How to Fix the Electoral College
federicolopriore.com
federicolopriore.com
Of course it doesn't really matter. The Constitution means whatever you can bribe the Supreme Court to say it means. God Bless America.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_compact
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutionality_of_the_Natio...
At this point, of course there's always a risk that something could go awry, but I'm willing to accept the risks inherent in a one-person-one-vote system -- essentially an elective republic.
Both parties gerrymander. Both parties engage in "principled" discussions supporting positions seeking only expedient means to their practical objectives. I may be convinced that you believe in purely democratic election of the president, I'm not convinced that the Democratic party as an organization truly does.
I'm not a Republican. But I do like the existing system, where one house in the legislature represents the states, the other represents the people, and the executive is selected by the states with impunity regarding the criteria of selecting him. I'm also very happy that every state has independently decided that their citizens should be the arbiter of that outcome. I would not be happy with that though being encoded in such a way that this was not optional for states, I prefer the status quo, where it is just the stable state of the system and emergent out of existing incentives.
I'd be happier if the electoral college was closer to the popular vote, but my preferred method for achieving that would be the ratification of the congressional apportionment amendment, because it empowers the people at the expense of the federal government and the parties, and also empowers them in the legislature as well as the executive branch, whereas just direct vote only empowers them in the executive branch, not the legislature, and does so at the expense of the states and not at all at the expense of the parties.
It's true that the Democrats gerrymander. I think it gives them an advantage in Illinois and Massachusetts. I'm personally willing to give that up, and let my party take its chances in an elective republic.
I agree that your preferred method makes sense. I can't think of another way.
I don't believe that the House represents the people. In my state, the House delegation, and the state legislature, are effectively chosen by the ruling party through gerrymandering. This could be found to be illegal, since the Constitution requires the states to have a republican form of government. But I'm not sure I'm willing to take my chances with letting the Supreme Court decide on this right now.
I think that eliminating gerrymandering might have an impact on policy, since both parties would have to change how they appeal to voters.
Requiring representatives to represent a maximum number of people wouldn't eliminate gerrymandering, but it would significantly reduce it's efficacy. I think, districting based on geography is the ultimate cause of the problem, the theory goes that people in close proximity share interests, but we see that that's not really optimal. It would be nice if something like, people can form groups together in a state that would function like districts, with a maximum number of members, and a maximum number of groups based on the number of representatives in the state (which is of course a function of the total population in the state), and elect theirs, basically let the people self organize and voluntarily associate so they can maximize their representation. I'm sure there are unforeseen consequences to that, like unions dominating many representative groups, or issues local to a small region going unaddressed, but it's interesting to think about and there is an optimal solution to the gerrymandering issue that requires us to change the way we think of a representative constituency.
That is quite a bit different than the popular vote as you can see this year when Trump would have basically run the board of electoral college votes without that caveat.
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is a way to choose the president by popular vote without the overhead of removing the electoral college.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...
That seems like it would inevitably fall apart.
Also present a lot of mystery about "they going to do it?" and then someone doesn't and someone else chooses something else.
Talk about a mess for democracy ...
States can pick any means of selecting their electors that doesn’t conflict with other provisions of the Constitution. Obviously, a state imposing a requirement that electors be white or male would not fly.
OK, so they choose to have a state election. It must be a fair election, affording due process to all the voters as that is Constitutionally understood (one person, one vote, for example).
“We’ll have an election, but if national results go a different way, we’ll throw out the votes of the ‘wrong’ voters,” is … not that.
An analogy: Could the southern states agree to a compact to elect their governors by party slate? I doubt that would pass muster, and neither would the popular vote compact.
Similarly in the other direction: aside from DC, the most Democratic state was Vermont, which ignored its 31% of voters choosing Trump.
Now consider that these are the most extreme states, and by definition, all other states ignored larger proportion of voters through winner-takes-all. Arizona had 49.36% D vs 49.06% R. Did the republican vote matter? Barely 10k more votes and the whole state decides all of its 11 votes are for Biden.
Yet somehow, no riots, no overthrowing state governments. (Yes yes we eventually had riots but that's a different issue - they were totally okay with the rules, they just didn't like the results.)
