For example, a vote in Wyoming counts 3.6 times more than a vote in California.[1] The people in California are not represented in the Presidential election; it would be more accurate to say that one-quarter of the people in California are represented.
"Rural issues" do not deserve special protection if that protection results in a tyranny of the minority. People are choosing to actively leave rural communities and congregate in urban areas; this does not on its face mean that their concerns have become less important.
Moreover, people congregating in urban areas tend to be center- and left- leaning, so skewing the Presidential vote towards urban areas also results in US politics as a whole shifting to the right. It also results in a judiciary that is more conservative than the population as a whole.
There are only eight states in America that have more people than Los Angeles county.[2] Why are the concerns of the people living in LAC less important than the concerns of the people in Nevada or Arkansas? What is it about their geography that makes their issues unimportant?
[1] http://theconversation.com/whose-votes-count-the-least-in-th...
"Tyranny of the minority" gets this issue exactly backwards. The problem the Electoral College was designed to mitigate is a tyranny of the majority.
> Why are the concerns of the people living in LAC less important than the concerns of the people in Nevada or Arkansas? What is it about their geography that makes their issues unimportant?
Why do any of these concerns need Federal intervention to solve? Why can't LAC and Arkansas and Nevada manage their own affairs? I understand rare emergencies like natural disasters require pooling national resources, but everyone talks now as if no locality at all can survive from day to day without Federal benefits.
The point they're making is that while it was designed to prevent a tyranny of the majority, it goes too far and results in a tyranny of the minority.
> Why do any of these concerns need Federal intervention to solve? Why can't LAC and Arkansas and Nevada manage their own affairs? I understand rare emergencies like natural disasters require pooling national resources, but everyone talks now as if no locality at all can survive from day to day without Federal benefits.
No one mentioned federal benefits. We are talking about the relative voting power of a voter in one area versus another in the presidential election. Let's not get distracted here.
Sure you did; you said LAC voters don't have their concerns addressed as well because they are part of a large, populous state whose EC votes count for less per capita. My question is, if LAC is capable of managing its own affairs, why does it care?
In other words, you're assuming that the President's job is to "take care of everyone's concerns", so everyone needs an equal vote to elect the President. That seems to me to be absurd. The President's job is to faithfully execute the laws and to make executive decisions about national needs like defense and foreign policy. It's not to address the individual concerns of every voter or the local concerns of every city, county, etc.
Similar remarks apply to the Federal government more generally. The fact that everyone takes it for granted now that the Federal government is supposed to address everyone's concerns is a sign of how corrupt and inefficient our system has become. Everyone judges their Senators and Representatives, not according to how well they take care of national issues, but how much pork they send home.
It has become evident that the federalist experiment has failed; because an integrated modern society cuts across state lines, while land can't vote and people matter more than land. Everything else is a side effect, no matter how tightly it's clung to by parties whose high-minded rhetoric, if we're being frank, is honored more in the breach than the observance as they look for low-status, low-power people to cudgel, using the guise of federalism to make it easier to do in their own little pond.
Not so much failed, but massively misaligned after the civil war. The nation made many compromises at every level for slave power, and should have renegotiated everything afterwards.
(Though I worry for the EU, too.)
To start with, states are the compositional unit of the United States. If Los Angeles County wants to become its own state, there is a process to do that.
But to answer the correct question: Nevada has the same say as California, both being states.
Thank you for illustrating the bankruptcy of the regressive position.
I guess if you want to just "thoughts and prayers" it then that's your prerogative.
Yeah you're probably right. Let's just disenfranchise more than half the population of the country. That'll give the federal government a ton of legitimacy!
> The President's job is to faithfully execute the laws and to make executive decisions about national needs like defense and foreign policy.
And we the people get to decide which candidate will do the better job. Or we should. But because of the electoral college, we don't.
If we accept that we the people should get to directly decide, then of course the decision should be made by popular vote. But that's just assuming your conclusion.
Also, this is a different argument from the one you gave before: now you're accepting that the President's job is not to take care of everyone's concerns.
Because issues like immigration, national defense, and environmental policy are all national issues. California voters are held hostage to the preferences of the people in Nevada, even though they vastly outnumber them.
> everyone talks now as if no locality at all can survive from day to day without Federal benefits
They plainly cannot. The federal government funds a large portion of everything from infrastructure to education to healthcare, but our government structure ensures that only people in small states have a say in how those programs actually work.
Maybe your argument is going to be that they shouldn't fund those things, but the fact is that the majority of Americans disagree with you on that.
