Why the Electoral College Will Be Banished
dvorak.substack.com
dvorak.substack.com
Thats a bit fraught though since unless you have some kind of parity it would instantly screw up the current balance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...
So banished - no, circumvented - possibly.
Some supporters and opponents of the NPVIC believe it gives one party an advantage relative to the current Electoral College system. Former Delaware Governor Pete du Pont, a Republican, has argued that the compact would be an "urban power grab" and benefit Democrats.[19] However, Saul Anuzis, former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party, wrote that Republicans "need" the compact, citing what he believes to be the center-right nature of the American electorate.[33]
A statistical analysis by FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver of all presidential elections from 1864 to 2016 (see adjacent chart) found that the Electoral College has not consistently favored one major party or the other, and that any advantage in the Electoral College does not tend to last long, noting that "there's almost no correlation between which party has the Electoral College advantage in one election and which has it four years later."[32]
Look at some of these doozies... [1]
I guess that's the whole Gell-Mann Amnesia thing.
Society as a whole has a major dearth of healthy skepticism - perhaps because a consumerist economy doesn't benefit from skeptics, and more from true believers.
"The severity of the virus from country to country is a reflection of media coverage, not the other way around."
I am not holding my breath.
Modern marketing for political campaigns will adapt either way. It's pretty easy for campaigns to target demographics, and I'm sure that a GOP candidate could pull the right strings to get a plurality vote. Hispanics, for example, are the weak link in the Democratic tent, as are asians who vote democratic but live in a fairly conservative way.
There was a bunch of hubub on the Right in the fall about a Democrat win leading to Democrats tilting the tables in all sorts of ways that would lead to a "permanent Democrat majority".
I always came back to the same point as you, two-party politics will naturally self-balance at a pretty even split.
At a city / state level, you might be able to maintain one-party control through various levels of corruption / influence, but the nation itself is way too fickle to put up with that for long.
The weak link in the current majority will always tend to switch sides as soon as it appears that they might gain an advantage by doing so.
And the Supreme Court, and many lower courts, which have been packed with Republicans.
Not to mention the military and the police, and probably the intelligence agencies too.
I am aware that is not necessarily true, but it is also in the self-interest of the judges to be perceived as impartial, otherwise they loose their authority.
Police, military and intelligence agencies are government agencies, and are part of the executive. They should do their job irregardless of who is in power. A lot of high ranking people have worked through several administrations because they simply do their job, irregardless of their political leanings. Partisanship is harmful for those people, as it threatens their job security.
If that were true you wouldn't have liberals appointing liberal judges and conservatives appointing conservatives, and fighting tooth and nail over it.
Also, the Supreme Court effectively makes the law, not just follows it, and that's true to some extent of lower courts as well, as most cases never make it to the SC.
It's not a coincidence that now that we have a conservative Supreme Court it's widely expected that Roe v Wade is going to get overturned soon. The law didn't change, but who's on the SC did.
"They should do their job irregardless of who is in power."
They have a lot leeway as to how to do their job, and many of them will use their power to pursue vendettas against people they don't like, as we saw with Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, Bagram, black sites around the world, and all the torture and murder that the police engage in.
Prison guards and employees of ICE and Homeland Security are also probably mostly Republicans, and it's hard to argue that their politics and world view doesn't affect the way they do their job or why they are in those jobs in the first place.
No, it doesn’t, unless the Republican Party doesn’t adapt to changing conditions as it has continuously since it’s founding. It probably guarantees the Republican Party will realign slightly around some peripheral issues to shift it's geographic focus slightly while retaining it's core economic message, and continue on without breaking stride.
Dislodging the duopoly (that is, opening the electoral system to 3rd parties) will require proportional representation full stop. Nothing else will do.
Maybe, but people probably thought that about Democratic-Republicans and Federalists, or Democrats and Whigs. The subsequent realignments have so far been more gradual adaptations within the existing major parties, but a radical and suddenly realignment destroying (and replacing, either immediately or in short order) one of the majors is still possible.
> Dislodging the duopoly (that is, opening the electoral system to 3rd parties) will require proportional representation full stop.
Something like that, yes. (Not necessarily party-list PR, but electoral systems with greater proportionality than FPTP.)
If you disagree with that last point, I sincerely hope you're right, but one need only cite the weight of history and Duverger's law to support it.
In general our country seems to try and prevent a tyranny of the majority, which is one of the historical flaws of pure democracy. E.g. see kulaks in USSR, jews in Nazi germany, other minority groups in the US etc.
And I want to be clear, I'm talking about equitable not equal. It seems weird to me that we don't talk about it this way when we do in so many other conventionally left topics (race, gender, culture, religion, etc). So why screw over the other side just because they disagree with us politically? I'm all for proportionate representation but at some point you have to strike a balance. You need both sides of the country to be operating as efficiently as possible and while now we favor the rural states swinging in the opposite direction isn't a balance, it is still a skew. Fairness doesn't always mean equality because the nature of reality isn't equal. Pretending that doesn't exist just creates inequality.
