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Comment by timapplesauce | Hacker News Reader

The Electoral College exists because popular vote would lead to just a handful of our largest cities holding all of the political power. Switching to popular vote would lead to presidents completely ignoring or worse enacting policies that harm smaller cities, suburbs, and rural Americans.

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A handful of the largest cities, where most of the people in America live. We already have a Senate where Wyoming with ~500k people has as many votes as California, with ~38M people. How much are we going to stack the deck against the average, likely more centrist voter, that lives in a metro area? Maybe we could finally pass common sense gun control legislation that a majority of Americans support.

Without the EC, you'd have mob rule, which would eventually decay into a tyrannical regime. Please read the federalist papers. All of them.

Another way of saying this is we have tyranny of the minority. A handful of small states hold the majority of the political power and get to make decisions that affect the majority of people. I don’t know why you think this is better than a majority of people holding the majority of power.

You could say that but you'd be wrong.

This is oft repeated, but it does hold up to even minor scrutiny.

1. More Americans live in suburbs than in urban areas, so they actually represent a larger share of the popular vote.

2. The electoral does not actually bias small states that significantly. California’s share of the popular vote was 11.0% in 2020, while it cast 10.2% of EVs.

3. The electoral college primarily biases large, tipping point states. Biden won California by a 63-34 landslide, while trump won Florida 51-48. In both cases, each candidate gets 100% of the electoral votes rather than a proportional amount.

4. Finally, the electoral college biases low turnout states vs high turnout ones, as EC votes are based on population and senators not actual votes themselves. In 2016 for example, Texas cast fewer votes than Florida, even though it is the second biggest state by population, and it got to cast 7 move EC votes.

As an aside, it’s always telling that when this debate comes up, people will always say that “California and New York will decide the election”, referencing the largest and fourth largest states, while leaving out Texas and Florida, the second and third largest…

or instead of a “tyranny of he minority”, we have a functioning Republic where minorities are less oppressed than in a pure democracy.

1. You’re replying to the wrong comment.

2. As my comment outlines, the electoral college actually does very little to protect minority interests.

3. Further, it has almost never actually worked as the founders intended. They didn’t predict the existence of political parties and expected the electoral college to actually involved real debates and voting within the body itself, not as it works today where they are essentially decided before they attend. The founders intended for the EC to be a filtering step among a multitude of candidates before the final election was decided by the house, voting as state level blocs.

What you’re arguing is post hoc rationalization that doesn’t even fit the facts on the ground.

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