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Comment by dagw | Hacker News Reader

or that people would making a different vote if it was counted differently?

Two changes would happen. A lot of people who don't vote today because their state either heavily favours the 'wrong' candidate or the 'right' candidate will already win by a massive margin, would start voting, since all of sudden their vote matters a lot more.

Secondly, and more importantly, candidates would campaign very differently. In todays system gaining 1-2 percentage points in swing states like Arizona, Georgia or North Carolina is worth infinitely more than gaining 5 percentage point in California, New York or Massachusetts, and politicians on both sides campaign accordingly. In a popular vote scenario those extra 5 points in California could swing the election which would change the entire focus of not only the campaign, but possibly even the type of policy and even candidates that the parties put forwards.

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This also makes many states cease to matter.

Already a big issue that big cities vote one way while rural voters go another way.

Stated differently, this makes states matter and rural voters matter in direct proportion to the number of people living there, because all people are equal.

It's not right that a voter in Maine or New Hampshire, which have 1.3 million people and are roughly even between the two major parties, has a high probability of changing the outcome with their vote, while a voter in California or Texas - which have 30 times as many people - is essentially irrelevant to the outcome.

This isn't so different in the EU is it? Smaller countries don't want their needs ignored by the bigger countries so they get more seats relative to their population than big countries.

Maybe it's hard to imagine the United States of American to become 50 independent countries but isn't the way you keep them united is by promising the smaller ones that they won't be trampled on by the big ones?

Nobody wants full democracy. Full democracy is what allowed Hitler to get away with gassing six million Jews, just because the majority of the population agreed it was a good idea at the time. Now Germany has very strict constitutional protections of certain rights to make it very hard for the majority to violate the minority like that again. State rights act similarly, protecting the populations of individual states to some degree from the arbitrary whims of the majority.

This wouldn't help Jews in WWII because Jews weren't grouped into a single German electoral region.

If you spread 49.9% of the population evenly in a system where states vote rather than individuals, you've insured that this minority gets no representation.

>Full democracy is what allowed Hitler to...

What election are you referring to where the Germans democratically gave Hitler power? His best "fair" election results saw his party get ~35% of the vote, and he only got the largely ceremonial chancellorship through backdoor deals. By the time he became president nobody could consider the elections fair.

> isn't the way you keep them united is by promising the smaller ones that they won't be trampled on by the big ones?

Yes, but in the US, at least, it's gotten to the absurd opposite where the minority is more or less assured a majority of votes. In order to avoid tyranny of the majority, we've more or less codified tyranny of the minority.

What's your evidence behind the statement that "the minority" is assured a majority of votes? Both Democrats and Republicans have won the electoral college and each of them throw a big rhetorical fit any time the other wins with it. At some point you have to accept that being equal doesn't always look fair in a micro vs macro sense of time. In the moment it doesn't look fair, when you look at the longer timeline they've had their share of elections. The system seems to be working as intended.

It would be more helpful to describe what a state of affairs looks like that doesn't result in large population states, who already maintain the gift/grift of cultural hegemony, running the country.

This comment is confusing to read. It doesn't matter which party wins the election because the voting system itself is flawed. It's also not a particularly new thesis but an often acknowledged problem. It might be that this was the intent of the system, that doesn't change the fact that nowadays significant portions of the population have gravitated towards a few very large metropolis, effectively giving disproportionate power to the people living in rural areas

The electoral college was set up to protect less densely populated areas from more densely populated areas, so the situation was always that way; it didn't "gravitate". It's not like "rural issues" are the ones dominating legislation or national conversation either.

To take a step back, I've lived in both rural areas and major cities (I currently live in one). Rural folks being represented in government is not an issue and I find it kind of odd that people try to make it an issue like this. I'm fine having my agenda compete with theirs.

I don't live in the USA, so i'm just repeating whats literally taught in school where i'm from.

there were no metropolis like we have them today back then. City were considered gigantic with with only a few hundred thousand people -- which is maybe a largish town nowadays

Nobody said that rural people being represented is an issue, its nonetheless a fact that they're overrepresented, as they have disproportionate voting power. That term doesn't mean that they shouldn't be represented, it means that they have proportionally more voting power then a person living in a city does.

> I don't live in the USA, so i'm just repeating whats literally taught in school where i'm from

You spoke so certainly about the subject that that was not apparent. Maybe it should have been a question instead?

> there were no metropolis like we have them today back then

In the US there were, and the early development of the US is the reason for the electoral college. You had sprawling cities like NYC having to vote next to people who took months to get to the East coast for voting. Their problems were very different and the electoral college helped balance the concerns of cities that have easy access to imports and labor with areas that had no such things. On the larger scale it helped protect smaller states and territories from the policy and influence of larger states and territories. Again, their problems are very different, and in current day translate to what we end up referring to as urban, suburban, and rural.

> Nobody said that rural people being represented is an issue, its nonetheless a fact that they're overrepresented,

In the US they're not and you still haven't answered my original question, which is how are they overrepresented. You're just stating that's a fact, but it's really not.

Isn't "overrepresented" another way of saying that each individual voter living in a rural area has effectively more voting power then it's counterpart living in a metropolis?

Thats why I'm stating it as a fact,as it sounds like very simple logical connection. It could be a misunderstanding on my part, but it always sounded like a very straightforward situation to me.

No, voting is much more complicated than that and the history of our voting system speaks to that. Purely popular voting, as in a pure democracy, is demonstrably flawed - that's why representative democracy came about. The foundation of your argument is also flawed; if rural areas are so overrepresented then we'd be seeing a lot more emphasis on the funding of rural schools, hospital systems, clean drinking water, and broadband. Instead, these issues are regularly underfunded and are even joked about on forums like this.

There's lots of issues in the US to solve. Voting, imo, is just the pet issue of the losing party.

> Purely popular voting, as in a pure democracy, is demonstrably flawed - that's why representative democracy came about

Every form of democracy is flawed, and it's important to be aware of them. Otherwise things tend to kinda spiral out of control, which they arguably already have in a lot of western nations with wanton corruption and completely insane people getting elected.

You're supposed to update the ratios as time passes and the context changes.

The EU isn't exactly a model democracy, with its three levels of indirection.

No, it makes votes in all states count equally. The current system makes votes in certain states orders of magnitude more valuable than votes in others.

The "intended" malapportionment to benefit small states[0] is a far smaller effect than the "unintended" effect of silencing local political minorities. If you wanted to retain the former, you could replace the Electoral College with just weighing votes cast in smaller states slightly more. Right now, neither large nor small states have a say in presidential elections at all - it's purely undecided states that play kingmaker, and it drastically warps the priorities of elected Presidents.

[0] Which is also a problem. You know how everyone says the EU is undemocratic? It's for the same reason why we have an Electoral College - the whole "federal government represents states instead of people" thing.

> You know how everyone says the EU is undemocratic? It's for the same reason why we have an Electoral College - the whole "federal government represents states instead of people" thing.

The grass sure is greener on every other side.

Isn't this already the case, except right now it's states like California or Texas that don't matter, since they always vote the same way anyway?

> This also makes many states cease to matter.

States are abstract political entities; it's people who matter.

People are represented in the House by population (less so than they should be since we refuse to let the lower chamber grow in size) and in the Senate by state.

The President of the United States represents every United States citizen everywhere on the planet. The holder of that office should be elected by a majority, preferably with some form of expression of ranking preference, of those voters regardless of what political entity they are currently in or connected to.

By that you mean the swing states? If so, good. Those states don't deserve a disproportionate weight into who we elect as President.

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