And then Kansas actually has cities in it. Why does a resident of Kansas City (Kansas) get more national voting power than a resident of Los Angeles?
Unless you live in a swing state, you generally know how the Presidential election will turn out in your state. So if you're in the minority in a non-swing state, you know going in that your vote will have no effect on the outcome, it's effectively just going to get discarded. If you're in the majority, your individual vote still doesn't have a lot of power, anything over the 51% is irreverent and effectively discarded.
With a popular vote, every single vote counts. No matter how big the majority or how small the minority in a state, every vote still has power. Nobody's vote is invalidated by where they happen to live.
I am in full agreement that proportionate representation (e.g. Maine and Nebraska) is a step in the right direction, but my personal feeling is that the presidential election should be the one place that every citizen's voice and vote should be equal. I can't imagine another situation where that should/could be the case and I think it's important to have that one place where every voice in the country can be equally involved and every vote equally weighted.
The short version of why I don't think any vote-per-district approach makes sense for the presidential election is that it will always reduce the election down to the "swing" districts that actually decide the outcome and get the most attention from the candidates. It can come down to very few votes, and a candidate pandering to the more extreme fractions can flip those sometimes-tiny margins.
I'm left-of-center in a very Blue state, but it bothers me that more conservative voices in my state have no impact on federal elections. They can't swing the state for the presidential election or congressional representatives, so they are provided little voice on the national stage. I think giving more influence to right-leaning voices from left-leaning areas, and visa-versa, could help bring the whole nation much more into balance and away from extremism.
You can try to minimize the issues I'm describing, but I think they're inherent to any vote-per-district approach such as the Electoral College. So I am seeing the two options as vote-per-district, and popular vote. Are there other solutions you're considering that I'm not seeing here?
After the complete failure of the Articles of Confederation, a second initiative was created to desperately try to get the 13 states to subjugate themselves to a collective government. They all wanted the benefits of this shared collective, but had various gripes about joining it.
The biggest gripe:
At the time of the drafting of the Constitution, Virginia alone had over 20% of the entire population of the US. New York and Pennsylvania were also populous, compared to states like Delaware, Connecticut, South Carolina, etc.
The original design of just having a purely population-based House of Representatives (and Presidency) was immediately rejected by all of the smaller states. Only the big states were ok with that. The smaller states were unwilling to join under an umbrella government that could be fully controlled by two or three populous states, at the expense of the interests of their own citizens. They immediately rejected the Constitution. This resulted in the creation of the Senate, and it's role as being the UPPER body of Congress, with more power than the House of Rep.
Without removing the pure popular vote, the union could have never been created in the first place, because it was immediately viewed as a way for populous states to subjugate less populous states. And those states and their citizens were unwilling to take that risk.
When you understand that this system was DEMANDED by smaller states before they were willing to join the union, you quickly realize why removal of such a system would likely result in some form of gradual disintegration of the union.
The system now makes it so liberals in Mass and rednecks in Wyoming occasionally get people that match their beliefs running the Federal government, with cycles of fury from the losing side every election. Abolishing the EC would have the near-term effect of having one of those groups, the one that dominates large, sparsely populated states that control most food production, become perennial losers, in a permanent and unending fury at a government that doesn't listen to or care about them. If you want to understand what this looks like, go talk to your average voter in upstate New York, whose state government and tax policies are dictated by NYC voters who are mostly renters. Do you think upstate New York has similar needs to NYC? I can guarantee they don't, and those needs are unaddressed. Ditto for voters in southern Illinois. The animosity is palpable, and that's for neighbors a hundred miles away.
Eventually, states will secede. And in a modern world like ours, I don't think it would be dramatic and violent. Likely just modern secession referendums.
The current conversation about abolishing the EC has always been a partisan power-game, just like giving DC statehood. If the conversation around DC statehood were actually about representation, rather than 2 new Senate seats that are guaranteed to represent city-dweller interests, the Congressional Act that allocated land from Maryland to be DC would simply be reversed, with the land ceded back to Maryland, and the addition of two new Congressional representatives to Maryland. This is exactly what was done in the 1800s with the unused portion of land Virginia allocated to form DC with Maryland. (the Virginia side of the Potomac was ignored by Fed gov, so the residents demanded to be rejoined with Virginia, and they were.)
As of now, the Federal government still treats cannabis like it's supremely harmful, with zero medical use, along with other DEA schedule 1 classified drugs. This is about to change, but since the 1990's, there have been locations in the US where a majority of the population reject this.
California was the first, and eventually in 2014 you had Colorado become the first state to wholesale legalize it, in spite of Federal law. Along with those movements, came a feeling of identity as a Californian first, an American second, that became particularly strong when the Feds raided businesses which complied with state, but not federal law. The people who really wanted legal weed increasingly viewed the Fed as an overreaching, far away tyrant. Imagine what it will be like in states that embrace low taxation if the Federal Govt is controlled for 3 consecutive decades by the party that represents city dwelling voters? Just like the reaction from Californians and Coloradans when the Feds raided citizens in their states for activities made legal at state level, it will help fuel anti-fed sentiment.
