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Comment by thomascgalvin | Hacker News Reader

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

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> "Rural issues" do not deserve special protection if that protection results in a tyranny of the minority.

"Tyranny of the minority" gets this issue exactly backwards. The problem the Electoral College was designed to mitigate is a tyranny of the majority.

> 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?

Why do any of these concerns need Federal intervention to solve? Why can't LAC and Arkansas and Nevada manage their own affairs? I understand rare emergencies like natural disasters require pooling national resources, but everyone talks now as if no locality at all can survive from day to day without Federal benefits.

> "Tyranny of the minority" gets this issue exactly backwards. The problem the Electoral College was designed to mitigate is a tyranny of the majority.

The point they're making is that while it was designed to prevent a tyranny of the majority, it goes too far and results in a tyranny of the minority.

> Why do any of these concerns need Federal intervention to solve? Why can't LAC and Arkansas and Nevada manage their own affairs? I understand rare emergencies like natural disasters require pooling national resources, but everyone talks now as if no locality at all can survive from day to day without Federal benefits.

No one mentioned federal benefits. We are talking about the relative voting power of a voter in one area versus another in the presidential election. Let's not get distracted here.

> No one mentioned federal benefits.

Sure you did; you said LAC voters don't have their concerns addressed as well because they are part of a large, populous state whose EC votes count for less per capita. My question is, if LAC is capable of managing its own affairs, why does it care?

In other words, you're assuming that the President's job is to "take care of everyone's concerns", so everyone needs an equal vote to elect the President. That seems to me to be absurd. The President's job is to faithfully execute the laws and to make executive decisions about national needs like defense and foreign policy. It's not to address the individual concerns of every voter or the local concerns of every city, county, etc.

Similar remarks apply to the Federal government more generally. The fact that everyone takes it for granted now that the Federal government is supposed to address everyone's concerns is a sign of how corrupt and inefficient our system has become. Everyone judges their Senators and Representatives, not according to how well they take care of national issues, but how much pork they send home.

Even when you take for granted--and we shouldn't, but just for funsies we will--that the whole point of the thing is to make executive decisions about national needs...why the heck should Nevada get a bigger say than Los Angeles County?

It has become evident that the federalist experiment has failed; because an integrated modern society cuts across state lines, while land can't vote and people matter more than land. Everything else is a side effect, no matter how tightly it's clung to by parties whose high-minded rhetoric, if we're being frank, is honored more in the breach than the observance as they look for low-status, low-power people to cudgel, using the guise of federalism to make it easier to do in their own little pond.

It doesn't though. Do you really believe voting is the most powerful way to influence lawmakers? There generally is far more wealth, power, and influence in population centers. How can you feel like some of the most powerful cities in the world are getting an unfair shake?

> It has become evident that the federalist experiment has failed

Not so much failed, but massively misaligned after the civil war. The nation made many compromises at every level for slave power, and should have renegotiated everything afterwards.

Agreed. I should have said that American federalism has failed; that misalignment is endemic to America--it goes back as far as the Missouri bleeping Compromise, and that's just the part labeled "America"--and is probably unfixable.

(Though I worry for the EU, too.)

> why the heck should Nevada get a bigger say than Los Angeles County?

To start with, states are the compositional unit of the United States. If Los Angeles County wants to become its own state, there is a process to do that.

But to answer the correct question: Nevada has the same say as California, both being states.

"It should be the way it is because that's the way it is."

Thank you for illustrating the bankruptcy of the regressive position.

How so? What you just said has no bearing on a comment describing that there is a solution to the problem.

I guess if you want to just "thoughts and prayers" it then that's your prerogative.

> In other words, you're assuming that the President's job is to "take care of everyone's concerns", so everyone needs an equal vote to elect the President. That seems to me to be absurd.

Yeah you're probably right. Let's just disenfranchise more than half the population of the country. That'll give the federal government a ton of legitimacy!

