As governor he got his state signed on to the national popular vote interstate compact
100% correct.
But without the electoral college, politicians would suddenly have to care about states with a lot of people living in them
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.
Can we get rid of the senate too?
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.
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.
It’s a great argument, and incredibly depressing that the only thing that will convince them is that it’s also their people are being hurt, not that it’s the most fair and just thing to do.
Brilliant.
Of course, there’s no guarantee republicans would understand the point.
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.
And that’s even before the bullshit that is swing states.
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
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.
What is the good reason to keep it? That our slave-driving wealthy elite founders were infallible?
Tread on me harder, daddy.
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.
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.
ONE PERSON
ONE VOTE
ONE CAGE
ONE BELT
ONE CHAMPION
SUNDAY
SUNDAY
SUNDAY
MONSTER TRUCK!
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.
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?
Just to be clear: Also, “states” don’t have a voice, only the people in them. Giving a state a disproportionate voice is exactly as just as it is giving its people a disproportionate voice. When the right uses that argument, it’s injustice laundering, it’s not a valid concern.
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
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
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.
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
Let’s see what the founders had in mind:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
It protected a business-friendly candidate from one that was supported by women and minorities. The system worked perfectly.
The leader might be elected DEMOCRATICALLY? The horror
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.
If the majority of Americans vote for Trump then America is a failed state.
Is that you, Alito?
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.
Historically, the EC protected the women’s suffrage movement. In a straight NPV, you couldn’t allow progressive states like Wyoming to just double their electoral influence by letting women vote until conservative states like Massachusetts are ready to do the same.
Maybe the modern equivalent is ranked choice voting reforms. Under EC, it’s no problem for Maine to choose electors by IRV, and if other states see it working, they might follow. Under a NPV, or even the NPVIC, they’d be forced to revert to a plurality system so their votes could be added to the national total.
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