The college was a compromise to give a larger voting share to slave owning states that had a high overall population, despite having a relatively smaller number of possible voters.
So while the electoral college might have also functioned as a way to redistribute votes within a state... I don't think that was its main purpose.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_elector#List_of_fait...
As with so much in American history the explanation involves slavery but judging from the downvotes here, that wounds everyone's pride a bit.
...other than the large numbers in the late 1700s and early 1800s, you mean?
And in any case, "intent" and "actual practice" were pretty different here. But that doesn't mean that the Connecticut Compromise [0] (which split the US legislative body into the House with representation apportioned by population and the Senate with set representation per state) was solely or even primarily due to slavery. And once you had that, using the total of Senators and Representatives for your number of electors makes a good amount of sense.
The compromise reduced the control the slave states had.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/08/22/he-tried-st...
I'm a supporter of NPV. I don't think it's likely to be a problem, although this feels like something that will shake out a lot further in the federal courts.
Well, that didn't work.
Communication happened at the speed of a horse, so if you need a decision quickly, you can’t have electors asking for instructions from their home government. For better or worse, the founders favored a definitive result in this case over a correct one.
Why is cross regional appeal of any value, if these region don't make up even 10% of the combined US population.
If US states were divided by population it would be a different think all together. But California has 40 times as many people as Wyoming.
Cross regional appeal is quoted as an obviously good thing to have, but the core assumption of equal distribution of population has been violated.
Because those people control a large fraction of the country’s food supply and it would be a disaster if they decided to stop selling it to the rest of us.
In reality, free markets being a thing, this wouldn't happen. We can import from other countries and they need to sell their goods to live.
You’re right that it’s extremely unlikely to get so bad that they get forcibly nationalized. However, my understanding is that market conditions are pretty bad for farmers right now, and have been for years. Any change that makes things worse for them will likely drive some to other lines of work and reduce overall production, driving food prices up.
This particular effect is probably extremely small in practice, but I felt the need to remind HN that not all value is produced in cities.
I'm not so sure it's just the 24/7 life or death coverage that makes that happen though. In solidly red or blue seats the main threat to a senators seat is a challenge from the extreme of their party, left or right, which also pulls them further towards the extremes of their parties.
Population isn't everything. We have states like Alaska, Hawaii and Wyoming which are national treasures with low populations.
Why not give disproportional representation to them on the basis of their race, or religion, or sexual orientation, or on whether or not they prefer big, or little-endian notation? Surely, it would only be appropriate that politicians should have cross-demographic appeal to win?
Every argument for why we should give extra influence to voters living in particular zip codes is just as valid, as any argument for giving extra influence to voters based on some other semi-arbitrary distinction.
Rural people have special, marginalized concerns, and are outnumbered by urban voters? Great. So do LGBT people, for example.
You don't get extra consideration for your vote for being a ______. Why should you get it on the basis of geography?
You can't do that with national effect by concerted state action with less than 100% of the states (you can simulate it by casting all votes for the candidate that would win by that rule with a bare makority, but that's just a chunky version of national popular vote.)
> I've seen more news about states leaning towards the 2nd option which is actually much worse than the electoral college in its current state.
It's worse if you care about the per-state vote and not the national outcome; it's better if you care about the outcome, since it produces the desired outcome of adopted by states with a majority of electoral votes (and the NPV only goes into effect in states adopting it when it has been adopted by states with a majority of electoral votes), while proportional allocation for electors needs universal adoption to implement it's effect.
This isn't some discrimination thing. Those people can still vote. They just aren't given more representation than they deserve. That's the con of the electoral college.
A few percentage points is a big deal in an election where every vote is supposed to count. And this overrepresentation isn't a narrow margin like Brexit, we're talking about at least 5% more represented.
It may encourage the discrimination against minorities.
∗and he appears to refer to it as a well established idiom so I suspect it goes further back
[0] On Liberty https://www.bartleby.com/130/1.html
or because you are LGBT,
or because you are black,
or because you have a disability.
But the small-state kind of minority seems to be the only one who deserves electoral protection from tyranny of the majority. Oh what a coincidence then, that these minorities also happen to be mostly white, christian, and straight.
Would a register for who is LGBT be a good idea? Would you support laws and voting based on ethnic background and/or skin colour?
Why do these ideas sound dangerous?
As to it being their constitution, we're really talking about the Bill of Rights, and that was an updated version of the 1689 British Bill of Rights.
It's sad how we no longer have it, and that people in the past had more rights than we have now. American Constitutionalists are right to dig their heels in over anything that looks like it will encroach on their rights.
Do you disagree?
