Another approach that is in the works is the so-called States Compact whereby each state would assign all its electors to the candidate that gets the most votes nationwide. This has the advantage that no change to the Constitution is needed. Currently, several States have agreed to this, and the Compact will be activated once enough States sign on that provide more than the 270 electoral votes required to win the election.
So the electors are restricted to what they can do to some extent, but can the individual state tell the electors to do something that conflicts with what their own voters may have overwhelmingly voted against?
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.
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.
I can't find a table for this election, but for 2020, the most Republican state was Wyoming, with 27% (73k) still voting for Biden. Wyoming still got to ignore those 73k voters because the rule says the winner of the state takes it all.
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.
Being a winner takes all state by LAW isn't the same as just "agreeing" with the next door neighbor state that you will be a winner take all, based on a national popular vote, and tell electors to do something different ...
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.
It would require a modification to the constitution, Article 1 Section 10 Clause 3 prohibits the states from entering into any compact with one another without the consent of congress. Congress could consent to it, which would bypass the amendment requirements, but I doubt they would as it takes federal power away.
I don't know if it would. At least according to the Wikipedia article on state compacts[0] and the entire article on the constitutionality of this specific compact[1] SCOTUS has already ruled that explicit consent isn't always necessary (it can even just be inferred,) and there seems to be some room for debate.
Of course it doesn't really matter. The Constitution means whatever you can bribe the Supreme Court to say it means. God Bless America.
The problem with a popular-vote systems is that we have a decentralized system of elections. Most people don't take seriously that many states would be incentivizes to cheat or at least look the other way to boost the number of votes coming from their state.
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.
We already have a similar problem to what you describe.
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.
The compact is likely unconstitutional. It hasn't been tested in courts because it hasn't been "activated". I wouldn't put my hopes in this solution (or any other, it's non-issue IMHO)
Any of the states that aren't party to it could file suit, and the ones that are against it probably would. There's also the bald reality that the NPVIC does overall advantage one party and disadvantage the other, and that "other" party is known to have much more of an influence in the Supreme Court.
They also won the electoral college. You have to ask yourself which party has a higher likelihood of winning the popular vote while losing the electoral college.
It would be implementing a popular vote nationwide by circumventing the electoral college. It’s just a mechanism to get around modifying the constitution.
The current compact only kicks in is the electoral college vote and the popular vote differ.
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.
Either way, the person who wins the popular vote wins the election; what difference does it make how many electoral college votes they get (if the electoral votes are determined by a rule like that).
There is no evidence[1][2][3] of any meaningful amount of voter fraud in any modern US election.
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]
I wish these sorts of suggestions were less on the end of "here's what would be better" and more on the end of "here's how it would be possible". Anything that requires a magic wand to enact is a bit of a waste of energy. Would love to see more actual action plans on how to enact the change though.
As stated in other comments, it would be actually easy to implement as it doesn't require a change in the constitution.
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.
Yours is a very good point of view actually. I initially hadn't thought about the tragedy of the commons situation where all the states agree to implement it and later one state decides to go back to winner take all system.
Ok yes maybe "easy" isn't exactly the correct term, but the way to appoint electors in each state doesn't need a 2/3 majority in every house + 3/4 of the states as it happens with Constitutional amendaments. So it's definitely an easier approach
I still can't support changing the electoral college. A few cities deciding the election for everyone feels horribly unfair, and undemocratic. Maybe the EC isn't perfect, but it certainly forces politicians to at least care what people in Iowa, Vermont, and Nevada have to say. It works because of the state system.
Vermont has been voting Democrats straight since 1992. You got it backwards - EC allows any presidential candidate to completely and comfortably ignore Vermont because nothing they do would change any outcome. (Hell, after this election, I'm not even sure if either candidate going on live TV with "Fuck Vermont!" would have changed anything.) If you are a presidential candidate and you spend an hour thinking about what Vermont needs, then you're wasting one hour of your precious time.
Could you elaborate why it's more fair and democratic for a candidate losing the popular vote to win an election (e.g., 2000 and 2016)?
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.
The word “fair” would need to be defined first. Direct democracy is not used anywhere in the world because it’s problematic. Me and my friend can’t vote to beat you up and take your money even though it’s two votes against one. That would be immoral.
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.
>I still can't support changing the electoral college. A few cities deciding the election for everyone feels horribly unfair, and undemocratic.
... 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.
James Madison wrote: There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.
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.
Depending who is in office, one party will never go for this. The reason is states like California and maybe Florida/Texas will never allow this, it removes their advantage in the current electoral collage. Also it does not fix the population skewing for smaller states. Per voter, Wyoming voters have more power that people in Calif and Texas.