Popular vote is basically "Our state decided to choose what the majority of Americans want. The people have spoken, and chose candidate X. We're now honoring the decision." There's no reason why it should fall apart any more than the electoral college should.
That's not the same thing at all.
In each of the seventeen states and DC, National Popular Vote Interstate Compact has been passed by the state legislature, and signed by the executive branch, except for Hawaii (whose governor tried to veto it but it was overriden).
The bills followed all the proper steps to be signed into respective state's laws. It's not some kind of "agreement." It's the LAW. If you don't like it, feel free to go campaign in those states to change the LAW.
“We’re going to award our electors according to a compact never approved by Congress and that by design disenfranchises some fraction of our citizens who voted in a Federal election.”
People will accept a flawed mechanism that's been used for 200 years far more readily than a new slightly-less-flawed-but-still-flawed mechanism.
And every voting mechanism has trade-offs, so every mechanism has flaws from certain perspectives.
States without strict voter id still have mechanisms to ensure people who vote are real people and that they vote once. Strict voter id is security theater, though it does not reduce turn-out, either.[4]
[1] https://votingrights.news21.com/article/election-fraud/
[2] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/4/26/15424270/v...
[3] https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/The...
It's not election changing if one state, lets say accidentally, allows people to vote twice. It could effect their local outcomes, but if everyone votes twice, it should net itself. However, a fair election of the president would be completely fucked.
You propose a weakness in our election system where a conspiracy of state officials that wants to influence an election can control who is allowed to vote twice. If they can do this, they can already influence the outcome in their state.
Of course we see no such thing, because the elections are only administered at a state level, they are actually done at a local level, and there's quite a lot of observation and auditing that goes into verifying that things are done correctly.
Under popular vote, even the minimal vote margins are quite large because it's aggregated at the national scale - e.g., Kennedy defeated Nixon in 1960 with only 0.17% difference in popular vote, which was still 113K votes.
To sway that election, you would've had to organize across multiple states to find a way to smuggle 113K votes illegally, while not getting any suspicions from poll workers and people tabulating results. And non of your co-conspirators should ever divulge it. It's so ridiculous that it approaches "9/11 was an insider job" territory.
If you overlay the existing states that have passed the NPVIC over what Harris won, all but MN went blue. If the compact was active for 2024 with the current participating states, Harris would have only received the VA and NH electoral wins for a total of 17 votes. Trump would have 521 votes.
Anyway, as I told in another comment, I'm not from the US, so my intention wasn't really to say how to implement the proposal. I just had this idea and wrote it down in a blog post.
big-green-man wrote a good comment about that
If it is easy, why hasn't it been done. Do you think that no one considered this approach?
... unless those cities are in Iowa, Vermont, and Nevada, in which case you're fine with it?
I mean, the EC is so unfair and undemocratic that Presidential candidates avoid states entirely where the political calculus says they simply won't matter. And it's ridiculous to assume that when a candidate does show up in a diner in Iowa to order whatever meal their campaign staff says will most appeal to the locals, work on an assembly line, or whatever, that they actually care about anything those voters have to say.
They don't have to care about the voters, they just have to care about the numbers. Remove the EC and the voters actually matter.
Additionally, why is it more fair for a voter in Wyoming to have 3x the electoral impact of a voter in California?
The latter is a particular problem borne from the fact that we've capped the size of the House at 435 in 1929, thus giving increasingly disproportionate power to low-population states in both the House and Electoral College as the difference in population between states continues to grow.
> but it certainly forces politicians to at least care what people in Iowa, Vermont, and Nevada have to say.
The problem is that it disincentivizes politicians to care about what people in deep blue or deep red states have to say, and there are many more of those than there are swing states. Both Democrat and Republican presidential candidates should have to campaign in all 50 states rather than a single-digit number of potential swing states.
Large cities grow their own cultures. People become alike in some aspects, and adopt similar ideologies. There’s no guarantee those people know what’s best for some village far away. There’s also no guarantee they wouldn’t vote to raid that village and put it to the torch, with 30 million votes against 2000.
I think it’s fair that sparsely populated areas get say in nationwide topics as well. When it comes to your longing for a system “more democratic”, well, the US is a constitutional republic and the founding fathers thought about this stuff long and hard.
Ditto for, say, Oklahoma (straight R since 1968).
