to due so due to lack of political stake if I move elsewhere.

who's to say one direction is more important than the other? At least if we ditch the electoral college, individual voices always have the same volume

Electoral college is for the presidency. But the political power discrepancy between rural and urban areas is quite stark in other branches of government.

For example: Right now in the US there are 2 senators from each state. California with a population of over 39 million has 2 senators, Alaska with a population around 700,000 also has 2 senators.

Counter arguments to that:

1. Rural places do have representation, through Congress. Abolishing the EC will not change that.

2. Rural areas already have outsized representation due to how the Senate is set up.

3. The electoral college only matters for presidential candidates, during the general election, and they aren't spending a lot of time in rural areas already anyway. I grew up in North Dakota, and no presidential candidates ever wasted their time campaigning there.

There's a great reply to this in Pod Save America, the gist of which is: politicians ALREADY don't go to Wyoming or Montana or Central California or Upstate New York. Presidential hopefuls, especially in the GE, go to swing states.

The question we should be asking is, why are Ohio, PA, Michigan and Florida more important than any other state?

> if abolished, politicians won't have incentives to campaign in rural territories

That's one take. Another take is that urban centers are being actively disenfranchised.

Btw, those politicians who benefit from the EC are the ones creating policies that are destroying the rural populace at the same time.

Why should people residing in any geographic group intentionally be given outsized political power when picking the president? Giving equal input to every voter is not advantaging non-rural people over rural people, it's advantaging more popular political policies over less popular ones.

While people living in rural areas may have distinct cultural values and may face real inequities when it comes to infrastructure, economic opportunity, education, health care access, etc., this seems completely unrelated to deciding the fairest way to pick a president.

Rural communities are already vastly overrepresented in Congress. They don't need what's effectively extra votes for President too.

This cannot be true.

Right now in order to win Florida you must win a popular vote in Florida. There is no internal electoral college in Florida. Winning Florida is incredibly important for presidential candidates.

Where do they campaign in Florida? Everywhere. They don't just hang out in Miami. If candidates do not avoid less populated areas when aiming to win a popular vote in a state, why would they do so for the nation?

The EC supports battleground states, NOT rural states. Maine is very rural, Florida is not, but Florida is where the campaigning occurred.

This distorts our national priorities. For example ethanol subsidies are so high because Iowa is a battleground state.

We could conduct a popular vote where a Wyoming resident gets 3x the vote of a California resident. This would be an enormous improvement over the EC and I would support it.

> An argument I heard recently against this is, if abolished, politicians won't have incentives to campaign in rural territories, and they won't be accountable to rural territories.

This doesn't effect politicians other than Presidential candidates, and doesn't effect territories (rural or otherwise) because those get no votes in Presidential elections. Though moving to a national popular votes in the states proper could be the first step to a national popular vote of US Citizens, which would give Presidential candidates a reason to campaign in territories.

Also, as long as there is a Senate and Presidential candidates are seen to have electoral coattails, there will be an incentive for Presidential candidates to campaign in low-population states.

Also, the association of low-population states with “rural areas” is wrong: California has a rural population about equal to the total population of South Dakota; Texas—the second most populated state—has the largest rural population, bigger than the total population of South Dakota and the four smaller states; North Carolina and Pennsylvania (also top 10 population states) have rural populations that also each exceed the total population of several of the smallest states combined.

>An argument I heard recently against this is, if abolished, politicians won't have incentives to campaign in rural territories, and they won't be accountable to rural territories. That basically makes sense. The EC is the only thing that really gives rural territories any stake, as the majority population has shifted to larger urban centers.

With the modern ratio of the voting to the total populations being about the same across rural and city populations the EC doesn't do that much for the rural territories. The EC was specifically made to give huge political weight to the very specific rural demography back then - plantation owners in the South states - i.e. the time and place of extremely low ratio of voting to total populations. Without EC the south states would back then have political weight of about 0, ie. equal to its share of voting population - white male landowners; with EC - the political weight of those states was its share of all the white population plus 3/5 of the slaves.

Of course with universal voting rights and slavery abolishment the EC is just an obsolete undemocratic remnant of those old times.

We could implement a proportional representation system, which would make sure that their voices are represented in a far way. If people vote 30/60/10 for parties A/B/C, 30/60/10% of candidates elected would be of that party. Now its more like 45/55/0 or some other random result, based on gerrymandering.

> Even though I live in a giant urban area, I wouldn't want to feel pressured to due so due to lack of political stake if I move elsewhere.

This makes no sense. You've just made an error in thinking.

The pro-EC argument is people who tend to live rural have a different set of issues, and also tend to be a relative minority of people, and thus those issues aren't given due weight with 1-person-1-vote.

Deciding to move to a rural area does not decrease the power of your vote in a non-EC system - your vote has equal power.

Territories aren't people. People are people. By granting more power to "territories" what you're really doing is over-representing people who hold land.

Even if you took the side that disproportional voting power to rural voters was a just goal, does this argument even make sense? The electoral college leads to winner take all situations such that many states are not contested and thus not catered to.

If you're a swing voter in a heavily partisan district, it doesn't matter how dense the district is, you won't be campaigned for.

This is an innumerate talking pointing point repeated endlessly by Republican talking heads. There is somewhat of a numerical advantage to small states, but it helps Vermont, Delaware, Rhode Island, New Mexico etc for Democrats, and it hurts Texas, Florida, Ohio, Georgia etc for Republicans.

With winner-take-all allocation of states' electoral votes, politicians are incentivized to put all of their effort into battleground/swing states, regardless of size. Presidential candidates spend 99% of their time in swing states, except for when they go to NY/CA/TX/FL to fundraise. Iowa gets attention because it's the earliest primary, not because it's rural.

The argument against that is under the current system if you're voting in a hard blue or red (spit) state, your vote doesn't matter in practice. Because the amount of 'swing' isn't enough to change the outcome.

If you get rid of the electoral college then no matter where you live your vote would count. At least for President.

> the only thing that really gives rural territories any stake

Whatever percentage of the population they make up, that's the stake they'll get (and the amount of accountability the politicians will have to them). What's wrong with that?

I guess when we're talking about actual campaign tours there might be some neglect that happens because of the logistics of physical travel. Although I have to question the real benefit of those visits to the citizens. They benefit the politicians themselves, but they aren't exactly a vital source of information in a world with the internet.

> An argument I heard recently against this is, if abolished, politicians won't have incentives to campaign in rural territories, and they won't be accountable to rural territories.

I don't see a problem with that if we confront and dismiss the notion that certain individuals (e.g. individuals who live in rural areas) should have more political influence than certain other individuals (e.g. individuals who live in urban areas).

Something as arbitrary as the amount of unpopulated land around a person's home should not affect how much political influence that person receives.

