You say this as though this means a popular vote is a better idea, rather than a worse idea.

What do you think would happen if every person in LA County had their vote for president count as much as every person in Wyoming?

It's not like the vote for President is something where people from cities are going to have an opportunity to vote to harvest the blood and organs from people from rural areas or something (as if that's something they even would vote for if that were on the table). It's literally only about electing the President. That's all the electoral college affects.

It's become somewhat of a meme that there's this big divide between rural dwellers and city dwellers, and that somehow if city dwellers were allowed to have genuine proportional representation, somehow they would screw over the rural dwellers, but I have never heard anyone articulate any specific thing they think would go toward that. Let alone how they think getting proportional representation purely for Presidential elections would let them do so.

But the president does not just represent dwellers. He also represents jurisdictions and governments. This is the reason a state's pull in the presidential election is a combination of its pull in the House (representing purely dwellers) and its pull in the Senate (representing purely jurisdictions/governments). People who want a popular vote for the president fundamentally do not see the US as a federation. People who want a leader for LA can vote for LA's mayor.

It is unfortunate how many people did not pay attention in civics class when they went over every compromise made in the formation of the Constitution, especially the ones about population proportionality as it relates to the legislative and executive branches. If you want the particular arguments for how large states would screw over small ones, the records of the Constitutional Convention are a good place to start.

I briefly went over what the founders actually thought of people like non land owners and democracy. Spoiler: they didn’t care for democracy as much as their own class and kind having a lot of power.

It’s unfortunate how much people pay attention to civics classes and never learn what the status quo has no interest in teaching them.

Ah yes, the 3/5ths compromise and its relevance to today’s world. Basing one’s political beliefs on apportionment of power over the fears held by 18th century politicians feels ripe for bad takes.

There are many, many other divides than high population vs low population territories that we conveniently ignore in this debate. If you want to argue in favor of the population of smaller states deserving greater representation, can I get you on board for giving black people, Muslims, LGBTQ members, and communists vote multipliers as well?

You see, there’s actual historical precedent for population majorities screwing over these groups.

In comparison, those small population states you fight so valiantly to protect historically receive more tax dollars than they pay in. Seems like a pretty sweet deal.

Before you say hey that’s all thanks to disproportionate representation, Canada and other countries with more proportionate representation see the same thing. You see, small population states are in general beneficiaries of putting their lot in with bigger states. Giving them more vote power on top of that is… silly.

No, you cannot get me on board with that, because they do not have their own governments that federate with those of states. In case you missed the entirety of the comment you're responding to, the issue is not groups of people, the issue is governments. You can analyze this from the perspective of different ways of looking at groups of people, but you won't be doing anything different. You can talk about where tax dollars go, but if that was the real issue you'd be complaining about tax policy instead of the electoral college. And if your gut reaction to discussion about the formation of the Constitution is to echo something about the ⅗ compromise and the 1700s, I doubt there is any more nuanced version of this you're holding in reserve.

What's so special about squiggly lines drawn by politicians generations ago? You realize there's no divinity in the division between South and North Dakota, right? Even back then these territories were being divided up to maximize political power.

I could be wrong, but I genuinely believe the problem with your line of reasoning is you're rationalizing for a system that benefits you. Your ideology benefits from how things are, and so you find reasons to justify why the way things are is good, actually.

If say states had been divided up differently, would your entire belief system crumble? Assume city-states were the norm and the Senate was overwhelmingly controlled by whichever party controlled urban populations. Like say North Carolina got divided into Raleigh-Durham, Charlotte, the Triangle, Wilmington, and the rest of the state as just one big territory. And every state was like this.

Would you suddenly say hey this is a bad system, not because it benefits people I don't agree with, but because of some other silly reason?

What is so magical about lines put on maps by our great-great-great grandfathers?

If there was a magical US with three states, two with only 1 citizen and one with 1,000,000, would you still hold by your principle that they have their own governments that federate with those of states so this is good?

Where in your system do you draw the line and make a distinction between fair and unfair? How do you determine if one arrangement is more fair than another? Why would you not push for the most fair arrangement?

My principle is embarrassingly simple. Political power should be equal to the number of people represented. That's it. Easy to explain, easy to grasp, easy to measure whether something is fair or unfair. It's imperfect--Lord knows population majorities can still be bastards--but it's the best, most egalitarian system created. And, importantly, it's a principle that doesn't change just because it doesn't benefit me. You're right, it's not very nuanced. Simple often works best.

> Would you suddenly say hey this is a bad system, not because it benefits people I don't agree with, but because of some other silly reason?

What if 60% of the population wanted to slaughter the other 40%? That's right, I too can come up with wacky hypotheticals that won't happen and presuppose a lot of other important variables don't change.

> What is so magical about lines put on maps by our great-great-great grandfathers?

The governments whose jurisdiction extends to them.

> Where in your system do you draw the line and make a distinction between fair and unfair? How do you determine if one arrangement is more fair than another? Why would you not push for the most fair arrangement?

Why do you presuppose I'm not pushing for the most fair arrangement? Why do you assume that an arrangement where states just as important to the union have two orders of magnitude less representation would be more fair? Probably because, as you keep asserting about me, it benefits you. If a state thinks that the union is a negative for it, and in a way that the union would never agree to change, and it would get a better deal outside of the union, maybe it should just secede. But it's not a net negative, you're just not thinking any further than the culture war; say what you want about the difference between North Dakota and New York, but I'll bet New York really appreciates North Dakota being its breadbasket.

> Why do you presuppose I'm not pushing for the most fair arrangement?

Because, by their (and my) definition of "fair", "Political power should be equal to the number of people represented," and you're pushing for something that is not that. It doesn't take any "presupposing".

