An amendment to the Constitution of the USA to abolish the electoral college | Hacker News Reader

An amendment to the Constitution of the USA to abolish the electoral college

congress.gov

48 pointsgrawprog107 comments

The Electoral College is not going away via an amendment. No small state Senator would vote for that, nor would any small state legislature.

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact? Maybe.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/12/09/how-to-get-...

The National Popular Vote Compact still needs the approval of Congress.

> No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.

US Constitution, Art. I §10 Cl. 3

https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/section_9.16#myth_9.16.5 says that the Supreme Court has on several occasions interpreted that clause differently. The rule so far appears to be that it only applies if the states try to oppose the power of the federal government, but that doesn't apply to voting because control of vote apportionment is given to the states.

This source is particularly biased for obvious reasons. Legally speaking there are a lot of open questions surrounding NPVIC and anyone claiming anything at this point should be looked at with a heavy dose of skepticism. There are good arguments on both sides but they're not dispositive.

What if the SCOTUS rules that the Compact isn't legally binding, but the states all act as if it were binding nevertheless?

Certainly it would mean that a state could unilaterally break the Compact with impunity, but that would only make a difference to the election if the size of their defection was bigger than the amount of "excess" electoral votes the popular vote winner had, including from states that weren't part of the Compact.

Also, you might find some electors from states outside the Compact acting "faithlessly" in order to counteract the "faithlessness" of the electors who betrayed it.

Even if some states break from the compact too late for the other states to back out in an election, the end result would still be fine. I'll use the 2000 election as a concrete example to avoid a more charged recent one. Presuming that 270 electoral votes worth of states had signed up for the compact before the election, and then a couple of them had defected "too late" for the other states to react, the end result would still be in keeping with the goal of the compact. At worst, a "partial compact" has no effect, and at best it still accomplishes the goal of the "full" compact.

Eh, I think this is more clearly about diplomacy than, say, the "well regulated militia" stuff.

And still, i the compact is repealed, the states are free to apportion their electors however they like. States could also independently match the popular vote when it wouldn't make a difference. Even such a "dry run" would shake things up.

Bottom line, unless there is a different law to require the states to apportion electors a cetain way, I don't really know how to stop it.

Yes, but that is a “simple”* majority vote, and not the 2/3 majority needed in the House, Senate, and the states.

*not that any majority is simple these days, but you get what I mean.

There is quite some debate about whether - despite its name - the NPVIC counts as an "Agreement or Compact" in the sense that constitutional law has interpreted that phrase: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...

There is always a constitutional convention

https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/constitution

But that puts the whole constitution in play. I’m guessing those who hope for electoral reform will get a ban on abortions instead.

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact requires small state legislatures, too, and a number of small states have adopted it.

Why would they be less likely to adopt the Amendment?

The electoral college was arguably mooted by the events of this cycle.

How so?

The Electoral College was supposed to prevent a populist demagogue from being elected.

A populist demagogue was elected.

“Pure democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” – James Madison, Federalist 10, 1787

This bill is unlikely to pass in the Senate.

Why would lower-population states reduce their own representation power?

Funny how people always bring up this quote and not the one from Federalist 58 where Madison warns against requiring supermajorities for general legislative work which many defenders of the EC also support (i.e., the filibuster rule).

"It would be no longer the majority that would rule: the power would be transferred to the minority. Were the defensive privilege limited to particular cases, an interested minority might take advantage of it to screen themselves from equitable sacrifices to the general weal, or, in particular emergencies, to extort unreasonable indulgences."

Probably because it doesn't stand on it's own and it's not nearly as impactful.

I'm still not even sure what it's saying without further context, even with your explanation.

Vermont has signed on to this bill in part because it's more democratic and fair then what we have today. I think it's a little bit altruistic of them but honestly - why do folks need to be bought to do something that widens the net of justice?

> Why would lower-population states reduce their own representation power?

That is why the supporters of this amendment (and similar approaches like the NPVIC) should be prepared to settle for a compromise which preserves the disproportionate power of the lower-population states.

In fact, such a compromise was proposed in 1950, with the bipartisan Lodge-Gossett Amendment[0]. The idea behind it was that the electors in each state would have to vote proportionally to the popular vote within that state while not changing the number of electors granted to each state.

Because of the small number of electors in some states, rounding issues can be quite significant in some situations, and I believe the proposal required fractional electoral voters, representing a tenth of a percent of the state popular vote.

