Yes, as a Californian you can vote, but your vote is near guaranteed to have no effect, and as a result, neither of the sides cares to address your interests, solicit your opinion, advertise for your vote.
It struck me as really bizarre.
Also it is the system that was designed over 100-200 years ago. The problem is the lack of meaningful reform because the people in power are there only because of the current system.
That’s the reason why is it so hard to change electoral system without some external/internal shock. And “unfortunately” US has been way too stable politically during the 20th century compared to most other countries.
That's the case of every state which is away enough from swing. Only "purple" states[0] matter during presidential elections.
Then again, swing states only get pandered to for a few months every 4 years.
[0] and Maine and Nebraska which use district voting, but at 4 and 5 electors they're to small to really matter
I live in Texas, around Houston. Here we certainly do have representatives (but not members of the Senate) who send mail to constituents with information. Our Senators send emails once in a while, if you sign up for them.
But good luck ever figuring out the real information from the spam and ~~malicious dis~~incorrect information and opinions.
Isn't that partly their fault? If you're always going to vote for one party regardless of what they or the other party does, of course neither party is going to bother catering to you. It's kind of like declaring that you will always buy apple products, then complaining that apple doesn't address your grievances.
I’ve heard Americans lament about this exact concept and coming from Canada I don’t know what the solution. Sometimes I think Ross Perot was the country’s last shot at anything but the present status quo.
Republican controlled states don't want people's votes to count, so none of them have passed the bill.
Actually, it does: more specifically, degree of proportionality does, and antimajoritarianism (systems in which an absolute majority-preferred option can lose to a minority option) are an extreme case of nonproportionality. Having a powerful central executive elected by nonmajoritarian election itself weights the government to nonresponsiveness (though the US has many other factors reinforcing that.)
The many states that have agreed to this (have passed the bill) have simply accepted that the votes of the people is worth more than the feelings of the billionaires who have sponsored the Republican gerrymandering movement.
Right now, effectively, the land votes, and the people's vote is often ignored. Wisconsin is a good example, where the Republicans keep losing the vote, but yet with less than 50% of the vote, they somehow have a super-majority in the legislature.
I haven't read the bill but if certain states are committing themselves to popular distribution of their electoral votes while the red states stick to all or nothing, the reality is that 40% of CA's electoral votes go red and blue candidates don't have a chance at winning.
More like that the votes of people outside their state matter more than the votes of their own people. Nothing weird about that being recognized as the disenfranchisement that it is.
> Wisconsin is a good example, where the Republicans keep losing the vote, but yet with less than 50% of the vote, they somehow have a super-majority in the legislature.
The Electoral College - and this compact of states pertaining to it - has precisely zero impact on any legislative branch, federal or state. It solely pertains to presidential elections (and in turn the rest of the Executive Branch).
The solution to the problem you describe would be to address gerrymandering and other instances of geographic electoral manipulation.
More generally, any single-winner election system is prone to a "Rawlsian compromise": something that works out well for 51% of people and poorly for the other 49%. This still isn't so bad if things are changing now and then. But we've been stuck with Clintonist "preachy" Democrats and Gingrichite "edgy" Republicans for nearly my whole life.
Then Woodrow Wilson’s Espionage Act during WW1. In Schenck v US and Debs v US, the supreme court upheld convictions (first for the crime of distributing literature arguing the draft was illegal, and second just for hinting that the US shouldnt have joined the war).
But yeah allowing the Federal government to have more power is definitely a double-edged sword
And for everyone who is crying about the popular vote, there is a very good reason we don't do that. It was recognized from the start that if you do a strict popular vote. the more populous and wealthy areas would always call the shots and would dictate politics to the rest of the nation. At the time that meant Virginia. But it doesn't really matter who, the principle still holds. This was a compromise between populous areas and rural areas in order to get the union formed.
If you switch to a pure popular vote then the nation would be run by a handful of mega cities like NYC, LA etc. That's not democracy. The system we have prevents that while still allowing for populous areas to matter. Getting rid of the electoral college would remove one of the main compromises our federal system is built on and in my opinion would be fair grounds for any state to secede. It would be comparable to throwing away parts of the Bill of Rights.
