As governor he got his state signed on to the national popular vote interstate compact
California gets 54 electoral votes; Wyoming gets 3.
California has 38.94 million citizens; Wyoming has 0.575 million.
California gets one electoral vote for every 721,110 people. Wyoming gets one for every 191,660. This means that per capita, Wyoming gets 3.76 times as much say in who gets to be the president as California.
Indeed. Scrap electoral college and remove the arbitrary cap on House reps.
Don’t forget to implement proportional representation in the House, blow up the senate, and implement ranked choice voting or something similar in all elections
remove the arbitrary cap on House reps.
I think thats what they meant?
If you're thinking about proportional representation, that's a separate thing
That is it's own different thing yes, but the house members were supposed to be proportional to the USA population, except they capped it and it's out of whack now.
Instead smaller states have out proportioned power.
Made up numbers, but in some states it might be 100k people per house member, and another state it's 300k people.
remove the arbitrary cap on House reps.
proportional representation
I thought you were conflating these two. If not, then I have no idea what you were talking about when you said
I think thats what they meant?
I’m talking about actual proportional representation, single member house districts are way too easy to gerrymander
And that's even before the bullshit that is swing states.
Aka FPTP wasting votes in most USA states since someone thought it great idea to issue electors as state size blocks. When Constitution gives each state right to decide ways of apportioning their awarded electors.
State starts awarding 3 democrat electors and 7 Republican electors and suddenly both parties care to entice voters to try to make it 2 and 8 or 4 and 6.
Doesn't even take removing the electoral college. Just state deciding "state wide FPTP is stupid", we are going to start using something more proportional.
Even in swing states it would still work, work better. Since there would be fight over is it 5 and 5 or 6 and 4.
Yeah, there is a laundry list of ways to improve the current system. It just sucks that so little progress is being made.
Problem is that without giving smaller states a bit more weight than their population, you risk loosing them, because they have no means to weigh in. Thats why in the EU smaller countries also have more representatives relative to their population.
For the US, if only the coasts would have political power in the federal level, the mid would have a lot of motivation to fuck things up for them.
This isn't the electoral college causing the problem. It's Congress capping the size of the house 100 years ago. It needs to be increased, but it won't happen without force as it requires Congress to agree to reduce their individual power.
sigh
Yes, it is the EC causing the problem. You'll never get 1:1 with it in place no matter what congress does.
There's 0 reason the president, representative of all people, should use this shitty system for election
It's a federalist Republic, direct democracy is the opposite of the design.
This isn't direct democracy, we aren't voting on every issue that would otherwise come across the presidents desk. We are still electing representatives to make decisions on our behalf.
We are still a federation of states (federalist) represented by elected decision making leaders (Republic).
Our current system is far more direct than intended. The masses weren't supposed to pick senators and presidents, that isolated from populist candidates. Leaning even harder to systems vulnerable to populism is a poor choice.
I don’t care what it was meant to be. I really don’t. What it is is bullshit.
We don't have to stick with the original design, the founders were in no way perfect
We should have a good reason to to swap, especially to something they purposely avoided.
And we do. It seems silly to hold their wishes in such high regard compared to our own anyway though, we know more about how our system works in practice than they did when thinking of it after all, both because things dont often go completely as planned and we have the actual experience of using the result for a significant time, and because the system has been already changed in various ways already over that time.
What is the good reason to keep it? That our slave-driving wealthy elite founders were infallible?
Tread on me harder, daddy.
A good reason like the current system not actually being representative of the will of the people?
Sure but I don't think anyone could look at it and critically think the current system is for the benefit of the common man in any way shape or form.
It was designed to prevent Trump, instead Trump happened. That's a flaw in our current system that needs to be fixed.
The Electoral College is allowing more an more manipulation from these small states. It is time for that to end. They are holding this country back much too much.
As a pretty left person who lives in Tennessee, please get rid of it. Anytime I have this conversation with folks on the right, I always point out that there are more Republican voters in California than Texas. That usually gets them to concede.
Brilliant.
Of course, there's no guarantee republicans would understand the point.
Republicans aren't any dumber than Democrats, they're just more evil.
ONE PERSON
ONE VOTE
ONE CAGE
ONE BELT
ONE CHAMPION
SUNDAY
SUNDAY
SUNDAY
MONSTER TRUCK!
As an Alabamian I dream of the day that my vote actually matters, fuck the electoral college.
As a Washingtonian I also dream of that. It is ridiculous that only people in states that are kinda purple have their opinions heard.
I'd prefer at least to maintain districts, 1 vote for 1 district, remove states and the extra two votes. Each district exactly the same number of people, give or take 1%. Give the low populated counties out in the boonies a chance to be heard.
But failing that, straight popular vote is a better option than the current cluster fuck.
If it is equal representation, why does having districts make the rural vote heard? Whether it is one person one vote or 100,000 people one vote it won’t make a difference.
Everyone will still have their representatives and senators to hear them. In fact I think we need to increase the number of representatives. It needs to be a number that a person can reasonably represent. Say 50 or 100 thousand people per representative. This would also help with gerrymandering as having a lot of small districts would make everyone’s voice louder.
But for national positions like the president, we should have proportional votes, preferably with getting rid of first past the post that got us stuck with the two party system to start with.
Congress of going to need to expand a little bit, if all 3,330-6,660 reps should be able to gather at the same time.
This would be a problem if it were 1924, but we're living in 2024. The solutions for this are right in front of us and have been for decades. Get all these guys and gals on a secure teleconference and turn the Capitol building into a museum, or renovate it to have smaller private offices.
There, now we can get 10,000 reps in if we need to. The bigger concern is how are they going to decide who gets to speak with that many representatives. They can't realistically give everybody equal floor time and expect government to be anything other than completely paralyzed. So the number probably still needs to be capped, but it should be capped at a value where whatever the state that has the lowest population sets the value at 1 and every other state divides their population by that number to figure out how many representatives they get.
There was an article (Archive Link) in The Washington Post discussing the nuts and bolts of how expanded representation could work. It wouldn't be hard.
A quote from the article: To my surprise and delight, the team’s last proposal reveals that we could actually take the House of Representatives up to 1,725 members without having to construct a new building.
Districts open things up to gerrymandering..
Which is a problem that needs to be solved regardless.
Absolutely, but let's not make it worse by putting the presidential election behind it... It's bad enough it causes an imbalance in the House of Representatives. It would be far worse than the Electoral College.
Trump in 2012: The electoral college is garbage and needs to go.
Trump in 2016: The electoral college is genius. What a great system.