[0] https://www.fairvote.org/past_attempts_at_reform

In 1979 it got close without compromise.

I'm quite against compromise here. The productive parts of the country need to unlearn helplessness and get tough of we can't get a real democracy.

DC Statehood can help with the senate votes despite being a small state too.

I agree that it's possible to compromise too much, but it's not 1979 any more, and I don't think you should be encouraging any side to "get tough" and unilaterally rewrite the Constitution. Also, you're going to need to add a lot more new states than just DC to get a two-thirds majority in the senate.

I don't have much attachment to the union. If a bunch of states want to secede or, more realistically, set up alternative currencies so they can have some monetary and fiscal sovereignty, that's fine with me.

The ironic thing is the places who keep talking about seceding being the answer are the places that can’t make it on their own: the rural areas that are dependent on federal funding to survive! Look up the State Of Jefferson for a laugh.

I say for fun let’s let rural America secede into its own country and see which country “cries uncle” first. I know who I bet on.

> The productive parts of the country need to unlearn helplessness

  Thats so reductive. the "productive" parts of the country are completely dependent on the "unproductive" ones for anything that isnt software or finance.

It's reductive but true. Large parts of the country are tax burdens when we look at the big numbers. For example, California and Oregon make a profit for the USA, while Mississippi and Alabama are more expensive to operate than they return in tax revenue.

This pattern also emerges on a county-by-county level within states. For example, Oregon and Washington are bisected by the Cascades, and the eastern counties are much poorer than the western counties and depend on the profits made in the west.

This uneven burden is an important ingredient in explaining why it's not just rural folks resenting city folks, but also city folks resenting rural folks. It is not fun to know that one's tax dollars are disproportionately funding welfare for folks who politically desire to see one's way of life burnt down because it's immoral or wasteful or simply not as sexist and racist as in the past.

The unproductive parts of the country (let’s not use euphemisms: call them Red States) are in general net recipients of funding from the federal government and the Blue States are net providers. The hated “coastal elites” are literally propping up flyover country. Who is dependent on who?

Yes, but as a counterpoint that was due to offshoring of the domestic manufacturing base which was due to the setup of the international monetary system in 1971/1974 as well as a whole slew of policy decisions which made labor-intensive manufacturing businesses less profitable as a whole in the U.S. because of the necessity of running fiscal deficits and a strong dollar; so the red states were basically sacrificed in the grand scheme of things, not by their own volition.

You're talking about a few states up near the great lakes. And for the record, I'm not sure I'm counting those as the unproductive parts.

There are plenty of other red states which were never industrial. Your Wyomings and, Missisippis, etc.

"Why would lower-population states reduce their own representation power?" To do the right thing, that is why. Not doing it implies that they know that have an over-representation and would only be against it to maintain that over-representation for their own selfish goals.

In no way would this law make the US a pure democracy, where citizens can vote directly on whether or not to pass laws. The US would still be a representative democracy, a republic, where citizens vote for representatives, who then pass laws without input from citizens.

This isn't a proposal for pure democracy. Depending on how you define it, that would require proportional allocation of the senate, or its abolition, as well.

Our not-so-pure democracy, based on the constitution Madison signed, has lately been quite the spectacle and proved incompatible with basic rights and security. It hasn't lasted very long, and arguably fell apart in 1860. Our president elect has been alive for a third of its lifespan, counting the long way from 1788. Which is another way of saying our president elect is pretty old, and our government pretty young.

There are founders aplenty to quote on the necessity of amendment, as well. But without further research, I'd guess trouble in the Senate, too.

> Pure democracies

The US is a representative democracy, not pure/direct; Madison explicitly quoted:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_democracy#United_States

Is Madison even correct about this? Is the U.S. less turbulent than other countries where the power of each vote is more equal? It doesn't seem so to me from where I sit, but maybe I'm missing something?

I don’t think you’re missing anything. It’s perhaps folly to quantify “democracy”, but looking past that folly, the US doesn’t rank all that highly.

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

Mind you, it’s weird to see all those nominal constitutional monarchies rank so highly. But, at least in Canada, which I am most familiar with, all that monarchy stuff is dusty window dressing. The actual house is full of sensibly apportioned voting districts.

Given that the Queen had zero say (not even any publicly-expressed opinion, let alone any consultation from the rest of the government, let alone any actual involvement) in Brexit, which will have repercussions on the state she "rules" for centuries, it seems fair to say that Commonwealth-style constitutional monarchies are just as democratic as they would be without a democracy.

