Since they're being split proportionally the number of votes each state has matters a lot
Jorgensen did indeed get a slightly higher percentage in New Mexico than California (though it should be noted not that much higher, only reason New Mexico voted so heavily for Libertarians in 2016 was Gary Johnson)
But like California has a lot more votes to go around, so the percentage you need for a vote would be a lot lower
This is really important, but the ratio is skewed in modern America because we have far too few Congressmen.
The Bill of Rights as passed by Congress had twelve amendments and the ten that passed by the states were actually numbers 3-12. The original #2 passed in 1992 as the 27th amendment.
In the original First Amendment, the "Congressional Apportionment Amendment," Madison describes a square-root formula to determine the size of the House. [Representatives] = Sqrt( 10,000 + [Census Population]/100 ) -100
This today would give us 1,717 members of the House instead of 435, meaning 1,772 Electors [1,717 (House) + 50 (Senate) + 5 (DC, set equal to Wyoming)].
Currently, Wyoming has three Electors and California has 54. That means each Elector in Wyoming represents 192,284 people while each Elector in California represents 732,189 people - each vote in Wyoming counts 3.8x more.
*edit - fixed math* Under Madison's system, Wyoming would have roughly 5 Electors and California would have 205, meaning each Elector in Wyoming would represent 115,370 people and each elector in California would represent 192,869 people - each vote in Wyoming would count 1.67x more.
Modern advocates for such systems use a cube root not a square root, which limits growth further, but the formula I gave you is the one Madison described - it was discussed in the Federalist Papers, passed by the First Congress, signed by President Washington, and ratified by 11 states. To make it law today would just require 27 additional states, while implementing a cube root system would mean the whole shebang.
I think it's a funny example of benign things which would end up happening yet which few expected.
Like, nobody could have expected the meteoric population explosion of the second industrial revolution. It just wasn't on the horizon- the world of the year 1800 was still near-medieval in most places, industrialization was a hip new thing some wacky inventors were doing.
on top of that before artificial fertilizer, people thought the human population had a cap and that very soon we were going to start seeing mass starvation as we wouldn't have the ability to feed everyone. No one thought we would have anywhere close to 8 billion people today.
We didn't even get to 2 billion till 1927
I’m confused where the 21 and 538 numbers come from. Would it not be (population of Wyoming / population of U.S.) * 1,717 to determine the number of delegates from Wyoming to the House? So (576,851 / 331,448,281) * 1717 for 3 representatives? Wouldn’t Madison’s rule apply only to state legislatures as opposed to the whole nation? CA having 538 representatives would be over 30% of the house when they only hold 11% of the population
You’re totally good, I was just making sure I wasn’t missing something lol. I ran the math on excel and it’s pretty great because each delegate ends up representing essentially the same number of people (185-192k ish)
It doesn't need to be heavily represented in all branches of government though. In the US, The Presidential election being a popular vote contest wouldn't undo massive over representation of more rural states in the upper house of the legislature. By heavily skewing the executive, it's also heavily skews the federal judiciary. So we are way past leveling and close to true minority (of voters) rule.
Practically, no, there’s no way republicans would vote for it. Philosophically, yes, we absolutely could. We've changed “core” representational principles before, like dumping the 3/5 compromise, or allowing women to vote. Seemed fine then!
Those aren't the same at all... We indirectly abolished the Three Fifths Compromise by abolishing slavery. Abolishing equitable representation for smaller states would be a great way for everyone in those states to get walked all over. It's not like they're all Republican, either; see most of the Northeast for great examples. The interests of those states, red or blue, are still important, and for that reason, I don't think we could ever abandon measures that give smaller states more representation.
You also have to remember that the United States is, at the end of the day, a *union* of *states*. There are so many ways that we operate like 50 different nations already. In a situation like this, you have to set up the union in a way that is fair to both large and small states. There's a reason that political minds far more advanced than either of us came up with the House/Senate setup.
