"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?