Stuff that should be handled at the state and local level, with granularity specific to each state's unique geographic and demographic circumstances. I would limit the Federal-level influence to just establishing/recommending common standards (kinda like ISO standards) that multiple states can choice to implement.
Maybe if we didn't have Federal taxes, the states could charge more for additional services without over-burdening their populations. Federal income tax is one of many reasons why I consider Woodrow Wilson the worst American President ever.
If that's really true, then we as a country are screwed, because the money the federal government is spending on all this stuff comes from us. We can't pay ourselves more money than we have, and if we all get paid equally, then we're all just getting back what we paid and nothing is actually happening. So basically what you're describing is localities fighting over who gets to take money from whom. And the argument about popular vote is then just an argument that the most populous localities should be the ones taking from everyone else.
States have representation, done universally by popular vote within those states for their representatives in Congress. (if you know any states that are an exception, feel free to add). Most of the country, and the world, experiences elections by popular vote except for a single particular position.
The Electoral College is only for the appointment of 1 person for the office of the President. It is an aberration. Even when looking at the President's ability to appoint people, many other popular vote elected representatives have the ability to appoint people too.
This aberration was from a time when the non-slave population of the United States was 1 million people, completely coastal (although those states had widely different boundaries back then which stretched deep into Appalachia), and in some of those states only the land owners could vote.
The purpose of the Electoral College was a compromise, not part of the grand wisdom and design. A compromise that has been merely tolerable and now has been stretched to its limits.
The democracy we exported throughout the whole world for the next 200 years looked at our older iteration and said "no, we'll patch that".
US Electoral College has reached its peak of tolerance, and the inability to amend it is maintained by the states that are the very reason why the electoral college is intolerable.
Actually, as someone else remarked upthread, in most parliamentary democracies the Prime Minister is elected by the parliament, not by popular vote.
I specifically was not referring to positions that are not.
If we want to talk about Head of State selection processes, I am a fan of Switzerland's Federal Council which contains 7 heads of state that act together but represent the interests of the constituent parties, while one acts as a frontman for diplomatic purposes with other nations. It maintains professional tact privately and publicly - concept only rarely strained in Switzerland's Federal Council history - and more importantly maintains representation. A brief civil war between that collection of small counties and cities was needed to get those reforms and other forms of direct representation into their constitution.
That was the original point to electoral votes and a representative government system. It's not that the system doesn't work, it's been perverted. If we can end the gerrymandering and other political machine issues, we'd have a better system. Not perfect. But I think its steered the wrong way with political affiliation as platform rather than constituent needs.
But this is the point to the whole system. It's supposed to attempt to keep everyone's needs in mind. Gov body structures were originally figured out for countries the size of... Florida. Maybe California. Thus, your nation has roughly the same "issues" and "needs". But the USA is the "same" country for 3,000 miles of driving. West and east coast Americans are not the same. New Englanders and Southerners are not the same. West coast and is not the save as Mid-westerners. Hell, even folks on the Pacific Northwest are not the same as Californians. Then you have Texans. Shit, let's not forget Hawaii and Alaskans. Different land. Different climates. WAY different industries and lifestyles. I learned this first hand since I've traveled and lived in different parts of the country every 1-2 years (roughly).
So yea. Pretending like axing the electoral college is just a simple fix that solves this super simple problem... you're out of your god damn mind.
So ... separate but equal?
Apologies if there’s a direct linkage that I’m simply missing
It’s not only the US which has to balance rural vs urban electorates. Some are even further down the spectrum like Japan where rural areas have even larger influence than cities compared to other democracies.
But in a way it makes sense. Without people in the countryside the people in the cities would have little to eat. Most countries go to some lengths to ensure some modicum of food security/self-sufficiency.
This argument would be accurate if we lived in a mercantile oriented world still, but there are plenty of countries that are entirely on other countries for basic necessities. While I can sympathize with the fact that farmers have gotten the rough end of the stick from seed corporations (like Monsanto) lately and that they have been forced into incredibly thin profit margins their work isn't inherently more valuable because it results in edible objects.
There are plenty of countries out there with a net import of food like the UAE, Germany, Russian, Japan, Egypt and Venezuela - that's a pretty diverse group of varying GDP per capita and political stability so I think it's pretty safe to dismiss any concerns of a strategic food reserve.
Claiming that because California has 57 votes and Wyoming a whopping 3 votes, instead of California having 70 and Wyoming one (if at all), we "no longer have representative democracy" is nonsense. California still have wastly more votes. Yes, Wyoming also gets some, otherwise it why bother voting at all if everything is essentially decided by the most populous states anyway?