The flip side is that candidates ignore large states that are unlikely to change (think California for Republicans or Texas for Democrats), even though both states have a ton of people who don't have the same ideologies and values as their state is stereotyped.

> Even though I live in a giant urban area, I wouldn't want to feel pressured to due so due to lack of political stake if I move elsewhere.

Imagine a developer in San Francisco tempted to move to Austin, but who won't because the state as a whole will always go Republican even though Austin tends to be more liberal.

This would make a lot more sense of the federal government were a lot weaker and state government a lot stronger, like it was originally. As it stands now, the President governs over the people far more than it governs over the state, so the people should get to choose the President, not the states.

That's the wrong way to look at the problem.

The real core issue is: the president and the federal govt has way too much power. There is no reason why a centralized authority should decide on policies for both rural and urban communities.

If political power was surrendered back down to where it naturally belongs, i.e. to the state, or even better to the city level, and the fed was stripped and left with little to no political power, this whole electoral college charade would become entirely moot.

Why doesn’t this same logic also apply to, say, black people? The percentages are about the same. Why do we dedicate the entire shape of our system to ensuring that rural Americans aren’t forgotten, as opposed to any other group of that size?

The problem is not rural vs. high population states. It is whether a state has a strong party lead or not. Those who have not are the so-called "battleground" states. So some rural states get a lot of attention, where the outcome of the election is not already decided, while other states are completely ignored in campaigning. This is not bound to the size of the state.

Some people have wondered whether candidates might concentrate on big cities or ignore rural areas in an election in which the winner is the candidate receiving the most popular votes.

If there were any such tendency, it would be evident from the way real-world presidential candidates campaign today inside battleground states. Every battleground state contains big cities and rural areas. Presidential candidates—advised by the country’s most astute political strategists—necessarily allocate their candidate’s limited time and money between different parts of battleground states. The facts are that, inside battleground states, candidates campaign everywhere—big cities, medium-sized cities, and rural areas. Far from concentrating on big cities or ignoring rural areas, they hew very closely to population in allocating campaign events.

No, you shouldn’t count for 50 Californians or whatever. The few hundred thousand people in Wyoming could care less that millions of people in big cities live under the threat of gun violence. That’s highly unfair and a big reason for the disfunction in the US today.

rural territories still have the senate to balance things out.

counter-point is that the political stake is currently being taken away from people who live in large states, and is thus negatively affecting the most amount of people possible.

Why should 'rural' be a protected minority as opposed to any other minority? Should African Americans ger 3.6x the vote as White Americans because there are fewer of them?

I understand pre-industrial revolution why we needed to make sure rural voters got a little boost. Back then 50%+ of the population was agrarian. Now it's 0.3%. You can go to wal-mart anywhere. The main difference in your lifestyle across regions is determined by local politics, not national ones.

Since almost everyone lives in a quasi-suburbia in america now, who exactly needs protecting? Why does someone in North Dakota deserve more of a say than someone in california these days?

The majority population has shifted to larger urban centers, whose votes don't matter one bit anymore.

Perhaps those who live in urban areas may want to consider moving to a rural area so their vote can matter more. Living in a large urban area and voting Democratic is generally meaningless. Move to a rural area (or a small city), and the game's different.

The political implications of showing urbanites that (some) rural areas are better places to live than is currently being preached could get interesting.

There will still be the Senate - 2 senators per state regardless of population.

They still have 1 person 1 vote. There are a lot of people in rural areas and if one politician shows up there more the will get more of their votes.

Its sort of like the analogous effect showing up in Michigan in the auto manufacturing areas had for Trump. He showed up, Hillary did not, and he won more of those votes.

>On Tuesday, Nevada became the latest state to pass a bill that would grant its electoral votes to whoever wins the popular vote across the country, not just in Nevada. The movement is the brainchild of John Koza, a co-founder of National Popular Vote, an organization that is working to eliminate the influence of the Electoral College.

I don't think this will survive constitutional challenge, because it is not the voters of the state who are deciding how the state's electors are decided. For example, would it be allowed for a swing state such as Florida which now has a Republican governor and state legislature, to pass a law stating that their state's electors would be allocated based on how Alabama votes? That way, even if the Democratic candidate won a majority of votes in Florida, the electors would still go to the Republican candidate if the Republican candidate wins in Alabama.

> I don't think this will survive constitutional challenge, because it is not the voters of the state who are deciding how the state's electors are decided.

Is this US constitutional law or Nevada constitutional law that I'm not familiar with? There's no law I'm familiar with against faithless electors and Ray v. Blair made it clear that states are allowed to exclude electors if they won't pledge their support a certain way. Finally, article 2 clause 2 of the US constitution gives fairly broad leeway on how states assign their electors.

I could be mistaken though. Outside observers from other countries often are.

It’s a shame most of these comments are debating the merits of the Electoral College, skipping right past the much more interesting & relevant argument of whether the NPV compact is constitutional.

I agree with you that it’s not. States can indeed choose electors with any constitutional method they wish, but if they hold a statewide election, it has to be a fair election or it will run afoul of the 14th Amendment.

It seems like failing a constitutional challenge is the best case.

Electors don’t actually have to vote the way state law tells them to—that would require a constitutional amendment that restructures the whole process. When they vote counter to state law, they are called “faithless electors”.

A state system which ignores the will of its constituents is going to be much more susceptible to faithless electors, who may face tremendous incentives and pressure to trade votes.

I would expect the first such election to lead to the dissolution of the republic.

Technically every single voter in Nevada could vote for one candidate yet under certain circumstances all their votes would go to the the opposing candidate under the Compact.

Yeah, I don't think all the people in smaller states falling over themselves to join the Compact are really thinking this through.

The Electoral college exists because of slavery.

The original idea going into the Constitutional Convention was to have Congress pick the president. A majority of delegates going into the Convention supported this, but discarded it after debates established it would violate the separation of powers.

The popular vote wasn't an option, however, because it would mean the southern states with their large, non-voting slave populations would have vastly reduced influence. The southern delegates would have never supported a popular vote. Thus, the electoral college.

Madison wrote about it here: http://memory.loc.gov/ll/llfr/002/0000/00610057.tif

That page you linked (http://memory.loc.gov/ll/llfr/002/0000/00610057.tif) contains that argument from Madison followed by a non-slavery based argument made by someone else.

To say that the electoral college exists "because of slavery" is an oversimplification. It ignores the misgivings about a popular vote that are mentioned in the page you linked, and it also ignores the desire of the state governments to exert control over their representation in the Federal government -- senators were not directly elected for the same reason.