And by all accounts Empress Masako is deeply unhappy in her position and would be better off as a commoner.

As I read it, the discussion was not about the electoral college, but about representative democracy versus direct democracy.

It was written in a time, when there was the negative example of parts of the French revolution, where there was essentially mob rule, and people have been executed left and right, because the public could be sufficiently incited.

The amount of empirical data about pure democracies that James Madison had in 1787 is minuscule compared to the amount of empirical data anyone with a free half hour and a connection to Wikipedia has today.

(Madison was also a slaveowner and an advocate of expanding slavery into new territories. Now, yes, he was apparently considerate to his slaves compared to the average slaveowners, and I suppose you could make the "by the standards of his time" argument, but - the standards of his time were that you could literally own slaves and still be a considerate person and a respected authority on fair republican government.)

Im not amercian, but isn't one of the factors that lead to "trump", a feeling that rural was very different than urban, and that rural felt disenfrsnchised, so they went for the demagogue who wanted to burn the world down ("drain the swamp")

Seems like effectively reducing rural voting power would just inflame tensions

What's the argument for rural votes currently having disproportionally more power than other votes?

Voting by land area vs voting by population is one of the oldest debates ever. There's pros and cons to either side, but the general idea is that in a representative democracy you want the different groups to have their interests represented (i.e. if you have 30% of the vote, you should have 30% of the "power"). Pure population might be more likely to lead to policy for population centeres at the expense of rural centers, since you just need 51% of the vote to do what you want, as the majority takes all the power. E.g. if 75% of population is urban and 25% rural, and assuming that they are unified voting blocs (big if), rural effectively has 0% of the power, as 25% of the vote is going to win a majority vote 0% of the time. Ideally they would win 25% of the votes (or have 25% of the "power" somehow), but failing that, having half the power seems more fair than having none of it.

I remember i heard once the idea that if the percent of the representitives was porportional to the sqrt of the population, that that tracks the amount of effective power much more closely to the population distribution than linearly assigning representitives, but i dont know how true that is.

> On the one hand, the Senate has always been unequal, long giving less populous states an outsized voice relative to their population.1 But for more than a century, this hasn’t posed much of an issue: Until the 1960s, Republicans and Democrats competed for both densely and sparsely populated states at roughly the same rate

> But over the last several decades, that’s changed. The parties have reorganized themselves along urban-rural lines, and there is now a clear and pronounced partisan small-state bias in the Senate thanks to mostly rural, less populated states voting increasingly Republican. In fact, it’s reached the point that Republicans can win a majority of Senate seats while only representing a minority of Americans.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-senate-has-always-f...

It's less about rural votes and more about population. Electoral votes per state are based on population not population density, but with an additional 2 each. That tips the scale in favor of states with smaller populations.

E.g. Rhode Island and Idaho both have 4 electoral votes, but Rhode Island is certainly not rural.

Idaho also has a population of 1.8 million compared to 1.0 million in Rhode Island, so technically Rhode Island voters have more voting power than their rural counterparts in Idaho.

Anyways these are just cherry picked states; my point is that the Electoral College is designed to give a disproportionate vote to smaller states, not rural states.

That things that happen (agriculture, manufacturing, etc) in rural parts of the country are important to everyone, but will suffer if the people living there have no voting power.

"things that happen" is for sure... extremist terrorist disgruntled white dudes is apparently what happens. Agriculture, manufacturing, etc in the US needs to fend for itself on its merits and/or support by a majority, not based on an inflated influence of rural populations. A strong case could be made that could inspire urban people to be in favor of uplifting these segments also. For example, I would gladly pay more for food or goods made in the US if the case was made to me that it was helping more rural population of my country, just like how I gladly accept paying higher taxes that benefit the unemployed and poor. You don't have to give an artificial amplification of power to make sure good things happen for everyone. Sadly, that is where my argument falls apart, people are selfish.

I get your point, but the current result is that Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio and the other swing states affect the result. The rest of our votes effectively matter far less.

I lived in one of those states in 2016, and was surprised by how both parties actually seemed to care about trying to get votes, compared to all the other years I've lived elsewhere.

Fears of Tyranny of the majority, with our geographic size and mutual ignorance of each others' local concerns. An extreme depiction in popular culture is the domination of rural districts in "The Hunger Games".

