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Comment by GolDDranks | Hacker News Reader

From an outsider perspective, the US bipartisan system seems to be a big problem. There are almost no meaningful choices. Moving to transferable vote would perhaps improve things? But I doubt that would happen anytime soon, because the current system is a live-lock of two wrangling powers that don't want more competition.

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First we have to git rid of our ludicrous electoral college system. This requires a constitutional amendment, which must first be approved by 2/3 of both houses of congress, then ratified by 3/4 of the state legislatures.

Since that is the only thing that has enabled Republicans to barely win presidential elections since 2000, we will not get anywhere close to passing such legislation, let alone get it approved by 3/4 of the state legislatures.

As a side note, the last attempted constitutional amendment was the Equal Right Amendment, giving equal rights to women. It was proposed in 1972, and is maybe close to finally being approved.

https://www.equalrightsamendment.org

> This requires a constitutional amendment, which must first be approved by 2/3 of both houses of congress, then ratified by 3/4 of the state legislatures.

Actually all it requires is the state legislatures of enough states to hit 270 EC votes to pass the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta.... It's at 209/270 at the moment.

The electoral college is an utterly idiotic system, but can be broken from within.

The NPVIC is a fucking awful solution that would backfire on the idiots supporting it eventually. Talk about vote disenfranchisement on a massive scale—it could literally invalidate entire states worth of votes just because California, Texas, Florida, and New York decided to vote the same way. Which means that candidates would ignore literally every state except the 4-5 with the largest population because they are the only ones that would matter.

California might be 60/40 but that 40 would matter a lot. Republicans would go to Bakersfield Dems to Santa Cruz. Right now you only campaign in a handful of swing states vs getting whatever you can.

Yes and that would be a good thing, if people stopped thinking that by-state voting for the presidential office is a good thing in the first place. The way it is now means that your vote's weight depends on your street address. You can't move to to upstate New York to improve your influence because New York City will weigh you down. But you can move to New Hampshire and then of course the weight of your vote will improve much.

> The way it is now means that your vote's weight depends on your street address

Say huh? It is literally the same thing as now but in reverse and much much worse. At least now your vote has a chance of counting for something if only influencing your elector. If you live in a state that has agreed with the compact and has a small population, your vote doesn’t mean a damn thing even if you vote for the popular vote winner. Your vote is not yours, it’s the mob’s.

Your whole argument rests on the historically accidental choice that and how states should be apportioned seats in the electoral college. Everything about these procedures is arbitrary, much more so than the principle of "one man, one vote". Of course others have—of late in this forum—also aksed why it shouldn't be that big landlords get several votes. That's how they did it in Prussia in the 1800s. Commenters at they time remarked it is not clear whether it's the farmer or his many pigs who are allotted first class in elections. To sum it up, I'm for the simple and clear rules.

Oh and of course if you're for a small-state bonus in presidential (i.e. federal, nationwide) elections why is it that geography of all factors should be the one distinguishing point? How about skin color or profession? You as the artisanal baker that you are by vocation, don't you feel that artisanal bakers are always underrepresented in parliaments? Shouldn't your vote as an artisanal baker be given more weight, just like the way that citizens of New Hampshire get preferential treatment the Way God Intended?

I understand fully that states can choose to allocate their electoral votes however they want, but the geography factor is what is in the constitution. The current method of democratic influence of state electors to keep is simply better than waiting to see what your neighbor has done before you act in my opinion.

If you don’t believe that geography and states is the correct framework we should use, go work to amend the constitution. Why “break it from the inside”? Go make your case and let your argument win on its merits and get the votes. Stop trying to game the system, go change the system.

What? I sure propose to change the system, not to game it. I hate gaming systems, one should always be upfront and tell the truth. I clearly state, and if not before I do now, states and electoral districts should not be able to influence the outcome of presidential elections.

Here is how. Get at it.

https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/constitution

In a national vote, your vote is exactly as strong regardless of where you live: one person, one vote.

In the current system, some people's votes, those of the least populous states, count for far, far more than some other people's votes (those in the most populous states).

Plus, today, if you live in a state that is overwhelmingly in favor of one party, your preference for the other party doesn't count in the slightest. If you're a blue Texan or a red New Yorker, there is 0 point to you even going to the polls. In a national voting system, your votes would truly matter as well.

