Of course it doesn't really matter. The Constitution means whatever you can bribe the Supreme Court to say it means. God Bless America.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_compact
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutionality_of_the_Natio...
That seems like it would inevitably fall apart.
Also present a lot of mystery about "they going to do it?" and then someone doesn't and someone else chooses something else.
Talk about a mess for democracy ...
States can pick any means of selecting their electors that doesn’t conflict with other provisions of the Constitution. Obviously, a state imposing a requirement that electors be white or male would not fly.
OK, so they choose to have a state election. It must be a fair election, affording due process to all the voters as that is Constitutionally understood (one person, one vote, for example).
“We’ll have an election, but if national results go a different way, we’ll throw out the votes of the ‘wrong’ voters,” is … not that.
An analogy: Could the southern states agree to a compact to elect their governors by party slate? I doubt that would pass muster, and neither would the popular vote compact.
Similarly in the other direction: aside from DC, the most Democratic state was Vermont, which ignored its 31% of voters choosing Trump.
Now consider that these are the most extreme states, and by definition, all other states ignored larger proportion of voters through winner-takes-all. Arizona had 49.36% D vs 49.06% R. Did the republican vote matter? Barely 10k more votes and the whole state decides all of its 11 votes are for Biden.
Yet somehow, no riots, no overthrowing state governments. (Yes yes we eventually had riots but that's a different issue - they were totally okay with the rules, they just didn't like the results.)
Popular vote is basically "Our state decided to choose what the majority of Americans want. The people have spoken, and chose candidate X. We're now honoring the decision." There's no reason why it should fall apart any more than the electoral college should.
It's not election changing if one state, lets say accidentally, allows people to vote twice. It could effect their local outcomes, but if everyone votes twice, it should net itself. However, a fair election of the president would be completely fucked.
Under popular vote, even the minimal vote margins are quite large because it's aggregated at the national scale - e.g., Kennedy defeated Nixon in 1960 with only 0.17% difference in popular vote, which was still 113K votes.
To sway that election, you would've had to organize across multiple states to find a way to smuggle 113K votes illegally, while not getting any suspicions from poll workers and people tabulating results. And non of your co-conspirators should ever divulge it. It's so ridiculous that it approaches "9/11 was an insider job" territory.
You propose a weakness in our election system where a conspiracy of state officials that wants to influence an election can control who is allowed to vote twice. If they can do this, they can already influence the outcome in their state.
Of course we see no such thing, because the elections are only administered at a state level, they are actually done at a local level, and there's quite a lot of observation and auditing that goes into verifying that things are done correctly.
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is a way to choose the president by popular vote without the overhead of removing the electoral college.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...
That is quite a bit different than the popular vote as you can see this year when Trump would have basically run the board of electoral college votes without that caveat.
If you overlay the existing states that have passed the NPVIC over what Harris won, all but MN went blue. If the compact was active for 2024 with the current participating states, Harris would have only received the VA and NH electoral wins for a total of 17 votes. Trump would have 521 votes.
States without strict voter id still have mechanisms to ensure people who vote are real people and that they vote once. Strict voter id is security theater, though it does not reduce turn-out, either.[4]
[1] https://votingrights.news21.com/article/election-fraud/
[2] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/4/26/15424270/v...
[3] https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/The...
Anyway, as I told in another comment, I'm not from the US, so my intention wasn't really to say how to implement the proposal. I just had this idea and wrote it down in a blog post.
In 2020 there were more Republican presidential votes in California (6,006,518[1]) than there were in Texas (5,890,347[2]). The Republican votes in California basically had no say in determining the outcome of the election. Was that fair to them?
There were more GOP votes in New York state (3,251,997[3]) than in Ohio (3,154,834[4]).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...
Ditto for, say, Oklahoma (straight R since 1968).
No, the local elections should - and will - be determined by those cities, the state elections should be determined by the inhabitants of the states and the federal elections by 'the states' in a weighted manner so as to make sure less densely populated states also have a say in all things federal. If you think this gives too much power to the less densely populated states I'd suggest this is caused by the idea of the federal state having too much power, not by the electoral college or anything related to it. Don't want to have people from 'fly-over states' to have a say in ${issue}? Make sure ${issue} is handled at the state or local level and those rednecks, deplorables, 'garbage' and hillbillies don't get to have a say in it while thanking you for keeping out of their affairs.
The federal state should be as small as possible and only busy itself in things which by their nature can not be handled at the local, county or state level. Nearly all if not all of the issues of importance to those who are in favour of having the popular vote decide who becomes president should be decided at state or lower level.
Additionally, why is it more fair for a voter in Wyoming to have 3x the electoral impact of a voter in California?
