Because of the EC I would argue that in most states, including California, your vote effectively doesn't matter at all.

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's not an argument against the Electoral College per se, but rather an argument against letting states allocate all of their Electoral College votes to the winner of the popular vote. This particular problem could be solved by forcing all states to apportion their Electoral College votes based on the distribution of the popular vote.

> This particular problem could be solved by forcing all states to apportion their Electoral College votes based on the distribution of the popular vote.

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.

This is exactly what the article is about, and 16 states with 194 votes have already done it. It will eventually pass 270 because most states (all non-swing states) have a lot to gain from it.

I'm pretty sure the poster I responded to was talking about doing this on a per state basis. Not the national popular vote.

That’s exactly what the NPVIC is trying for... they’re not abolishing the electoral college, just making an agreement that 270+ of them will vote for whomever wins the entire nation’s popular vote.

IIRC this behavior is per-state and some (Maine or NH maybe?) do just that.

Maine and Nebraska apportion their electoral votes on a per-Congressional district basis. But because Congressional districts can be heavily gerrymandered this is not a substitute for a truly proportional allocation scheme.

Exactly. I live in NYC. I still vote, but really it doesn't matter whom I vote for since there's an approximately 100% chance of New York's electoral votes going to the Democratic candidate. On the other hand, Kansas hasn't voted for a Democrat since Lyndon B. Johnson; I'm sure people there don't feel particularly enfranchised either.

But this proves the point.

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.

it invalidates all voters. Overvotes are a thing. You can have 90% of CA vote against a candidate and it won't mean anything more than 51% voting against.

So roughly half of the votes in all non competitive states do not count.

So those people in California are citizens just like you who pay the same federal taxes and have the same rights yet when it comes to voting for the President they do not have have those same rights. It might be annoying to us that they are all "liberals" or whatever you like to brand them with but they are people with equal rights and deserve equal vote. If it means that the majority of the country is made of these "liberals" that we dislike or disagree with then so be it, but that's what it means to have a representative democracy.

A representative democracy by definition means that each vote does not count exactly equally.

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.

Such as?

I don’t want to be repetitive with my other comments, but I think a good example is environmental regulations CA passes for automobiles effectively setting standards for the country.

That’s the free market, not government. Companies choose to make vehicles CA compliant. Any other examples?