If you want to point to part of the Constitution that exists purely because of slavery, the 3/5 compromise is a better example. The decision to adopt an electoral college was certainly influenced by complications introduced by slavery, but there were a lot of other arguments in favor of an electoral college that were persuasive at the time.

Actually, or perhaps also, the electoral college exists because the founding fathers didn't trust the people to make good decisions. This is discussed at length in the letters the founding fathers wrote about their political opinions.

> The popular vote wasn't an option, however, because it would mean the southern states with their large, non-voting slave populations would have vastly reduced influence.

I'm not saying you're wrong, bc clearly you've done at least some research and I've done none. But didn't most states not have anything resembling a "popular" vote at first?

In the first presidential election 43,782 cast a ballot. (Population nearly 4 million in 1790.. so about 1% got a vote.)

When many states didn't even HAVE a popular vote at the state level, is it really true that they were considering using a popular vote rather than state electors based on populations?

I'm really confused about this because I don't understand the incentives politicians have to adopt this in their own state. It clearly undermines their state's power in national elections.

My (cynical) assumption is that this will be obeyed insofar as it helps bring about the desired outcome by those in power. It will be disregarded if it would shift the outcome in the other direction.

It's not confusing if you ditch the cynicism. Many people genuinely believe that a system wherein the president is elected after winning fewer voters then their opponent on a regular basis is a system that should be changed.

Does it? What if there state votes for the popular winner and that popular winner is not the winner?

Remember, this will work both ways - eventually we will have a democrat that doesn't win the popular vote as well in the current system.

I think a lot of people forget that US = United States. That is, states that are united. The electoral college attempts to "balance" the power that each STATE has to elect a president.

The election is a state-level function. In my opinion, to switch to a popular-vote-wins system is to basically say "hey everyone in other states, go ahead and decide for our actual citizens".

The electoral college achieves one very useful function thats ignored by everyone calling for its abolition in favour of the popular vote: it produces a clear winner and contains the contagion of litigating and delegitimizing the outcome of an election.

Think about this: there are a number of elections that have a very small popular vote margin. What if this gets less than, say, 20,000? That's entirely possible. In a strictly popular vote election, what's to stop each side from scrounging up votes or invalidating votes in every county in the country?

The most contentious and litigated election is probably the 2000 election. The electoral college contained those shenanigans to Florida alone (and largely to Miami-Dade and Broward countries, specifically).

There are four main problems with the US election system as I see it:

1. Voting needs to be mandatory. Americans who love "freedom" chafe against this but optional voting undermines democracy. You can see this in the organized efforts to suppress voting and disqualify voters by US political parties.

2. The US needs preferential voting. Third-party votes are otherwise largely a waste.

3. Paper ballots with optical recognition only. No punch cards, certainly no electronic voting. You need the paper trail of actual ballots. This could be filling in a ballot and validating it with a machine or using a machine to print out a ballot. These have an exceptionally low error rate.

4. Stop politicizing the election process. Like, why is the supervisor for elections an elected political position? This is the case in Florida, for example. Likewise, you have the Senate majority holding up election reform because of there is suspicion this will help the Democrats in the House who passed it. Seriously, Mitch McConnell needs to go to jail.

5. I'm fine with states being represented in the US system. The problem is that this system was designed at a time when populations were rural and cities were small. I don't think anyone predicted the disparity between ~40M people in California and ~150k people in Vermont having 2 Senators each.

You'll note that none of these are having the popular vote. IMHO that's fixing the wrong problem.

> Stop politicizing the election process. Like, why is the supervisor for elections an elected political position?

The alternative is that it's an appointed position. That won't be less political.

The electoral college doesn't necessarily help the voting process produce a clear winner, nor does it necessarily stop each side from scrounging votes.

As you mentioned, in the 2000 election, the outcome came down to Florida, specifically two counties. The electoral college helps create situations like this. The officials and what happened that election in those two counties essentially set the pace of America for the next decade. If they did fudge the numbers, the electoral college did not do anything to make the vote safer.

The electoral college causes there to be very specific places that can be targeted to swing the entire election. Those places must be secured, but in the end, it makes more sense to take the secure voting practices and apply them everywhere, not just to the places the electoral causes the votes to matter.

For (5), I'm pretty sure they not only foresaw it but specifically designed the system this way. This is why they created both the Senate and the House. CA has 53x as many representatives as Vermont.

I always hear people complain about the electoral college, but I've never once heard a detailed, objective argument as to why they think a popular vote would be a better system.

Friends I've talked to about just seem to default to a majority system because it seems more 'fair', or its easier to understand? I dont know.

In the USA, I think we are conditioned to belive in the democratic process, so I guess it feels 'natural' to just tally up the votes, & majority wins.

We've done it countless times in our personal lives. Anytime there's a disagreement, or a group decision to be made, "Ok, lets vote on it". Majority wins. Simple.

This is a fine & easy way to decide things in small groups, but is it really the best way to decide something among 300 million?

I'm not convinced. I'm not saying the EC is perfect, I just suspect a simple majority wins vote could cause other serious problems that are not immediately obvious.

If majority rule is a bad thing, why do you think minority rule is better?

What if I told you that the framers Hamilton and Madison were appalled by winner-take-all laws passed by states in the early 1800s, and tried to change the constitution to abolish the Electoral College, it having become an abomination completely unlike their intent?

There’s a lot of reasons for it on the movements official site:

https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/written-explanation

The Connecticut Compromise is good and all, but I think it's about time we discard it as an artifact of the days when communication was difficult and states had expectations around operating as semi-autonomous bodies. States used to be a strong identity tie than the nation but our general mindset has shifted toward identifying as Americans before Delawareans.

In a related anachronism...

> In [Republican CO State Senator Sonnenberg's] view, the Electoral College was created so that “people in rural areas did not get overrun by the masses.”

This can't be true since in 1790 (roughly the same time period the EC was created), "the masses" were rural; at that point only about 5% of the population was urban[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta...

There's some impressive logical bootstrapping here.

"States aren't autonomous anymore, so let's make the legal situation match that."

Except, wait, why are you even spending your time talking about this? Because it impacts federal elections, right? Seems like some states are still autonomous, you just don't think they're legitimately so.

https://dilbert.com/strip/1994-03-04

For some states - mostly red ones - that isn't true. Texans still identify primarily with their state.

That said, it's still a stupid reason for giving fewer people more votes. There is no reasonable argument for that, no matter which way you slice it.

Long live Delaware! You otherins shant try to come on err land and regalate err corporate forms.

Great, get your Article 5 wheels rolling.

It's in the Constitution. If you don't like the Constitution: --amend it. --call for a Constitutional Convention. These are the agreed methods to change the document. "End runs," state compacts and attempts to game the system are unconstitutional and doomed.