In 2020 there were more Republican presidential votes in California (6,006,518[1]) than there were in Texas (5,890,347[2]). The Republican votes in California basically had no say in determining the outcome of the election. Was that fair to them?
There were more GOP votes in New York state (3,251,997[3]) than in Ohio (3,154,834[4]).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...
No, the local elections should - and will - be determined by those cities, the state elections should be determined by the inhabitants of the states and the federal elections by 'the states' in a weighted manner so as to make sure less densely populated states also have a say in all things federal. If you think this gives too much power to the less densely populated states I'd suggest this is caused by the idea of the federal state having too much power, not by the electoral college or anything related to it. Don't want to have people from 'fly-over states' to have a say in ${issue}? Make sure ${issue} is handled at the state or local level and those rednecks, deplorables, 'garbage' and hillbillies don't get to have a say in it while thanking you for keeping out of their affairs.
The federal state should be as small as possible and only busy itself in things which by their nature can not be handled at the local, county or state level. Nearly all if not all of the issues of importance to those who are in favour of having the popular vote decide who becomes president should be decided at state or lower level.
They have been trying to reform the electoral college for as long as there has been an electoral college, and all attempts have foundered for the simple reason that those that benefit from the power it gives them will block attempts at reform.
In any event, in this election the point is moot.
The first issue I would aim to address is the variance in voting power from district to district. In Wyoming, voters have a significantly lower constituent to elector ratio, ie greater voting power, than those in e.g. California.
This issue is a recent development due to the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, which fixed the number of reps in the House. As the population has grown, the distance between the average population vs the minimum population of a district has increased.
The remedy is to simply uncap the size of the house and increase the number of representatives. This would quantize the population over a greater number of electors thus reducing the remainder, resulting in relatively more equivalent voter power.
As an added benefit, it would increase the amount of access each voter has to their Representative in the House, and make it practically more difficult to corrupt a majority of the House members.
https://www.reddit.com/r/UncapTheHouse/comments/lklp4h/the_u...
The strongest response I have received to this suggestion is something like a fear about having more paid politicians. I don't see an increase in the number of legislators as the same as an increase in executive branch bureaucrats. I think part of the issue that does come to mind is how we fit twice as many reps in the capitol. I like the idea of having to adjust the size and arrangement of our legislative chamber. I also like the idea of addressing housing challenges; maybe its time to bring back the legislator bunkhouses. It becomes the reason to review and revise the existing standards for offices, housing, and even the culture of the house or representatives.
The better options is this, which will bring back the original intent of the US Constitution:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyoming_Rule
or the States Compact Option suggested by litoE above.
[1] https://fairvote.org/defining-the-spoiler-effect/ [2] https://electionlab.mit.edu/research/instant-runoff-voting
What do you think about keeping the electoral college and use IRV instead?
I think the electoral college is working as intended to balance out power between larger more powerful states and less powerful states. Though I also don’t believe the popular vote is necessarily ideal from the perspective of maintaining more diversity of thoughts and opinions which is useful for a healthy republic.
As someone who’s lived in mostly rural states I’m glad because it prevents places like California with large populations with pretty homogeneous opinions and world views to dominate the nations elections. I get folks in those larger states would also feel equally left out as well.
I view the electoral college as a means of accounting for the “entropy” of votes among states. There’s more diversity of thought and opinion between say a rural Wyoming farmer and a worker in Hawaii than there is among most Californians living in say the 50 square miles of Hollywood.
In a fashion it’s similar to how network effects dominate large in markets where companies lucky to get a market first or to grow first get an unfair network advantage. Antitrust and tax laws ideally gently balance out this winner-takes-effects to provide more diverse and robust markets. Most hyper successful companies aren’t necessarily better at what they do and there’s a large amount of luck in success. Of course they still have to work hard and be effective to capitalize on the opportunities. Similar things happen among states in the USA.
While I often hear “land doesn’t vote”, people don’t consider that a farm will never have the same economic output as an office building with the same footprint. This includes the population that comes with all that employment. There needs to be a way to represent the less economically dense sectors of the country because otherwise cities will dominate everything.
That office building might have more economic outpiut, but at the end of the day it's the farm that feeds people and mines that provide materials to build the offices. We can do without Meta or Google, but without farms people start starving and revolting pretty quickly.