> The President's job is to faithfully execute the laws and to make executive decisions about national needs like defense and foreign policy.

And we the people get to decide which candidate will do the better job. Or we should. But because of the electoral college, we don't.

> we the people get to decide which candidate will do the better job. Or we should. But because of the electoral college, we don't.

If we accept that we the people should get to directly decide, then of course the decision should be made by popular vote. But that's just assuming your conclusion.

Also, this is a different argument from the one you gave before: now you're accepting that the President's job is not to take care of everyone's concerns.

> "Tyranny of the minority" gets this issue exactly backwards. The problem the Electoral College was designed to mitigate is a tyranny of the majority.

States have representation, done universally by popular vote within those states for their representatives in Congress. (if you know any states that are an exception, feel free to add). Most of the country, and the world, experiences elections by popular vote except for a single particular position.

The Electoral College is only for the appointment of 1 person for the office of the President. It is an aberration. Even when looking at the President's ability to appoint people, many other popular vote elected representatives have the ability to appoint people too.

This aberration was from a time when the non-slave population of the United States was 1 million people, completely coastal (although those states had widely different boundaries back then which stretched deep into Appalachia), and in some of those states only the land owners could vote.

The purpose of the Electoral College was a compromise, not part of the grand wisdom and design. A compromise that has been merely tolerable and now has been stretched to its limits.

The democracy we exported throughout the whole world for the next 200 years looked at our older iteration and said "no, we'll patch that".

US Electoral College has reached its peak of tolerance, and the inability to amend it is maintained by the states that are the very reason why the electoral college is intolerable.

> Most of the country, and the world, experiences elections by popular vote

Actually, as someone else remarked upthread, in most parliamentary democracies the Prime Minister is elected by the parliament, not by popular vote.

"experiences elections", like the surrounding part of my comment, was referring to how every other position that electors get to weigh in on are by popular vote only.

I specifically was not referring to positions that are not.

If we want to talk about Head of State selection processes, I am a fan of Switzerland's Federal Council which contains 7 heads of state that act together but represent the interests of the constituent parties, while one acts as a frontman for diplomatic purposes with other nations. It maintains professional tact privately and publicly - concept only rarely strained in Switzerland's Federal Council history - and more importantly maintains representation. A brief civil war between that collection of small counties and cities was needed to get those reforms and other forms of direct representation into their constitution.

> Why do any of these concerns need Federal intervention to solve? Why can't LAC and Arkansas and Nevada manage their own affairs?

Because issues like immigration, national defense, and environmental policy are all national issues. California voters are held hostage to the preferences of the people in Nevada, even though they vastly outnumber them.

> everyone talks now as if no locality at all can survive from day to day without Federal benefits

They plainly cannot. The federal government funds a large portion of everything from infrastructure to education to healthcare, but our government structure ensures that only people in small states have a say in how those programs actually work.

Maybe your argument is going to be that they shouldn't fund those things, but the fact is that the majority of Americans disagree with you on that.

>>>The federal government funds a large portion of everything from infrastructure to education to healthcare,

Stuff that should be handled at the state and local level, with granularity specific to each state's unique geographic and demographic circumstances. I would limit the Federal-level influence to just establishing/recommending common standards (kinda like ISO standards) that multiple states can choice to implement.

Maybe if we didn't have Federal taxes, the states could charge more for additional services without over-burdening their populations. Federal income tax is one of many reasons why I consider Woodrow Wilson the worst American President ever.

> They plainly cannot.

If that's really true, then we as a country are screwed, because the money the federal government is spending on all this stuff comes from us. We can't pay ourselves more money than we have, and if we all get paid equally, then we're all just getting back what we paid and nothing is actually happening. So basically what you're describing is localities fighting over who gets to take money from whom. And the argument about popular vote is then just an argument that the most populous localities should be the ones taking from everyone else.