> protection results in a tyranny of the minority
3 votes against 57 is hardly "tyranny".
> Why are the concerns of the people living in LAC less important than the concerns of the people in Nevada or Arkansas?
Why people leaving in LAC should be in virtually full control (with the current power of federal government it's very close to that) over people of Nevada and Arkansas and Wyoming? What's the point for Wyoming to sign up for such a deal to be ruled by LAC?
The state isn't voting homogenously. Just like Eastern Washington could vote differently to the Puget Sound with more direct representation.
The key word in your argument is 'populous'. Thinking in terms other than people, be it states/counties/acreage is another version of putting "landowners" in charge.
> Why people leaving in LAC should be in virtually full control (with the current power of federal government it's very close to that)
Which explains why politicians spend so much time in Election season in LAC. Except they don't. They are instead in Ohio, Montana, NH, Wyoming, Iowa, Florida.
Again, having 3 votes against 57 does not put whoever has 3 votes "in charge" in any sensible meaning of the word.
> Except they don't.
Because they think LAC has already made up their minds, no matter what. And judging from voting patterns, they are correct. So whose fault is that? If more LAC voters would vote diversely, politicians would pay more attention to LAC, they are not stupid. But when it's 70+% to one side, why bother? Same campaigning dollar would bring much more impact elsewhere, and campaign resources are finite.
LAC and NYC both voted very blue, yet here we are. How do you credibly claim that "LAC is by and large in charge of the direction of the federal government"?
This policy was enacted by a President that lost the popular vote in California, and lost the popular vote nationwide.
That is tyranny.
Remember that picture of the children in cages floating around the news? That wasn't our current president. That was during the time of a president elected by both the popular vote in Cali and the national vote.
Also remember that those detention centers are literally that- short term holding. The intended duration for a stay is max 72 hours, and rarely exceeds a week- and that's only because HHS literally can't find suitable places fast enough with how many are entering the country.
The solution here is to understand and address why so many millions of people voted for him, not to give even more power to the most powerful and wealthiest states that hardly need it. One reason Trump managed to drum up so much support is because interior states had been neglected for so many decades. Is neglecting them further your solution? Maybe just completely disenfranchise them on a national level and then you don't have to ever worry about what life is like in most of the country?
Why? They elected Trump to address those concerns. If he can't or won't, the rest of the country is under no obligation to do so on his behalf.
If Trump fails, then he fails. But that's a lot different from completely disenfranchising many states when it comes to the presidency.
Trump represents the rich and powerful, though, arguably more so than Hillary Clinton, who's rich and elite but not even in the same league as Trump, or as entrenched with multinational business interests (although as far as the common voter is concerned, the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire may be irrelevant.)
And realistically, electing any President based on a laundry list of partisan grievances is going to disenfranchise the rest of the country. The Electoral College is no more or less fair than a popular vote in that regard.
Why would Arkansas or Nevada have joined a union of states where their votes mean essentially nothing?
Why would California have joined a union of states where their votes mean 1/4 of Wyoming's?
Read higher up in the thread:
> For example, a vote in Wyoming counts 3.6 times more than a vote in California.[1]
* access to single market and currency
* federal loans/money
* territory protection from other countries military intervention
* freedom of movement (including study, work, living, etc) within all the other states of the union
If states want to do some things differently that's why there are state level laws. If those states don't find that they have the right amount of freedom at the state level and think those benefits above matter less than being able to outvote 3:1 a citizen in California when it comes to presidential election then, I guess, they are free to leave the union?
But it needs to be on agreed upon and mostly amicable terms, or the state(s) desiring to leave will be unable to get the necessary votes.
The southern states trying to take their slavery and go home knew this for decades before, so they didn't even bother.
It’s also hard to say this is even problematic in general. The winner of the popular vote has only lost 5 times in history (or 6 depending on who you ask about 1960), and not by large margins either. But you can’t take this to mean that the results would have been different if the election was to be decided by popular vote to begin with. Currently Republican candidates have little incentive to campaign in CA or NY, and Democrat candidates have little incentive to campaign in TX. If the outcome was to be decided by popular vote to begin with, there’s no way to say that the outcomes would have been any different.
Some people like what California does with its state-specific policies. Some people even choose to live there.
If the Executive branch was less powerful and the States retained more of what they were originally intended to oversee for themselves, I might have less of a problem with California liberals electing the Executive for the whole country.
As it is, California has 53 of 435 seats in Congress and 55 electoral votes. The disparity with Wyoming is just because the minimum is 3 per state, and Wyoming’s population is minuscule.