Trump in 2020: The electoral college is garbage and needs to go
I remember his tweets each time.
Yup, I understand it was meant to give smaller states an equal voice but he GOP weaponized it and now the minority is speaking for the majority.
Tell me the system isn't broken when ONE vote in shitty red state Wyoming is equal to TEN THOUSAN VOTES in Blue California?
Weaponized.. sounds dangerous..
100% correct.
Hey hey! Ho ho! The electoral college has got to go!
I'm glad someone is saying it! Stupid ass lines on a map determines who becomes president
Can we get rid of the senate too?
As a Canadian, can anyone ELi5 how the electoral college works? Is it like every state gets the same amount of votes regardless of population?
It's really impossible to keep this brief, but I'll try to keep it understandable:
The EC is a body of "electors", who serve as an intermediary body between the direct democracy of a popular national vote and the actual selection of a president. Their purpose is literally and intentionally to serve as a middleman, both to give a safety net to the ruling classes to make sure that whoever wins an election is someone they approve of, as well as to install a system that takes a national popular vote and basically applies an overlay to it...an overlay that leaves the process open to manipulation, stacking the odds, etc.
I'm not just saying this as a criticism of the system (though it is), this is the explicit purpose of the existence of the system.
Now to the nuts and bolts:
The US has a federal government with three branches: the executive (headed up by the president and including all of the various "Departments" like the departments of State (handling all diplomatic affairs), Defense (the military), Justice Department (FBI), Interior (National Park Service), Education, Agriculture, Homeland Security, etc.
Then there's the Judicial Branch, which is the federal court system, spearheaded by the Supreme Court. In addition to criminal trials involving federal crimes, they also have the responsibility of deciding on whether laws or actions of other government bodies are constitutional. If not, they have the authority to strike them down.
Last there's the legislative branch, which is responsible for creating laws and deciding how to spend money. Within the legislative branch, there are two bodies: the Senate, and the House of Representatives. This is because when the government was being created, states were much more independent than they are now, and there was a serious disagreement over how not only the people, but also the states would be represented in federal government.
So for the House, the number of Representatives each state sends is (roughly) proportional to that state's population; ie. a state with more people living in it will have more representatives than a state with fewer people living in it. The specifics have changed over time, and the way this system works is another issue, but that discussion is for another time.
However, smaller states, and (especially) states with slaves were concerned that even though they had a serious impact on the nation, they had a small voice in government. They wanted a system where their state was on equal footing with more populous states. Where just because they had less people (and by "people", in that time, they of course meant "land owning white male people"), they wouldn't have less power.
Thus there were two concessions given to these states to get them to join the union:
First, the three-fifths compromise: when determining population (to see how many representatives each state could send to the House), states were allowed to count each slave living in that state as three-fifths (0.6) of a person. Yes, these slaves, who their states regarded as property any other time, and who sure as hell weren't allowed to vote...were nonetheless to be allowed to count toward how much voting power their owners would have.
And second...the Senate. The Senate is the other house of Congress, where instead of determining members by population, it's much simpler: every state gets two. Regardless of population. This puts the smallest state on equal footing with the largest in the Senate.
And since both chambers of Congress (the Senate and the House) must pass a bill in order for it to become law, this is why it's so hard to get anything done for Congress.
SO!
Now that we know about the house and Senate and why and how they are the way they are... what's that have to do with the electoral college?
Well...the number of electors from each state are determined by adding up the number of Representatives and Senators that the state sends to Congress. So a small population state like say, Wyoming has one representative because very few people live there...and they get two senators because they are a state and all states get two. 2 + 1 = 3. So in a presidential election, Wyoming gets 3 electoral votes. For a more populous state, like my home state of Pennsylvania, we've got 17 representatives. Adding our two senators to that means that Pennsylvania gets 19 electoral votes for president.
Adding up all these electoral votes, it works out such that whichever candidate gets 270 electoral votes wins the presidency.
So you might be thinking, "Hmm... sounds like proportional voting and democracy with extra steps... what's the big deal?"
Well... there's two issues going on:
First: It's only proportional in allocation, but not so much in casting those votes. Of all 50 states, all but two (Maine and Nebraska) are set up such that whoever wins the state wins all of that state's electoral votes. So take my Pennsylvania for example: we've got about 13 million people living here. Obviously not everyone can vote, and not everyone that can vote will vote, but if next month, let's say all 13 million of us vote...if 12,999,999 people vote for Trump and 1 person votes for Harris, Trump wins all 19 votes. That makes sense. However, if Trump gets 6,500,001 votes and Harris gets 5,999,999 votes, that two vote difference means that Trump still gets all 19 votes. We don't split them so that he gets 10 and she gets 9. Winner take all.
Not only does this distort the popular vote, but it also has the effect of making a narrow victory in one area the same as a landslide in another.
Second: With the way votes are allocated, the fewest that any state can have is three (one representative and two senators). Even if ten people lived in that state, they still get three votes in the electoral college. Meanwhile, with the way congressional laws work, states with bigger populations do get more representatives...but as a state's population gets bigger and bigger, even though they get more electoral votes, each of those votes encompasses more and more people.
So looking (approximately) at Wyoming and California: Wyoming has a population of 582,000 and gets 3 votes, California has a population of 39,000,000 and gets 54 votes. That means that every vote in Wyoming represents about 194,000 residents, while every vote in California represents about 723,000 residents.
Doing the math, this means that every vote in Wyoming carries about 3.73x more power than a vote in California.
So in summary: the biggest criticisms of the electoral college are:
The lopsided way votes are allocated in the first place.
The winner-take-all system awarding the same number of votes for a landslide and a narrow victory distorting the actual voting numbers.
The lopsided allocation resulting in a situation where some Americans living in low population states having dramatically more power than others, based simply on where they live.
Of course these issues lead to lots of other weirdness and wrongness...for example: with the winner take all system, candidates don't even try to win states that are projected to safely go to one candidate or the other...they focus all attention on "battleground" states where the election is set to be close, ignoring millions of people nationwide because they happen to live in a state that's not competitive. A national popular vote would eliminate state political boundaries and make everyone's vote matter equally.
Likewise, this is how you end up with a case like 2016: more people voted for Hillary Clinton than Donald Trump...but those people lived in the wrong states, so basically she won by bigger margins but the margins meant nothing because he won narrow victories in more areas...so even though more people wanted her to be president, because of the electoral college, he got enough votes in the right geographical areas to win the presidency with fewer votes.
No, you get a number of votes equal to your total representatives in Congress, so it's a compromise between population size and statehood, as the House is based on population and every state gets two votes in the Senate.