To your arguement about why do LA residents count less. I say it's not neccesarily less. Just differently. Do you want someone who has never farmed in their lives. Probably never even picked up a shovel, have a say in the rules and regs about agriculture throughout the midwest? Same goes vice versa. Country folk who hate living in concrete jungles shouldn't make rules for city dwellers. Thus an equal vote, isn't equal. Because my one vote for some other industry I don't know isn't fair for someone who lives it.

That was the original point to electoral votes and a representative government system. It's not that the system doesn't work, it's been perverted. If we can end the gerrymandering and other political machine issues, we'd have a better system. Not perfect. But I think its steered the wrong way with political affiliation as platform rather than constituent needs.

This cuts both ways, why should someone who lives in an area with hardly any immigrants be making policy for people who live in places like LA which are full of them?

Not arguing. I did say vice versa applies to my example.

But this is the point to the whole system. It's supposed to attempt to keep everyone's needs in mind. Gov body structures were originally figured out for countries the size of... Florida. Maybe California. Thus, your nation has roughly the same "issues" and "needs". But the USA is the "same" country for 3,000 miles of driving. West and east coast Americans are not the same. New Englanders and Southerners are not the same. West coast and is not the save as Mid-westerners. Hell, even folks on the Pacific Northwest are not the same as Californians. Then you have Texans. Shit, let's not forget Hawaii and Alaskans. Different land. Different climates. WAY different industries and lifestyles. I learned this first hand since I've traveled and lived in different parts of the country every 1-2 years (roughly).

So yea. Pretending like axing the electoral college is just a simple fix that solves this super simple problem... you're out of your god damn mind.

> I say it's not neccesarily less. Just differently.

So ... separate but equal?

In what way are they segregated? This seems like a flip and irrelevant inflammatory comment to me.

Apologies if there’s a direct linkage that I’m simply missing

This is somewhat balanced by representation in the other house of Congress.

It’s not only the US which has to balance rural vs urban electorates. Some are even further down the spectrum like Japan where rural areas have even larger influence than cities compared to other democracies.

But in a way it makes sense. Without people in the countryside the people in the cities would have little to eat. Most countries go to some lengths to ensure some modicum of food security/self-sufficiency.

> But in a way it makes sense. Without people in the countryside the people in the cities would have little to eat. Most countries go to some lengths to ensure some modicum of food security/self-sufficiency.

This argument would be accurate if we lived in a mercantile oriented world still, but there are plenty of countries that are entirely on other countries for basic necessities. While I can sympathize with the fact that farmers have gotten the rough end of the stick from seed corporations (like Monsanto) lately and that they have been forced into incredibly thin profit margins their work isn't inherently more valuable because it results in edible objects.

There are plenty of countries out there with a net import of food like the UAE, Germany, Russian, Japan, Egypt and Venezuela - that's a pretty diverse group of varying GDP per capita and political stability so I think it's pretty safe to dismiss any concerns of a strategic food reserve.

You imply people in the countryside own the means of producing food, but the consolidation of agriculture tells a different story.

It would be somewhat balanced if there wasn't a cap on the number of representatives and there was 1 rep per N population. But that's not the case. So even in the House there is an imbalance.

That would be a valid concern if food weren't so ridiculously easy to grow. The entire agricultural segment of the US economy is less than 1% of GDP.

> we are no longer an actual representative democracy.

Claiming that because California has 57 votes and Wyoming a whopping 3 votes, instead of California having 70 and Wyoming one (if at all), we "no longer have representative democracy" is nonsense. California still have wastly more votes. Yes, Wyoming also gets some, otherwise it why bother voting at all if everything is essentially decided by the most populous states anyway?

> protection results in a tyranny of the minority

3 votes against 57 is hardly "tyranny".

> Why are the concerns of the people living in LAC less important than the concerns of the people in Nevada or Arkansas?

Why people leaving in LAC should be in virtually full control (with the current power of federal government it's very close to that) over people of Nevada and Arkansas and Wyoming? What's the point for Wyoming to sign up for such a deal to be ruled by LAC?

> everything is essentially decided by the most populous states anyway?