The better options is this, which will bring back the original intent of the US Constitution:
There are a few concerns about the electoral college, but I don’t consider it broken in any meaningful sense. After all, the Constitution has survived over 200 years with it in place, which makes it the longest-serving constitution in force today. We cannot say for sure that it would have survived so long under any proposed alternative.
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.
From what I understand, the Permanent Apportionment Act can be adjusted or removed as result of a law being passed which would make it a really promising option. Access to representatives and durability against corruption also feel like they could be really compelling issues to voters.
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.
Exactly, it's always the sore losers who complain about this. There's are good reasons to keep the system as it is, regardless of who wins. But the discussion is always driven by losers.
Think of the extra weight given as Affirmative Action. It isn't hard to get it. It is as socially progressive as any type of affirmative action. Plus, these tend to be remote underconnected areas: why should they be ruled by mobs from far away places who have nothing to do with their way of life? Why stay in an union if your way or life is overruled by others?
the electoral college was a compromise made a long time ago that has two facets: the indirect nature of voting for representatives who vote for us (that was necessitated by preindustrial communication and transportation systems) and some extra weight given to smaller states to get them to agree to come into the union. That was the deal, no takesy-backsies.
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...
when i say economics, i'm not referring to money, i'm referring to human endeavor, human effort and human rewards (which, in terms of economics, are exactly what money represents) So, I meant that it's it economically beneficial that most people in the country don't need to care about elections because the system is taking their preferences into account already. There is little to be gained on margin from engaging many more people for only the slightest difference in outcome once in awhile. Since the forces of negative feedback actually move the centerlines wrt to the system we have, it's not clear that the long term results would even be different with a different system.
Wow I was pro-electoral college before reading your comment, but now I'm cemented in my view.
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.
people who are not in the middle can have perfectly open minds, they just agree with more of their perfectly open minded neighbors. I said left-right because it was convenient, but voting does not really work that way, it's an n-dimensional space of little tugs of war.
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.
We need to solve the problem where the system breaks when there are more than two parties: the "spoiler vote".[1] It is the single largest problem facing American democracy.
Dump the electoral college system and start from scratch. Look to real democracies like Europe where they use ranked choice voting - also called instant runoff voting.[2]
Despite the criticism of the two party system, I nevertheless wonder whether or not the American public actually wants to have third parties. Even in states that are solidly red or blue, third parties never manage to gain a substantial (beyond 3-5%) of the vote. I would think that in a solidly blue state, the greens (or any on-the-left third party) would see a much better showing. Same for libertarians in red states. I imagine that the whole spoiler vote phenomenon would not be an issue in these states’ races.
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.
For the people that are serious about gaining office, it's more effective to try to run as part of one of the larger parties, or at the very least, align strongly with them.
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.
Yeah, spoiler vote brings to 2 parties (like the US). Although the current electoral college doesn't work well, I'm not sure the Americans would prefer to remove it completely and rather use directly popular vote because in the rural areas they don't want to be "governed" by the decisions of big cities.
What do you think about keeping the electoral college and use IRV instead?
> Although the current electoral college doesn't work well, I'm not sure the Americans would prefer to remove it completely
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.
One thing to consider is that the electoral college system also accounts for varying levels of economic density.
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.
Yeah good point. Its sort of hidden in my argument, but economic diversity (including density) is part of the overall diversity and it's critical to "the system as a whole".
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.
Hello, here is my proposal to improve the Electoral College. The basic idea is to allocate electors proportionally in each state with the Jefferson method (aka d'Hondt method) rather than using a "winner-take-all" system.
What do you think about it?
PS: I'm not from the US, so an American perspective on that would be extremely appreciated :)
I think that it would be a way to get the US closer to popular vote aligning with the election result, and in a way that allows states to make the change themselves instead of requiring a constitutional amendment or somrthing. You'll never get exactly the same as the popular vote because you're rounding to integers, but it gets reliably close.
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.
I believe you're right, even if all the states agreed to make a similar change, this "equilibrium" state would be unstable. It would require an amendment to the US constitution to make it stable and that would require a huge majority.
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?
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.
Our problem isn't that there's a lack of ideas on how to reform. It's that said reform requires amending the constitution, which in US is contingent on 3/4 of states (specifically, their legislatures) ratifying the amendment. It is a very high bar in general, but is especially hard to break through when what you propose is virtually certain to change the balance of political power in the country.
Just get rid of it. Either go full on popular vote like everyone else with a president or go parlamentarian like everyone else with a prime minister. This system isn't truly democratic and should be abolished yesterday.