> What if 60% of the population wanted to slaughter the other 40%? That's right, I too can come up with wacky hypotheticals that won't happen and presuppose a lot of other important variables don't change.

This was my point about how the majority can be bastards. There are countless examples where the majority wanted something that punished the minority throughout history and throughout the world. Having said that, humankind hasn't come up with a better system--at least to my knowledge. Yours certainly only introduces the potential to make problems like this worse.

> Why do you presuppose I'm not pushing for the most fair arrangement? Why do you assume that an arrangement where states just as important to the union have two orders of magnitude less representation would be more fair? Probably because, as you keep asserting about me, it benefits you. If a state thinks that the union is a negative for it, and in a way that the union would never agree to change, and it would get a better deal outside of the union, maybe it should just secede. But it's not a net negative, you're just not thinking any further than the culture war; say what you want about the difference between North Dakota and New York, but I'll bet New York really appreciates North Dakota being its breadbasket.

First, the "culture war" is not a real thing. It's just right-wing propaganda to frame any expression or change they disagree with as an attack on them. Framing wanting fair representation as not thinking beyond an imaginary attack on conservatives is sorta funny.

I don't think you're pushing towards a more fair arrangement because you can't even outline what makes a system fair to you. You don't think North Dakota with 0.8m population should have 1/10th the representation of New York with 8m. OK what is fair to you then? What makes it fair or unfair? What knobs could I change in theoretical compositions of the US that would make you say this federation is fair and this federation unfair? Surely you can admit that not all federations are fair, right?

Again, my principle shared before is super simple and easy to represent and I would argue intuitively feels fair to most people. It's not rocket science. Does it benefit my beliefs? Yes. But that doesn't invalidate it as wrong when I think it's also the solution most uninvolved third parties would agree with (also weird, it's what the article in this post states). And I think even _you_ agree with it if the system weren't stacked in your favor or if we were talking about another country.

You magically think that each state is "just as important to the union" when that's impossible. The US without CA is significantly worse off than it is without CT. Just not a matter of opinion or feelings.

North Dakota really appreciates New York buying its produce, too. And producing its science, technology, and art (no matter how much they complain about it now, I mean come on, Fox News is in NYC!). Also, their agricultural output is 20th (ND) and 24th (NY) in the US, so it's not as if NY is entirely reliant on others. Food output is important for sure, but ND gains more benefit from being in a country with NY than NY does from being in a country with ND.

You say this like some people's votes should count less than other people's votes.

The really cool thing about Federalism is that California can make it's own laws about what happens in California.

On a Federal level, California has to share power with the other 49 states. California should not be able to dictate federal policy for everyone else.

And...they can't?

Even with fully proportional representation, there is no state that would be able to do anything close to "dictat[ing] federal policy".

California has, according to other people in this discussion, about 40 million people.

The US as a whole has about 340 million people. You'd need 5 Californias, all voting in perfect unison, to "dictate federal policy" in a fully proportional system. And guess what? California does not, in fact, vote in perfect unison, and no one's proposing a system wherein the people of the state vote, and then assign their state's proportional votes entirely to whichever result in that statewide vote gets 50% + 1 votes.

Oh, wait. There is a system that does that. The Electoral College. The one we're talking about getting rid of.

In 2020's Presidential election, California cast more votes for Trump than Texas did. (And Texas cast more votes for Biden than New York did, for that matter.)

In a fully proportional system, something like a third of California's representatives (based on those 2020 Presidential election results) would be voting for policies that the GOP favors.

Once you stop looking at the Electoral College maps and thinking that they accurately depict the political leanings of the country, you start to realize that no state is homogeneous, and the idea that we need to treat them as such is, at best, a hopeless anachronism, and at worst active propaganda.

Thank you for saying two big things. (1) how relatively balanced the country is with Dem and Repub divide. I just looked and was blown away how often most states were within a 65/35 divide of voting for president.

(2) bringing up a silly system that ends up being electoral college. But bringing up some “silly” alternative is an issue because doing away with 2 senators per state doesn’t automatically mean we just duplicate the house in the senate. Why is that the assumption.

DC should be a state and PR should be a state if they majority vote for it too. These should be beyond obvious and agreeable if people really believe in the reasons America exists and democracy etc.

When my initial comment went against the current senate set up, I didn’t say disband the senate. I’d be fine with a scaling system of Senators like 12 for California, 10 for Texas, 8 for Florida, New York, 6 for next eight states, and so on. This will lead to an amount of around 200 senators. Giving California 5-6% of the Senate instead of 2% isn’t going to suddenly destroy the farmer in Kansas from having any power.

Indeed. Most of the country is pretty purple.

I tracked a discussion on exactly this topic on Tumblr quite recently; here's a fairly representative post: https://fandomsandfeminism.tumblr.com/post/69134673708595609...

It includes two very helpful county-level maps from the 2016 election that drive home how politically non-homogenous our states are.

How would California be able to do that with a different Senator set up? No one has said what the alternative to current senators would be. So how can anything be assumed by what a change with senators would provide? Why would that necessarily change your last paragraph? And thus require keeping the current status quo?

The ideal should be equal representation. If some over-representation is going on it has to be corrected. If not, is is undermining democracy.

This has always been a weird belief to me. California is the US’s best economy and a leader in science, art, technology, education, trade, manufacturing, and agriculture. It has led the way on many civil rights issues which later end up being adopted by the nation as a whole.

So much value for the US and it should be disfavored over those that provide so much less? Sure it has its problems, but just looking at results it’s clear California is the most successful state we have.

So you want to overrepresent the unsuccessful states?

Why?