Winner take all is not in the constitution. When states started arranging their elections this way in the early 1800s, the chief creators of the Electoral College Madison and Hamilton, called it an abomination and sued, and when that failed, tried to amend the constitution to get rid of winner-take-all.

The constitution says that states can apportion their votes however they want. If they want to give them to the national popular winner, that's their prerogative.

The electoral college was just a kludge to allow elections before modern instant long distance communication became a thing. The gold standard for democracy was always "one person, one vote", but nowadays there's a lot of people that consider their personal gain more important than being democratic and those people (the Republican party mostly) will try to hang on to the electoral college, no matter the cost apparently.

“The gold standard for democracy has always been one person one vote”: it’s much more complicated than that. At least for US legal history, the idea of “who has the right to vote” has changed significantly, from land owning white males to citizens who haven’t committed felonies (and a few other exceptions like residents of Puerto Rico or citizens who live abroad and a few more). If you look even further back, Athens, the creator of democracy, would generally view our government as oligarchy (rule by the few) as popular vote elections were viewed as possible to be games/bought by the wealthy or connected. You can see echoes of that in today’s politics with dynastic families (Clintons, Bushes). To solve the problem, the Athenians employed the concept of “sortion” or essentially a civil service lottery where the ruling council of the city was chosen at random from all eligible citizens. A modern example of something close to sortition today is Jury Duty.

This is not true. Go read about the formation of the Constitution.

It doesn't even make any sense. States were just as capable of holding elections and sending six-digit numbers to Washington as they were holding elections and sending two-digit numbers to Washington.

I have often thought that part of the rationale for the electoral college was that in the 18th century they did not have the internet, TV, Radio, even newspapers were pretty scarce. So it just wasn't all that practical for a candidate to ride a horse around all 13 colonies to meet each voter. The logical solution would have been to have a parliamentary system whereby the congress would select the president for you. The problem there was that the president would be beholden to the congress and you would lose some of the checks and balance features because he would be less likely to veto something. So they developed a "shadow congress" that did not have law making responsibilities but sole purpose was to travel to Philadelphia or DC and hear the speeches and so forth and select the president for you as your representative.

Looking at it from this 18th century perspective highlights why it is completely unnecessary today. Obviously the voter has many ways of getting to know the positions of the candidates themselves and hence able to elect the president directly. There is no need for it today.

On the other hand, the electoral college, like congress, gives actual weight to the idea that a state is more than just the sum of its population, by automatically getting two votes for being a state.

Whether or not that is necessary is a different conversation from the information dissemination purpose of the EC.

If people are up in arms about the electoral college giving small states outsized influence, wait until they hear about the senate.

The "electoral college helps small states" thing isn't true. It's a convenient justification that high school teachers repeat without thinking. It makes no sense.

If the EC helps small states, then why has there never been a presidential visit to Wyoming?

The answer is that the electoral college doesn't empower small or large states, it empowers battleground states. This is dumb, undemocratic, and contrary to the framers intentions.

That's the literal point of the Senate, though, to be fair.

Why cant states just give out percents of electoral votes based on who voted?

Example: Lets say CA has 10 Electoral Votes (for easy math) 60% vote Dem, 40% vote Republican. California then Gives 6 Electoral Votes to the Democrat and 4 to the Republican instead of all 10 to the Democrat.

Feels like that would more fairly represent the voters of each state no?

Yes, I also think this is the simplest way to make it more fair. States can do this unilaterally without pact. That's why I feel the pact is not about fairness.

I feel like I've seen some maps for past elections done hypothetically like this. I can't recall the conclusions though. I think the Senate situation still gives disproportionate power to small states in that model, even if it is slightly less dramatic than the winner take all in each state we have now.

Why can't one party campaign like the rules were written down beforehand, instead of hanging out running up the score in California?

Getting rid of the electoral college won't necessarily make Hilary win this time around. It will be a different vote entirely. Republicans will actually contest California and some others. They'll try to run up the score in Texas. They'll shift a couple issues left.

The only sure thing from this change would be ignoring the spread out population.

Most modern countries have similar systems, where smaller areas are disproportionally represented in the legislative power. Its only when you loose that is a problem?

The President is not a legislative body.

"Legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests." - Justice Earl Warren

There's a long history of the US electoral system favoring rural areas over urban areas. Typically, the courts had to intervene in order to remedy an issue where clearly the legislature has a conflict of interest. The most famous is Reynolds v Sims (1964), which stated that electoral districts of state legislative chambers must be roughly equal in population [1].

Hopefully, we can see similar change happen in the Electoral College.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynolds_v._Sims

When looking at political methods I like to look a first principals from all points of view.

Here is a conservative or traditionalist political point of view in favor of the Electoral College

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/danger-attacks-electoral-coll...

Here is a liberal or progressive point of view against the Electoral College

https://harvardpolitics.com/united-states/the-case-against-t...

These are but two opinions. Politics is ultimately creating policy on opinions from a large community.

Isn't it interesting that minority opinions matter and must be treated equally, until your state has the minority of the population...

Up next: Abolishing the World Series. Make it one big, long game and count only the total number of runs.

If the results of presidential elections lasted a single year and had stakes as low as the poorly-named "World Series," that would be fine.

this is the cricket approach. baseball typically plays multi-game series instead.

i agree in spirit though. i have long thought it would make sense to abolish the playoffs. give the pennants to the teams with the best records. then, have them play a 21-game World Series in the fall.

Surely you must be joking to relate a sports game with American democracy.

If this happens, Democrats will be very unhappy with how many Republicans there are in Upstate New York, Southern Illinois and Rural California who's vote now counts for something.

It'll mostly balance out I think, and even if it doesn't, that's hardly the point

Democrats want rural Republicans in New York to have their voice heard, that's the whole point: everyone's vote should count equally and the winner should need to seek majority support.

Unlike Republicans, Democrats have these things called "principles". They are ideas that you believe in whether they benefit you or not.

This is known as the "Winner take-all effect". The electoral college also has a small-state bias (smaller states get more electoral votes per person than larger ones).

Historically, these two have often approximately cancelled eachother out as they favored opposite parties. But there's no guarantee of that - when Reagan won with 58.8% of the popular vote, he took 97.5% of the electoral vote.

Similarly, sometimes the small state bias is a substantially stronger effect: when Trump won with 56% of the electoral vote, he had only 46% of the popular vote, largely due to Clinton's higher "wasted" margin of victory in larger winner-take-all states.

There are 2 major data points that are forgotten in this discussion

#1 The founding fathers responsible for the american revolution risked everything by creating the constitution and the electoral college. They literally went against the most powerful empire in the world. They determined that the electoral college was the best system to defend the freedom of the naescent Republic.