Although we are often taught that it is slavery slavery slavery, the electoral college is also an attempt to prevent the tyranny of the majority - something the founding fathers were worried about.
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...
There's no historical justification for that assertion as far as I'm aware. If you know of one, I'd love to see the reference.
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.
Is it? I'm no history buff, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that the main way the founders attempted to avoid the tyranny of the majority was by having the Senate be two representatives per state regardless of size.
- 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.
Giving some people more votes than others "prevents" tyranny of the majority by substituting it with tyranny of the minority.
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."
>Although we are often taught that it is slavery slavery slavery, the electoral college is also an attempt to prevent the tyranny of the majority - something the founding fathers were worried about.
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.)
Historically the electoral college was a compromise that allowed for the counting of slaves as 3/5 of a person for the purpose of taxation and voting without having them vote. Consider a state like South Carolina which at the time had about 50% of its population as black. How could the 3/5 of the 50% of the people get added to the total otherwise? Any method would be a hack, but this one had the benefit of being able to create a justification that it protected small states from being dominated by large states.
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.
> 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.
Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin would be enough electoral college votes to change the election result. The combined margin in those states is currently about 250,000 votes.
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).
Another approach that is in the works is the so-called States Compact whereby each state would assign all its electors to the candidate that gets the most votes nationwide. This has the advantage that no change to the Constitution is needed. Currently, several States have agreed to this, and the Compact will be activated once enough States sign on that provide more than the 270 electoral votes required to win the election.
So the electors are restricted to what they can do to some extent, but can the individual state tell the electors to do something that conflicts with what their own voters may have overwhelmingly voted against?
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 ...
You are, I believe, correct.
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.
I can't find a table for this election, but for 2020, the most Republican state was Wyoming, with 27% (73k) still voting for Biden. Wyoming still got to ignore those 73k voters because the rule says the winner of the state takes it all.
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.
Being a winner takes all state by LAW isn't the same as just "agreeing" with the next door neighbor state that you will be a winner take all, based on a national popular vote, and tell electors to do something different ...
That's not the same thing at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...
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.
It would require a modification to the constitution, Article 1 Section 10 Clause 3 prohibits the states from entering into any compact with one another without the consent of congress. Congress could consent to it, which would bypass the amendment requirements, but I doubt they would as it takes federal power away.
The main problem is that it takes power away from one party.
Yes, and as of today that party would be the one youre (probably) not thinking of.
I don't know if it would. At least according to the Wikipedia article on state compacts[0] and the entire article on the constitutionality of this specific compact[1] SCOTUS has already ruled that explicit consent isn't always necessary (it can even just be inferred,) and there seems to be some room for debate.
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...
The problem with a popular-vote systems is that we have a decentralized system of elections. Most people don't take seriously that many states would be incentivizes to cheat or at least look the other way to boost the number of votes coming from their state.
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.
We already have a similar problem to what you describe.
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.
The compact is likely unconstitutional. It hasn't been tested in courts because it hasn't been "activated". I wouldn't put my hopes in this solution (or any other, it's non-issue IMHO)
The Supreme Court would probably strike this down once it threatens to activate.
How so?
Any of the states that aren't party to it could file suit, and the ones that are against it probably would. There's also the bald reality that the NPVIC does overall advantage one party and disadvantage the other, and that "other" party is known to have much more of an influence in the Supreme Court.
I don't know that I believe that it does disadvantage one party. After all, the "other" party did just get a majority in the popular vote.
They also won the electoral college. You have to ask yourself which party has a higher likelihood of winning the popular vote while losing the electoral college.
How is this different from popular vote?
It's not and that's the point.
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...
So then it should be called "Popular Vote" and not "Interstate Compact". It just obfuscates the issue.
It would be implementing a popular vote nationwide by circumventing the electoral college. It’s just a mechanism to get around modifying the constitution.
The current compact only kicks in is the electoral college vote and the popular vote differ.
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.
Either way, the person who wins the popular vote wins the election; what difference does it make how many electoral college votes they get (if the electoral votes are determined by a rule like that).
Exactly, they called it something else in order to obfuscate the issue. Call it what it is.
This approach, unlike the one in the OP, removes the per-state quarantining effect that the electoral college has on voter fraud. That makes it a non-starter for red states: https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/california-gover...
There is no evidence[1][2][3] of any meaningful amount of voter fraud in any modern US election.
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...
[4] https://www.nber.org/papers/w25522
I wish these sorts of suggestions were less on the end of "here's what would be better" and more on the end of "here's how it would be possible". Anything that requires a magic wand to enact is a bit of a waste of energy. Would love to see more actual action plans on how to enact the change though.
As stated in other comments, it would be actually easy to implement as it doesn't require a change in the constitution.