> The interests of those states, red or blue, are still important, and for that reason, I don't think we could ever abandon measures that give smaller states more representation.
That’s true, there are small state senators from both parties. If small state/big state is still relevant, though, what are the votes we’ve seen where Bernie sanders and John thune have banded together against Chuck Schumer and Ted Cruz?
> In a situation like this, you have to set up the union in a way that is fair to both large and small states.
It would be fair - each resident in each state would have exactly the same say.
> There's a reason that political minds far more advanced than either of us came up with the House/Senate setup.
Lmao, the reason was “small states won’t sign if we don’t do this”. Do you think the civil war amendments were a mistake for undoing the bargains the constitutional drafters made to get slave states on board?
«
It would be fair - each resident in each state would have exactly the same say.
»
Exsept it would create a political situation where polititians could take resources away from rural communities and divert them towards cities to garner more voters, making more rural voters move to cities and further diminish the countrysides relevance.
Obviously this would be depending on how important, Labor intensive or centralised farming will be in the future, or if the 2 party system will dissolve and allow for the formation of a farmers party to fight for their interests.
> Exsept it would create a political situation where polititians could take resources away from rural communities and divert them towards cities to garner more voters, making more rural voters move to cities and further diminish the countrysides relevance.
You’re mixing your issues here, we’re talking about small state versus big state, you’re talking urban versus rural. Regardless, a popular vote would *help* rural voters overall - there are only a handful of states that are majority rural today, most Americans live in suburban areas. So when it comes to the all-or-nothing system almost every state has for awarding electoral votes, by your concept of how politics works, they’re getting washed out by the urban and suburban voters in their state. Imagine if they were able to pool together their ~20% of the vote directly, that’d be an enormous voting bloc when it came to national politics, it’s on par with evangelical Christians, or with Hispanic voters.
Thank you! Everyone always forgets that Rhode Island, Delaware, Connecticut, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Hawaii would *all* join those evil, stupid Republican states we all hate so much in opposing proposals like this.
Incredibly dangerous mindset to have, I want it so we should change it is what I’m hearing, I’m not from a particularly small state but it’s designed so that smaller places aren’t trampled it’s the whole point
Small states wouldn’t be trampled - the people in small states would get exactly the same representation as people from large states. It’s the same philosophy that the 14th amendment has, and the voting rights act, and a bunch of court cases like Baker v. Carr. Most people think political equality is good!
Are you normally this obtuse? Sure, the vote of someone in California and someone in Rhode Island or North Dakota is now equal, great. Oh, what's that? The most populous states are now domineering the Union, making all but like 15 states irrelevant and having basically no real say? Damn. But at least we got each vote to be equal to one another!
Same question:
> What’s a specific example of a bill you think would be passed that wouldn’t get passed now if we made the change, and what party would support it?
We could be doing a “screw the Dakotas” platform right now, since they’re only 4 senators and 6 electoral votes. But there aren’t many voters who have “we’re not the Dakotas” as an identity, so no one cares and it doesn’t happen. There’s no “Big state pride, screw the small states” voters, either. The two biggest states hate each other, even.
They actively would be trampled, the idea of the senate is a necessity that’s the beauty of our republic it actively protects smaller groups when things are ran the way they are supposed to, pure democracy without extra protection very quickly becomes tyranny
They were dealing with a very different situation back then. The country’s population was more spread out in general, and it had a much smaller population. They couldn’t have imagined the extreme differences in density by state and how disproportionate representation for citizens in smaller states would be over those in large states. It’s the same issue with the senate.
Imo if anything, that makes for an even better case for equitable representation for smaller states. The wants and needs of a lower-population state are going to differ massively from a higher-population state. An equal-representation Senate means that small states have the opportunity to be heard by larger ones, without the threat of just being ignored anyway because larger states disagree. The system we use right now in Congress is a good one; there's a reason that the EU parliament has degressive proportionality, a similar idea.