Then on the other side, you have a bunch of armchair bureaucrats and talking heads trying to change the system they inherited thanks to the blood of others. They want the benefits from the change ("more votes") but should the system implode, they will surely socialize losses among USA (they wont even join the army , let alone fight for what they believe in ).

Then you have switzerland. The longest continuous government in the world operates as an extreme version of Republic, giving ample powers to small groups, where they can undo anything enacted by the majority. Nothing gets done as people bicker about small things. Majority does not get its sat. Yet the country is the most stable in the world.

Maybe its time to consider what is the price for changing something that was forged with the blood of tears of more brave men, and has proven to stand the test of time.

The electoral college also serves as a “firewall” of sorts to contain any local election fraud to that state (such that the will of the voters in that state is compromised, but the compromise doesn’t extend beyond that).

For all I care, CA could pick their votes out of a lotto machine and it wouldn’t affect the power of my vote (as a non-CA resident). The fact that my vote is meaningless (deep blue state) is a collateral issue, perhaps.

This is an interesting point. The EC provides a kind of process isolation, in theory.

Election fraudsters and hackers hoping to control the outcome of an election have to make big splashes in small ponds, so to speak. It seems intuitive then, that their shenanigans are more likely to be noticed - and are at least somewhat contained if they aren't.

If we're going down the "1 person, 1 vote" road, that isolation vanishes. No more big splashes needed - only very small droplets in a vast, vast ocean.

And if Ohio or Florida has election fraud? The electoral college doesn’t firewall off election fraud. It creates vulnerabilities by concentrating voting power.

The National Popular Vote (NPV) initiatives website has a lot of good info and background on the issue, and takes on the myths around it.

- https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/

Explanation - https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/written-explanation

Myths - https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/answering-myths

As for the compact being a partisan issue, losing the presidency despite winning the popular vote can happen in either direction:

A shift of 59,393 votes in Ohio in 2004 would have elected John Kerry despite President Bush’s nationwide lead of over 3,000,000 votes.

Edit: C-SPAN interview with NPV co-founder John Koza from March 2019:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?458502-6/washington-journal-jo...

It's like we've been trying to destroy the electoral college almost since it's inception. And every step makes it worse.

The electoral college was supposed to be a sort of bulwark between the public and the highest office in the nation.

State governments choose their electors. Those electors are supposed to be tasked with choosing the best among the candidates for president and vice-president.

But instead, state governments threw that decision to the public. Effectively making the electoral college a proxy popularity vote for a state. And that's a big fucking ask of any person. Choose the person who is capable of running the country and making all these decisions, whose policies will guide your nation to prosperity, etc.

Hell man, I'm just trying to get my budget straight. Do I look like I have time in between everything else I do to also seriously investigate every single candidate? And I'm not a complete moron either. And I know I cannot actually make a completely informed decision here. But I know complete morons. And they get a vote just like me.

No he isn't and he won't.

But, it's a good social engineering mechanism to discuss these issues so the next gen and others who don't understand the US thanks to pop culture can learn why the EC is important.

Repeal the 17th Amendment while you're at it and then increase the house reps to 5000 and triple the senators.

Then we'll see how effective or profitable lobbying, campaign finance or gerrymandering is.

For 32+ years, the fact is that the Democratic candidate has won the popular vote 7 times in the last 8 elections.

I am not saying whether this is good or bad.

But, I think the two party system would crumble very quickly if the Electoral College were removed, and something else would come into place instead.

Disclaimer: I do not vote despite being an American citizen. I am also an anarchist.

If this means viable 3rd parties, am all for it.

I could not be more opposed to the abolishment of the Electoral College. The founders had a very good rationale for putting it in.

That said... I think there's a solution for this. Hard term limits for everyone, in all the branches.

It already exists for the Executive branch. I think it should be instituted for both Legislative and Judicial as well.

The rationale for the EC and every other compromise in the Constitution was simple: it’s what was required to get the states to actually sign up.

There was the very real possibility that the individual states would go their own way if they didn’t like the proposed Constitution. Larger states could have easily decided that they didn’t need to be part of a larger country. Smaller states could have easily decided that they would be ruled by the larger states and that they’d be better off independent.

The electoral college was needed to convince everyone to stick together. Same with the different structures of the House and the Senate, the 3/5ths compromise, and more.

Things are completely different now. There’s no realistic possibility that any state will exit the union. The major purpose of so many elements of our federal system is completely gone.

> The founders had a very good rationale for putting it in.

Yeah, slavery. How would you have a popular vote if you're allowing slaves to count as 3/5ths of a person for vote share? They obviously wouldn't have allowed them to vote. Fortunately, we no longer have slavery as an official institution, so it may be time to revise why we're doing it.

The founders could not have foreseen shifts in population demographics the like of which have occurred in the last 200 years. The urbanization of our population has been staggering during that time, and the percent of people who own or work on farms has dropped to nearly a rounding error, compared to most of the people in the world.

The idea that we must worship every aspect of the founders' thoughts on the makeup of a country, when the world has changed so drastically since their lifetimes, makes no rational sense. Sure, a lot of their ideas (checks and balances, good!) are still relevant. Others (slavery, no women's suffrage, bad), not so much.

> The founders had a very good rationale for putting it in.

Well, it had a reason: like the per-state represt in the Senate which was locked in against amendment, like the 3/5 compromise, like the prohibition locked against amendment protecting the slave trade for a set time period, and probably like a handful of other things I'm probably not remembering off the top of my head, it was a mechanism of politically securing slavery and reassuring the slave states that the more populace free states, where ethical objections to slavery were already common, would not be able to band together and demand that all people be treated as people rather than some being treated as property.

(Before anyone starts quoting the Federalist Papers, I'll point out that those weren't working documents that the Constitutional Convention made decisions based on, but campaign literature to sell ratification particularly in New York. So they weren't going to say “A lot of this document is about mollifying the slave states to get them to stay by giving them as much assurance as possible that it will never be structurally possible to abolish slavery.” But, not saying it when selling the document in New York doesn't stop it from being true.)

https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/section_9.1#myth_9.1.4

Definitely, for the Senate, I don't mind unlimited in the house since they are up for reelection every two years.

The electoral college was created to strike a balance between valuing a diversity of perspectives and popularity of perspectives. The probability that a geographically restricted monoculture gets it right is very close to zero.

That's not what the electoral college does. It's a post-hoc justification your high school teacher probably came up with on the fly, and you clearly haven't thought about it critically since.

The only thing the electoral college does is give the voting power of local minorities to local majorities.

3 million people in the state vote for A

4 million people in the state vote for B

B gets 7 million people's worth of electoral votes, A gets nothing. Repeat 47 times.

There is no explanation for this that makes sense. It wasn't designed this way, it happened by accident. The framers tried to stop it in the 1790s and 1800s, but there was no political will: everybody wanted to exploit the antidemocratic loophole in the constitution instead of fixing it.