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

Tyranny of the majority is avoided by giving organized minority parties rights, so they can negotiate from positions of weakness, not arbitrarily choosing a minority to have disproportionate representation.

Our current system of democracy suffers because we can attack a much smaller % of the population with misinformation, and rural voters are more efficient to target.

Your second sentence does not serve the argument against because it can be just as arbitrarily purposed for the opposite. That dense cities with packed schools and omnipresent media make it more efficient to sway them with "misinformation".

No, you have to convince more people in dense cities to get the same voting power, because of the electoral college.

At the extreme, you have to convince 3.6 people in california to have the same electoral vote impact as convincing just one voter in Wyoming, and that’s before taking into account that being a winner take all system in most states, you have to influence up to half of California in the worst case, before getting any return on investment.

https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/how-much-voting-p...

You would have to make the argument that people in cities are cheaper per capita to convince, because of their density; cheap enough to offset these massive differences in electoral power. I don’t buy it, as dense cities have the most expensive media markets and modern internet advertising can easily target rural areas.

You don't have to influence any of California, which is essentially a 1-party state for statewide elections.

California hasn't elected a Republican to the US Senate in 32+ years.

What is your point, and how is it relevant?

I'm sure many rural voters will strongly feel that way, but when you look into it, this will give equal voice to rural voters of CA central valley (who have basically zero voices now), while reducing the voice of overwhelmingly liberal Philadelphia, PA and Milwaukee, WI as much as anyone else.

> Seems like effectively reducing rural voting power would just inflame tensions

I don’t know why that means we should be stuck with continuing to give small and predominantly rural states disproportionately higher representation.

This feels like the mindset of someone stuck in an abusive relationship.

I'm pretty sure in the next ten years that will be fixed.

Why do you think that having 15% of the population controlling the most powerful house of Congress, and something like 35% of the population being able to control the executive branch will lead to less tension?

Barely 1/3 of eligible California voters voters for Clinton in 2016, yet she got 100% of the electoral votes.

So if we're throwing "fairness" and "parity" around, let's make it so across the board and avoid partisan cherry-picking.

The numbers I'm quoting assume a 50.1% majority of the voters in the small states, not some cherry-picked fantasy.

I don't think your response is anything but trying to change the subject. If you think the union can survive the imbalance of 2030, much less 2040, you don't have much evidence to support such a claim.

Inflame them to do what? Rural people are overrepresented in our nation’s politics. What’s the worst they can do? Start an armed rebellion? We’re already there.

Inflame tensions. Make people feel even more so that they are not practically represented.

If you think its bad now, imagine if they had an actual legitament grievence :P

It's probably about time this happened, but it is unlikely to occur as an amendment. The least populous states would instantly lose even the minimal power they have, and it would disadvantage the party of the rural, until such time as they can reconfigure themselves to appeal to city dwellers. Doesn't seem likely.

In any event, the simple fact that the electoral college allows a tie is reason enough to eliminate it, to me. What happened in 2020 is nothing compared to what we can expect in the event of an electoral college tie.

Abolish the Presidency.

Presidential systems give too much power to a single person, which only entrenches partisanship and the worst of politics.

Or just vastly reduce the president's (and federal government's) powers. If the individual states could decide their own drug policy, gun policy, marriage policy, and the point at which life begins, then the campaign for president could focus largely on trade and military policies.

This is an interesting idea. So many of the problems with American politics seem rooted in the Presidency, either its powers or the politics and system of election, etc.

So why do we need a President? Other than "Because the Constitution says," why not a Prime Minster, or no one at all?

I’d like to keep some sort of state partitioning and vastly improved voting security.

That was one poorly functioning state can’t claim that they had 100% voter turnout and skew the entire result.

What are the pros and cons to moving to a purely populous voting system? Have other countries made this move and how did it play out? I bet someone here is an expert on this topic.

If your goal is a United States, then purely populous isn't ideal.

Electoral college essentially requires cross-regional appeal in order to win.

We also have to remember that there are some really key states to the US that don't have population. Ex: Alaska and Hawaii.

It's not good to lose states (or regions) from the union based purely on votes cast from more populated regions.

But it does need to be damn close to # of votes. The electoral college is not perfect but it's pretty masterful.

How does normalizing Alaska and Hawaii's representation to their population cause them to be "lost from the union"?

