By “the electoral college” most people seem to mean that each state has influence disproportionate to its population, because every state gets two electors regardless of size. Ignoring that that is independent of the electoral college, disproportionate power isn’t where most of the problem arises. The problem is that most states do not allocate their electors proportionally to how their citizens voted. Almost all states give all electors to the majority winner in the state. It’s not required to do it that way, and Maine and Nebraska allocate at least some of their electors based on the proportion of the vote.
If states allocated their electors solely based on the proportion of votes in the state, that would achieve what a national popular vote would achieve and more. For example, Trump won despite losing the poplar vote, but if states had instead allocated their electors proportionally to voters within the state, Trump would have lost.
Why do this instead of a national popular vote? First-past-the-post voting systems result in two party systems with a lot of conflict. Ranked choice systems elect representatives that are more agreeable to everyone. A national popular vote entrenches a bad system, making it harder to ever get a rank choice system.
More importantly from a pragmatic standpoint, it’s much harder to get a national popular vote implemented. To work, almost all of the states would need to get on board, but there’s no individual-level incentive for citizens of a state to agree to it. Why would the majority of citizens of Montana agree to send their electors to the national popular vote winner when it’s likely not the person they voted for? How are you going to convince them to join? The majority of people there won’t want that, so they won’t pass the law.
If states allocate based on proportion, individuals won’t be concerned that their votes will ever support a candidate they don’t like. It also doesn’t matter whether other states hop on board. Maine and Nebraska are proof of this. They changed their allocation schemes without regard for any other state. At the individual level, the choice is easy; no one wants their vote to go toward a candidate they don’t like, and the current system AND the national popular vote system both do that. If you think about your own views, are you in a state that the majority of the time the majority of people vote for a candidate you don’t like? Wouldn’t you rather have your state allocate proportionally? Are you in a place where the majority of the time your state goes the way you do? Are you happy that your neighbors’ opinions are suppressed? It’s pretty easy to get on board at an individual level, so that makes it easy to pass within a state.
People should give up on national popular vote and focus on getting their state to switch to proportional allocation. If you really want progress, target some key states: Florida, Ohio, Texas, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia, California, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois.
National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is a viable path to getting a national popular vote. Essentially if enough states agree to send all of their electoral votes to the popular candidate then the popular vote winning candidate will win the election. The compact will only go into effect once enough states agree that would make a majority. Right now there are states with 206 electoral votes that have agreed and only 65 more electoral votes would be needed.
I do feel like your proposition is harder to convince people to enact. Right now my state has finally changed to be for a party I support I don’t want to support legislation that will mean some of those electoral college votes will go to the other party, it would be more fair on the state level but not nationally. Sure I’d be okay with it if other states that vote for the other party did the same thing. It becomes this standoff where people want the other side to move first. That’s my favorite part about NPVIC is that it does away with the messy middle ground.
This was more of a valid argument when Republicans were winning elections. I think we should keep the electoral college as long as there’s a republican candidate that wants to overturn our democracy.
This would help so much. Not only would greatly increasing the number of representatives lead to fairer representation - it would decrease lobbyist power in the House (harder to buy a critical number of members when there are so many representatives).
Well of course they do, the electoral college was made specifically so that states with the most population aren’t the ones solely determining the outcome. If you got rid of the EC, the elections would come down to California, Florida, New York, and Texas.
Which ironically, given how Florida and Texas lean, would not “kill the Republican party” as some are claiming here.
The last republican to win the popular vote was Bush in 04. It would force them to actually care about what the people need instead of just threatening everyone else
You say that it would help Republicans, but the last two times the electoral college went against the popular vote they gave the presidency to Republicans.
I’m not saying it would either help them or hurt them. I think many people totally ignore that fact that if the election rules and law were changed in the United States, then campaign strategies would change too. Both the Democratic and Republican parties have enough resources and power to able to adapt.
Five presidents have been elected despite losing the popular vote. Four of those were Republicans: Hayes, Harrison, Bush, Trump. John Quincy Adams was the first, just as the Republican party came into existence, although he wasn’t a member. He joined it later.
First we need a federal initiative/ referendum system. Because the existing politicians will never vote to limit their own power.
After we have this, we can start with initiatives that set maximum ages, fix the voting systems. Fix Roe. Dismantle the terrible stranglehold the two party system has on getting anything done.
Do all the things that are popular but politicians will never do.
Direct democracy has shown to be a pretty bad idea. It’s useful here and there for certain things like referenda, but to use it for everything? Fuck that, no way. People are fucking dumb and are already constantly voting against their interests.
I mean just look at Brexit. And that would be just the tip of the iceberg if we ran our entire country that way.
Obligatory: “Ranked Choice” is a specific use of ranked ballots, and it kinda sucks. It beats what we’re doing now… but anything would.
Ranked Choice Voting ignores the ballot except for the top name and eliminates candidates in rounds until someone gets 50%. So if some guy is literally everybody’s second choice, that guy is eliminated in the first round. If this sounds ridiculous it’s because RCV is a misuse of a multi-winner system, Single Transferable Voting. It picks the first winner… not the best winner.
Condorcet methods like Ranked Pairs choose the candidate who’d win every 1v1 runoff. There is no “it shoulda been” factor. It works the way people automatically assume ranked ballots work.
Or we could do Approval, where you just check all the names you like, and it somehow matches Condorcet results. There is no good reason we’re not already doing this everywhere.
I propose the National Popular Vote Interstate compact. Cgp grey has an amazing video on it. It’s a “petition” of sorts that basically says that states that sign it will have its elective representatives vote with the majority vote of their said state.