The state isn't voting homogenously. Just like Eastern Washington could vote differently to the Puget Sound with more direct representation.

The key word in your argument is 'populous'. Thinking in terms other than people, be it states/counties/acreage is another version of putting "landowners" in charge.

> Why people leaving in LAC should be in virtually full control (with the current power of federal government it's very close to that)

Which explains why politicians spend so much time in Election season in LAC. Except they don't. They are instead in Ohio, Montana, NH, Wyoming, Iowa, Florida.

> Thinking in terms other than people, be it states/counties/acreage is another version of putting "landowners" in charge.

Again, having 3 votes against 57 does not put whoever has 3 votes "in charge" in any sensible meaning of the word.

> Except they don't.

Because they think LAC has already made up their minds, no matter what. And judging from voting patterns, they are correct. So whose fault is that? If more LAC voters would vote diversely, politicians would pay more attention to LAC, they are not stupid. But when it's 70+% to one side, why bother? Same campaigning dollar would bring much more impact elsewhere, and campaign resources are finite.

> Again, having 3 votes against 57 does not put whoever has 3 votes "in charge" in any sensible meaning of the word.

LAC and NYC both voted very blue, yet here we are. How do you credibly claim that "LAC is by and large in charge of the direction of the federal government"?

I don't claim they are. I claim they would be, if Wyoming had 1 vote and California 70. Right Wyoming specifically has a little more influence than it would have in purely population-based system. That was by design - otherwise large urban conglomerates would totally dominate all the politics and more rural states would have no chance to influence politics at all. Now they have a larger chance, while still being very far from any dominancy, but at least they have guaranteed minimum influence of 3 votes.

The president is the chief executive of the government, and the government is a union of state governments. The federal government itself was never intended to be all that powerful. Tyranny of the minority is not really a problem in the US because state governments can diverge so much from each other. CA, for instance, is a huge outlier already; there really is no "tyranny" at play here. Residents of CA have a state government presiding over a $2.7 trillion GDP working for them and only them; they also have more representatives than any other state in the country. Arkansas by comparison has a GDP of only ~$118B, and their GDP per capita is half that of CA; they have only 4 representatives. It's hard for me to imagine why CA somehow needs more power than it already has.

"Our" Federal government is currently imprisoning hundreds or thousands of children in squalid conditions. Some of these children are being held in California.

This policy was enacted by a President that lost the popular vote in California, and lost the popular vote nationwide.

That is tyranny.

So if he'd won the popular vote nationwide but lost it in CA you'd be okay with that? Moreover, while detention facilities have become more crowded under Trump, he certainly didn't invent them.

The solution here is to understand and address why so many millions of people voted for him, not to give even more power to the most powerful and wealthiest states that hardly need it. One reason Trump managed to drum up so much support is because interior states had been neglected for so many decades. Is neglecting them further your solution? Maybe just completely disenfranchise them on a national level and then you don't have to ever worry about what life is like in most of the country?

>but the solution here is to understand and address why so many millions of people voted for him,

Why? They elected Trump to address those concerns. If he can't or won't, the rest of the country is under no obligation to do so on his behalf.

The above poster is saying that Trump shouldn't have been allowed to be president because he didn't win the popular vote. This means that, under the above poster's scheme, they wouldn't have any president fighting for them at all, and I doubt CA would suddenly start caring about them were that the case. I see this as an abandonment of the poor in favor of the rich and powerful.

If Trump fails, then he fails. But that's a lot different from completely disenfranchising many states when it comes to the presidency.

>I see this as an abandonment of the poor in favor of the rich and powerful.

Trump represents the rich and powerful, though, arguably more so than Hillary Clinton, who's rich and elite but not even in the same league as Trump, or as entrenched with multinational business interests (although as far as the common voter is concerned, the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire may be irrelevant.)

And realistically, electing any President based on a laundry list of partisan grievances is going to disenfranchise the rest of the country. The Electoral College is no more or less fair than a popular vote in that regard.