If you eliminate the per-state minimum I expect there would be large geographical areas of the country which would eventually become uninhabitable / unsustainable.
Unless you are in a purple state you basically don't have a vote, and politicians can ignore your entire State.
So while the EC does empower some rural voters, in reality it effectively disenfranchises most of the country.
That is not a realistic proposal. Political gridlock will never allow a change like this. Doing it state by state is even worse because it just creates a system where dems try to do it to only red states and the GOP tries to do it to only blue states. It would just further skew the outcomes away from a democratic result.
The issue you are having at the state level is a dominant majority makes the views of the minority irrelevant.
And to be clear, the EC does not disenfranchise all the voters in states like CA, just the minority voters.
This is actually precisely what the Senate and the Electoral College is designed to mitigate.
So roughly half of the votes in all non competitive states do not count.
My point is that while the current setup probably dilutes CA liberals voting power the most in terms of the EC, there are other ways the system works that is particularly empowering to CA liberals.
>Why are the concerns of the people living in LAC less important than the concerns of the people in Nevada or Arkansas?
So instead you want even more people from Nevada and Arkansas to move to LAC, because that's where politicians will pay attention?
Yeah but maybe that's a good thing. Otherwise you have a situation like New York where NYC gets to dictate everything since it's super high population density even though the majority of geographical NY state is farmers. So the farmers get screwed over by the interests of the city folk who have never even stepped foot out of the city. For example, city folks are more likely to vote for increases in property taxes - not that they care too much since they only have a tiny apartment - but it hits the people outside of the city with lots of land (for farming) really hard.
It's just like the "rich getting richer" conundrum. Once you have a large city, it will gain more people faster than a small town just by virtue of the properties of growth. So pretty soon you'll have a few megacities that get to dictate the government of the entire country and if you live anywhere else; too bad, the city folk are in charge now.
Only if you start with the assumption that different individuals voters should have different amounts of political influence, which the NPV movement is explicitly rejecting.
> Otherwise you have a situation like New York where NYC gets to dictate everything since it's super high population density even though the majority of geographical NY state is farmers. So the farmers get screwed over by the interests of the city folk who have never even stepped foot out of the city.
I think the problem here is that you're portraying it as if cities or states are the agents making decisions, rather than individuals. Obviously the electoral college establishes states as the agents making decisions in Presidential elections. The NPV movement seeks to make individuals the agents that decide Presidential elections.
That was exactly the point of the Electoral College - that states would elect the president.
You may think that's a bad idea. That's fine. You may want to change it. But it's a really fundamental change to the architecture. If it's to be changed, it should be changed by a constitutional amendment, not just by a compact among the states.
Also, the framers expected that most of the time, there would be too many candidates for any to win a majority. In that case, the House would select a winner from the candidates.
A system where electors do not make their own decisions, and one candidate always wins a majority, was simply not conceived of.
https://www.constitution.org/fed/federa68.htm
This is the most easily digestible evidence, but Hamilton is obviously not the only one who thought this way. He is representing the position of most of the framers, that's why the system he describes here is what ended up in the constitution. Note that there is no mention at all of rural vs. urban, underrepresented communities, states' rights, anything like that. Those factors contributed to the creation of the Senate and the House, but not the electoral college. That was entirely due to the men writing the constitution not trusting the men they were allowing to vote.
That was part of the purpose; a part that we have since mostly neutered. But the number of electors was definitely chosen to compromise between small and large (population) states.
Senate representation is apportioned constantly per state. House representation is apportioned approximately proportional to population. The electoral college is a compromise (sum) of these too.
States have gotten to choose how to select their electors, and most have chosen winner-take-all (in part because this is a strategy that is strategically powerful). So it remains a forum of state-chosen electors, with a weight that is a compromise between per-state and per-population representation, like it has always been.
So why, in your view, do the states get to appoint the electors?
Given the geographic clustering of opinions, it is not adequate to give every individual equal say over every area.
Well yeah. There's a reason why it's called the United STATES.
I live and work in rural NY State. For every farmer out here, there are dozens of teachers, janitors, computer programmers, hairstylists, restaurant owners & workers, and every other type of profession you have in hamlets, small towns, and non-mega-cities.
And yeah, there are a lot of people here who don't want property taxes to go up. They don't want any taxes to go up, because they're rural Republicans who have bought into the line that taxes are bad hook, line, and sinker. But as rural Republicans, they mostly don't even make much noise about wanting taxes to go down. The signs you see along the side of the road are clamoring to repeal gun control laws that prevent violent criminals and the mentally ill from purchasing guns.