The problem is that the votes are really electors. The specifics of that get beyond ELI5 because it's largely up to the states individually but in general whoever wins the popular vote of a state is supposed to get all of their votes.
And to quickly expand on that with my little knowledge (I haven't confirmed this yet), states can decide to throw all of their electors for one candidate if that state gets a majority in the electorate.
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Why do we keep having this discussion when IT WONT ever happen? It's a grift at this point. A boogie man to raise funds against, like Trump.
Abolishing the Electoral College would require the approval of some of the states that would lose power.
The only way it happens is if we pay them off for their vote.
He'll never mention it again after the election.
He got his state on the national popular vote interstate compact as govenor. He's talked about it before and done more than most to make the popular vote a reality
Without a constitutional amendment, the electoral college is going nowhere.
The popular vote compact is a work around that doesn't require constitutional ammendment. It's an agreement to put their states delegates vote toward the winner of the national popular vote. (And only goes into effect once a majority of the electoral votes have signed on to it)
So far 209 of the needed 270 electoral votes have already signed on
The national popular vote interstate compact is a pipe dream.
In the extremely unlikely event it is ever enacted, it will be dissolved as soon as a supporting state realizes it is likely to affect the outcome of the upcoming election.
If it ever actually affects an election, it will likely be deemed unconstitutional at the supreme court.
Even if it is not deemed unconstitutional, states bound to vote against their own voters will withdraw from it immediately.
At most, it will directly affect no more than one election, and probably not in the direction expected.
There's still the electoral college which needs to go, creating a half-assed workaround which could easily be dissolved is not a fix. It's nothing other than a spit and a handshake
It's more than a "handshake". States are actually passing laws for this. Plus there's nothing stopping you from going above 270 electoral votes
Once it's been in effect for a while, it would make a formal constitutional ammendment to fully remove it a lot easier to get though
Once it's been in effect for a while
It will never be in effect "for awhile". If they ever get to 270, it will last one election cycle at most. More likely, it will be dissolved between the time it comes into effect and the first general election afterward.
Guess you all are fine with having everything decided by a few states. I for one am not willing to end up with rle by the Mob.
Without the E.C., no presidential candidate will go to any Midwest state, southeast or the southwest. Politics will not matter in DC for any state past the coasts.
The system we have was designed so that instead of one group taking over we have to find common ground. Checks and Balances are important for keeping it in the middle ground. Just because it may help in one way, doesn't mean it can be used against the Democrats in the future.
I'm as far left as they come, but I don't think gutting the system for short term gains will help. We should increase the House due to thensize, but I think we should go back to a senate chosen by the state and not having senate elections. It has so far turned the senate into another popularity body instead of people being able to pass laws without regard of electioneering.
Guess you all are fine with having everything decided by a few states.
No, we're not, hence why we want to abolish the EC.
The purpose of the EC is to undermine the popular vote and to make sure we are ruled by a few states. The reason it exists is because slave states wouldn't join the union without a method to ensure they could control the president and protect the institution of slavery. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is just a rule that (when enough states sign on to make up the majority) their electoral college votes go to whichever candidate won the most votes, not how much dirt is controlled by states who voted for a candidate.
The fact that more people live in some areas should not mean their votes are worth less, like is the case for the EC. Why should someone in the Midwest be more valuable as a citizen than someone in, for example, California? Please don't respond if you can't answer that question.
Could it be that you are a Stalinist or something similar and have a deep hatred for democracy? Cause no electoral collage is more democratic and having senat elections is also more democratic then having them indirectly elected by the state legislators.
Obviously this changes the electoral landscape a lot, as presidental candidates no longer just have to care about voters in a few states, but the entire country. Again making it more democratic. It would also give the Democrats an advantage, but not an insane one. It however does give Republican voters in blue states and Democrat voters in red states a voice as well, instead of being ignored.
Yes Stalin famously implemented an electoral college.
The only reasonable explanation for an American to support the EC is claim it's democratic is him being a Stalinist or a Russian sock puppet.
Couldn't be an American internalizing USA's own jingoistic propaganda about how it is the most democratic and free state etc.
Always somebody else's fault.
Anybody who claims to be as far left as they come, tends to be not very fed up on USA propaganda. They also do not tend to be Russian stock puppets.
I’m not sure I agree the EC has to go; it definitely has to change, but it also does provide protections — just ones that aren’t currently at issue with the present political climate.
Combined with the PV compact and a ranked vote system, it could actually become a more relevant part of the process.
What kind of protections?
It feels like the only protections the EC provides is to the GOPs ability to win the presidency. I agree with Walz, the EC needs to go, it's too easy to game by focusing on swing states.
The ec Is so anti democratic. It does need to go
What it was designed for, to protect the slave states and provide another barrier to populist movements.
Also the EC will never be abolished, despite whatever candidates promise every 4 years. It's too useful.
While there's plenty of criticism of the constitution along slavery lines, this isn't one of them. Sorting the 1790 census by total population and then comparing the percentage of slave population, you'll see that it's very mixed. If the EC were to protect slavery, we would expect states with a high slave population to have a lower population overall, but that isn't the case.
Also of note is that only two states (Maine and Massachusetts) had zero slaves. There were a handful of house slaves in almost every state at the time. Those states didn't have a heavy economic dependence on slavery, though. It's the southern states, with their whole economy built around plantation slavery, that are the real problem. But again, they don't line up in ways that would give them an EC edge.
No, its a pretty well documented critique. The EC increased the South's delegates by a huge margin.
Except it doesn't check out when you break down the numbers.
Right from the get-go, the Electoral College has produced no shortage of lessons about the impact of racial entitlement in selecting the president. History buffs and Hamilton fans are aware that in its first major failure, the Electoral College produced a tie between Thomas Jefferson and his putative running mate, Aaron Burr.
The EC in the 1800 election was 73/65 in favor of Jefferson. The popular vote was 60% in Jefferson's favor, but he got 53% of the EC. If anything, the EC put him at a disadvantage.
The tie spoken of above was a technical issue between Jefferson and his intended Vice President, Aaron Burr. It doesn't have much to do with slavery at all. They were trying to hack around the system of setting the second place winner as Vice President, and it blew up in their face. Burr was always intended by the Democratic-Republicans to be Vice President.
The 12th amendment was passed before the next election to do away with that means of selecting the Vice President. It was ratified by both slave and free states. It was rejected by Delaware and Connecticut, both of which had <10% of their population as slaves in the 1800 Census (only three states had zero slaves by then).