Not for presidential elections, nobody cares about Delaware or Wyoming's 3 electors. Small-population states matter for the Senate where they're way over-represented.
Not that they're not over-represented for the EC mind, but e.g. for their 0.2% of the national population Wyoming has 0.55% of the Electoral College, versus 2% of the Senate. By comparison California's 11.75% of the national population gives them 10% of the EC and... 2% of the Senate.
States which have a say (or are heard really) during presidential elections are states with large enough populations (and thus EC) that it's worth spending time and dumping money there for campaigns, yet purple enough that there's a chance to swing them.
The actual number of potentially contested states is quite low; states not in contention aren't contested.
There are many "within the constitution" ways of adjusting this -- states chose electoral college reps as chosen by nation wide popular vote, as chosen by state election ratio, etc. But as things stand, no individual state would do this by itself because an inconsistent implementation would (IE if california or texas stop sending all or nothing electoral college reps) tip the balance to one or the other party for forever.
There's some indications that the republicans won the house in this current election cycle because new york didn't aggressively gerrymander, allowing several republicans to be elected when the absolute math would have made it trivial to exclude them.
Politics is hard. It's better than mass murder, though, which is the typical alternative.
Not every state. Two states (Maine and Nevada) have district voting, so they allocate one elector per congressional district (based on that district’s vote), plus two statewide. Tough they only account for 9 electors combined. And it’s still far from proportional representation.
Weird thing that politics does is convince you that it’s not in control of the mass murder. I promise you we have hundreds of thousands of state sanctioned or willfully negligent deaths annually in <country name of your choice>.
Modern politics isn’t about stopping the deaths, it’s just better at hiding how the sausage is made.
- let say you’re a “solid” state (whether red or blue), odds are that’s on both presidential and state (governor, possibly to likely assembly), if you adopt district voting you parcel out EVs to “the other party” without that favour coming back the other way
- if you’re a purple state, then you lose out on campaign presence, money, and publicity, because instead of shifting, say, 10+ EVs getting that extra % popular votes shifts 2 EVs if they’re not in a purple district, 3 if they are
That’s why the NPVIC was designed with a threshold: when the NPVIC covers 270EVs it comes into force and everybody gets the same thing at the same time.
I’m assuming that’s because you’re not trying to vote in candidates who consistently support a small group of loudly aggrieved people to inflict their will on the vast majority of the country.
The original intention was not this bloc-voting crap. The idea was that a state would select some trusted, wise, and ideally educated, locals to go get a look at the candidates and vote on their behalf, since expecting everyone in a whole country the size of the US to get any meaningful sense of the candidates, or to understand many of the relevant issues in order to make an informed choice, was obviously crazy in a time before broadcast (and still is, actually; broadcast barely even helped with the core problem of most folks—justifiably!—knowing almost nothing about the things a head of state deals with).
This broke down instantly, as electors began pre-declaring for candidates. But we kept the system, which, while a half-decent (if hopelessly poorly-implemented) idea originally, is now simply very bad—we get all the noisy, absurd national campaigning but most of us don't get a meaningful say in the election, anyway.
The electoral college was created because it was expected that state governments would elect the president, not citizens. In the presence of direct election of the president, it's an anachronism at best. It was never about "tyranny of the majority", and in a two-party system, trying to prevent the tyranny of the majority is just a tyranny of the minority.
If you want, weight the votes so votes in small states count more, or votes in rural areas count more. It'll still be a much more fair and equitable system than the electoral college, which effectively means that anyone outside a swing state has no representation.
Of course, doing it that way would make it much more obvious that there's no credible reason we should give 1,000 suburbanites Wyoming more voting power than 1,000 farmers in rural California, or 1,000 voters in Columbus more power than 1,000 voters in Brooklyn.
If you read historians opinions there are several reasons, the "big States get all the power" is typically not cited [1], however one important reason which does get cited is slavery. The southern states wanted a way to count slaves as population without actually letting them vote. The three fifth rule was the compromise [2 - 4]
[1] https://uselectionatlas.org/INFORMATION/INFORMATION/electcol...
[2] https://historyofyesterday.com/the-racist-origins-of-america... [3] https://www.npr.org/2020/10/30/929609038/how-electoral-colle... [4] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/electoral-...