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.
How would you ensure that all fifty states adopt this approach at the same time?
Yours is a very good point of view actually. I initially hadn't thought about the tragedy of the commons situation where all the states agree to implement it and later one state decides to go back to winner take all system.
big-green-man wrote a good comment about that
> it would be actually easy to implement
If it is easy, why hasn't it been done. Do you think that no one considered this approach?
Ok yes maybe "easy" isn't exactly the correct term, but the way to appoint electors in each state doesn't need a 2/3 majority in every house + 3/4 of the states as it happens with Constitutional amendaments. So it's definitely an easier approach
I still can't support changing the electoral college. A few cities deciding the election for everyone feels horribly unfair, and undemocratic. Maybe the EC isn't perfect, but it certainly forces politicians to at least care what people in Iowa, Vermont, and Nevada have to say. It works because of the state system.
Vermont has been voting Democrats straight since 1992. You got it backwards - EC allows any presidential candidate to completely and comfortably ignore Vermont because nothing they do would change any outcome. (Hell, after this election, I'm not even sure if either candidate going on live TV with "Fuck Vermont!" would have changed anything.) If you are a presidential candidate and you spend an hour thinking about what Vermont needs, then you're wasting one hour of your precious time.
Ditto for, say, Oklahoma (straight R since 1968).
Could you elaborate why it's more fair and democratic for a candidate losing the popular vote to win an election (e.g., 2000 and 2016)?
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.
The word “fair” would need to be defined first. Direct democracy is not used anywhere in the world because it’s problematic. Me and my friend can’t vote to beat you up and take your money even though it’s two votes against one. That would be immoral.
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.
>I still can't support changing the electoral college. A few cities deciding the election for everyone feels horribly unfair, and undemocratic.
... 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.
James Madison wrote: There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.
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 context: https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-006...
Depending who is in office, one party will never go for this. The reason is states like California and maybe Florida/Texas will never allow this, it removes their advantage in the current electoral collage. Also it does not fix the population skewing for smaller states. Per voter, Wyoming voters have more power that people in Calif and Texas.
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.
Makes sense
There are a few concerns about the electoral college, but I don’t consider it broken in any meaningful sense. After all, the Constitution has survived over 200 years with it in place, which makes it the longest-serving constitution in force today. We cannot say for sure that it would have survived so long under any proposed alternative.
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...
https://thirty-thousand.org/
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/435-representatives/
From what I understand, the Permanent Apportionment Act can be adjusted or removed as result of a law being passed which would make it a really promising option. Access to representatives and durability against corruption also feel like they could be really compelling issues to voters.
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.
Lived through clinton, bush, obama, trump, biden, and now trump again. I've voted for three parties in my lifetime.
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.
Exactly, it's always the sore losers who complain about this. There's are good reasons to keep the system as it is, regardless of who wins. But the discussion is always driven by losers.
> There's are good reasons to keep the system as it is,
I've read some of the reasons, but none sound good to me. What do you like about the electoral college?
Think of the extra weight given as Affirmative Action. It isn't hard to get it. It is as socially progressive as any type of affirmative action. Plus, these tend to be remote underconnected areas: why should they be ruled by mobs from far away places who have nothing to do with their way of life? Why stay in an union if your way or life is overruled by others?
> Why stay in an union if your way or life is overruled by others?
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.
the electoral college was a compromise made a long time ago that has two facets: the indirect nature of voting for representatives who vote for us (that was necessitated by preindustrial communication and transportation systems) and some extra weight given to smaller states to get them to agree to come into the union. That was the deal, no takesy-backsies.
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...
> our elections get fought out in a small number of places which is an economically efficient way to do it.
In theory shouldn't money spent go right up to the limit of expected return, whether there is one "swing state" or 50?
when i say economics, i'm not referring to money, i'm referring to human endeavor, human effort and human rewards (which, in terms of economics, are exactly what money represents) So, I meant that it's it economically beneficial that most people in the country don't need to care about elections because the system is taking their preferences into account already. There is little to be gained on margin from engaging many more people for only the slightest difference in outcome once in awhile. Since the forces of negative feedback actually move the centerlines wrt to the system we have, it's not clear that the long term results would even be different with a different system.
Wow I was pro-electoral college before reading your comment, but now I'm cemented in my view.
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.
> What you're essentially saying is that the electoral college favors areas with more open minds willing to vote either direction
How did you draw that conclusion rather than concluding that it favors areas with the people most easily swayed by massive advertising campaigns?
people who are not in the middle can have perfectly open minds, they just agree with more of their perfectly open minded neighbors. I said left-right because it was convenient, but voting does not really work that way, it's an n-dimensional space of little tugs of war.