This would not really change the two party system. All it would mean is that you genuinely need a majority of votes and not the majority of a weird convoluted combo of states.
First-past-the-post voting systems result in two conflicting parties. This would entrench the two party system. The current system is not good, but popular vote is only slightly better.
The EC can work but make it a contest for each electoral vote, and remove the states from the equation entirely. California being safe blue and Texas being safe red don’t matter, each district is counted for one electoral vote, and the states don’t get extra votes anymore.
That just seems like popular vote with extra steps. I’m not sure, but I feel like mathematically there would be no way in which the result of the EC would differ from the popular vote under such a system. I suppose it might still be possible to skew it far enough to shift the outcome using some extreme gerrymandering.
It is a popular vote with extra steps. That’s literally what it is.
The extra steps mean that politicians can’t purely focus on population centers, rural communities would count for the same vote. each district should be of similar population size, and every district counts for one.
each district should be of similar population size, and every district counts for one.
seems to run counter to this:
The extra steps mean that politicians can’t purely focus on population centers, rural communities would count for the same vote.
As an example, lets say you have a rural area with 1000 people in it, and you decide that each district should contain 1000 people, so that entire area is one gigantic district. Nearby you have a city with 10,000 people, so you split the city into 10 districts. That city still counts 10 times what that one giant rural area does. The only way I can see where you could make the rural area count for more is with extreme gerrymandering where you snake little bits of every rural area in to include a chunk of the city population thereby diluting the strength of the cities vote by smearing part of it over the rural areas.
I see absolutely no reason why we should adopt a system that exists solely for the purpose of making gerrymandering possible, and I see no reason why doing things this way would make any difference over just using the popular vote if you aren’t gerrymandering.
Many democracies don’t have the people directly vote on their leader. Parliamentary systems typically have the people voting for a representative who will then vote for the Prime Minister on their behalf.
Instead of tilting at the windmill that is removing the EC how about we do something much easier and simpler and simply expand the House of Representatives? Not only would this add votes to the EC and make the Presidential Elections more representative it would also, you know, make the HoR more Representative! For extra fun it would also diminish the returns of gerrymandering since there would be so many more districts.
All we need is a change to the Re-Apportionment Act of 1929. There is no good reason that the size of the HoR is fixed at 435. None.
In 1929, each representative represented about 283k Americans. Now each representative represent about 762k Americans. That’s almost a 300% increase. This means each American’s voice is only about 1/3rd as powerful as it was in 1929. To have as much political power as they did in 1929, we’d need about 1200 Representatives.
Sure, you just define the problem differently. Instead of saying that there are X representatives in total, you just say there should be 1 representative for every 283K citizens. In this way the number of representatives naturally scales with the population.
This is basically what the Wyoming Rule does. It sets the ratio in the lowest population State, currently Wyoming, as the ratio for everywhere. Wyoming currently has 500,000 people and 1 Representative. That means the HoR would expand to something like 580 Seats.
We could change the math, and the name, to the “1929 Rule” and set the ratio 280,000 to 1. I’m actually fine with an HoR that has 1,200 people in it but either way the Re-Apportionment Act of 1929 needs changed and the HoR needs expanded.
And yet, having more representatives fundamentally reduces the power of each as well. Your vote is fundamentally worth less as the population increases. Something you’re just gonna have to come to terms with.
We can achieve that now through fairness in redistricting.
No you can’t.
Your way doesn’t return the ratio of EC votes between the HoR and the Senate to what it should be. It keeps it stuck in 1929 and every year that goes by makes it worse.
Your way doesn’t scale the number of total EC votes as our population grows.
Your way ALSO doesn’t return the ratio of Citizens to Representatives to anything resembling sanity. Ratios of nearly 800,000 to 1, and growing, are irrational and break Democracy.
You could redistrict the ever loving hell out of the other 49 States but Wyoming would keep it’s 3 EC votes and its outsized vote for President. It would keep it’s outsized influence in the HoR and it would keep it’s ranking as #1 in the Citizen to Representative Ratio.
So much of what everyone hates about our Federal Government today is DIRECTLY tied to a vastly undersized HoR. The body is simply too small to adequately represent a population of over 300,000,000 people.
I would modify the electoral college rather than get rid of it. Make it so that states are obligated to assign their electoral votes to candidates in proportion to the number of votes received. For example, Maryland might go 60% blue and 40% red, so they would give 6 of their 10 votes to blue and 4 to red.
This would de-emphasize the importance of swing states, not completely disenfranchise rural voters, and would return a result that more closely mirrored the popular vote. It might also pave the way for a 3rd party to be relevant if the stars aligned elsewhere.
Might work for MD size states, but most smaller even EV states would split their EVs evenly, even if the state voted 60/40 one way or the other – while odd EV states would always cast a net vote for the winner.
For example, using the 2020 election numbers Trump would win if the election included only the following states:
AK (R+10) Trump 2-1 Biden
GA (D+0) Trump 8-8 Biden
WI (D+1) Trump 5-5 Biden
PA (D+1) Trump 10-10 Biden
NV (D+2) Trump 3-3 Biden
NH (D+7) Trump 2-2 Biden
ME (D+9) Trump 2-2 Biden
RI (D+20) Trump 2-2 Biden
I don’t know that it’s any nobler to for electoral influence to discriminate on the basis of even states and odd states than swing states vs safe states. Unless you’re also one of the group wanting to expand the legislature until there are no 4 and 6 EV states …
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