Just because New York City has enough population to drown the rest of the state in doesn't mean that we should give the rest of the state disproportionate power.
Is it in the best interests of all the people to have proportionate power? I believe so.
The EC is an abstraction, which philosophically and practically takes choice away from individuals. Population centers having more power than rural areas (even when they are the geographical majority, otherwise) is a proxy for land-owners having more power. While, ironically, land-owners (like farmers) often tend to be poorer than city-dwellers in absolute terms, I don't believe they should have some sort of relative power difference.
So the "land-owners," or at least, the owners of the companies that own the land, also live in the cities, and are themselves among the vastly wealthy.
Is it in the best interests of all the people to have proportionate power? I believe so.
I don't believe they (rural vs metropolitan citizens) should have some sort of relative power difference, despite their relative wealth and land-ownership differences. That's not important to me, philosophically.
Best I can do to clarify.
Land doesn't (shouldn't) vote.
> too bad, the city folk are in charge now.
You mean democracy? You mean 1 person 1 vote? You mean the majority? This is what you have a problem with? Go ahead and state that view, but let's be honest about what you are saying.
You think somehow people should be punished for population density. That their votes should be worth less, person for person, than a rural vote.
Why.
Local politicians should be concerned with their locality - national politicians should be concerned with the nation and making sure that no localities are presented with problems beyond the scope of their power... the state sorta does both - but it also serves to mask local issues within the state's representation up to the national level. It's why I'm rather fond of the house and less fond of the senate - as a former Vermonter I had intensely good representation at the national level - I had one house rep and two senators which were concerned with representing me specifically - but when I resided in MA our rep was concerned with local issues but the Senators were more focused on pushing forth agendas that the state-house was pushing out... so the representation of individual localities were lost on those senators.
Cost of a small apartment in NYC is equal to the cost of several acres of farmland. Proportional property taxes would impact both demographics similarly.
But no. Land owners make money extracting rent. The difference is that farming is subsidized.
The tyranny of the minority who sit on emptier ground is not a sacred value.
Firstly, property taxes are levied at the town(ship) levels in New York State. Secondly, property taxes are levied on the assessed property value of the property in question, which will be $1-5000/acre for agricultural land, so an $800,000 Manhattan studio will have the same assessed value of up to 800 acres of farmland. Thirdly, property taxes on farm land are fully deductible business expenses, while property taxes on your primary residence is not.
Finally, it doesn't come through in text, but allow me to spend the next seven minutes laughing on the floor at the notion that city dwellers are blase about their property taxes going up.
For instance: gun control. Rules for millions of people crowded into a pressure-cooker city, vs rules for folks living a mile apart with varmints, police protection an hour away, hunting, are reasonably very different. Same for zoning, licensing, inspections, on and on.
Rural residents often get saddled with metro rules that make no sense.
The premise that urban and rural dwellers generally have such radically divergent ways of life that it's infeasible for a single entity to govern both is a bit of a populist myth.
I can see half a mile in any direction, and not see another human habitation. Clearly this is rural. And clearly, things around here work a little differently from a city. For instance, I pay for fire service (volunteer fire association; I donate). I essentially don't have police service except for cleaning up after major catastrophes (half a dozen sheriffs per 100 square miles). I saw an eagle swoop by my kitchen window the other night, with a rabbit in its claws (yeah eagle! I'm a gardener). When the deer get out of hand harvesting my garden before I do, I'm allowed to shoot them. With one of my guns, a bigger one because the little ones are for varmints like rabbit, skunk, rats, the occasional badger.
My interactions with a neighbor are purely voluntary, because other than annual discussions about fences (and the fireman's ball) we have little we need to talk about. There are no association rules; there are no inspections nor even inspectors. If my neighbor parks a bunch of trailers behind his windbreak in an ugly rusting mess, go neighbor. I guess I'll just plant a row of trees and wait 10 years to mask the view in that direction.
So just call me Mr. Populist Myth I guess.
Except no one who talks about "city dwellers" is talking about people living in small towns or suburbs. And if I am living in a city, it doesn't conform to any of the political or cultural assumptions that the urban/rural divide makes about "city dwellers." It also isn't nearly as rural as your definition of "rural," although I've lived in those areas as well. I certainly don't think it would be accurate to lump the culture and community of the town I'm in with LA or New York - certainly people there would consider me rural.
And maybe that's one problem - "city dweller" and "rural" are vague and subjective labels.
>So just call me Mr. Populist Myth I guess.