Not only can a candidate win the electoral college while losing the popular vote, but the winner-take-all system means that only votes in closely-contested states really matter. The Electoral College allows the minority to overrule the majority.
Which means the president is and should be, elected by representatives of the states. The House of Representatives should be the only federal office directly voted on by “the people.” If that were the case, especially eliminating the direct election of senators, you’d see a much less divisive, gridlocked system where governance is more about public service and less about these election soap operas.
For some reason, though, I never see supporters of the electoral college feel that it's right and proper to give equal political power to social minority groups (Only geographical minority groups. As if where you live is more important to your interests than who you are.)
As to your innovation in voting, if you accept immutable aspects of identity as the basis for voting rights you're opening the door to some terrible ideas, like ethno-states and Jim Crow laws. Again, without embarrassment at the facetiousness, I'm also not sure how actually making the Jews have more power in 1930s Germany would've solved their problems. Would've probably fuelled grievances: "Hey, Adolf, you know that Jews really do run Germany?" Eeek!
The best way to protect minorities is by the protected freedoms of speech and to bear arms, not by weighting votes by arbitrarily chosen characteristics.
It's not this.
But I also get the arguments of people that say that without the electoral college, there is zero incentive for politicians to campaign in or pay attention to the interests of people in lightly-populated area. And I think that is a bad thing - whenever you completely disenfranchise people you get create a potential crack for revolution, secession, or other fragmentation processes to seep in. (It's also just shitty to the people involved.) I'd rather fix that by getting rid of first-past-the-post voting systems, but I also think you can't ignore that problem.
You still haven't answered why you believe there's an excluded middle. The opposite of tyranny is representation, and it's the system we have in the U.S. You can quibble about the degree of representation, but the fact that you can quibble about it means that we don't have a tyranny.
Ballotpedia's congressional approval polling average: 20% (August 21, 2019)
Cambridge Analytica has shown the method to manipulate any political system. We are in for an "interesting" future.
This is a lie probably told to you by a high school teacher who never really thought about it, and clearly you haven't either.
If the electoral college empowers lightly populated areas, how come no Presidential Candidate has ever gone stumping for those sweet sweet Wyoming voters?
Because it doesn't empower small states. It doesn't empower big states. It empowers closely contested states.
The electoral college makes no sense, it was not designed this way, the designers tried to get rid of it after they saw how it was being abused.
It's non-democratic, nonsensical, and there has been ~75% support for abolishing it for over 100 years but politicians have been holding off because it makes elections easier for them to fight because it lets them ignore most of the voters.
I love the electoral college. For those that bother to understand that America is a republic; the system was nearly perfectly designed. If we can get back to the original method of electing senators and back to the idea of “these United States” rather than “the United States,” we’d all be happier. States should have increased sovereignty. The 10th Amendment ought to matter.
If the Electoral College made every state matter equally, then candidates would be campaigning for support in every state equally. It is a fact that that's not what the Electoral College does.
Also, the Electoral College in its current form was not "designed". It was a mistake. The people who designed it, Hamilton and Madison, tried to get rid of it with constitutional amendments after they saw how it was being abused with "winner-take-all" laws.
In the EU, is Ireland less important than Germany? Why doesn’t Germany get to pick the EU president each time? Since Germany has over 80 million people, they could team up with France and simply own the EU. Ireland and Poland would be forced to go along with whatever Germany and France wanted. Or, they would leave the EU.
If California and New York picked the president every single time, why would other states bother staying in the Union? If you just have to win New York City and Los Angeles and Chicago, then every single policy proposal would simply be to benefit those voters alone. You could deny federal protections and funding to every other part of the country because you’d rather have more money to spend in New York City. It would become just like the Hunger Games where the “districts” would serve the capitol.
The current system has worked for 200+ years. Just because some people didn’t like outcome, doesn’t make the system broken.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. Also, no witch burning.
I don't know why the electoral college would be better at identifying high need areas than willingness to change your vote. Shouldn't people who need help be more likely to change their vote than to live in a purple state?
If a 10m pop area has a 70-30 split, it's still better to campaign there than a 5m pop area with a 50-50 split. In absolute numbers it's still 3 million supporters versus 2.5 million supporters.
Under your model where the goal of the campaign is to visit your supporters, you'll favor smaller cities that strongly support you over larger cities that support your opponent. A place with 5 million population that's 70-30 in your favor has 3.5 million supporters.
So I guess you're totally OK with the current system where they spend all their time in Florida & other swing states because the others don't matter...
I’m not entirely convinced presidential candidates share this belief.
They're going to campaign somewhere, why should they pay more attention to Cleveland, Ohio (metro area population ~2m) than Los Angeles (city population 3m, metro population over 13m)?