The electoral college gives extra votes to certain people. Why stop at rural vs urban? Why not give extra votes to people shorter than 5 feet? To people with black hair and blue eyes? To people who can wiggle their ears and roll their tongues at the same time?

Use a condorcet method [0] to elect a US president that represents common ground.

Needs of specific groups of people can be taken into account as transparent supplementary conditions. Sparsely populated areas constitute one potential parameter. Maybe the opinions of poor and ill people can also be taken into account for while respecting their privacy.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method

I turned 30 this year,and the Republican candidate has won the popular vote once in my life,and he was an incumbent. There has been a Republican president 14 of the 30 years of my life. Now,the first president of my life ( Bush 1) won the popular vote before I was born, but if we don't count him, no Republican has entered office with the popular vote in my life. Regardless of political beliefs does this seem right to everyone?

If you removed only California from the popular vote then Hillary lost. The share number of people there still cause Hillary to get the popular vote. Is it fair that 1 state has a controlling share over every other state?

GWB won the popular vote in 2004.

I'm interested in hearing arguments from anyone who genuinely believes that California and New York are over all politically underprivileged.

Every non-swing state (including Texas and Wyoming) is when it comes to electing the president.

https://i.imgur.com/wpOIGxq.png

That's a nice number of comments.

Right or wrong, the only thing that matters is the constitution.

It is easy to imagine that a purely democratic system would be better, but I find it easy to imagine that it would be substantially worse.

The founding fathers rightly believed that most people were ignorant and relatively stupid so the people vote for the house, but senators and electors were appointed.

The agreement to get small states to join was that they would have an equal number of senators. If you want a different system change the constitution. Im skeptical that a democratic system would be better.

They setup the system to be a collection of states with a weak federal govt with limited power. The federal govt over time has taken more and more power from the states.

When california joined the union it had 33X less population than the most populous state (new york). Californians were happy to have the overrepresentation when it benefitted them.

Overall a strongly federal system is worse than a system where 50 states each try something different. In a 50 state system we get many chances to find the best policies. For example when marijuana is illegal at the federal level the antis predicted wholesale mayhem. There was no way to test to see what would happen until some states defied federal law. Once one state showed that it was fine others could come on board.

The same goes for open carry. Antis claimed there would massive increases in crime and shootings. It turns out not to be the case.

My problem with the electoral college is that it doesn’t seem to matter who I vote for or which way my state goes.

The election comes down to some key battleground states, which is where the candidates spend the vast majority of their time campaigning.

The constitution shouldn’t be put on a pedestal. The men who wrote that document were flawed just like any other human. Many of them owner slaves. I’m not saying we should disregard our laws but I am saying we should keep an open mind to amending the constitution as needed.

This is states taking the entirely constitutional action of deciding who to give their votes to: in this case, whoever wins the popular vote.

> "Sanford Levinson, a constitutional law scholar at the University of Texas at Austin, is sharply critical of the Electoral College system, but does not believe the interstate pact would solve all of the problems inherent to America’s election design."

Same argument as we can't try any gun restrictions because none of them will stop all shootings.

What if Congress revoked all (or nearly all) implicitly and explicitly delegated powers to the Executive? The jockeying over who runs for President and how we elect them always seems to miss the point that the modern Executive is much too powerful.

Make the Presidency weaker, and then let's have this discussion about how we elect them.

In much more recent news:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/faithless-elector-a-...

About the same number of people live in public housing in NYC as Wyoming.

Either land area matters or people matter.

Choose.

This article is from May. Oregon has since joined, becoming the 16th state to do so.

The current number is 15. Nevada didn't join. Although passed by the Assembly and the Senate, the Governor vetoed it.

Every time this debate comes up I can't help but wonder if we are letting the office of the president have too much power. To over-simplify a bit: the president should be executing the will of Congress, right?

The electoral college is a fault domain for voter fraud, and scaler to mitigate differences in voter accessibility, which cannot otherwise be fully mitigated given differences in geography.

Questions like this push me more and more to the idea that places like China have got governance nailed. Why bother about all this? It's disorder for little gain.

I'd be curious how this holds up to court challenges because it seems like a deliberate circumvention of the constitution.

Not that the current system is completely equitable.

Democratic candidates have won the popular vote 4/5 times in the most re ent elections, but only won the Presidency 2/5. That’s an issue.

It’s not an issue at all, the system does not regard popular vote by design.

Teams with the most yards lose some football games, too. Is that an issue?

Run to win the election under the rules that are in force.

The real core issue is the president and the federal govt has way too much power. There is no reason why a centralized authority should decide on policy for both rural and urban communities and for states as deeply different as Louisiana and Washington state.

Obviously only the "blue" states want this change. Fortunately there are more "red" states than blue states, so the original purpose of the electoral collage, as created by the founding fathers, will be preserved. Otherwise we would be in "tyranny of the majority" mode, which we are anyway, but at least not with regard to presidential elections.

It’s really not a blue state vs red state thing as much as a swing state vs non-swing state thing. Right now it’s more blue because trump is in power, but if democrats take the White House (and especially if it’s without winning the popular vote), red states will be jumping on the bandwagon. Before 2016 red states were terrified of the electoral college “blue wall” and many were very close to joining the compact before the 2016 election made it politically infeasible.

Another thing to abolish - winner-takes-all system, which prevents wider parties variety.

you could make a strong argument that the 'winner-takes-all' electoral votes in states that have winner-takes-all systems is essentially already doing what the proposal to effectively eliminate the electoral college is doing -- it's saying that individual votes dont count, only the collective whole.

Would you have multiple presidents? How would you break their roles up? Which one gets the nuclear code or do they all?

1. Even if NPV is a good idea, this is the wrong way to do it. Doing it the wrong way means legal chaos. Doing it the wrong way means it can probably be undone or made worse the wrong way.

2. George Mason vs. Elisabeth Warren. James Madison vs. Jay Inslee. These match-ups aren't even close.

3. I don't think the results will match the intentions.

For point 1 this seems like parts of Obamacare. Whether you support it or not, enforcing/creating parts of it via executive order means it can be unenforced/dismantled via executive order. This isn't a direct comparison, my point, if you base something on legally weak and questionable methods you will end up with weak and questionable outcomes.

Another way I look at point 2, can Justin Beiber rewrite Mozart and improve upon it? There are very few political intellectuals I would put on par with the founding fathers, and sadly most of those are not politicians. The founders' system has worked very well for centuries, the USofA has faults sure, but from ragtag rebel colonies to world super-power, this part is working fine. We have many problems, isolate the variables, I don't think the EC is the cause.

