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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

The issue the GP is referring to is how the way our electoral process is set up people with more land have more voice in government. In effect, if you are rural your vote is worth more. This is an extreme in the Senate where a single person's vote has 1.5% of the power of a person in a different state (California vs. Wyoming).

And why do we give more voice to the rural vote? Sure they would be a minority otherwise, but so are left handed people and we don't give them more vote. Are they better informed politically than people who live in more densely populated areas? It doesn't really make much sense and I've never heard a argument stronger than "but then the cities would have a lot of political power" without explaining why that is a bad thing.

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The electoral college has very seldom deviated from the popular vote. It's happened a handful of times, but not frequently.

My point is that people who clamor "popular vote" don't always take into consideration what would happen if we implemented popular democracy.

Interestingly, Japan is another country that gives the countryside political advantage and tax advantage.

It's happened 2/6 times this century. That doesn't strike me as very seldom.

Historically it is very seldom. We obviously will need more time to see if this 2/6 is a pattern or an aberration.

This was just limiting it to this century, though. The pattern is well established and well understood. It isn't even very complicated. Each state has 2 senators and at least one representative. The number of electoral votes of a state is the number of senators plus the number of representatives. So a state like mine, Vermont, has three electoral votes even though we have only about 500,000 citizens. If population size were uncorrelated with political leanings, this would just contribute noise to the electoral process, but it doesn't. Less densely populated regions are conservative. The more such regions there are in a state, the lower the population of the state. So in effect conservative voices are given extra weight in elections. If you believe in the principles of the Declaration of Independence -- "all men are created equal" and whatnot --, this should offend you.

"Very seldom" including every single Republican Presidential term for the past 30 years save one. Without the electoral college propping them up the modern Republican party would be in serious trouble.

> "Very seldom" including every single Republican Presidential term for the past 30 years save one.

So, twice?

Yes just two of the last six elections. This determined 7 of the 9 sitting members of the court.

The two times that a president has lost the popular vote and won the election in recent history were Bush Jr's first term in 2000 and Trump's term in 2016.

Only 3 justices were appointed during those terms, all by Trump in 2017 - 2020.

Bush Jr did appoint two justices but they were during his second term, when he won the popular vote.

The remaining four justices were appointed by Bush Sr, Clinton, and Obama (2).

So I have no idea where you are getting your figure of 7/9 from.

So what you are saying is 7/9 justices came from the six elections in this century? Sounds an awful lot like what I said but I guess redundancy is sometimes useful.

and Japan's government is equally dysfunctional and influenced by minority fringe groups and religious zealots.

Remember, founding fathers had a very dim view on Democracy, this is why they chose to have a Republic and then restrict the republic through a constitution. If Democrats were losing out to big numbers, they would pro-republic and Republicans would be pro-democracy.

But, one of the best explanations for why founding fathers built the system the way they did is this[1], by late Justice Scalia.

The fundamental idea is that the American system is created to represent the will of the republic across time and space:

- Every bill needs to be passed by all three House, Senate and the President

- House recycles very fast (every 2 years)

- President recycles at a moderate speed (every 4 years)

- Senate recycles at a slow pace (every 6 years, and partially every 2 years)

- House represents the population

- Senate represents all states equally (or represents land)

- Presidency is elected through a hybrid system (electoral college, which is distributed in proportion to the population).

- The fundamental idea is that any bill must be agreed upon by:

a. The will of the people not just in short term (house), but in mid-term (presidency) and long term (senate) also. When UK wanted out of EU, the remainers believed that they should have a revote because they didn't believe that people voted with full information. Of course, years later a second proxy vote through general elections made the intent clear, but in the US we will not go for a bill to be passed unless its not just what we voted for in the past 2 years, but also what we voted for in past 4 and 6 years.

b. The will of fifty states, and territories and not just by a few populous states. In contrast, EU's policy making is all a decision of France and Germany. EU is more 'democratic' than US, but also far more fragile.

American Democratic Republic system is a part of experiment of 'Union of Unions'. It's a balance between the different sides. If you make the union too weak, it will fail to hold itself up. Like Articles of Confederation was a failure because it was too weak, pre-Civil War US also turned out to be a union not strong enough. League of Nations wasn't strong enough.

But if you make it too strong, then individual states will start walking out because they don't find their interests represented (like UK voting for Brexit from EU).

1. https://youtu.be/Ggz_gd--UO0

I totally agree with this view and the "problem" is people want their way _NOW_. They don't have the patience nor want to understand that the other side has the political majority at this time. And when the majority becomes a minority opinion, they also cannot handle that change very well.

Today's bare-knuckle politics sure does not help moderate the peaks.