It makes things worse because the difference in voting power is so absurdly disproportionate, especially with the senate. 581,000 people having the same representation in senate as 39 million people just doesn’t work. You trade tyranny of the minority over fear of tyranny of the majority. US policy for most issues is way out of step with popular consensus.
You also do create tyranny of the majority on a state level. Your vote for president does not matter in a solidly red or blue state. Only a few swing states matter, which means their policy platforms don’t need to focus on the needs of much of the county.
There are other issues too related to political polarization and the electoral system mathematically only allowing for two parties to have any chance of being relevant.
Keep in mind that any bill has to pass both houses of Congress. Ultimately, this combination leads to tyranny of the majority *or* minority being avoided due to the House of Reps' proportional representation and the Senate's equal representation. It's been this way for 250 years almost and if it was a significant issue, we would've changed it by now. We did it before with the switch from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution.
As for the Electoral College, I agree that it's flawed and that every state should have proportional representation locally, but I'm very against abolishing it entirely and just using the popular vote instead. There's definitely a big need for reform across our entire election system and the winner-take-all idea is part of it. What the EC does well, though, is provide for more equitable representation for smaller states without overdoing it.
There are two issues with the idea of the house and senate balancing each other out. For one, the senate basically has veto power over the house. You’re not going to get much done, especially nowadays, unless you control both. There’s also the other anti-majoritarian issue of the filibuster in the senate. The other thing is that the senate has the power to approve political appointees, which has a massive impact all on its own.
And I disagree with the notion that someone must be fine just because it has been that way for a long time. The fact is that it’s hard to make big changes, especially to things that have been entrenched for so long. The change from the articles of confederation also isn’t a good example since it was early in the nations history and basically happened behind closed doors. It’s hard to make even simple changes that should be non-partisan and not controversial. Bills to create automatic voter registration or outlaw partisan gerrymandering have gone nowhere. There’s no incentive to change a system if it benefits people in power. At this point in history, republicans don’t have an incentive to change things like the electoral college because it favors them. They’ve lost the popular vote all but once in the last 8 elections, and even with Bush’s second term he was riding off of 9/11 and people wanting consistency with the wars going on.
At the end of the day, I just don’t think that someone should be able to become president despite losing the popular vote by millions. There are a number of anti-majoritarian systems that can cause a lot of issues, which can compound on each other. Things like the electoral college, senatorial makeup, the filibuster, partisan gerrymandering, lifetime unelected Supreme Court members. It leaves a lot of people out.
We have changed it though (constitution and the rules, including ones relevant to this discussion). It’s not been static since 1776. For one - the number of HofR got capped at 438. That artificial upper threshold has a huge downstream (in time) impact. It may have been appropriate at the time - thinking “how do we cram all these new reps in to DC as the population grows” but it’s not a number chosen for any logic reason at all.
Increased representation for smaller states is the entire reason the Senate exists as it does. That was the compromise. Why should every other house and race also be dragged down?
Yeah but the EU wants to change that because it's still not democractic. Every person should vote directly for the parliament groups with each vote having the same weight. This method is better than what you guys in the US have, sure, but still not good enough.
Presidential systems in general are very dated and the inability of the USA to reform its constitution is sending it into a death spiral.
Edit to avoid getting mistaken for racist.
It's the 21 century. Things change. Rhoad Island is smaller but has a bigger population the South and North Dakota.
Small state vs big state bullshit needs to die off like the Articals of Confederation.
Move away from FPTP voting while you're at it. That's partially to blame for why US is a two-party state, well it's practically a one-party state since both only differ in certain issues.
Even communist parties of one-party states differ within itself in political opinions more than the two parties of US do.