Adams was by far more consistently against slavery compared to Jefferson. You can find writings where Jefferson was against it, but his actions plainly speak otherwise. Adams never owned a slave and even avoided employing them secondhand. Which is about as difficult as avoiding products from tobacco industry subsidiaries today.
Adams lost, but he would have lost with or without the EC.
Anything that happens later (which is where the article goes after the above) isn't particularly relevant to how the EC was intended to work. The population dynamics and entry of new states couldn't have been predicted at the time.
The three-fifths compromise, though? Absolute fucking evil. Adams maybe wins the EC in 1800 without that, and (more importantly) Congress would certainly look very different. The EC was, if anything, a counterbalance to the three-fifths compromise, though not a very strong one.
The EC should go away because it's antidemocratic. The argument that it was for slavery, though, just doesn't add up.
The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States. It will not be too strong to say, that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue. And this will be thought no inconsiderable recommendation of the Constitution, by those who are able to estimate the share which the executive in every government must necessarily have in its good or ill administration. Though we cannot acquiesce in the political heresy of the poet who says: "For forms of government let fools contest That which is best administered is best,'' yet we may safely pronounce, that the true test of a good government is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.
In other words, it's supposed to stop someone like Trump from ever being President. Since that clearly failed, maybe we should junk the whole thing.
Even this is generous. The Federalist Papers, IMO, should be taken as a way to sell the new constitution to the populace. They make it sound like the whole thing was more well thought out than it really was. The constitution that came out is just the compromise everyone could live with after debating it for hours. Politicians back then aren't that different from today; they have their own agendas, their own ambitions, and their own squabbles. They also get tired after long debates and will vote for anything as long as it gets them out of there.
On top of that, a good chunk of what they were thinking at the time--which you can see echos of in the quote above--was deflecting criticism that democracy couldn't work. The US was the first modern democracy, and there were plenty of aristocrats in Europe (and even some useful idiots domestically) who laughed off the idea of a government run by peasants. The result is a system that doesn't go all in on democracy, and has all these little exceptions. "No, no, see, the electoral college will stop a populist idiot from taking executive power".
We've changed a lot of those over the years, such as electing senators rather than having them appointed by state governors. In hindsight, these were not necessary at all. It's time for the electoral college to go.
To be honest, I’m not sure it applies.
The electoral college is an institution where electors cast votes to elect the President. In theory, it allows electors to choose a different president if the population chooses someone terrible.
It’s not /supposed/ to favor red states. However the formula for counting number of electors relies on the number of representatives in the house. That is fixed at 435 by law. To fix the electoral college, we’d have to remove that cap and it would work the way the founders intended.
But then, you’d need a helluva lot of dissenters to change. Is it possible? Sure. Is this system built for current day population and densities? Arguably not
I did some math assuming lowest population is 1 seat and rounding to the nearest whole number based on 2020 census using that factor.
We should have 574 seats with 676 electors. I didn’t include Puerto Rico or overseas who didn’t claim a state.
Today each state decides how to assign their electors. In my uneducated opinion for the system to be fixed, rather than states being "winner take all", it would make more sense for each state to allocate electors in proportion to the popular vote within their state.
Would be easier to just get rid of the damn thing
It’s not /supposed/ to favor red states. However the formula for counting number of electors relies on the number of representatives in the house. That is fixed at 435 by law. To fix the electoral college, we’d have to remove that cap and it would work the way the founders intended.
We'd also have to end the popular vote and have all the states go back to having Electors appointed by the state legislatures. That's what the founders really intended: something more akin to how prime ministers are chosen within a parliamentary system, but with added Federalism by delegating it to the states rather than Congress.
That whole Federalism part of it, which comes from the initial concept of the US being a confederation of sovereign States (kinda like the EU is now) rather than the single sovereign entity it's mostly become, really was designed to balance power between large-population states and small ones at least a little bit, though. As such, I can't entirely agree with your first sentence.
Except the scotus recently ruled that electors have to abide by the laws of the state that require them to vote a certain way, so the idea that they are free to vote as they wish is gone.
And part of the reason why it was implemented is that the population in the north was way bigger than the south, and so they were trying to make it more even where southern States would have more representation, so in a way it was meant to "protect red states."
It's important to note that the human populations of northern and southern states were fairly close to even, but the south decided that anyone with a bit too much melanin was property, not a human with rights and a vote....and they were very reluctant to give up that system.
True. I should have been more clear and said voting population. I think the population in the south exceeded the north if you count slaves, which is why they only counted 3/5ths.
Another strike against the EC - no other country uses one. If it really provided protections, surely another country would have adopted it by now? It's hardly a secret formula or anything.
It makes sure white people never lose political control of the country.
It absolutely must go - fuck the EC with a rusty fucking spork.
Consider the possiblity that the president will be elected by the popular vote. That might be dangerous
And, when the president is elected against the popular vote? Like in 2016?
It protected a business-friendly candidate from one that was supported by women and minorities. The system worked perfectly.
2000 too. Not to mention that in 1980 the electoral college did not protect us from a populist fascist. So I'm not really sure what good Electoral College is. If it doesn't do the thing the people say it's supposed to do. Even though all it was ever supposed to do was to protect slave states and conservative power. Which is all it's ever done.
I thought the issue with the 2000 election was because of SCOTUS.
Not a yank, and wasn't amping for the 1980s, but I appreciate your insights!
A lot went on in 2000. One was the electoral vote didn't match the popular. Another was that the automatic counting machines rejected good ballots due to error in Florida. The spread was close enough to trigger a recount. After the first machine recount gore requested a hand recount. The Republicans running Florida threw up every barrier they could. I belive gore was up in the hand recount and likely to win it, but they moved the date up and stated they would reject recounts not finished. The Supreme Court upheld the date, which had been chosen to be impossible to meet.
2000 was only close due to the electoral college. The supreme court fuck up didn't help of course. Without the Electoral College Reagan or bush senior would have been the last Republican presidents we had. Because I think they were the last two to win the popular vote.
Everyone's vote having the same weight, and our elections not being a competition to win a handful of battleground states while ignoring the rest of the country? Don't threaten me with a good time.
The leader might be elected DEMOCRATICALLY? The horror
If the majority of Americans vote for Trump then America is a failed state.
This was the video that made me passionate that the electoral college needs to go. It is a dumb system that seemed good at the time, but makes literally no sense today.
The EC is undemocratic, but the Republican Party would never be able to win the presidency if it was decided by pure popular vote. So, it will never go or even change.
Then, one would argue that the republican party should not government if they are unable to garner the requisit amount of votes!
But they are currently in enough of government to block any move that removes their advantage.