On the other hand you shouldn't be surprised when people are angry at you when you tell them "hold on, we are going to fix this problem in the future" when they have been waiting for literally their entire lifetime and nobody seems to want to do anything about it.

"This problem will be inconvenient for me to solve, so please wait until I die of old age before you solve it, thank you for your patience."

Sure, that's human nature. One cannot satisfy everyone simultaneously short of having them live in simulated environments.

States already tried to walk out once, and it didn't go so well.

A fundamental problem of catering to minority opinions is that if a minority shrinks it tends to become more and more strident to the point where it can no longer compromise, but they still maintain power due to the way the system is set up. This leads to highly polarized and dysfunctional political systems.

Plus, if there is a danger that a minority might feel disenfranchised and want to leave, what happens when a majority feels the same way?

The phrase “founding fathers” is gross and embarrassing as an American. They weren’t deities and they didn’t happen to invent the ultimate possible government for all time. We’re using computers to talk about stuff they literally wrote on animal skins with bird feathers! They rode horses to go visit other states, we have global fiber optic networks. Even if they were good ideas then, it’s not remotely the same world we’re living in now.

> Even if they were good ideas then, it’s not remotely the same world we’re living in now.

Which is why the government system they created allows us to update the constitution. Which we have done. Many times.

At least give specific reasons for why you think we should abandon the political philosophy that has underpinned our government for almost 250 years rather than vague references to technological changes.

Sure. Why send a handful of representatives from each state to Washington? With horses somebody needed to physically go. Now we can all watch C-SPAN. If we can vote for American Idol we can vote on laws. Yeah, direct democracy, computers make it work. It never did before but now it does.

Of course I don’t want to have to study every law and decide how to vote, that would be a full time job. So I’ll pick a representative and add my vote to the weight of theirs. But I can change my representative any time, even on a vote by vote basis, and obviously they don’t have to be from my state.

There are all kinds of better way of doing things that are possible now that nobody has gotten around to trying.

> Yeah, direct democracy, computers make it work.

I feel like you made zero effort to understand the point I tried to make. Founding fathers may have been from a different time, but they absolutely weren't wrong about democracy not being a solution.

They studied numerous constitutions written during the antiquities and correctly concluded that for a large geographical nation like the US, democracy cannot work. That part does not change just because we have super fast communication lines and computers today.

They absolutely did not consider the “large geographical nation” that the US has become, because it did not exist as such at that time.

They had 2.5M people, we now have 330M. We’ve scaled 100x. It shouldn’t be surprising that we need to rethink the initial architectural decisions.

Think about it this way. They got to study their antiquities and learn from those lessons right? It would have been really weird if they had said, “Look, wise men already studied this stuff and figured out the right way,” and they’re talking about ideas from the year 1500, as if there was nothing to learn from the preceding 250 years.

They didn’t do that. Why should we?

> They absolutely did not consider the “large geographical nation” that the US has become, because it did not exist as such at that time.

You are making the same mistake as in the earlier part. US was already pretty big at the time of US constitutional debates to make direct democracy not possible.

> They didn’t do that. Why should we?

You're more than welcome to do that, but understand something, all the past constitutions/republics/democracies is data, which cannot be easily replicated and controlled for. You're going to come up with a new political system which ignores literally every negative lesson of the history of past 3000 years then you will need to explain how are those concerns not necessary.

Founding fathers were, really really really worried about things devolving into a military dictatorship and violation of individual rights. There are plenty of reasons to criticize them for not caring enough about the individual rights, but none that their concerns were unwarranted.

Just to give you an idea of the concerns we need to care about:

- Build a system which is democratic in nature and works for a large country like ours.

- Make sure that it prevents the democracy from violating individual rights.

- Make sure that it does not become a dictatorship (like how Roman Republic ended and became a dictatorship when Julius Caesar declared himself the permanent dictator).

> The fundamental idea is that the American system is created to represent the will of the republic across time and space:

> - Every bill needs to be passed by all three House, Senate and the President

> - House recycles very fast (every 2 years)

> - President recycles at a moderate speed (every 4 years)

> - Senate recycles at a slow pace (every 6 years, and partially every 2 years)

> - House represents the population

> - Senate represents all states equally (or represents land)

> - Presidency is elected through a hybrid system (electoral college, which is distributed in proportion to the population).

I feel like a lot of people fail to consider whether this is a good thing. Like social studies classes always present this as an unvarnished good - "checks and balances, the bedrock of our system". But a system really should be designed to build consensus to action - there should always be someone in the driver's seat, even if it's not someone I agree with. Letting the rudder flap in the breeze until 100% of people can agree on something is not an inherently desirable outcome, because that almost never happens!