The myth is that your experience is typical for Americans not living in large cities. It's an outlier, not the norm.
They are, depending on the concern. Rural voters have representatives and lobbyists in Washington and there are plenty of laws intended to favor rural interests. Part of the argument in this thread is that the Electoral College itself gives rural states out-sized influence in determining the Presidency. It isn't true that Washington is ignoring rural populations entirely, or that they have no political power.
Most of the issues you listed upthread as examples of how urban and rural lives differ are examples of issues which should be (and usually are) handled locally, not nationally. Gun control might be an exception (although personally I believe it should be entirely a state issue) but I think it would be absurd to claim that rural populations don't have a powerful influence on that through the NRA already, given that most of the country supports stricter gun control laws than would ever be politically feasible in the US.
Sure there are attempts to design government to balance rural and urban. They work better or worse, at each level. Abolishing them because they are 'out of balance' is maybe not the best solution.
* But love cashing their welfare checks sent from urban citizens.
Urban cities form extremely powerful electoral blocks in Congress which can pass huge amount of pro-urban legislation and pro-urban budgets. The rural areas have much less representation but at least enough so that they can perhaps dog-trade for policies that are important to them.
Remember that laws pass on majority or super-majority rules in Congress. So once you have enough to form a coalition your vote “matters” or not.
Isn’t this literally not true?
Of course it’s true. WY has 1 representative to CA’s 53.
We must stop this madness!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Two_of_the_United_Stat...
> People who want to get away from the ~big cities~ small towns and live a different kind of life with different priorities (and different legislative interests), shouldn't be totally shut out, should they? Even though I live in a ~giant urban area~ rural area, I wouldn't want to feel pressured to due so due to lack of political stake if I move elsewhere.
who's to say one direction is more important than the other? At least if we ditch the electoral college, individual voices always have the same volume
I grew up rural, but I long ago moved to an urban life. Politicians — and to be honest rural folk themselves — often try to enforce the idea that rural life is somehow more genuine. You’ll hear this as “Real America”, or how city folks don’t understand how “the Real World works”, or are some how “out of touch”. Which is fundamentally a completely bizarre idea when the majority of Americans (and I believe the world in general now) live an urban life. While there are unique and legitimate concerns that may need to be addressed for rural life, they are not mainstream concerns. Similarly, allowing rural politics and social mores to dominate national politics is as absurd as saying the Sentinelese[0] should dominate world culture because they’re more in touch with the land or something.
I think you're underestimating the figures. 80.7% of Americans lived in urban areas according to the 2010 census. Estimates for the entire world are over 50% for over a decade now (since 2007, to be more accurate). It increases slowly but steadily, so we were at about 55.27% in 2018. It's going to be about 68% by 2050 and about 85% by 2100.
Edit: I'm not disputing the larger point. I just think the number is probably a little lower than that if you adjusted for being "truly" urban.
If the trend doesn't change for the next 80 years. Which is a big if.
For example: Right now in the US there are 2 senators from each state. California with a population of over 39 million has 2 senators, Alaska with a population around 700,000 also has 2 senators.
As does:
1. Wyoming (Population: 572,381)
2. Vermont (Population: 627,180)
3. Alaska (Population: 735,720)
4. North Dakota (Population: 760,900)
5. South Dakota (Population: 892,631)
6. Delaware (Population: 975,033)
7. Rhode Island (Population: 1,056,738)
8. Montana (Population: 1,074,532)
9. Maine (Population: 1,342,097)
10. New Hampshire (Population: 1,363,852)
These states combined control 20% of the Senate with a roughly combined population of 10 million people. That's only 25% the population of California alone, or 3% of the total country.
Now obviously the Senate/House power balance was designed with this in mind. But the House hasn't reapportioned representation by population in a century.
Seems to me like the American democratic system has a very large bias for rural voters, especially when you consider where in the country presidential campaigns start every 4 years.
The House reapportions by population after each census (10 years), with the exception of the notable failure after the 1920 Census.
The House hasn't increased total size since the reapportionment after the 1910 census, which is probably what you are thinking of.
Doesn't this effectively make it impossible to correctly reapportion by population though, because without a change in size a number of low population states "should" have < 1 member?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Two_of_the_United_Stat...
I’m surprised that given technology advances people don’t just cut out the expensive elected officials and put everything up to several national votes per day. If you think that the founders got the proportional balance wrong, what about the temporal balance? Why invest decision making power in one person over such long time frames?
You can define “correctly reapportion” in a way that this is true, but there is no reason to think that was the Constitutional intent.
