I don’t know much about the ins and outs of politics, but wouldn’t modifying the electoral college to be bound by popular vote help?
Or if it were abolished, couldn’t the popular vote be set to act as one vote per section, with separation in a way that is fair.
Just spit balling here, but it doesn’t seem like going pop vote means we would have to drown out less populated areas with densely populated areas.
Am I wrong? Am I on the right track?
“Drowning out” less populated areas with more populated areas is a non-issue that conservatives pretend is a bad thing because it’s in their interest to do so. The less popular ideas being drowned out by the more popular ones is fundamentally how democracy is supposed to work. What they really want is to maintain the status quo where some people’s votes are worth several times more than others just because they live in a less densely populated region. Land shouldn’t vote. Borders shouldn’t vote. Corporations shouldn’t vote. PEOPLE ARE THE VOTERS.
I’m conflicted on this. On one hand, there are clear problems with the electoral college situation right now, but on the other hand, getting rid of it means that the tyranny of the majority will become a bigger problem. It’s unclear to me which is worse or how we can fix the latter.
Thing about the electoral collage is that it doesn’t matter what the large majority wants.
The problem with a simple majority is it allows large states to completely dominate less populated states.
We are a republic, kind of like how the UK is a union of (at least) four countries each with its own government. We are 50 states each with its own government and the constitutional right to make it’s own laws about matters not specifically delegated to the federal government (see the abortion rights debate).
The founding fathers established the electoral college as a compromise between electing the president in a vote by Congress and a popular vote. I would take an amendment to the constitution to get rid of it.
All this went out the window when they capped the number of representatives in congress. That took away popular vote power. Montana doesn’t need 2 senators and a rep. North Dakota doesn’t need 2 senators and a rep. California is getting massively screwed on their representative count. That state alone should swing legislation based on reps alone. It would lay bare the tyranny of the minority.
The founding fathers established the electoral college as a compromise between electing the president in a vote by Congress and a popular vote. I would take an amendment to the constitution to get rid of it.
They established it as a way to launder slave votes into presidential elections, as stated explicitly by the man responsible, James madison:
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-0065
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.
The electoral college exists because southerners were spoiled bitches who wanted more power than they deserved, then they threw a tantrum when they lost anyway (the Civil War), now they keep threatening and whining if they can’t keep their unfair advantage while gerrymandering to hell.
I’d be fine with the EC, if we also denied the electoral votes of states that don’t follow the constitution or ratify all the amendments (Mississippi still refuses to ratify the 24th banning the poll tax).
Thank you for that
The more I learn about the concessions made to the southern slave owners I wish the founders hadn’t tried so hard to include them in the union. The north and the south were so different it seems like it would be as doomed to failure as jamming all the Balkan states into a single country.
Every time Texas threatens to secede and doesn’t I wish we had the choice to vote them out so they could see just how badly they are not the hot shit they think they are.
What, and end the control and power the establishment has over you? Good luck
It will be a cold, dark day, over my dead body, when New York City has more voting power than all of Washington state. I will fight people to the death to keep the electoral college. Get you’re moronic facts straight, the Electoral keeps high population areas from forcing their ideals on the rest of the Nation, it also makes cheating harder. FIX THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE! Fine. But remove it and you give the ruling class the ability to add a billion votes nation wide and winning an election, instead of now where they cheat district to district. Just because it’s becoming obvious your drug war baron might not win because people hate that she had jailed people for simple drug possessions, and she’s as much a traitor to the Republic as Donnie T, you don’t get to change the rules. GET A BETTER CANDIDATE WORTHLESS DEMOCRATS! Weak humans blame the system for their weak candidates, when it’s them and their candidate that are to blame, not the system that rejects them.
Everyone saying this can’t happen and stuff but we already have started the process. There is a set of several states that signed a pact that make it vote for the majority. Can’t think of the name of it but we only need several more states (not all of them) to meet needed electoral votes to basically bypass the electrical college.
The thing is that the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is nothing until it’s all the way there. Having 95% of the necessary electoral votes has the same effect as 0. So there’s no reason for opponents to even care about it until it is within striking distance of the threshold. It seems to me that if we ever reach a point where it comes down to just a state or two, that legislation will be fought tooth and nail, not just in those last states, but there will be fights and legal challenges in states that have already entered the compact to reverse it too. And even if we manage to win the fight and it gets activated, we will still have to keep fighting in perpetuity because almost any state pulling out would undo the whole thing.
I’m not saying people shouldn’t even try, maybe some good comes of it regardless. It just doesn’t seem like a solution as much as a statement.
The real solution is to allocate delegates proportionally to how citizens vote, as is done in Nebraska and a couple other states. This achieves exactly the same purpose as the NPVC but is actually politically tractable.
No state has any incentive to assign its delgates to a person the citizens of the state didn’t vote for. You can do what the NPVC does and make it contingent upon everyone playing along, but that requires everyone to play along and is incredibly tenuous. Even if it ever goes into effect, as soon as states allocate delegates to someone who wasn’t the most popular candidate in their state they’ll pull it, and the whole thing will fall apart.
Every state has incentive to allocate its delegates proportionally. That’s exactly what people want. They want that more than winner takes all. It doesn’t require a huge chuck of states to buy into it amd it isn’t tenuous. But it accomplishes the same goal; if states allocate delegates proportionally to how they vote, then the most popular candidate gets the most delegates. If you’re in one of the many states that has winner takes all, advocate to do what the few more democratic states have already adopted and are happy with.
This only solves it if you also make the number of delegates for each state be proportional to its population size. California has 68 times the population of Wyoming but only 18 times the number of electoral votes.