And yes, some people would say that's a good thing too, that we should bias towards doing nothing instead of doing something, but... that's not really a viable model indefinitely. The world is now based around exponential growth in economic output, exponential growth in technology, and we are preferring political systems optimized for an O(1) constant-state world where there's 100 years between the cotton gin and the internal combustion engine.

Especially in times of crisis that bias towards doing nothing is a really bad thing... consider the case of the Polish Sejm and how the goal of "excessive consensus" basically crippled the country and allowed their enemies to manipulate the system to create disruption and then exploit the deadlock for political gain.

https://www.britannica.com/place/Poland/The-17th-century-cri...

Everyone agrees 100% isn't the right number, but then, what is? is 75% the right number? 60%? Simple majority? How big a consensus has ever existed in the modern political sphere, short of 9/11-style world-changing events? A 60% popular vote is considered a landslide, but if the system requires a 75% popular vote to achieve a 60% senatorial/house majority, the number is effectively 75% and actually achieving consensus really isn't possible in that system.

The American system's focus on checks-and-balances really is excessive - it's not a good thing for a system to be unable to reach consensus. It worked for a while as long as the "gentleman's agreement" held but now we are seeing people exercising political maximalism, "hardball" so to speak, and with those participants the actual rules of the system no longer result in consensus

We can then optimize around the "what if we flop back and forth between parties" problem separately but - requiring 100% consensus between all dimensionalities of society to do anything is not really the solution for that.

This idea that "deadlock between branches is a positive design goal" is fundamentally not how the rest of the world approaches this. After all, in parliamentary systems the PM is the leader of the party/coalition that controls parliament. That's a good system, it builds a government that has a consensus towards action and goals! Producing deadlock between branches of government isn't a desirable outcome in itself. And that, if you phrase it as such, is an inherent rejection of the American ideal of "checks and balances" in the sense you outline it here ("to require massive consensus across all dimensionalities of society via multiple branches and political compartments each favoring a dimensionality"). Yes, absolutely they still have a constitution and judicial branch to protect people, but they don't design the system around deadlocks between arms of the government being a design goal. And it still doesn't lead to "laws completely flip every time power changes" or the other supposedly negative outcomes from consensus-oriented systems.

> And why do we give more voice to the rural vote? Sure they would be a minority otherwise, but so are left handed people and we don't give them more vote.

There are other minorities that we think a bit harder about than left handers. Consider, for example, that African Americans are approximately 12% of the US population.[1] They are not, however, evenly distributed around the United States. For example, they make up 33% of the population of Georgia and 22% in North Carolina,[2] states that crack the top 10 in US population.[3]

It took a bit of doing, but I weighted the electoral votes for all 50 states and DC (see [2]; you've got to issue your own queries to get them all) according to the percentage of African-American population (AAPC). For example, Alabama has nine electoral votes and an AAPC of 26.8%, which returns 2.412 adjusted votes.

In sum, African Americans account for 70.658 total electoral votes, about 13% of the total compared to their population representation of 12%. That step change is an 8% advantage relative to their total population (538*0.12 ~ 65 electoral votes; 1 - 65/71 ~ 8.45%).

This is not, I want to point out, an argument about racial inequality or the fitness of the electoral college to deliver solutions to those kinds of problems. Neither is it an exhaustive treatment (obviously) of every kind of demographic. There are obvious flaws in this approach (you can't split EC votes, EC votes are typically winner-take-all, not all of the population are voting age, etc., etc.). So it's also not intended to say, "Well, akshully..."

I do think, though, that there is some nuance that is missing here. Rural people aren't the only minority affected by the electoral college, and questions of geography and demography play important roles in how people vote. It's worth considering what happens when you are in the minority, because it is the rights of the minority that are most likely to be overrun by the majority.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_Unit...

[2]: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/GA,NC/PST045221

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

I'm not sure what your point is here? You are trying to calculate black voting power without even considering the longstanding and effective black voter suppression efforts in states like Georgia, so it's all academic anyway.

Replacing tyranny of the majority with tyranny of the minority isn't a win.

> I'm not sure what your point is here?

While the EC could "erode voting power" of the majority in favor of minorities we don't like, it may also favor those minorities we do like.

It doesn't matter if I like the minority or not, singling them out for more political power makes no sense.

> It doesn't matter if I like the minority or not, singling them out for more political power makes no sense.

It seems like as a society we have a complicated relationship with this idea. Rights are in principle equal, but power is not equally distributed. Maintaining any balance is a really hard problem.

The electoral college could be a relic of a bygone era whose time is over and done, but I'm not sure that eliminating it is going to reset the balance of power in a way that protects rights more effectively.

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