Which isn't to say I don't think there is a policy problem, I just don't think you can reduce it to incorrect apportionment.
Not sure where you live, but since 1914 in Colorado:
1914 - four representatives
1973 - five representatives
1983 - six representatives
2003 - seven representatives
So clearly seats are added as population changes in a state.
See also: https://www.insightsassociation.org/article/states-expected-...
To truly remedy this situation in the House, you have to bring the House up to about 930.
https://time.com/5423623/house-representatives-number-seats/
I'm not sure adding more reps would make the system work any better - part of me thinks it would be even more expensive and chaotic.
In particular, for any bill requiring spending, the Senate can only amend a bill that started in the House. Impeachment must start in the house and is then tried in the Senate. The Senate can't nominate someone to office, they can only confirm a nominee presented by the executive.
Words have histories of course, and probably at one point this was a spatial metaphor - maybe some bicameral legislature literally did have one of their higher status body on a different floor than their lower status body. But the words upper and lower when applied to the legislative branch have evolved since then.
Should some states have zero?
I understand our federal politics are a complete mess but think that has more to do to equating money with freedom of speech, the great return on campaign donations, the polarization of our media and the lack of solid non-partisan research institutes that our elected leaders can rely upon. Have you ever watched CSPAN? Our leaders routinely become informed about the world around us through the same mass media as we do.
I would not mind that
This was all by design. The smaller states would not have joined the union if it mean that the bigger states would monopolize all the power.
All states have two Senators and at least one member of the House, with additional House members based on their population.
This is why California (with it's large population) has 55 electoral college votes, while Alaska only gets the default minimum of three.
This is why we have the House of Representatives, which is based on population. California has 53 representatives, Alaska has one.
The original idea as I understand it, before the 17th amendment, was that the Senate was supposed to represent the interests of the states, hence two senators from each equally represented state. While the House was supposed to represent the interests of the residents of those states.
1. Rural places do have representation, through Congress. Abolishing the EC will not change that.
2. Rural areas already have outsized representation due to how the Senate is set up.
3. The electoral college only matters for presidential candidates, during the general election, and they aren't spending a lot of time in rural areas already anyway. I grew up in North Dakota, and no presidential candidates ever wasted their time campaigning there.
The question we should be asking is, why are Ohio, PA, Michigan and Florida more important than any other state?
That's one take. Another take is that urban centers are being actively disenfranchised.
Btw, those politicians who benefit from the EC are the ones creating policies that are destroying the rural populace at the same time.
While people living in rural areas may have distinct cultural values and may face real inequities when it comes to infrastructure, economic opportunity, education, health care access, etc., this seems completely unrelated to deciding the fairest way to pick a president.
I’m not sure it’s possible to convince small states to give up power now that they have it. Although I’m sure they may want to cecede. Can you imagine the immense power that Wyoming would have as a sovereign nation? Or Delaware? They would be protected from threat by being surrounded by the US and could become havens for activities not allowed in the US. Basically become super Switzerlands.
Right now in order to win Florida you must win a popular vote in Florida. There is no internal electoral college in Florida. Winning Florida is incredibly important for presidential candidates.
Where do they campaign in Florida? Everywhere. They don't just hang out in Miami. If candidates do not avoid less populated areas when aiming to win a popular vote in a state, why would they do so for the nation?
If it was much cheaper to convince undecided voters in urban areas, they’d go there first... but the competition among candidates spending would start to drive up the cost per voter to an equilibrium where it started to make sense to go to rural areas, and if that started to drive prices up, maybe next is suburban. But it’s everywhere, all over the country, appealing to everybody as effectively as you can, to win. And since the president affects everybody, it only seems right they should be elected by 1 person, 1 vote, across all citizens.
This distorts our national priorities. For example ethanol subsidies are so high because Iowa is a battleground state.
We could conduct a popular vote where a Wyoming resident gets 3x the vote of a California resident. This would be an enormous improvement over the EC and I would support it.
This doesn't effect politicians other than Presidential candidates, and doesn't effect territories (rural or otherwise) because those get no votes in Presidential elections. Though moving to a national popular votes in the states proper could be the first step to a national popular vote of US Citizens, which would give Presidential candidates a reason to campaign in territories.
Also, as long as there is a Senate and Presidential candidates are seen to have electoral coattails, there will be an incentive for Presidential candidates to campaign in low-population states.
Also, the association of low-population states with “rural areas” is wrong: California has a rural population about equal to the total population of South Dakota; Texas—the second most populated state—has the largest rural population, bigger than the total population of South Dakota and the four smaller states; North Carolina and Pennsylvania (also top 10 population states) have rural populations that also each exceed the total population of several of the smallest states combined.