Yup
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.
And the corrollary, those who ignore peaceful protest signal that only violence will be recognized.
Sending one person to Washington to speak on behalf of a arbitrarily chosen group (and not even have to respect their choices) is an antiquated system from the days we sent representative by horseback..
You haven't even given a reason you think it shouldn't go away. The only reason to keep it would be to exploit it.. it's a ridiculous system.
California gets 54 electoral votes; Wyoming gets 3.
California has 38.94 million citizens; Wyoming has 0.575 million.
California gets one electoral vote for every 721,110 people. Wyoming gets one for every 191,660. This means that per capita, Wyoming gets 3.76 times as much say in who gets to be the president as California.
Indeed. Scrap electoral college and remove the arbitrary cap on House reps.
Don’t forget to implement proportional representation in the House, blow up the senate, and implement ranked choice voting or something similar in all elections
I think thats what they meant?
If you're thinking about proportional representation, that's a separate thing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation
That is it's own different thing yes, but the house members were supposed to be proportional to the USA population, except they capped it and it's out of whack now.
Instead smaller states have out proportioned power.
Made up numbers, but in some states it might be 100k people per house member, and another state it's 300k people.
I thought you were conflating these two. If not, then I have no idea what you were talking about when you said
I’m talking about actual proportional representation, single member house districts are way too easy to gerrymander
And that's even before the bullshit that is swing states.
Aka FPTP wasting votes in most USA states since someone thought it great idea to issue electors as state size blocks. When Constitution gives each state right to decide ways of apportioning their awarded electors.
State starts awarding 3 democrat electors and 7 Republican electors and suddenly both parties care to entice voters to try to make it 2 and 8 or 4 and 6.
Doesn't even take removing the electoral college. Just state deciding "state wide FPTP is stupid", we are going to start using something more proportional.
Even in swing states it would still work, work better. Since there would be fight over is it 5 and 5 or 6 and 4.
Yeah, there is a laundry list of ways to improve the current system. It just sucks that so little progress is being made.
Problem is that without giving smaller states a bit more weight than their population, you risk loosing them, because they have no means to weigh in. Thats why in the EU smaller countries also have more representatives relative to their population.
For the US, if only the coasts would have political power in the federal level, the mid would have a lot of motivation to fuck things up for them.
This isn't the electoral college causing the problem. It's Congress capping the size of the house 100 years ago. It needs to be increased, but it won't happen without force as it requires Congress to agree to reduce their individual power.
sigh
Yes, it is the EC causing the problem. You'll never get 1:1 with it in place no matter what congress does.
There's 0 reason the president, representative of all people, should use this shitty system for election
It's a federalist Republic, direct democracy is the opposite of the design.
This isn't direct democracy, we aren't voting on every issue that would otherwise come across the presidents desk. We are still electing representatives to make decisions on our behalf.
We are still a federation of states (federalist) represented by elected decision making leaders (Republic).
Our current system is far more direct than intended. The masses weren't supposed to pick senators and presidents, that isolated from populist candidates. Leaning even harder to systems vulnerable to populism is a poor choice.
I don’t care what it was meant to be. I really don’t. What it is is bullshit.
We don't have to stick with the original design, the founders were in no way perfect
We should have a good reason to to swap, especially to something they purposely avoided.
And we do. It seems silly to hold their wishes in such high regard compared to our own anyway though, we know more about how our system works in practice than they did when thinking of it after all, both because things dont often go completely as planned and we have the actual experience of using the result for a significant time, and because the system has been already changed in various ways already over that time.
What is the good reason to keep it? That our slave-driving wealthy elite founders were infallible?
Tread on me harder, daddy.
A good reason like the current system not actually being representative of the will of the people?
Sure but I don't think anyone could look at it and critically think the current system is for the benefit of the common man in any way shape or form.
It was designed to prevent Trump, instead Trump happened. That's a flaw in our current system that needs to be fixed.
The Electoral College is allowing more an more manipulation from these small states. It is time for that to end. They are holding this country back much too much.
As a pretty left person who lives in Tennessee, please get rid of it. Anytime I have this conversation with folks on the right, I always point out that there are more Republican voters in California than Texas. That usually gets them to concede.
Brilliant.
Of course, there's no guarantee republicans would understand the point.
Republicans aren't any dumber than Democrats, they're just more evil.
ONE PERSON
ONE VOTE
ONE CAGE
ONE BELT
ONE CHAMPION
SUNDAY
SUNDAY
SUNDAY
MONSTER TRUCK!
As an Alabamian I dream of the day that my vote actually matters, fuck the electoral college.
As a Washingtonian I also dream of that. It is ridiculous that only people in states that are kinda purple have their opinions heard.
I'd prefer at least to maintain districts, 1 vote for 1 district, remove states and the extra two votes. Each district exactly the same number of people, give or take 1%. Give the low populated counties out in the boonies a chance to be heard.
But failing that, straight popular vote is a better option than the current cluster fuck.
If it is equal representation, why does having districts make the rural vote heard? Whether it is one person one vote or 100,000 people one vote it won’t make a difference.
Everyone will still have their representatives and senators to hear them. In fact I think we need to increase the number of representatives. It needs to be a number that a person can reasonably represent. Say 50 or 100 thousand people per representative. This would also help with gerrymandering as having a lot of small districts would make everyone’s voice louder.
But for national positions like the president, we should have proportional votes, preferably with getting rid of first past the post that got us stuck with the two party system to start with.
Congress of going to need to expand a little bit, if all 3,330-6,660 reps should be able to gather at the same time.
This would be a problem if it were 1924, but we're living in 2024. The solutions for this are right in front of us and have been for decades. Get all these guys and gals on a secure teleconference and turn the Capitol building into a museum, or renovate it to have smaller private offices.
There, now we can get 10,000 reps in if we need to. The bigger concern is how are they going to decide who gets to speak with that many representatives. They can't realistically give everybody equal floor time and expect government to be anything other than completely paralyzed. So the number probably still needs to be capped, but it should be capped at a value where whatever the state that has the lowest population sets the value at 1 and every other state divides their population by that number to figure out how many representatives they get.
There was an article (Archive Link) in The Washington Post discussing the nuts and bolts of how expanded representation could work. It wouldn't be hard.
A quote from the article: To my surprise and delight, the team’s last proposal reveals that we could actually take the House of Representatives up to 1,725 members without having to construct a new building.
Districts open things up to gerrymandering..
Which is a problem that needs to be solved regardless.
Absolutely, but let's not make it worse by putting the presidential election behind it... It's bad enough it causes an imbalance in the House of Representatives. It would be far worse than the Electoral College.