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.
We need to solve the problem where the system breaks when there are more than two parties: the "spoiler vote".[1] It is the single largest problem facing American democracy. Dump the electoral college system and start from scratch. Look to real democracies like Europe where they use ranked choice voting - also called instant runoff voting.[2]
[1] https://fairvote.org/defining-the-spoiler-effect/ [2] https://electionlab.mit.edu/research/instant-runoff-voting
IRV is also vulnerable to third-party spoilers; the squeezed middle is a well-known phenomenon in that system.
Despite the criticism of the two party system, I nevertheless wonder whether or not the American public actually wants to have third parties. Even in states that are solidly red or blue, third parties never manage to gain a substantial (beyond 3-5%) of the vote. I would think that in a solidly blue state, the greens (or any on-the-left third party) would see a much better showing. Same for libertarians in red states. I imagine that the whole spoiler vote phenomenon would not be an issue in these states’ races.
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.
For the people that are serious about gaining office, it's more effective to try to run as part of one of the larger parties, or at the very least, align strongly with them.
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.
Yeah, spoiler vote brings to 2 parties (like the US). Although the current electoral college doesn't work well, I'm not sure the Americans would prefer to remove it completely and rather use directly popular vote because in the rural areas they don't want to be "governed" by the decisions of big cities.
What do you think about keeping the electoral college and use IRV instead?
> Although the current electoral college doesn't work well, I'm not sure the Americans would prefer to remove it completely
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.
One thing to consider is that the electoral college system also accounts for varying levels of economic density.
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.
Yeah good point. Its sort of hidden in my argument, but economic diversity (including density) is part of the overall diversity and it's critical to "the system as a whole".
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.
> in the rural areas they don't want to be "governed" by the decisions of big cities.
And cities don't want to be governed by the outsized importance of small population states (Wyoming)
Hello, here is my proposal to improve the Electoral College. The basic idea is to allocate electors proportionally in each state with the Jefferson method (aka d'Hondt method) rather than using a "winner-take-all" system.
What do you think about it?
PS: I'm not from the US, so an American perspective on that would be extremely appreciated :)
I think that it would be a way to get the US closer to popular vote aligning with the election result, and in a way that allows states to make the change themselves instead of requiring a constitutional amendment or somrthing. You'll never get exactly the same as the popular vote because you're rounding to integers, but it gets reliably close.
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.
I believe you're right, even if all the states agreed to make a similar change, this "equilibrium" state would be unstable. It would require an amendment to the US constitution to make it stable and that would require a huge majority.
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?
>It has other benefits too, like reducing the prevalence of 2 parties in the house
Could you elaborate further?
Yeah sure.
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.
Our problem isn't that there's a lack of ideas on how to reform. It's that said reform requires amending the constitution, which in US is contingent on 3/4 of states (specifically, their legislatures) ratifying the amendment. It is a very high bar in general, but is especially hard to break through when what you propose is virtually certain to change the balance of political power in the country.
Would you implement such a thing for the EU leadership?
Because the United States was meant to be more like that than it was a country like say France.
Just get rid of it. Either go full on popular vote like everyone else with a president or go parlamentarian like everyone else with a prime minister. This system isn't truly democratic and should be abolished yesterday.
It isn't supposed to be "truly democratic".
But it should be and we can change it
Although we are often taught that it is slavery slavery slavery, the electoral college is also an attempt to prevent the tyranny of the majority - something the founding fathers were worried about.
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...
There's no historical justification for that assertion as far as I'm aware. If you know of one, I'd love to see the reference.
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.
Is it? I'm no history buff, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that the main way the founders attempted to avoid the tyranny of the majority was by having the Senate be two representatives per state regardless of size.
Yes, it's easier to show with an example.
- 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.
Giving some people more votes than others "prevents" tyranny of the majority by substituting it with tyranny of the minority.
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."
>Although we are often taught that it is slavery slavery slavery, the electoral college is also an attempt to prevent the tyranny of the majority - something the founding fathers were worried about.
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.)
Historically the electoral college was a compromise that allowed for the counting of slaves as 3/5 of a person for the purpose of taxation and voting without having them vote. Consider a state like South Carolina which at the time had about 50% of its population as black. How could the 3/5 of the 50% of the people get added to the total otherwise? Any method would be a hack, but this one had the benefit of being able to create a justification that it protected small states from being dominated by large states.
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.
> 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.
Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin would be enough electoral college votes to change the election result. The combined margin in those states is currently about 250,000 votes.
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).
> People don't know how to lose.
Completely agree. So much "stop the steal", fake electors" and storm the capitol nonsense.