With the modern ratio of the voting to the total populations being about the same across rural and city populations the EC doesn't do that much for the rural territories. The EC was specifically made to give huge political weight to the very specific rural demography back then - plantation owners in the South states - i.e. the time and place of extremely low ratio of voting to total populations. Without EC the south states would back then have political weight of about 0, ie. equal to its share of voting population - white male landowners; with EC - the political weight of those states was its share of all the white population plus 3/5 of the slaves.
Of course with universal voting rights and slavery abolishment the EC is just an obsolete undemocratic remnant of those old times.
The President would become a ceremonial figurehead (directly elected by popular vote or a McGarvie model -see below), sign the bills and maybe still hold but rarely use veto power.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGarvie_Model
Disclaimer: Australian so obviously biased
This makes no sense. You've just made an error in thinking.
The pro-EC argument is people who tend to live rural have a different set of issues, and also tend to be a relative minority of people, and thus those issues aren't given due weight with 1-person-1-vote.
Deciding to move to a rural area does not decrease the power of your vote in a non-EC system - your vote has equal power.
If you're a swing voter in a heavily partisan district, it doesn't matter how dense the district is, you won't be campaigned for.
With winner-take-all allocation of states' electoral votes, politicians are incentivized to put all of their effort into battleground/swing states, regardless of size. Presidential candidates spend 99% of their time in swing states, except for when they go to NY/CA/TX/FL to fundraise. Iowa gets attention because it's the earliest primary, not because it's rural.
If you get rid of the electoral college then no matter where you live your vote would count. At least for President.
Whatever percentage of the population they make up, that's the stake they'll get (and the amount of accountability the politicians will have to them). What's wrong with that?
I guess when we're talking about actual campaign tours there might be some neglect that happens because of the logistics of physical travel. Although I have to question the real benefit of those visits to the citizens. They benefit the politicians themselves, but they aren't exactly a vital source of information in a world with the internet.
I don't see a problem with that if we confront and dismiss the notion that certain individuals (e.g. individuals who live in rural areas) should have more political influence than certain other individuals (e.g. individuals who live in urban areas).
Something as arbitrary as the amount of unpopulated land around a person's home should not affect how much political influence that person receives.
> Even though I live in a giant urban area, I wouldn't want to feel pressured to due so due to lack of political stake if I move elsewhere.
Imagine a developer in San Francisco tempted to move to Austin, but who won't because the state as a whole will always go Republican even though Austin tends to be more liberal.
The real core issue is: the president and the federal govt has way too much power. There is no reason why a centralized authority should decide on policies for both rural and urban communities.
If political power was surrendered back down to where it naturally belongs, i.e. to the state, or even better to the city level, and the fed was stripped and left with little to no political power, this whole electoral college charade would become entirely moot.
If there were any such tendency, it would be evident from the way real-world presidential candidates campaign today inside battleground states. Every battleground state contains big cities and rural areas. Presidential candidates—advised by the country’s most astute political strategists—necessarily allocate their candidate’s limited time and money between different parts of battleground states. The facts are that, inside battleground states, candidates campaign everywhere—big cities, medium-sized cities, and rural areas. Far from concentrating on big cities or ignoring rural areas, they hew very closely to population in allocating campaign events.
counter-point is that the political stake is currently being taken away from people who live in large states, and is thus negatively affecting the most amount of people possible.
> Should African Americans ger 3.6x the vote as White Americans because there are fewer of them?
Because it's not the United Races of America.
The current system claims to be a Union of States, but the current system also defines a goal of a more perfect Union . The Constitution was meant to be a living document, IIRC Jefferson himself believed that it should be rewritten every generation. If the right to govern comes from the mandate of the people, then does the creation of a more perfect Union not entail representation of people not states? From first principles it still doesn't make sense to me why we should privilege the rights of states over the rights of people.
Since almost everyone lives in a quasi-suburbia in america now, who exactly needs protecting? Why does someone in North Dakota deserve more of a say than someone in california these days?
The political implications of showing urbanites that (some) rural areas are better places to live than is currently being preached could get interesting.
Its sort of like the analogous effect showing up in Michigan in the auto manufacturing areas had for Trump. He showed up, Hillary did not, and he won more of those votes.
People who want to get away from the big cities and live a different kind of life with different priorities (and different legislative interests), shouldn't be totally shut out, should they? Even though I live in a giant urban area, I wouldn't want to feel pressured to due so due to lack of political stake if I move elsewhere.