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Comment by TallGuyShort | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the Democratic side here either. There's a question of citizenship, but census data is used to determine allocation of electoral college votes. The electoral college system being something that I support but that Democrats keep trying to undermine. Yeah if you come here undocumented, or illegally, there's pretty natural consequences. I don't think anyone should ignore that. And they seem to want undocumented immigrants to be treated at the same level as legally naturalized citizens, but they rarely take any opportunities for immigration reform and the state of immigration enforcement under Obama wasn't so much better than Trump's that I yearn for the return of a Democratic presidency. So yeah - both sides erode my faith in the system. Just because I think one candidate in this election is worse doesn't mean I'm not angry at the pathetic counter from the Democrats.

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Counting everyone is literally what’s in the constitution.

Remember, when the country was formed immigration wasn’t some complex thing you just showed up. Picture an immigration official trying to turn back a ship full of slaves because they where undocumented or missing paperwork. Meanwhile they still counted as 3/5th person in the official count.

I'd be fine with that, but let's be clear that that's not the system the Democrats move towards. Instead we have this weird system where a bunch of people jump through hoops to be here legally and a bunch of people don't, and Democrats pick and choose when they care about either one. There's no predictability, rule of law, consistency or sense on this issue from either party.

I began immigration to the US under a Democratic administration and finished it at the end of a Democratic controlled Congress and another Democratic administration. It was consistently a badly run, non-sensical process. So FOH with claims that Democrats would like a country with open borders or that they're much better at running a sane process.

It really looks like you’re conflating policy with bureaucracy.

Open borders isn't their policy either. A census that just counts people isn't their policy either. Source: censuses I've taken under Democratic exrcutives asked me plenty of other questions.

And even if those things were their policy, if the bureaucracy is still the same, what difference does it really make? The article concerns itself with links between how a bureaucracy is run and policies. This thread of conversation deals with people's faith in a "system".

> Source: censuses I've taken under Democratic exrcutives asked me plenty of other questions.

That's not the point. The Supreme Court was convinced by the evidence presented (statements on record by people in the current administration) that the intend of the citizenship question was to reduce the count of people with illegal immigration status. So the question was intended to undermine the primary purpose of the census as mandated by the constitution: counting all the people.

You don't have to understand the democrats, you just have to understand the Supreme Court ruling.

It's clearly spelled out in the constitution that it should be an accurate count of all people.

People not eligible to vote (non-citizens, mostly slaves) were explicitly intended to be included by design.

If you want that to be different, there is a process for that, and that's a constitutional amendment.

I agree. It would be much better if both sides were at least honest.

for example, the Democrats could say "we understand some electoral college votes will be indirectly allocated to illegal immigrants, we also understand that because liberal states have more illegal immigrants it will help the left more than the right, but that's the price to pay for counting every actual US citizen."

The republicans could say, 'we want to make sure only US citizens count in terms of votes, and we will lose some actual US citizens plus we will undercount illegal immigrants (which is useful in other, non voting related ways) in order to ensure that.'

Then we can have a conversation. The way this dialog is being had, with liberal statisticians making 'scientific arguments' and republicans attacking electoral integrity is just a mess.

I agree with the general thrust of what you're saying in terms of honesty, but I want to point out that it's not clear that the ground truth fits/supports this framing.

If you look at something like https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/interactives/u-s-unauth... and sort the list any way you want: There are several reliable D/R states with almost no undocumented immigrant population, and several D/R states with 3%+.

It’s something of a tossup if counting all immigrants directly helps Republicans or Democrats in term of house seats. That really depends on which states are near the breakpoint and so far we just don’t have that data, presumably the current administration is basing their choices on something we don’t know rather than ideology.

It might impact gerrymandering efforts, which gets even more complicated and again without a clear winner unless you have a preliminary version of the data to work with.

Honestly, I dislike what’s being done due to optics more than politics.

There are multiple games being played concurrently by all of the different participants, making it hard to understand what/why from the local context of a single game.

If both sides erode your faith in the system, I suspect it's because you see real problems that need to be solved, but the people "elected to solve them" are instead constrained by these games.

Speaking of systems--can you clarify what about the electoral college system you support, and perhaps cite either some systemic features/biases/incentives you think it corrects for, or perhaps some points in U.S. history where you think the electoral college system improved overall outcomes?

I think the "Great Compromise" helps correct for the fact that people in different locations value different things and have different experiences. People who live in farming communities understand plenty of things that people in cities don't and vice-versa. Beyond that, it's an agreement that was reached between states who were giving up their sovereignty to join together. If we discard compromises like that because people who won the popular vote by a tiny margin now think it's outdated and that they have some democratic mandate, then collectively society has lost my trust to keep it's word on future compromises wherein I'm asked to forfeit some of my independence and sovereignty.

Thanks for responding. I'm going to poke at this a bit, so I want to be clear that I respect you for engaging.

> I think the "Great Compromise" helps correct for the fact that people in different locations value different things and have different experiences. People who live in farming communities understand plenty of things that people in cities don't and vice-versa.

This phrasing feels like a platitude that can justify any distribution of electoral-college power we feel like creating. Can you clarify how it "corrects" for people having different locations/values/experiences?

Maybe it helps to focus on narrower questions like: Do you feel like the current winner-take-all allocation in most states or proportional allocation as used in Nebraska and Maine either uphold or undermine the values you're describing here?

> ...it's an agreement that was reached between states who were giving up their sovereignty to join together. If we discard compromises like that because people who won the popular vote by a tiny margin now think it's outdated and that they have some democratic mandate, then collectively society has lost my trust to keep it's word on future compromises wherein I'm asked to forfeit some of my independence and sovereignty.

This feels a little unfair...

1. States made a compromise of some sovereignty to join, but the compromise was very much about protecting significant parts of that sovereignty. The states, quite pointedly, retain the sovereignty to modify the compromise. If the electoral college is discarded, it will be because states exercised their sovereignty, via this process, to do so.

2. Following the above, minus a few stipulations, each state legislature retains broad power regarding how their electors are selected and what they are expected to do. Something like the Fair Vote proposal entails exercising this sovereignty.

Enumeration Clause of the Constitution says that the census counts everyone.

Legislators can change that through legislation. They're not supposed to sabotage the accuracy of the census.

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