Puerto Rico has 0 representation, and yet they're still part of the united states (ok, plenty of puerto rican might want a different arrangement... but my point is that you'll lose Puerto Rico before losing Alaska)

I'm just saying that if a small subset of states (NY/CA/TX/FL,etc) essentially could pick the President as an example, you run the risk of alienating a lot of states, including some that are really important, but have small populations.

And it could get to the point where they wish to exit the union. Let's say you lose the farmland and Alaska and some other important, but low population states.

Is that worth it so everyone could say that the most votes will always win?

We already have a system where candidates can just ignore states. They really can't ignore regions though with the electoral college. They have to have some cross regional appeal to win. That's a good thing.

Straight popular votes is too risky for little gain.

I care more about the states and their rights, the preservation of the union, the country's assets, and other things than ensuring that every vote is counted 1:1 in practice. For many, yes, their vote will not matter depending on who they vote for and where they live. But the founders anticipated more than most realize.

It's like when you have an election with 10 candidates. Nobody gets a majority, but some people are like - whoever gets the most votes should win!

That's not likely to be the best result.

I'm a big fan of keeping it simple. But I don't believe a straight popular vote would be a better system with our history, today's divisiveness and the goals of preserving the union.

Aristotle and others gave some thought to the polity vs. democracy. The electoral college is one of the checks on the possibility of the tyranny of the masses, polity perverted to democratic demagoguery. The crude version is: The red states feed the blue states, so better keep them happy - electoral college is one of the checks that performs that function.

The red states feed the blue states, so better keep them happy - electoral college is one of the checks that performs that function.

You’d think the giant bribes—oops, I mean, farm subsidies would help with that.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/12/us/politics/trump-farmers...

And for those downvoting me: I grew up in a town called Farmington. My family gets these big fat subsidies.

Which I sure do appreciate!

Doesn’t mean it’s not a tremendous distortion of the market and the environment.

That depends which blue states you mean. California and some others are net agricultural exporters.

Wait, do the red states actually feed the blue states?

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/state-export-data/ann... says the top exporters are California (blue), Iowa (purple), Illinois (blue), Minnesota (blue), Nebraska (red), and Texas (red). And even so, the margins are not huge - at most about 2/3 and 1/3, and usually closer - so the idea of "red states" or "blue states" doesn't quite make sense, I think.

EDIT: I ran the data - looking at the 2020 results (and rounding off Maine to D and Nebraska to R), "blue" states have $64B agricultural exports and "red" states have $73B agricultural exports. So the answer is that while red states export a bit more, it can hardly be described as one feeding the other.

Going to a popular vote system essentially means the Republican Party as currently constructed would have a very difficult time winning the presidency.

The democratic nominee has won the popular vote in 7 out of the 8 previous presidential elections, including 2016 when Clinton won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College.

Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000 but lost the Electoral College to George Bush.

The Constitution will never again be amended, because you will never get 2/3 of States to ever agree on anything, ever.

As it stands, such an amendment would require rural citizens to effectively eliminate themselves from the electoral system. They will never consent to this and why would they? Since State legislatures are also not pure popular-votes, this assures that nothing remotely resembling this will ever happen. No rural voting district will consent to being washed out by a large metro.

At the same time, there is no need to amend it, when you can get 5 robed people to find penumbras emanating from it as necessary.

The beauty of the current system is that the federal government gets no say in who is president by placing the election into the hands of the States. Imagine what Trump could have done if the federal government oversaw elections. The electoral college needs updated, but it might not be a good idea to replace it with a popular vote administered by the federal government

See Canada for an example of an independent federal institution overseeing the elections, see https://www.elections.ca

I believe the US requires stronger safeguards. The temptations to abuse power so great, the feeling that it is necessary to steer the world in the "right" direction by holding onto office so immense, that any centralized election system will be abused.

The decentralized election system of the US is extremely resilient to tampering from the top. I personally believe the decentralized nature of the US election system is vital to its democracy. Think of the decentralized election system as a check and balance on power rather than a fair count of each person's vote. That said, I think the US needs to do away with the electoral college middlemen and replace it with a direct vote tallied by each county that is reported by each State. The US also needs to make gerrymandering illegal

This will be on the table the day after Texas votes for a Democratic candidate. Not before. Hopefully we can get the first-past-the-post language out of it before then.

Franklin said, “a republic, if you can keep it”.