The latter is a particular problem borne from the fact that we've capped the size of the House at 435 in 1929, thus giving increasingly disproportionate power to low-population states in both the House and Electoral College as the difference in population between states continues to grow.
> but it certainly forces politicians to at least care what people in Iowa, Vermont, and Nevada have to say.
The problem is that it disincentivizes politicians to care about what people in deep blue or deep red states have to say, and there are many more of those than there are swing states. Both Democrat and Republican presidential candidates should have to campaign in all 50 states rather than a single-digit number of potential swing states.
Large cities grow their own cultures. People become alike in some aspects, and adopt similar ideologies. There’s no guarantee those people know what’s best for some village far away. There’s also no guarantee they wouldn’t vote to raid that village and put it to the torch, with 30 million votes against 2000.
I think it’s fair that sparsely populated areas get say in nationwide topics as well. When it comes to your longing for a system “more democratic”, well, the US is a constitutional republic and the founding fathers thought about this stuff long and hard.
... unless those cities are in Iowa, Vermont, and Nevada, in which case you're fine with it?
I mean, the EC is so unfair and undemocratic that Presidential candidates avoid states entirely where the political calculus says they simply won't matter. And it's ridiculous to assume that when a candidate does show up in a diner in Iowa to order whatever meal their campaign staff says will most appeal to the locals, work on an assembly line, or whatever, that they actually care about anything those voters have to say.
They don't have to care about the voters, they just have to care about the numbers. Remove the EC and the voters actually matter.
They have been trying to reform the electoral college for as long as there has been an electoral college, and all attempts have foundered for the simple reason that those that benefit from the power it gives them will block attempts at reform.
In any event, in this election the point is moot.
The first issue I would aim to address is the variance in voting power from district to district. In Wyoming, voters have a significantly lower constituent to elector ratio, ie greater voting power, than those in e.g. California.
This issue is a recent development due to the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, which fixed the number of reps in the House. As the population has grown, the distance between the average population vs the minimum population of a district has increased.
The remedy is to simply uncap the size of the house and increase the number of representatives. This would quantize the population over a greater number of electors thus reducing the remainder, resulting in relatively more equivalent voter power.
As an added benefit, it would increase the amount of access each voter has to their Representative in the House, and make it practically more difficult to corrupt a majority of the House members.
https://www.reddit.com/r/UncapTheHouse/comments/lklp4h/the_u...
The strongest response I have received to this suggestion is something like a fear about having more paid politicians. I don't see an increase in the number of legislators as the same as an increase in executive branch bureaucrats. I think part of the issue that does come to mind is how we fit twice as many reps in the capitol. I like the idea of having to adjust the size and arrangement of our legislative chamber. I also like the idea of addressing housing challenges; maybe its time to bring back the legislator bunkhouses. It becomes the reason to review and revise the existing standards for offices, housing, and even the culture of the house or representatives.
The better options is this, which will bring back the original intent of the US Constitution:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyoming_Rule
or the States Compact Option suggested by litoE above.
[1] https://fairvote.org/defining-the-spoiler-effect/ [2] https://electionlab.mit.edu/research/instant-runoff-voting
I’m curious about what other people think of this. I was once of the opinion that ranked choice voting (in the states that passed this reform) would lead to a renaissance in the viability of third parties there, but it hasn’t come to fruition. It led me to think that many Americans are actually content with having two parties.
A lot of people also end up running with no affiliation (for instance, for very local offices). They might align with some additional party in an ideological sense, but there probably isn't even a local organization to coordinate with.
What do you think about keeping the electoral college and use IRV instead?
And cities don't want to be governed by the outsized importance of small population states (Wyoming)
I think the electoral college is working as intended to balance out power between larger more powerful states and less powerful states. Though I also don’t believe the popular vote is necessarily ideal from the perspective of maintaining more diversity of thoughts and opinions which is useful for a healthy republic.
As someone who’s lived in mostly rural states I’m glad because it prevents places like California with large populations with pretty homogeneous opinions and world views to dominate the nations elections. I get folks in those larger states would also feel equally left out as well.
I view the electoral college as a means of accounting for the “entropy” of votes among states. There’s more diversity of thought and opinion between say a rural Wyoming farmer and a worker in Hawaii than there is among most Californians living in say the 50 square miles of Hollywood.
In a fashion it’s similar to how network effects dominate large in markets where companies lucky to get a market first or to grow first get an unfair network advantage. Antitrust and tax laws ideally gently balance out this winner-takes-effects to provide more diverse and robust markets. Most hyper successful companies aren’t necessarily better at what they do and there’s a large amount of luck in success. Of course they still have to work hard and be effective to capitalize on the opportunities. Similar things happen among states in the USA.
I oppose any change to the electoral college, including interstate collusion agreements.