Trump in 2012: The electoral college is garbage and needs to go. Trump in 2016: The electoral college is genius. What a great system. Trump in 2020: The electoral college is garbage and needs to go
I remember his tweets each time.
Yup, I understand it was meant to give smaller states an equal voice but he GOP weaponized it and now the minority is speaking for the majority. Tell me the system isn't broken when ONE vote in shitty red state Wyoming is equal to TEN THOUSAN VOTES in Blue California?
Weaponized.. sounds dangerous..
100% correct.
Hey hey! Ho ho! The electoral college has got to go!
The EC should go. It's possible for someone to become president with as little as 27% of the popular vote.
I'm glad someone is saying it! Stupid ass lines on a map determines who becomes president
Can we get rid of the senate too?
As a Canadian, can anyone ELi5 how the electoral college works? Is it like every state gets the same amount of votes regardless of population?
It's really impossible to keep this brief, but I'll try to keep it understandable:
The EC is a body of "electors", who serve as an intermediary body between the direct democracy of a popular national vote and the actual selection of a president. Their purpose is literally and intentionally to serve as a middleman, both to give a safety net to the ruling classes to make sure that whoever wins an election is someone they approve of, as well as to install a system that takes a national popular vote and basically applies an overlay to it...an overlay that leaves the process open to manipulation, stacking the odds, etc.
I'm not just saying this as a criticism of the system (though it is), this is the explicit purpose of the existence of the system.
Now to the nuts and bolts:
The US has a federal government with three branches: the executive (headed up by the president and including all of the various "Departments" like the departments of State (handling all diplomatic affairs), Defense (the military), Justice Department (FBI), Interior (National Park Service), Education, Agriculture, Homeland Security, etc.
Then there's the Judicial Branch, which is the federal court system, spearheaded by the Supreme Court. In addition to criminal trials involving federal crimes, they also have the responsibility of deciding on whether laws or actions of other government bodies are constitutional. If not, they have the authority to strike them down.
Last there's the legislative branch, which is responsible for creating laws and deciding how to spend money. Within the legislative branch, there are two bodies: the Senate, and the House of Representatives. This is because when the government was being created, states were much more independent than they are now, and there was a serious disagreement over how not only the people, but also the states would be represented in federal government.
So for the House, the number of Representatives each state sends is (roughly) proportional to that state's population; ie. a state with more people living in it will have more representatives than a state with fewer people living in it. The specifics have changed over time, and the way this system works is another issue, but that discussion is for another time.
However, smaller states, and (especially) states with slaves were concerned that even though they had a serious impact on the nation, they had a small voice in government. They wanted a system where their state was on equal footing with more populous states. Where just because they had less people (and by "people", in that time, they of course meant "land owning white male people"), they wouldn't have less power.
Thus there were two concessions given to these states to get them to join the union:
First, the three-fifths compromise: when determining population (to see how many representatives each state could send to the House), states were allowed to count each slave living in that state as three-fifths (0.6) of a person. Yes, these slaves, who their states regarded as property any other time, and who sure as hell weren't allowed to vote...were nonetheless to be allowed to count toward how much voting power their owners would have.
And second...the Senate. The Senate is the other house of Congress, where instead of determining members by population, it's much simpler: every state gets two. Regardless of population. This puts the smallest state on equal footing with the largest in the Senate.
And since both chambers of Congress (the Senate and the House) must pass a bill in order for it to become law, this is why it's so hard to get anything done for Congress.
SO!
Now that we know about the house and Senate and why and how they are the way they are... what's that have to do with the electoral college?
Well...the number of electors from each state are determined by adding up the number of Representatives and Senators that the state sends to Congress. So a small population state like say, Wyoming has one representative because very few people live there...and they get two senators because they are a state and all states get two. 2 + 1 = 3. So in a presidential election, Wyoming gets 3 electoral votes. For a more populous state, like my home state of Pennsylvania, we've got 17 representatives. Adding our two senators to that means that Pennsylvania gets 19 electoral votes for president.
Adding up all these electoral votes, it works out such that whichever candidate gets 270 electoral votes wins the presidency.
So you might be thinking, "Hmm... sounds like proportional voting and democracy with extra steps... what's the big deal?"
Well... there's two issues going on:
First: It's only proportional in allocation, but not so much in casting those votes. Of all 50 states, all but two (Maine and Nebraska) are set up such that whoever wins the state wins all of that state's electoral votes. So take my Pennsylvania for example: we've got about 13 million people living here. Obviously not everyone can vote, and not everyone that can vote will vote, but if next month, let's say all 13 million of us vote...if 12,999,999 people vote for Trump and 1 person votes for Harris, Trump wins all 19 votes. That makes sense. However, if Trump gets 6,500,001 votes and Harris gets 5,999,999 votes, that two vote difference means that Trump still gets all 19 votes. We don't split them so that he gets 10 and she gets 9. Winner take all.
Not only does this distort the popular vote, but it also has the effect of making a narrow victory in one area the same as a landslide in another.
Second: With the way votes are allocated, the fewest that any state can have is three (one representative and two senators). Even if ten people lived in that state, they still get three votes in the electoral college. Meanwhile, with the way congressional laws work, states with bigger populations do get more representatives...but as a state's population gets bigger and bigger, even though they get more electoral votes, each of those votes encompasses more and more people.
So looking (approximately) at Wyoming and California: Wyoming has a population of 582,000 and gets 3 votes, California has a population of 39,000,000 and gets 54 votes. That means that every vote in Wyoming represents about 194,000 residents, while every vote in California represents about 723,000 residents.
Doing the math, this means that every vote in Wyoming carries about 3.73x more power than a vote in California.
So in summary: the biggest criticisms of the electoral college are:
The lopsided way votes are allocated in the first place.
The winner-take-all system awarding the same number of votes for a landslide and a narrow victory distorting the actual voting numbers.
The lopsided allocation resulting in a situation where some Americans living in low population states having dramatically more power than others, based simply on where they live.
Of course these issues lead to lots of other weirdness and wrongness...for example: with the winner take all system, candidates don't even try to win states that are projected to safely go to one candidate or the other...they focus all attention on "battleground" states where the election is set to be close, ignoring millions of people nationwide because they happen to live in a state that's not competitive. A national popular vote would eliminate state political boundaries and make everyone's vote matter equally.
Likewise, this is how you end up with a case like 2016: more people voted for Hillary Clinton than Donald Trump...but those people lived in the wrong states, so basically she won by bigger margins but the margins meant nothing because he won narrow victories in more areas...so even though more people wanted her to be president, because of the electoral college, he got enough votes in the right geographical areas to win the presidency with fewer votes.
