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Comment by innocentoldguy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

Except it does. Smaller states do get more votes per capita than larger states.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_Colleg...

Are you sure that that's not exactly what it's designed to do? Can you explain what it _is_ designed to do? (edit: I'm not claiming either way, but would like to understand what you're claiming) (edit: hmmm, a single downvote ...)

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.

The "gerrymandering" would have to be done by moving state lines. So, probably not actually happening.

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.

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