That’s not being discussed here. It’s about states tossing how their citizens vote in favor of how other states have voted.

The logic is the same regardless of how it is implemented. If the majority of electors are guaranteed to vote according to the result of the national(federal) popular vote, than all voters are equal, and it also then matters if a million people voted R in California or 10 million did (whereas today that is entirely irrelevant). And this all includes the voters of the states that don't join this coalition.

It may feel nice if your state casts its votes for your preferred candidate even if they lose the general election. But it is absolutely 100% entirely irrelevant rationally. And this is the only thing lost if the law change goes through.

People who advocate a national direct democracy should work to change the constitution. States are the selection entity for the country’s executive office.

The states select the president, and in this case, the states agreed to adopt thr compact. Don't see a problem there.

Never said it wasn’t legal for states to adopt it—said it’s not real democracy and disenfranchises votes.

Whose votes get disenfranchised?

If your state participates in the compact, but votes for the loser of the overall popular vote, all of those votes are disenfranchised.

No, they are not. Not anymore than anyone else's vote who voted for a candidate who didn't win.

You are only disenfranchised if your votes can't affect the outcome in practice or in principle. Like, say, the votes for president of Republicans in California or those of Democrats in Texas in practice. Or the votes of those in Puerto Rico even in principle.

Any reasoning you care to provide for that?

Because we are constitutionally not a direct democracy?

First of all, a direct democracy is something else, it is a system where citizens vote for laws and other issues directly instead of appointing representatives such as congress or the president. France is not a direct democracy, even though they elect their president through a direct vote (like all other democratic nations that exist today except the USA).

Second of all, the constitution leaves it up to the states to decide how to appoint their electors. It follows that any system chosen by that state is as constitutional as any other system.

I would also add that a major improvement to the current rotten system would be for states to appoint their electors proportionally, instead of winner-takes-all. That would solve by far the biggest problem with the current system, which is not that Maine gets more representation per citizen than California, but that voting Republican in California is entirely useless.

Thanks for all the corrections to points that I didn’t make.

I asked you for a justification on why the states deciding to decide their electoral votes based on the national popular vote should only happen through a change to the constitution.

Your reply was that the constitution doesn't say that the USA is a direct democracy.

So, I explained that adopting the national vote wouldn't make the USA a direct democracy. I also explained that the constitution doesn't say that the states need to decide the electoral votes based on local popular votes only.

So, I refuted your argument in two different ways. I'm not sure where you feel I didn't respond to it.

That is a work-around for the worst flaws of the EC, but keeps in place the unfair distribution of EC votes that favors small states. It also will not allow any meaningful alternative to first-past-the-post voting, which is what people here keep asking for. We can't have ranked-choice voting for president without a constitutional amendment.

Surely if someone can win a popular vote, they can convince a bunch of electors to also vote for them when informed only by their conscience?

That's the point of the Electoral College. It weeds out groupthink, which is the downfall of direct democracy.

It's not stupid just because you refuse to use it right.

No, the majority of electors are bound by law to vote a certain way based on their state's decision. The electors themselves are manifestly irrelevant to the whole process, and have been for maybe a hundred years.

The real problem of the system is the state based system, where winning a narrow majority in a state is equivalent to winning a landslide, since you get the same amount of power. Also, the fact that different people get different leverage based on whether they live in a smaller or larger state is highly unfair.

The electors themselves have not actually decided an election in a hundred years or more (as in, electors deciding against the official choice of their state). While they legally could, I would bet you however much you want that they would get literally lynched, if not arrested and replaced, if they tried to. For all practical purposes, the USA has a weighted state-based popular vote system, where the president is the one who wins a majority in states with enough weight.

Edit: researching a little bit more, the electors have never changed the result of the presidential election. The closest they ever came was in 1836 when enough electors ignored their state's vote for vice-president, and still the VP who won the by-state popular vote got elected later in congress. The president was separate and won the electoral college per the popular vote as normal.

So, this concept that electors serve some purpose to safeguard democracy from populism is a pure fantasy. It may be a fantasy that the founders shared, but it has never panned out in reality.

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