> This policy was enacted by a President that lost the popular vote in California, and lost the popular vote nationwide.

Remember that picture of the children in cages floating around the news? That wasn't our current president. That was during the time of a president elected by both the popular vote in Cali and the national vote.

Also remember that those detention centers are literally that- short term holding. The intended duration for a stay is max 72 hours, and rarely exceeds a week- and that's only because HHS literally can't find suitable places fast enough with how many are entering the country.

> 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?

Why would Arkansas or Nevada have joined a union of states where their votes mean essentially nothing?

That logic doesn't work. It can be applied in reverse to invalidate your point:

Why would California have joined a union of states where their votes mean 1/4 of Wyoming's?

Sure, California's votes may mean less on a per capita basis, but if you're asserting that California is under-represented compared to Wyoming on a national basis, you're going to have to give some supporting evidence there. That's a pretty wild claim.

> supporting evidence

Read higher up in the thread:

> For example, a vote in Wyoming counts 3.6 times more than a vote in California.[1]

To get the benefits that you would get from such a union (whether they see those as benefits is up to them):

* access to single market and currency

* federal loans/money

* territory protection from other countries military intervention

* freedom of movement (including study, work, living, etc) within all the other states of the union

If states want to do some things differently that's why there are state level laws. If those states don't find that they have the right amount of freedom at the state level and think those benefits above matter less than being able to outvote 3:1 a citizen in California when it comes to presidential election then, I guess, they are free to leave the union?

They aren’t free to leave the union though. The last time the states disagreed on this a rebellion was put down violently by the north.

States were added by acts of Congress. It logically follows the same can be done in reverse.

But it needs to be on agreed upon and mostly amicable terms, or the state(s) desiring to leave will be unable to get the necessary votes.

The southern states trying to take their slavery and go home knew this for decades before, so they didn't even bother.

Sure they are, in modern times. If there's an overwhelming majority that wants independence, a state will eventually secede. In a democratic or even a hybrid system, a country's politics, laws and constitution eventually change to adapt to overwhelming wishes of the majority.

Good points!

Because Arkansas or Nevada are only really viable economic entities when supported by the much more productive states like California or New York.

Why? Because silicon valley is there? By your standard, Michigan was the most powerful state in the 50s thanks to Detroit.

If you want to look at recent trends, it’s hard to say the electoral college is helping Republicans. A lot of states have only voted in one direction since Bush Sr (the last republican to win CA). If you take those results for granted going forward, a Democrat needs to swing 83 votes to become president, and a Republican needs to swing 173. If Trump hadn’t flipped Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan for the first time since Bush Sr, Democrats would typically only need to swing 44 votes to win.

It’s also hard to say this is even problematic in general. The winner of the popular vote has only lost 5 times in history (or 6 depending on who you ask about 1960), and not by large margins either. But you can’t take this to mean that the results would have been different if the election was to be decided by popular vote to begin with. Currently Republican candidates have little incentive to campaign in CA or NY, and Democrat candidates have little incentive to campaign in TX. If the outcome was to be decided by popular vote to begin with, there’s no way to say that the outcomes would have been any different.

Conversely, there are many issues where California can wag the dog by instituting state-specific policies which effectively drag the whole country with it.

Some people like what California does with its state-specific policies. Some people even choose to live there.

If the Executive branch was less powerful and the States retained more of what they were originally intended to oversee for themselves, I might have less of a problem with California liberals electing the Executive for the whole country.

As it is, California has 53 of 435 seats in Congress and 55 electoral votes. The disparity with Wyoming is just because the minimum is 3 per state, and Wyoming’s population is minuscule.

If you eliminate the per-state minimum I expect there would be large geographical areas of the country which would eventually become uninhabitable / unsustainable.

Because of the EC I would argue that in most states, including California, your vote effectively doesn't matter at all.

Unless you are in a purple state you basically don't have a vote, and politicians can ignore your entire State.

