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Comment by humbledrone | Hacker News Reader

Are you implying that each Californian should count for less than one vote?

Open minded question: Maybe yes?

If states don't have an ability to have a voice for themselves as states, what's the point of them at all? They gain this small but important nudge towards autonomy from the electoral college.

I think states already get that enough through the senate.

I really think the president should be by popular vote, but don't see any way this would ever get changed.

The NPVIC[0] is actually inching closer and closer to being in force. It will still take a long time, but I see it actually possibly working eventually.

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

IMO, states choosing to enter an agreement like this of their own free will, is the appropriate way to get a popular vote, if that's what the people want, while still retaining the right of the electoral college.

I personally disagree with a state choosing to sacrifice its voice in such a way, but it's its right to do so, to award its votes how it sees fit.

I think this agreement won't work. When it matters, it would be ignored by some state and any enforcement can be challenged as circumventing the constitution

Yeah, I can see there being difficulty. It's the type of thing that sounds good to a lot of people before they find themselves in a situation where it actually makes a difference. When it suddenly kicks in and people say, "wait, what?", I can see there being legal action or something. But I think it would also be too late, if it's already been accepted as law. It might prompt people to want to start undoing it, but there may be an instance of it applying first.

In case you're not aware of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...), take a look. It's doable.

The senate is one mechanism, but its mere existence is not reason enough to consider it sufficient.

The remaining point of having states would be that local state law can still vary.

This is true even if we got rid of the senate, the EC, and every federal body had purely population-proportional representation (which I am in favor of).

Federal law overrules local law, so they are intertwined. A vote at the federal level is in many ways a vote on local laws, too.

While technically true, this isn't always the case in practice. After all, marijuana is still illegal in the eyes of the Federal Government but this has done very little to deter state-sanctioned dispensaries in more than a handful of states.

That means it sometimes is the case in practice.

I wasn't disputing that. I was pointing out that there are notable exceptions.

Okay. I guess I'm saying that's irrelevant. For local & federal law to be intertwined doesn't require there to be a lack of exceptions.

Not fully. It's already pointed out that federal law overrules state law, but it's important to remember that congress is only supposed to be able to make federal law on a small set of enumerated issues. IMO the issue is when you have an expansion of what congress is able to make laws on which limits what states can do.

In most countries states (or provinces or departments or whatever they like to call their subdivisions) exist in order to have some degree of internal autonomy. They can have their own laws and institutions based on their historical culture. That's enough. They don't have to have any special treatment at the Federal level.

How do you feel about the fact that this kind of thinking basically rules out the possibility of Puerto Rico from ever becoming a state? Or California splitting into two states?

You can still have states and also have a national popular vote.

States are not people, why should states have a voice? What voice would that be, if not the one of the people who live there?

Because the constitution says the states elect the president. That's how it works. In modern times this means the people of each state decide, by popular vote, how their state votes.

You're saying it should be like this because it is like this. That doesn't take us very far.

States having a voice is the whole point of a state. If states shouldn't have a voice, they should be phased out.

But they do have a voice, they are an entire level of gov't. They shouldn't necessarily have any particular say in the election of the president.

States "have a voice" in the local justice system and laws, as well as senators.

Making the president of the whole country be elected directly by the whole country would not make states redundant, far from it.

No one is implying that, that's how it works and is intended to work.

It's a historical quirk rather than intention. No sane democracy would have the electoral college system today.

I agree with your last sentence, but this is very clearly the intention. Small states threw a fit when they were writing the constitution so now we're stuck with this bullshit.

That’s not strictly true; the original intention was for slaveholding states to have a roughly equal voice in presidential elections without letting slaves vote. Smaller states threw a fit about counting slaves as full citizens for the purposes of representation, which is how we arrived at the Three-Fifths Compromise.

I'm talking about Connecticut compromise, which created the electoral college, not the 3/5 compromise.

The Connecticut Compromise created the Senate, not the electoral college. The explicit purpose of the electoral college was to give more power to slaveholding states without enfranchising slaves.

The Three-Fifths Compromise is intrinsically related to the electoral college, because it instructed how to count slaves when determining how many House seats a state would get.

I'm not sure if you're aware, but the senate is the reason the electoral college isn't democratic. Every state gets two senators and because of that 2 bonus electoral college votes. That's why Wyoming gets 3 times as many electoral college votes per person as California. Without the senate the electoral college is just a popular vote. The 3/5 compromise doesn't even exist anymore because slavery is now illegal.

> I'm not sure if you're aware, but the senate is the reason the electoral college isn't democratic.

That’s one of the reasons, but not the only one. Another problem is that electors are allocated to the winner of the state popular vote no matter how close it is.

> Without the senate the electoral college is just a popular vote.

Even if you didn’t count Senators for the purposes of electoral votes, you could still end up with one candidate winning the popular vote and another winning the electoral vote.

You're not wrong, it's a horrible system

It's intention was to give slave owners more voting power without actually letting slaves vote. It was wrong then and still is now.

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

Your (implied) counterproposal is not neutral either: you are suggesting that rurals and suburbans should be ruled by young type-As who are willing to pack themselves into tiny, overpriced apartments and make their careers a top priority well into their middle age. Why should that culture dominate?

> Are you implying that each Californian should count for less than one vote?

In a federalist republic, yes that's exactly what that means. The country was deliberately designed as a collection of independent states, and not a single population whose diversity is merely geographic.

You're making the implicit assumption that more of those people exist than the rural and suburban types, in which case... Yes? Your comment cuts both ways - one of those groups is going to be the dominant culture and if your argument is that the smaller one should win, I don't see the reasoning to back it up.

The electoral college moderates the effect. The big states still dominate. Just not as completely. The small states have their voice instead of being completely irrelevant. It's not that they "win" or even have an equal say.

You've assumed that everyone agreed at some point on majoritarianism, which never happened.

The coastal city culture is already dominant in all types of media and academia and large corporations.

It's not about winning. The original motivation for the US's structure is to impede lawmaking at the highest levels unless absolutely necessary. Making laws is not making progress.

> The country was deliberately designed as a collection of independent states,

Hmm... Couldn't it be argued that this haven't really been the case since the civil war?

When I lived in SF, most Americans I met weren't originally from California (not had they lived there long).

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