No, you get a number of votes equal to your total representatives in Congress, so it's a compromise between population size and statehood, as the House is based on population and every state gets two votes in the Senate.
The problem is that the votes are really electors. The specifics of that get beyond ELI5 because it's largely up to the states individually but in general whoever wins the popular vote of a state is supposed to get all of their votes.
And to quickly expand on that with my little knowledge (I haven't confirmed this yet), states can decide to throw all of their electors for one candidate if that state gets a majority in the electorate.
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Why do we keep having this discussion when IT WONT ever happen? It's a grift at this point. A boogie man to raise funds against, like Trump.
Abolishing the Electoral College would require the approval of some of the states that would lose power.
The only way it happens is if we pay them off for their vote.
He'll never mention it again after the election.
He got his state on the national popular vote interstate compact as govenor. He's talked about it before and done more than most to make the popular vote a reality
Without a constitutional amendment, the electoral college is going nowhere.
The popular vote compact is a work around that doesn't require constitutional ammendment. It's an agreement to put their states delegates vote toward the winner of the national popular vote. (And only goes into effect once a majority of the electoral votes have signed on to it)
So far 209 of the needed 270 electoral votes have already signed on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
The national popular vote interstate compact is a pipe dream.
In the extremely unlikely event it is ever enacted, it will be dissolved as soon as a supporting state realizes it is likely to affect the outcome of the upcoming election.
If it ever actually affects an election, it will likely be deemed unconstitutional at the supreme court.
Even if it is not deemed unconstitutional, states bound to vote against their own voters will withdraw from it immediately.
At most, it will directly affect no more than one election, and probably not in the direction expected.
There's still the electoral college which needs to go, creating a half-assed workaround which could easily be dissolved is not a fix. It's nothing other than a spit and a handshake
It's more than a "handshake". States are actually passing laws for this. Plus there's nothing stopping you from going above 270 electoral votes
Once it's been in effect for a while, it would make a formal constitutional ammendment to fully remove it a lot easier to get though
It will never be in effect "for awhile". If they ever get to 270, it will last one election cycle at most. More likely, it will be dissolved between the time it comes into effect and the first general election afterward.
Guess you all are fine with having everything decided by a few states. I for one am not willing to end up with rle by the Mob.
Without the E.C., no presidential candidate will go to any Midwest state, southeast or the southwest. Politics will not matter in DC for any state past the coasts.
The system we have was designed so that instead of one group taking over we have to find common ground. Checks and Balances are important for keeping it in the middle ground. Just because it may help in one way, doesn't mean it can be used against the Democrats in the future.
I'm as far left as they come, but I don't think gutting the system for short term gains will help. We should increase the House due to thensize, but I think we should go back to a senate chosen by the state and not having senate elections. It has so far turned the senate into another popularity body instead of people being able to pass laws without regard of electioneering.
No, we're not, hence why we want to abolish the EC.
The purpose of the EC is to undermine the popular vote and to make sure we are ruled by a few states. The reason it exists is because slave states wouldn't join the union without a method to ensure they could control the president and protect the institution of slavery. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is just a rule that (when enough states sign on to make up the majority) their electoral college votes go to whichever candidate won the most votes, not how much dirt is controlled by states who voted for a candidate.
The fact that more people live in some areas should not mean their votes are worth less, like is the case for the EC. Why should someone in the Midwest be more valuable as a citizen than someone in, for example, California? Please don't respond if you can't answer that question.
Could it be that you are a Stalinist or something similar and have a deep hatred for democracy? Cause no electoral collage is more democratic and having senat elections is also more democratic then having them indirectly elected by the state legislators.
Obviously this changes the electoral landscape a lot, as presidental candidates no longer just have to care about voters in a few states, but the entire country. Again making it more democratic. It would also give the Democrats an advantage, but not an insane one. It however does give Republican voters in blue states and Democrat voters in red states a voice as well, instead of being ignored.
Yes Stalin famously implemented an electoral college.
The only reasonable explanation for an American to support the EC is claim it's democratic is him being a Stalinist or a Russian sock puppet.
Couldn't be an American internalizing USA's own jingoistic propaganda about how it is the most democratic and free state etc.
Always somebody else's fault.
Anybody who claims to be as far left as they come, tends to be not very fed up on USA propaganda. They also do not tend to be Russian stock puppets.
I’m not sure I agree the EC has to go; it definitely has to change, but it also does provide protections — just ones that aren’t currently at issue with the present political climate.
Combined with the PV compact and a ranked vote system, it could actually become a more relevant part of the process.
What kind of protections?
It feels like the only protections the EC provides is to the GOPs ability to win the presidency. I agree with Walz, the EC needs to go, it's too easy to game by focusing on swing states.
The ec Is so anti democratic. It does need to go
What it was designed for, to protect the slave states and provide another barrier to populist movements.
Also the EC will never be abolished, despite whatever candidates promise every 4 years. It's too useful.
While there's plenty of criticism of the constitution along slavery lines, this isn't one of them. Sorting the 1790 census by total population and then comparing the percentage of slave population, you'll see that it's very mixed. If the EC were to protect slavery, we would expect states with a high slave population to have a lower population overall, but that isn't the case.
Also of note is that only two states (Maine and Massachusetts) had zero slaves. There were a handful of house slaves in almost every state at the time. Those states didn't have a heavy economic dependence on slavery, though. It's the southern states, with their whole economy built around plantation slavery, that are the real problem. But again, they don't line up in ways that would give them an EC edge.
No, its a pretty well documented critique. The EC increased the South's delegates by a huge margin.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/electoral-colleges-racist-origins
Except it doesn't check out when you break down the numbers.
The EC in the 1800 election was 73/65 in favor of Jefferson. The popular vote was 60% in Jefferson's favor, but he got 53% of the EC. If anything, the EC put him at a disadvantage.
The tie spoken of above was a technical issue between Jefferson and his intended Vice President, Aaron Burr. It doesn't have much to do with slavery at all. They were trying to hack around the system of setting the second place winner as Vice President, and it blew up in their face. Burr was always intended by the Democratic-Republicans to be Vice President.
The 12th amendment was passed before the next election to do away with that means of selecting the Vice President. It was ratified by both slave and free states. It was rejected by Delaware and Connecticut, both of which had <10% of their population as slaves in the 1800 Census (only three states had zero slaves by then).