Prior to the mid-1800s there wasn’t even a popular vote; people voted for their representatives and the representatives chose the president. This slippery slope of republic -> republic with a popular vote -> republic w/ referendums -> full democracy will be our undoing.

Hamilton said:

"But a representative democracy, where the right of election is well secured and regulated & the exercise of the legislative, executive and judiciary authorities, is vested in select persons, chosen really and not nominally by the people, will in my opinion be most likely to be happy, regular and durable."

Is there any evidence that countries or US states which allow referendums have worse political environments than those which forbid them? Also, how many countries and states that allow referendums have fallen down the slippery slope from there to "full democracy" and whatever disaster you picture at the bottom of that slope?

> how many countries and states that allow referendums have fallen down the slippery slope from there to "full democracy"

A joke, right?

I can’t speak for all states, but the last midterms in FL alone had 10 referendums, some of which changed the state forever in big ways, constitutional amendments, etc. (e.g., allowing felons to vote, permanent tax changes, etc.).

If you think that doesn’t represent a low enough bottom of that slippery slope, you’re out of your fucking mind.

"A joke, right?" Do you have any better example of the horror?

Allowing felons to vote sounds correct to me. It also sounds correct to me that we each get to vote about that correctness rather than your opinion being the one that matters.

"tax changes" is not bad or good until you define the nature of the changes and successfully convince everyone else that they are bad. (that darn "your opinion is merely your opinion" thing again)

Should felons be allowed to own AR-15s also?

I'd much rather see a super majority of Congress choose a prime minister at this point.

I am not from the US, but probably not gonna happen due to state politics? As in the whole point of EC is that mostly urbanized states won't overwhelm the sparsely populated ones?

You might want to understand how we got here. States never should’ve been allowed to count 3/5 of their slaves who couldn’t vote of course, for electoral purposes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-fifths_Compromise

Thank you for saying something notably absent from the rest of this thread. The EC was invented because of racism, period.

A more thorough, and probably more nuanced and balanced, discussion at

https://www.history.com/news/electoral-college-founding-fath...

“ As in the whole point of EC is that mostly urbanized states won't overwhelm the sparsely populated ones?”

Pretty much.

Also the idea that the election would have been the same only less close if the EC was abolished is a fiction.

It would just change where the battleground states are, largely to the places with the biggest urban populations.

People always say this, but it doesn't make sense. The reason there is such a thing as a battleground state is because some voters matter and others do not, thanks to the EC. Look at this map from the 2016 election. New York is almost all red, but Trump didn't even bother courting voters there because their votes matter not at all. If there were a national popular vote, then every vote everywhere would matter. No candidate could focus on a few places if they want to win, because the whole country would be in play.

Except 83% of the USA population lives in urban areas. Parent comment is suggesting that any candidate would rationally only focus on urban areas, urban issues, urban trends, etc.

In our first past the post voting system, the parties will gravitate to positions that roughly 50% of the people have. If there were two candidates that were both ignoring rural areas and were 50/50 with urbanites, it would be only rational for one to try to capture the remaining 17% of people who live in rural areas. That would make it so that the candidate who ignores the rural population would be a sure loser. The only thing that could happen then would be that the other party also fights for the rural vote or that they try to claim a larger share of the urban vote to make up for their disadvantage in rural communities. In either case, votes from the entire country would matter.

That doesn’t add up at all.

How can both be at 50% with urban voters and yet only one of them ‘ignoring the rural vote’?

Of course rural votes would have some effect at the margins, but the priorities of rural voters would always be a meaningless tie breaker, and never carry significant weight.

Yes, votes across the whole country would matter, but rural votes would have so little leverage that they wouldn’t impact the agenda.

Exactly - high population density areas would become the battlegrounds.

Nobody outside a city would matter.

> The whole point of EC is that mostly urbanized states won't overwhelm the sparsely populated ones

This should pretty much stay as is. This could easily backfire. Case in point, India, where 2 states with highest populations are also states with the most poverty, illiteracy, and crime. But unfortunately these states decide the overall politics for the country and therefore work against any and every form of progress and instead move towards more socialist and populist policy making.

The United States still has a senate that disproportionally awards power to rural and low population states by design, and house districts that do so in practice. It doesn’t need to also affect the presidency.

And I would argue that it is already not functioning properly so I’m not as worried about hypotheticals of how it could go wrong. We just had 4 years of ineffective populism thanks to the electoral college. It continues to elect presidents without popular support and a gridlocked congress with historically low approval ratings.

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