Point 3, this is mostly a party issue, Democrats support it, Republicans do not. Of the 16 states to pass it through legislature 15 had Democrat governors, the single Republican governor vetoed. I think it is safe to say the elections of Bush and Trump, without winning the popular vote, are the big driving factors for the NPV. I don't think NPV will have the intended effect. I think people are wrongly taking new rules and applying old stats but if you change the rules of the game you can't expect players (candidates and voters) to play with old strategies. A lot more Republicans will show up to vote in solidly blue states where currently voting for an R is a waste of time.

The United States bases way too much of its identity on who is its president.

Because the United States invests way too much power in who is President.

> Jerry Sonnenberg, a Republican state senator in Colorado who opposed the bill, said he believed the change would weaken the electoral power of sparsely populated rural states like Wyoming and Utah, while strengthening states like California and New York.

States. Are. Not. People.

No. But states' representatives will often work together across party lines to try to do something that benefits the state. "Political power of a state" is not a totally idiotic concept.

the electoral college system has become a scam to give the presidential election to the wealthy. they can, during the election year establish residency in the swing states and in affect have more of a say as to who becomes president. people here claiming that it gives the rural population more of a say, that's a lot of bs. with national popular vote the urban and rural states will have just as much of a say as each vote will count for one vote. none of this crap of increasing the representative count and taking advantage of the numbers being rounded in favor of one party vs the other. now if a party wants to rig the election, they will have a much harder time.

Wake me up when it's 35 states. Before that, it's just a political stunt - blue states promise to vote for popular vote winner, thinking it would be a Democrat, which they'd be voting for anyway.

It's quite likely that without the electoral college, Donald Trump would have won the popular vote. Republican turnout in NY is terrible for presidential elections, because they all know there vote won't matter. Registered Democrats out number Republicans in NY by more than 2 to 1, and yet there are more Republicans in NY that there are people in New Mexico and Vermont combined.

It's definitely not a given, but predicting what would happen is not a clear exercise. You can't change the rules without changing peoples behavior.

You misspelled obsolete :)

How is this tech related?

Most of these comments are about the structural issues with the electoral college.

I’m not really concerned about that. What concerns me is this insistence that a popular vote for President in a country of 350M people is a good idea. Does anyone actually believe this? The executive branch these days has essentially become a proxy for what laws one wants passed, and you end up voting accordingly. This might be fine, if the results were restricted to being local - and by the way, the original design of this country accented on exactly that point. But we don’t live in that country anymore, I guess. Now we want more democracy, all the time.

So I find it really hard to believe that introducing more “democracy” in a nation as divided and diverse as this one is a good idea. This, I thought, was supposed to be one of the reasons that people wanted to move here ... the whole Federalism thing. Taxes can be different between states. So can Social policy. The extension of this is of course the Electoral College.

Spare me the criticism of “slippery slope” but getting rid of the Electoral College seems like we’d be on the road to a government “of the majority, by the majority, and for the majority”. That is categorically absurd, at least in my view.

The cynic in me says that the only reason we’re even talking about this is because Trump won in 2016 via the EC. Sure. He did. And Clinton won the “popular vote” because of LA, SF, and NYC.

For those in SF (or whatever proxy): do you want folks in Sioux Falls or Fargo making your economic and social policy? No? I didn’t think so. So why is it okay to institute the reverse?

The point I’m trying to make here is this country, as diverse as it is, is best run as a distributed network. And centralizing the election of the Executive into a singular popular vote will help destroy what’s left of that network.

News flash: Trump would still have won, just with a different campaign strategy and a different platform. Promise a little more of what CA and NY want, and a little less of what everybody else wants, and he'd get the popular vote, too.

In fact I think this would make it _easier_ for a populist to win, not harder, because all they'd have to worry about is crafting a campaign message that resonates with the majority and portrays their opponent as Satan in the flesh.

That's exactly the goal. The point is not to pick a different winner, it is to re-enfranchise voters in states that are strongly 'red' or strongly 'blue'

Good. Then partisanship shouldn't matter when it comes to the merit of this proposal.

I mean, if he had won the popular vote, then fine, he is the winner.

All this is asking is 1 person 1 vote.

I wonder how many people arguing for the abolishment of the EC would like it if India and China automatically had the most votes in whatever supranational government arises in the future and got to decide everything that happened across the world. The US is still supposed to be a federation. The EC was part of the deal the US made with smaller states to become part of the Union precisely because they were afraid of being drowned out by the big states. Don't like it? Convince the smaller states. Might not be that hard. There are plenty of dumb people in the smaller states willing to permanently consign their land to irrelevance because they don't like a President who's going to be gone in a handful of years.

That only matters if our international government gets an elected god emperor.

The president is one of three branches of government. Congress/Senate balances the power across states.

The democrats crucified Trump in 2016 for not accepting the outcome of the election. Today they want to amend the constitution to abolish the electoral college. Maybe it's a good thing that we can't change these things on a whim.

This campaign doesn't require changing the constitution. States can decide how to divide their electors, which is exactly what is going on here. See https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/written-explanation.

Your first two sentences are both accurate, but I don't think your third necessarily follows. There are strong arguments for getting rid of the Electoral College and they should be (and are being) debated.

re: California

It's also worth considering the distortions that illegal aliens put on electoral college numbers.

If there was any evidence at all, the administration would have presented it.

Wouldn't that push housing up in big cities?

My issue with the electoral college is that winner take all - rather than each electoral vote being counted and rolled up, only the winner is. There are a couple states that do this, I’d like to see the others adopt this.

This is absurd populism. IMHO electoral college votes should come from US House district winners instead of winner takes all.

Probably a move in the right direction, but then the issues of gerrymandering come into play.

Anyone proposing this is doing so in the blind. Nobody knows how this would change the complex executive and legislative systems we have. Nobody could know, for decades. So why the confidence that this is the right thing to do?

1) the presidency has grown too powerful and imperial with a bureaucracy so massive the Qing emperor would be jealous.

2) 15 States can do what they want, but unless they meet the provisions in Article 5, the college is here to stay.

Thank goodness the Framers had the foresight to include the process for amending the Constitution in the document.

The states have the absolute right to assign their electors as they see fit.

The framers intended for them to be locally elected or proportional, like Maine and Nebraska today.

Let's imagine a state signs this and is a tipping point state for the presidential election. If this compact has any effect, it will be for the state's electors to vote against the popular vote in that state, resulting in the election of the undesired president according to the state's voters.

Nothing wrong with that constitutionally, but I suspect the politicians will feel differently after the voters express their opinion of the matter.

Yes, of course. If you support the election of President based on national popular vote, then you surely realize that sometimes the President will not be the candidate that was preferred in certain states.