Adams was by far more consistently against slavery compared to Jefferson. You can find writings where Jefferson was against it, but his actions plainly speak otherwise. Adams never owned a slave and even avoided employing them secondhand. Which is about as difficult as avoiding products from tobacco industry subsidiaries today.
Adams lost, but he would have lost with or without the EC.
Anything that happens later (which is where the article goes after the above) isn't particularly relevant to how the EC was intended to work. The population dynamics and entry of new states couldn't have been predicted at the time.
The three-fifths compromise, though? Absolute fucking evil. Adams maybe wins the EC in 1800 without that, and (more importantly) Congress would certainly look very different. The EC was, if anything, a counterbalance to the three-fifths compromise, though not a very strong one.
The EC should go away because it's antidemocratic. The argument that it was for slavery, though, just doesn't add up.
Let's see what the founders had in mind:
In other words, it's supposed to stop someone like Trump from ever being President. Since that clearly failed, maybe we should junk the whole thing.
Even this is generous. The Federalist Papers, IMO, should be taken as a way to sell the new constitution to the populace. They make it sound like the whole thing was more well thought out than it really was. The constitution that came out is just the compromise everyone could live with after debating it for hours. Politicians back then aren't that different from today; they have their own agendas, their own ambitions, and their own squabbles. They also get tired after long debates and will vote for anything as long as it gets them out of there.
On top of that, a good chunk of what they were thinking at the time--which you can see echos of in the quote above--was deflecting criticism that democracy couldn't work. The US was the first modern democracy, and there were plenty of aristocrats in Europe (and even some useful idiots domestically) who laughed off the idea of a government run by peasants. The result is a system that doesn't go all in on democracy, and has all these little exceptions. "No, no, see, the electoral college will stop a populist idiot from taking executive power".
We've changed a lot of those over the years, such as electing senators rather than having them appointed by state governors. In hindsight, these were not necessary at all. It's time for the electoral college to go.
To be honest, I’m not sure it applies.
The electoral college is an institution where electors cast votes to elect the President. In theory, it allows electors to choose a different president if the population chooses someone terrible.
It’s not /supposed/ to favor red states. However the formula for counting number of electors relies on the number of representatives in the house. That is fixed at 435 by law. To fix the electoral college, we’d have to remove that cap and it would work the way the founders intended.
But then, you’d need a helluva lot of dissenters to change. Is it possible? Sure. Is this system built for current day population and densities? Arguably not
I did some math assuming lowest population is 1 seat and rounding to the nearest whole number based on 2020 census using that factor.
We should have 574 seats with 676 electors. I didn’t include Puerto Rico or overseas who didn’t claim a state.
Today each state decides how to assign their electors. In my uneducated opinion for the system to be fixed, rather than states being "winner take all", it would make more sense for each state to allocate electors in proportion to the popular vote within their state.
Would be easier to just get rid of the damn thing
We'd also have to end the popular vote and have all the states go back to having Electors appointed by the state legislatures. That's what the founders really intended: something more akin to how prime ministers are chosen within a parliamentary system, but with added Federalism by delegating it to the states rather than Congress.
That whole Federalism part of it, which comes from the initial concept of the US being a confederation of sovereign States (kinda like the EU is now) rather than the single sovereign entity it's mostly become, really was designed to balance power between large-population states and small ones at least a little bit, though. As such, I can't entirely agree with your first sentence.
Except the scotus recently ruled that electors have to abide by the laws of the state that require them to vote a certain way, so the idea that they are free to vote as they wish is gone.
And part of the reason why it was implemented is that the population in the north was way bigger than the south, and so they were trying to make it more even where southern States would have more representation, so in a way it was meant to "protect red states."
It's important to note that the human populations of northern and southern states were fairly close to even, but the south decided that anyone with a bit too much melanin was property, not a human with rights and a vote....and they were very reluctant to give up that system.
True. I should have been more clear and said voting population. I think the population in the south exceeded the north if you count slaves, which is why they only counted 3/5ths.
I'm curious too. The EC has a troubling history - it was invented because of slavery, https://time.com/4558510/electoral-college-history-slavery/
Another strike against the EC - no other country uses one. If it really provided protections, surely another country would have adopted it by now? It's hardly a secret formula or anything.
It makes sure white people never lose political control of the country.
It absolutely must go - fuck the EC with a rusty fucking spork.
Consider the possiblity that the president will be elected by the popular vote. That might be dangerous
And, when the president is elected against the popular vote? Like in 2016?
It protected a business-friendly candidate from one that was supported by women and minorities. The system worked perfectly.
2000 too. Not to mention that in 1980 the electoral college did not protect us from a populist fascist. So I'm not really sure what good Electoral College is. If it doesn't do the thing the people say it's supposed to do. Even though all it was ever supposed to do was to protect slave states and conservative power. Which is all it's ever done.
I thought the issue with the 2000 election was because of SCOTUS. Not a yank, and wasn't amping for the 1980s, but I appreciate your insights!
A lot went on in 2000. One was the electoral vote didn't match the popular. Another was that the automatic counting machines rejected good ballots due to error in Florida. The spread was close enough to trigger a recount. After the first machine recount gore requested a hand recount. The Republicans running Florida threw up every barrier they could. I belive gore was up in the hand recount and likely to win it, but they moved the date up and stated they would reject recounts not finished. The Supreme Court upheld the date, which had been chosen to be impossible to meet.
2000 was only close due to the electoral college. The supreme court fuck up didn't help of course. Without the Electoral College Reagan or bush senior would have been the last Republican presidents we had. Because I think they were the last two to win the popular vote.
Everyone's vote having the same weight, and our elections not being a competition to win a handful of battleground states while ignoring the rest of the country? Don't threaten me with a good time.
The leader might be elected DEMOCRATICALLY? The horror
If the majority of Americans vote for Trump then America is a failed state.
This was the video that made me passionate that the electoral college needs to go. It is a dumb system that seemed good at the time, but makes literally no sense today.
https://youtu.be/7wC42HgLA4k?si=sZ3pwgrXL2CYsZgk
The EC is undemocratic, but the Republican Party would never be able to win the presidency if it was decided by pure popular vote. So, it will never go or even change.
Then, one would argue that the republican party should not government if they are unable to garner the requisit amount of votes!
But they are currently in enough of government to block any move that removes their advantage.
Yup
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.
And the corrollary, those who ignore peaceful protest signal that only violence will be recognized.
Sending one person to Washington to speak on behalf of a arbitrarily chosen group (and not even have to respect their choices) is an antiquated system from the days we sent representative by horseback..
You haven't even given a reason you think it shouldn't go away. The only reason to keep it would be to exploit it.. it's a ridiculous system.