And cities don't want to be governed by the outsized importance of small population states (Wyoming)
I’m curious about what other people think of this. I was once of the opinion that ranked choice voting (in the states that passed this reform) would lead to a renaissance in the viability of third parties there, but it hasn’t come to fruition. It led me to think that many Americans are actually content with having two parties.
A lot of people also end up running with no affiliation (for instance, for very local offices). They might align with some additional party in an ideological sense, but there probably isn't even a local organization to coordinate with.
I oppose any change to the electoral college, including interstate collusion agreements.
The people I see get upset with it are hardcore Dem and Rep, depending on the year, who blame the failure to get elected on anyone except themselves.
I've read some of the reasons, but none sound good to me. What do you like about the electoral college?
It is not going to change because those states that are disadvantaged by the change will not agree to it, so we are discussing it here for fun, not for profit. And if you think the advantage those states have is so overwhelmingly good, you are free to move to one of them, they are not exclusive clubs or oligarchies, they are open democracies themselves.
A major side benefit we get from the electoral college is, our elections get fought out in a small number of places which is an economically efficient way to do it. It is not the case that we are ignoring the voters of the other places, we are simply precounting them into their respective columns. If those places swung to more left-right balance, they could add themselves to the list of places fought over, and I guarantee that would make none of those people happy because elections, like making sausage, is ugly business.
Remember, if enough people move from California to Rhode Island, it is Rhode Island that will be complaining that California is getting a free ride in the electoral college...
What you're essentially saying is that the electoral college favors areas with more open minds willing to vote either direction, rather than hard core voting by party, and that is probably the greatest reason to keep it. Political parties _sometimes_ have the people or country's best interest in mind, but ultimately they are seeking power.
but, since you are disappointed by what I wrote, I won't go on to cover the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics, they are far and away more disappointing, but in a like manner, the electoral college of physics shows no signs of being open to change, the small quantum states won't go along.
How did you draw that conclusion rather than concluding that it favors areas with the people most easily swayed by massive advertising campaigns?
In theory shouldn't money spent go right up to the limit of expected return, whether there is one "swing state" or 50?
I understand why the electoral college is hard to change, but I don't know why high population states would want to be overruled by others.
It is also easy to forget that we are called the United States for a reason. We were more like the EU than we are like France...
- California has 38,940,231 inhabitants and 54 electors. That means 1 elector every 721,115 inhabitants - Oklahoma has 4,053,824 inhabitants and 7 electors, so 1 elector every 579,117 people.
And the Founders had far more nuanced opinions on this subject than modern right-wing politics tends to imply. Consider Federalist Papers #22:
"The right of equal suffrage among the States is another exceptionable part of the Confederation. Every idea of proportion and every rule of fair representation conspire to condemn a principle, which gives to Rhode Island an equal weight in the scale of power with Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York; and to Deleware an equal voice in the national deliberations with Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or North Carolina. Its operation contradicts the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail. Sophistry may reply, that sovereigns are equal, and that a majority of the votes of the States will be a majority of confederated America. But this kind of logical legerdemain will never counteract the plain suggestions of justice and common-sense. It may happen that this majority of States is a small minority of the people of America3; and two thirds of the people of America could not long be persuaded, upon the credit of artificial distinctions and syllogistic subtleties, to submit their interests to the management and disposal of one third. The larger States would after a while revolt from the idea of receiving the law from the smaller. To acquiesce in such a privation of their due importance in the political scale, would be not merely to be insensible to the love of power, but even to sacrifice the desire of equality. It is neither rational to expect the first, nor just to require the last. The smaller States, considering how peculiarly their safety and welfare depend on union, ought readily to renounce a pretension which, if not relinquished, would prove fatal to its duration."
It's still slavery slavery slavery. The tyranny of the majority the founding fathers were worried about was from Northern abolitionists. Framing this is abstract philosophical terms is disingenuous, the political and culture context of the time matters. The Electoral College would never have been conceived, much less enacted, if the preservation of slavery wasn't a non-negotiable term for Southern states to remain in the Union (and it eventually failed in that regard.)
Preventing the tyranny of the majority is what the separation of powers to executive (President), judiciary (Supreme Court), and legislative (Senate and House) was set up for.