If this actually does pass the tipping point, nobody will even be counting electors any more, they will only be counting the popular vote. The electors will be considered just a formality.

If the popular vote favored, say Trump, and if California could change the election by pulling out of the compact, they would. In a heartbeat.

That's why I'm not too worried about it. If it would really change the result, it's easy for a State to hit the pause button.

This is stupid. The entire point of the electoral college is to ensure small states have a say and the country isn’t ruled by the majority mob. Small states would have to be pretty ignorant to make themselves irrelevant like that.

Are you thinking of the US Senate? The electoral college is not meant to give a proportionally larger weight to small states.

The entire point of the electoral college was to protect us against low information voters actually:

https://time.com/4558510/electoral-college-history-slavery/

We see that that backfired. :)

However, it's not clear there's anything that small states can do about this (other than make sure that this doesn't get passed in states making up a majority of EC votes).

The states that would arguably be stupid to go for this are actually the purple ones rather than the large or small ones, because they are the ones that are currently the focus of presidential campaigning but they would no longer be if there was a mechanism for making the EC reflect popular vote. That's perhaps why Colorado may remove itself (see https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-movement-to-skip-th...)

I'm not sure the electoral college does that except when successfully gerrymandered. Electoral college votes are applied on a population basis. So small states get less votes.

Without the electoral college, "states" collectively don't get any say at all. Only citizens of those states.

It looks like there are at least three dumb fucks on Hacker News. According to Alexander Hamilton's Federalist 68, avoiding mob rule was the first reason for the electoral college. The second was to ensure qualified people chose the president of the U.S. The third was to prevent civil disorder (again, mob rule) by spreading the elector's votes around the nation. The fourth was to prevent corruption. Without the electoral college, small states don't have the numbers to counter states like California, New York, and other heavily populated areas. Mob rule is a problem to some degree with the electoral college; nevertheless, its purpose was to prevent that.

If trump is re-elected it may be the last time a republican wins a presidential election in the current system, due to demographic changes in key states (FL, TX, NC, etc.)

If the electoral college is abolished, it could actually end up getting another few republicans elected, since it would incentivize republican turnout in solidly democratic states like California.

I doubt it. The Republicans will just have to move their platform just enough to the left to appeal to whichever state has the 270th vote.

The states agreed to the Constitution with the Electoral College provision. If there's national will to change it, it should be through the amendment process described in the Constitution.

Having some states band together to subvert the intention of the EC fundamentally breaks the compact of the Constitution. What is the authority of a President chosen through subversion of the Constitution?

Constitution does not specify how states should implement EC. In fact, Maine and Nebraska do not use winner-take-all used by other states.

Great. With no electoral college, Wyoming would have 1.44% of the weight California would have towards who was elected. The only thing keeping Wyoming in the Union would be their two senators. Maybe then Wyoming folks should have to pay 1.44% of the Federal Income Tax that Californians pay.

Campaigning for President? Just go to New York, LA, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, and maybe a few other cities.

Maybe city folks can start making their own food while they're at it.

Guess what? Wyoming pays less than 1.07% <1> of the federal income tax that California does so you have gotten your wish.

Also California grows about 100x <2> the food of Wyoming so yeah we can eat our own food, thank you.

The most important reason the electoral college was invented was so that states with large slave populations could count 60% of them for representation without actually giving them the vote. You don't hear about it that much anymore for obvious reasons.

<1> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_tax_revenue_by_state

<2> https://www.farmprogress.com/management/what-us-states-produ...

I think this is both a dumb move and unconstitutional.

Present day politics aside, allowing for pure demographic voting in this day and age is even more dangerous than it was in the early days of the republic.

States and regions have different needs that need to be considered in the governance of the nation. You can already see warning signs, the Democratic Party platform has been so brain dead, they even managed to marginalize union voters. Kansas and Wisconsin were progressive strongholds.

Changing the way we count isn’t a fix for that issue — fixing how candidates and parties approach the people is. A more productive approach would be to reduce the carnival nature of the election process... candidates shouldn’t be picked based on their ability to shuck and jive in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Direct popular vote is basically a beacon for reactionary politics. It’s easy to churn out old people to vote.

What is unconstitutional about a state using its constitutional authority to cast its votes for President?

Why should fictional state borders take precedence over actual humans when allocating voting blocs? If different states have difference needs, then those states residents will vote for leaders who serve them.

Your problem seems to be that that giving supreme power to an arbitrary majority is flawed. And it surely is. But giving supreme power to an arbitrary minority is surely as bad or worse.

Old people live in every state.

If you have a problem with old people exercising their sacred voting right too much, surely the solution is to enable young people to vote, not give rural state citizens extra vote weight?

I think before we change the system we might want to get politicians to actually do their job and represent the people in their district. With all these people voting by mail and all these government provided or subsidized phones and internet connections it's not only trivial but should be mandatory to quantify and qualify what each person who votes wants as a matter of a public record of accountability rather than having some party line being towed. If the politicians were doing their job and not serving some party or political agenda, the electoral college I think would work just fine. Popular vote/mob rules? I don't think so. The majority should never rule over the minority, and the only good government is a democracy where the majority vote in the best interest of all citizens and compromise in order to do so. Or as I like to sum it up, don't confuse a coop game with a competitive game.

A hypothetical situation;

An amendment is proposed on the floor of the House to change the formula in a bill for how funding is allocated.

The amendment presents a pro-urban allocation which provides a greater share of funding for larger cities compared to a baseline per-capita allocation.

Urban center representatives stand up and argue how their cities need a higher reimbursement rate because the issue at hand is costlier to fix or more prevalent in their environment.

Rural representatives stand up and argue they need the baseline funding to run an effective program.

A vote is taken, and 54% of votes approve the amendment, urban center reps effectively pooling their votes to enact the funding paradigm that most benefited their constituents.

——

The moral of the story is that it’s a lot more complicated than 1 person 1 vote.

Often times policies may benefit a rural area over and urban environment or vice versa. One type of community benefiting and the expense of another. Cities already carry a massive voting advantage, because, that’s where most people live!

When bills pass on a majority vote, urban already wins over rural every time. The rural areas maybe can form blocks to help push otherwise divided city reps one way or another, but policy debate is already dominated by urban voters, despite the claim of urban votes “counting less”. The simple math belies the reality that urban center reps vote for pro-urban national policies and the rural states with 1 rep sit on the sidelines.

The last place these votes matter, even in the slightest, is in the EC in a closely contested election, and in the Senate. Frankly I’m not convinced more populism is any benefit, or that cities are particularly hurting from a lack of representation.

The thing I've never understood about this argument is why the urban/rural divide is so special that it needs special rules? There are a bajillion other types of ways to categorize people that there is a majority and a minority besides the population density of their state.

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