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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

Why is the conversation always "abolish vs keep as is?" The EC seems like a good idea that brings equity to a diverse nation but needs some updating as things have changed dramatically since its creation. There are other possible changes that might help, like removing the winner take all situation. But just basing on popular vote alone creates the same problem we're in but from the other direction. We need cities but we also need the rural areas (like our farm lands) and we need to represent both. But rural areas will never have the population size/density of cities. We shouldn't let fly over states decide the elections just the same way we shouldn't let California and New York decide them. There's got to be a better solution here that provides good equity.

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I don't think the concerns you're bringing up have anything to do with Electoral College, which doesn't care about cities or rural areas and doesn't favor small states in any case. It favors a handful of medium to large states that are seen as battleground states. The swing states that received disproportionate attention in the last election are on average quite a bit more urban than the United States as a whole.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-urban-or-rural-is-y...

If most people live in the cities, I don't see an argument for letting rural areas have more than their proportional share of representation.

Because their labor matters too. But the thing is that their labor, which is extremely essential to the operation of the country (and the country would fail without their labor), requires more land than hands (especially as we've drastically introduced automation into their labor). We need food and natural resources, arguably more than we need investment bankers and programmers (not that we don't need these things, but one is essential to being able to breathe). The idea is to create a system that can fairly represent those laborers too.

That's not an argument for them having more than their population-proportional share of representation.

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.

> If most people live in the cities, I don't see an argument for letting rural areas have more than their proportional share of representation.

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.

While I understand your point, the counter argument to this is "Land doesn't vote, people do." Why does someone deserve to have greater representation because they live on a larger plot of land in a different part of the country? Why does someone in a big city deserve to have less representation?

That's because it isn't the land that is voting. You're trying to represent a diverse set of people and industries. We shouldn't screw over farmers because laws that work in cities are disastrous in rural areas and we shouldn't screw over cities because of laws that work well in rural areas. We need the farms, mining, energy (solar and wind as well as coal and natural gas), fishing, etc that comes with rural areas. They provide us with food and many of our essential resources. Similarly we need cities and the resources they bring us: tech, finance, logistics, etc. We need both for a highly functioning state. So it isn't so much land as voting but labor and utility.

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.

We're trying to represent a diverse set of people and industries by dividing them into a false binary partitioned by largely arbitrary state lines, many of which were defined over 200 years ago, and leaving the vote for the presidency up to a tiny fraction of the population in a few of those arbitrary partitions. How is that equal or equitable? All states have some combination of rural, urban, and all the shades of gray in-between. Texas has Austin, Massachusetts is over half rural, NY is a Blue state that's mostly Red by area. Why should someone's vote have no weight because of where they live? I'm not saying that a popular vote would be perfect, I'm just saying that the Electoral College is absurd.

It's weird to divide the 300 million people that live in urban conditions and the 60 million people that live in rural conditions into 2 sides (that's using the statistical definition of urban that counts many small towns as urbanized areas, not the definition of urban that means super-dense megalopolis).

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?

In my mind one of the biggest negative effects of the Electoral College is that it doesn't just provide more/less national voting power, but in many cases effectively strips voters of any power over the Presidential election.

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.

This is why I've suggested a proportionate representation within the states (several states do this already). I do think the EC needs a lot of restructuring but I feel like most of the responses I'm getting are still reducing it to the dichotomy and applying positions to me that I don't hold. All I've stated is that the EC is broken so keeping it as is isn't a great solution and I don't think going to purely a popular vote is a good solution either. But there's a lot in between there and limiting ourselves to only those two solutions is a bit insane.

I did not intend to imply anything in regard to your positions, my intention was only to argue my interpretation of, and issues with, the current system and discuss why I think alternatives are better. Apologies if any of my posts came off as a personal attack.

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?

This discussion was had when the original 13 colonies made a decision, for the second time, to unify under a single federal umbrella government.

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.)

This only holds if people still think they are a "Virginian" first and an "American" second. I've lived in several states, have close family in a dozen different states, and extended friends and family in almost every state. For me and many others, the state borders don't mean a whole lot, they're artificial lines drawn based on political maneuvering from 200 years ago.

You make a good point, but keep in mind that nothing will create a culture of distinctiveness from the Fed and group-cohesion within a state/region than imposition of rules that are popular nationally, but highly unpopular in said region.

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’s true that many citizens feel little loyalty to their state. I think that’s because the feds are so far beyond their remit that states are left with few options for policy differences that would attract like-minded citizens. We now have different people enacting largely the same federal policies.

That, and it's just easier to travel now.

It seems like geographical proximity influences votes. I am not sure why cities tend to lean so heavily dem, but they do. So if it were just raw vote count the cities would control the whole country. Not sure that is preferable. Then it starts to look like a serfdom, where cities gain wealth through taxing the poor rural areas.

I'm not disagreeing that right now there is strong ideological divide between a majority of people in rural and urban populations, that's patently obvious. But what is the justification for providing someone with a larger representation per-individual based on what are largely arbitrary boundaries? Why should votes from Massachusetts for a Republican president and votes from Arkansas for a Democratic president be rendered meaningless?

It is not the land voting, but political municipalities which are tied by common culture and people. I think it makes sense to try and give smaller municipalities equal footing with larger municipalities. E.g. in the global scheme we think it is a bad thing when super powers stomp all over the little guy. Same thinking applies internally. Each state is sort of like a mini country.

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.

Part of my point is that states, and often congressional districts, do not really represent a "common culture and people" in a lot of cases. NY for example is a Blue state, but is Red by area. Those same boundaries can also introduce arbitrary borders that divide people with a common culture and life experience. The problem with the Electoral College is that it's just become a set of meaningless rules and lines that the political parties game to their advantage. I'd be less opposed if it weren't winner take all by state, and even less opposed if the electoral college districts ignored state lines and actually represented real cultural and environmental boundaries (instead of gerrymandered puzzle pieces) while trying to strike a reasonable balance between population and area. Given the virtual impossibility of that, I think that a popular vote is more reasonable then the Electoral College.

Let's take your NY example. What do you think is the fairest way to represent the people in the state? The current setup, or something else?

Because in this country there are dichotomies. There's my chotomy and the wrong chotomy.

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.

Interestingly I'm noting most of the replies to my comment are assuming I want to keep the EC as is. Which I'm not sure how to even respond to comments like that since my opening line states the opposite. That just I don't like the conventional alternative. But I guess this is the problem that we're talking about (and seems to becoming increasingly more common), that we're removing the nuance from problems and trying to apply overly simplified solutions. All that results is in continued problems and continued infighting. I'm not sure how to break the cycle when people on HN are forcing a position on me that I explicitly stated I did not hold.

I had the thought back in the fall that a reasonable compromise could be:

Every house district gets an electoral vote, and then each state's popular vote counts for the two votes provided by the senate seats.

I think you're describing exactly what Maine and Nebraska already do: https://www.fairvote.org/maine_nebraska

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