Preventing domination of the small states by the large states was why the Senate and House were structured as they are.
If you're American living in one of the majority of states that aren't "swing" states, I don't think you can escape the feeling when you vote for president that you're going through a kind of charade since the winner is going to be determined by some small number of voters in 6 states.
I don't get the repeating of this perspective, didn't he win the popular vote this time? How did "small number of voters in 6 states" affect this reality?
Isn't winning the electoral college but not the popular vote a statistical minor occurrence? People don't know how to lose.
Completely agree. So much "stop the steal", fake electors" and storm the capitol nonsense.
So if a few hundred thousand people had decided the other way, the electoral college would have gone to Harris, without really changing the popular vote outcome.
You may be imputing a position that the poster you replied to didn't take (they said voting in a state with predictable outcome feels like a charade, without saying anything about how they vote).
What do you think about it?
PS: I'm not from the US, so an American perspective on that would be extremely appreciated :)
More interestingly, this scheme reduces party power inside states, so the incentive is for each individual state not to want to do it even though on the whole it's better, and instead the current status quo is the stable configuration, so getting states to want to do this is basically impossible. Think about it: if every state did this, then one state said "nope, we are winner take all again" that state could decide elections. So this is a system that is easy to implement by states, requires no US constitution amendments or anything like that, but works in such a way that no state would for fear others wouldn't. Interesting game theory here, it's very similar to a tragedy of the commons.
Alternatively, there's a proposed amendment to the US constitution called the equal apportionment amendment, that was passed 200 years ago but never ratified by the states, that changes the way the house of representatives is apportioned, such that among many other improvements, will change the way electors are apportioned in presidential elections. You don't need every state to ratify it because you only need 3/4ths of states to do so, many of which already have, it's binding on all so no worry about any one backing out, and you don't need congress to vote on it because they already did and voted yes centuries ago. It has other benefits too, like reducing the prevalence of 2 parties in the house and therefore elsewhere potentially, and increasing the fair distribution of representation in the house, which suffers from a similar problem as the electoral college.
Even if they decided to ament the constitution, you would still face another issue: now electoral system is written in the constitution, so it becomes even more difficult to change in the future.
What do you think about the system adopted by Maine and Nebraska instead?
Could you elaborate further?
So just for reference, here's a Wikipedia article about this amendment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Apportionment_...
You wind up with one representative for every 50,000 people, minimum. Currently, the number of representatives is decided by congress, and the districts are drawn up by them as well. So you've got districts with overrepresented constituents, just like states with the electoral college. It is capped at 435 currently. The parties of course collude to keep it this way, they agree to trade power when redistricting and stuff like that.
With one representative per 50,000 minimum, you wind up with a house that would be, today, about 7000 members. And most of what they do can be passed by a simple majority. House representatives have to campaign directly to their constituents, having that few per means they have to get closer to what they want, which means that, as far as direct legislative representation goes, the pressure to run on overarching political football platforms wanes and the pressure to run on niche and local concerns dominates. With simple majority in the house for most things, that means you have to deliver on a lot more of those local concerns to get anything passed, because half of 7000 people is going to be hard to whip up for a vote on anything.
So you may get some aligned groups caucusing together, you may get them nominally under the same umbrella, you'll get coalitions, all just like happens in Europe, but people will get more granular, close to home representation.
Because the United States was meant to be more like that than it was a country like say France.
The difference is MEPs are appointed proportionally within each state (so if a party gets 40% in a state, it will get ca. 40% of the state's MEPs)
And one could even ask, if it is electors who decide why not get them campaign? Not voting for president, but voting for person who votes for president. Isn't that the intention of EC anyway?
Now, if one party generally expects to win the national popular vote more often than not, it might sign up for such a scheme on the condition that other states do - this is what the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is. But, by the same token, it means that the other party would generally expect to lose the national popular vote, and thus would do the best it can to block such a proposal from going forward by preventing states under its control from joining (or by other means; e.g. North Dakota actually passed a law to block release of its popular vote data until after EC vote specifically to disrupt NPVIC).
Thing is, nobody in position of power today actually cares what the "real intention" of EC is or ever was. The only thing that matters today is winning elections, and so a bipartisan agreement on any electoral reform that upsets the existing balance of power is extremely unlikely.
Bad idea.