I think that's the risk we run today:
City residents are upset with what they correctly view as an intransigent, backwards system that gives too much power to small states and rural residents. They want to tilt this more in their favor, and correctly state the common sense "every vote should have equal weight" argument. The issue is that the construct that ties these states together always assumed that each state would have some form of pure democracy, and that the coalition of states would funnel each state's democratic desires into the Federal construct that was, by design, not democratic.
My view is that the majority of citizens, most of whom don't even care to know about US history at a remotely detailed level, and don't understand that the system they want will gradually erode the benefits of staying in for many states, and simultaneously raise the costs. Resentment grows, and next thing you know you have a secession movement.
It does act to prevent the rural areas from becoming totally neglected hinterlands, help them implement polices that may be necessary because of the different conditions of non-urban areas.
That said, I do think the current bargain tips the balance too much, so I'm now in favor of abolishing the Electoral College, and giving the House an advise-and-consent role (in addition to that of the Senate), at least for judges. These smaller states can keep their extra representation in the Senate.
One person, one vote.
Not to mention that the US has a surplus of food, and the US government often pays farmers not to make food, so their value is really overestimated, if anything, especially considering all the subsidies they get at the expense of more populous states.
Most of the people that work in agriculture are probably undocumented immigrants with zero votes and zero representation, and those people who claim to care about the welfare of agricultural workers should have undocumented immigrant rights and representation at the forefront of their agenda. But somehow anti-immigrant, and thus anti-agricultural worker sentiment is rife among such people.
Many people are still under the illusion that small family farms are the ones that are being supported when they give agricultural subsidies. But those people are mostly gone. What are left in their place are huge corporations, and it's they who are benefiting most from the status quo.
Every house district gets an electoral vote, and then each state's popular vote counts for the two votes provided by the senate seats.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-urban-or-rural-is-y...
In times of stress people tend more to seek simple answers. I can only assume forcing false dichotomies on everything is a sign that people don't feel secure.
House of Representatives is suppose to be 1 Rep per a fixed number of people. But Congress put a hard limit of 435, that means Small States have more people per Rep than Large States.
For example, Wyoming has 1 Rep for 480900 people.
California has 1 rep per 736000 people. To be fair and agree with the original intent of the US Constitution, California should have about 82 Reps instead of 53.
Texas for that matter should really have 52 Reps instead of 36 as it as now. The way it is now it has one rep per 700279 people.
Fixing that limit should solve a lot of problems
The proximate reason why they don't do this, I would imagine, is that in the short term a party-controlled state wouldn't want a bunch of its Presidential vote delegates to go to the other party; e.g., California Democrats, who currently have the political power to change how their state awards delegates, don't want dozens of delegates going to the GOP and vice versa for Texas Republicans not wanting a bunch of Texas delegates going to the Democrats.
On the other hand, states like Ohio and Florida want to keep the influence they have as swing states -- they want presidential candidates to spend an insanely disproportionate amount of time campaigning there and making promises about future policy decisions that disproportionately affect local industries. If they awarded delegates proportionally, they'd lose the attention they enjoy every four years.
I'm not sure what the way to break the equilibrium would be, but do think that the solution to this is action on the state level rather than Federal. Am I missing anything?
They also just don't devote resources in heavily blue states for the Presidential race.
Why work to gain votes in a race you will lose anyway? Particularly given that you can win without putting in that effort.
Campaigns are optimized for the rules as they exist. Changing the rules changes the game. Just because the proposed rules look favorable to one side doesn't mean that they would remain that way if the changes took place.
"But I had more pieces left! Just because I was checkmated doesn't mean I should have lost."
Strategy is informed by the victory conditions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_presidentia...
Citation needed
If the President is elected by the Electoral College and the parties aligned to near electoral parity, then it often doesn't even take significant fraud or suppression to swing the national election, as long as you target easily-identifiable swing states.
Trump was not trying to change the respective laws in the states, but to get someone to change the outcome where they were not in his favour. _After the fact_.
The NPVIC is designed that any change can only come in effect well before an election.
People should elect candidates, not parties. If we do not stop electing parties, we will continue to elect gatekeepers and politicians who spend all their time creating and then pretending they can't solve wedge issues, while spending money frivolously to bribe people and pay-off the corporations who later hire them.
These politicians, who all seem to hate each other, are friends with each other, and they play citizens for fools. Why don't we all take a step back and stop playing _their_ game? The problem isn't the electoral college, it's the people who we let matriculate and the party system.
The only way to rig the election with voter fraud and get away with it is exactly the same - by spreading your fraudulent votes thinly so that no one area is too suspicious.