The people I see get upset with it are hardcore Dem and Rep, depending on the year, who blame the failure to get elected on anyone except themselves.
I've read some of the reasons, but none sound good to me. What do you like about the electoral college?
It is also easy to forget that we are called the United States for a reason. We were more like the EU than we are like France...
Preventing the tyranny of the majority is what the separation of powers to executive (President), judiciary (Supreme Court), and legislative (Senate and House) was set up for.
Preventing domination of the small states by the large states was why the Senate and House were structured as they are.
- California has 38,940,231 inhabitants and 54 electors. That means 1 elector every 721,115 inhabitants - Oklahoma has 4,053,824 inhabitants and 7 electors, so 1 elector every 579,117 people.
And the Founders had far more nuanced opinions on this subject than modern right-wing politics tends to imply. Consider Federalist Papers #22:
"The right of equal suffrage among the States is another exceptionable part of the Confederation. Every idea of proportion and every rule of fair representation conspire to condemn a principle, which gives to Rhode Island an equal weight in the scale of power with Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York; and to Deleware an equal voice in the national deliberations with Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or North Carolina. Its operation contradicts the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail. Sophistry may reply, that sovereigns are equal, and that a majority of the votes of the States will be a majority of confederated America. But this kind of logical legerdemain will never counteract the plain suggestions of justice and common-sense. It may happen that this majority of States is a small minority of the people of America3; and two thirds of the people of America could not long be persuaded, upon the credit of artificial distinctions and syllogistic subtleties, to submit their interests to the management and disposal of one third. The larger States would after a while revolt from the idea of receiving the law from the smaller. To acquiesce in such a privation of their due importance in the political scale, would be not merely to be insensible to the love of power, but even to sacrifice the desire of equality. It is neither rational to expect the first, nor just to require the last. The smaller States, considering how peculiarly their safety and welfare depend on union, ought readily to renounce a pretension which, if not relinquished, would prove fatal to its duration."
It's still slavery slavery slavery. The tyranny of the majority the founding fathers were worried about was from Northern abolitionists. Framing this is abstract philosophical terms is disingenuous, the political and culture context of the time matters. The Electoral College would never have been conceived, much less enacted, if the preservation of slavery wasn't a non-negotiable term for Southern states to remain in the Union (and it eventually failed in that regard.)
If you're American living in one of the majority of states that aren't "swing" states, I don't think you can escape the feeling when you vote for president that you're going through a kind of charade since the winner is going to be determined by some small number of voters in 6 states.
I don't get the repeating of this perspective, didn't he win the popular vote this time? How did "small number of voters in 6 states" affect this reality?
Isn't winning the electoral college but not the popular vote a statistical minor occurrence? People don't know how to lose.
So if a few hundred thousand people had decided the other way, the electoral college would have gone to Harris, without really changing the popular vote outcome.
You may be imputing a position that the poster you replied to didn't take (they said voting in a state with predictable outcome feels like a charade, without saying anything about how they vote).
Completely agree. So much "stop the steal", fake electors" and storm the capitol nonsense.
What do you think about it?
PS: I'm not from the US, so an American perspective on that would be extremely appreciated :)
More interestingly, this scheme reduces party power inside states, so the incentive is for each individual state not to want to do it even though on the whole it's better, and instead the current status quo is the stable configuration, so getting states to want to do this is basically impossible. Think about it: if every state did this, then one state said "nope, we are winner take all again" that state could decide elections. So this is a system that is easy to implement by states, requires no US constitution amendments or anything like that, but works in such a way that no state would for fear others wouldn't. Interesting game theory here, it's very similar to a tragedy of the commons.
Alternatively, there's a proposed amendment to the US constitution called the equal apportionment amendment, that was passed 200 years ago but never ratified by the states, that changes the way the house of representatives is apportioned, such that among many other improvements, will change the way electors are apportioned in presidential elections. You don't need every state to ratify it because you only need 3/4ths of states to do so, many of which already have, it's binding on all so no worry about any one backing out, and you don't need congress to vote on it because they already did and voted yes centuries ago. It has other benefits too, like reducing the prevalence of 2 parties in the house and therefore elsewhere potentially, and increasing the fair distribution of representation in the house, which suffers from a similar problem as the electoral college.
Even if they decided to ament the constitution, you would still face another issue: now electoral system is written in the constitution, so it becomes even more difficult to change in the future.
What do you think about the system adopted by Maine and Nebraska instead?
Could you elaborate further?
And one could even ask, if it is electors who decide why not get them campaign? Not voting for president, but voting for person who votes for president. Isn't that the intention of EC anyway?
Because the United States was meant to be more like that than it was a country like say France.
The difference is MEPs are appointed proportionally within each state (so if a party gets 40% in a state, it will get ca. 40% of the state's MEPs)
Bad idea.