So while the EC does empower some rural voters, in reality it effectively disenfranchises most of the country.

But this proves the point.

The issue you are having at the state level is a dominant majority makes the views of the minority irrelevant.

And to be clear, the EC does not disenfranchise all the voters in states like CA, just the minority voters.

This is actually precisely what the Senate and the Electoral College is designed to mitigate.

it invalidates all voters. Overvotes are a thing. You can have 90% of CA vote against a candidate and it won't mean anything more than 51% voting against.

So roughly half of the votes in all non competitive states do not count.

Exactly. I live in NYC. I still vote, but really it doesn't matter whom I vote for since there's an approximately 100% chance of New York's electoral votes going to the Democratic candidate. On the other hand, Kansas hasn't voted for a Democrat since Lyndon B. Johnson; I'm sure people there don't feel particularly enfranchised either.

That's not an argument against the Electoral College per se, but rather an argument against letting states allocate all of their Electoral College votes to the winner of the popular vote. This particular problem could be solved by forcing all states to apportion their Electoral College votes based on the distribution of the popular vote.

IIRC this behavior is per-state and some (Maine or NH maybe?) do just that.

Maine and Nebraska apportion their electoral votes on a per-Congressional district basis. But because Congressional districts can be heavily gerrymandered this is not a substitute for a truly proportional allocation scheme.

> This particular problem could be solved by forcing all states to apportion their Electoral College votes based on the distribution of the popular vote.

That is not a realistic proposal. Political gridlock will never allow a change like this. Doing it state by state is even worse because it just creates a system where dems try to do it to only red states and the GOP tries to do it to only blue states. It would just further skew the outcomes away from a democratic result.

This is exactly what the article is about, and 16 states with 194 votes have already done it. It will eventually pass 270 because most states (all non-swing states) have a lot to gain from it.

I'm pretty sure the poster I responded to was talking about doing this on a per state basis. Not the national popular vote.

That’s exactly what the NPVIC is trying for... they’re not abolishing the electoral college, just making an agreement that 270+ of them will vote for whomever wins the entire nation’s popular vote.

So those people in California are citizens just like you who pay the same federal taxes and have the same rights yet when it comes to voting for the President they do not have have those same rights. It might be annoying to us that they are all "liberals" or whatever you like to brand them with but they are people with equal rights and deserve equal vote. If it means that the majority of the country is made of these "liberals" that we dislike or disagree with then so be it, but that's what it means to have a representative democracy.

A representative democracy by definition means that each vote does not count exactly equally.

My point is that while the current setup probably dilutes CA liberals voting power the most in terms of the EC, there are other ways the system works that is particularly empowering to CA liberals.

Such as?

I don’t want to be repetitive with my other comments, but I think a good example is environmental regulations CA passes for automobiles effectively setting standards for the country.

That’s the free market, not government. Companies choose to make vehicles CA compliant. Any other examples?

So why not let the red states quit? And resolve the union? Los angeles county can then do whatever they want.

If rural issues aren't handled then you'll have even more urbanization and even more expensive housing. The odds are already attacked against rural life.

>Why are the concerns of the people living in LAC less important than the concerns of the people in Nevada or Arkansas?

So instead you want even more people from Nevada and Arkansas to move to LAC, because that's where politicians will pay attention?

That doesn't seem any more likely to me than Californians moving to Wyoming to make their vote count today.

The difference is that while the vote of each Californian might have less impact on the outcome of elections, there are so many of them that the problems that California has to deal with become important enough that politicians won't ignore them. If you make the situation work the other way around, then Wyoming's problems become even less important than they are right now and you can pretty much just ignore them and campaign in a certain county instead. If you don't handle people's problems then that makes them more likely to move, to seek a better future elsewhere.

Thanks for the thoughtful response. I can see how people would feel that way. Can also understand how people on the other side are frustrated when a minority of the population has disproportionate power though. So as with most things it sounds like there's no easy/perfect solution.

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