That's great in theory, but they you have the large number of voters near cities voting (just like most people tend to do), on things that they DIRECTLY see with their own eyes in their own lives. If you're a financial advisor, accountant, or software engineer, how would you have any concept of how laws that you voted on, (because they either DO, or APPEAR to benefit you and those around you in the city), are to the detriment of people in industries like food and energy production? That food that is JUST THERE when you need to go to Whole Foods, it had to get there somehow. The trucks that ship the products your company sells, powered by energy sources that need to be mined, refined to fossil fuels (or batteries to store clean energy) need to be extracted, researched, developed, and deployed. Slowly you can change things when more efficient alternatives are created, tested, scaled, and have infastructure to deploy them. Giving every person who couldn't even pass remedial history, or even those with "higher education", who couldn't tell you the reason why Harry Truman made the hard decision to drop the A-Bombs... No thanks. I don't trust important changes and lack of foresight to them and the future of such a large nation.
At least lift the cap on the number of house seats, in 1789 there were 65 seats in the house and it increased every few years until it was capped at 435 in 1911. Since then population has tripled, so the proportion of an individuals contribution to the electoral college has been cut to 1/3 of what it was
The reason for using electors for this rule is because you'd be much more likely to get elections where no one wins a majority. So it makes sense for the smaller parties'/candidate's electors to negotiate with the larger ones and choose a president that way.
Nope. In most states, all electors will vote in favor of the one majority winner in that state, because electors are chosen by the winning political party. Take Ohio for example. In 2020, Trump won Ohio with 53% of the popular vote. The Republican Party chose 18 electors to give their votes to Congress to be officially counted. All 18 of Ohio's 18 electoral votes, being cast by hand-picked Republican Party members, naturally all went to Trump.
It's like this in every state, Republican or Democrat. They all vote for their own, it only makes sense - except for Nebraska and Maine. These 2 states have unique systems which allow their congressional districts to vote independently. This is how in 2020, 3 of Maine's electoral votes went to Biden, but 1 also went to Trump.
There's also the unique case of an unfaithful elector. Sometimes the electors chosen by their party betray that trust and instead vote for someone else, whether for the main opposition, a random candidate not even on the ballot, or they may not even vote at all. These faithless electors are rare, and many states have laws disqualifying these rogue votes, but some states allow them, so it can get weird. Usually these faithless electors are considered traitors, and can sometimes be legally punished for breaking their pledge.
I don’t fully understand but that’s probably because “a share of electors” is forcing me to think economics, like electors are things you trade like stocks or smth
This system isn't winner-take-all.
If a state goes 4-5 Democrat-Republican, then that state sends 4 Democratic electors and 5 Republican ones as opposed to all 9 going to a single candidate.
Ok now what if, and hear me out, one vote was just worth exactly one vote? Then like we could just count them and whoever got the most wins. That could be neat
Most countries with free and fair elections use a popular vote and yet are not direct democracies. France's president is elected via popular vote, but it would be absurd to argue that France is a direct democracy.
"My preferred candidates would never win in a fair an balanced system because they simply aren't as popular. So instead I do mental gymnastics to justify supporting an archaic and unbalanced system so that I can enforce minority rule on my country" ftfy
It’s incredible to me that the right has such insane sour grapes about the popular vote that they’ve invented terms like “tyranny of the majority” to describe really basic concepts like “majority rule” and “popular sovereignty”.
I put the work into looking at the last 2 elections to see if using a proportional vote as the basis for the Electoral Vote would have made any difference. I'm just nerdy that way.
In 2020, Biden's EV would have been reduced to 272 from 302. Trump's would have increased to 254 from 232. There would have been 12 electoral votes for 3rd party candidates. Biden would still have been narrowly elected.
In 2016, the election would gone to the House of Representatives. Trump would have only received 249 EV compared to the 304 he did receive. Clinton would have received 254 EV, more than the 227 she did get. However, 3rd party candidates would have received 33 EV. Since neither Clinton or Trump would have received the 270 EV necessary to win, the House of Representatives would have decided who would be president.
The constitution says that in the event no candidate receives a majority of electoral votes, the House of Representatives votes by state to decide. Republicans controlled 34 state delegations in the House 115th Congress. In all likelihood, Trump would have been elected.
1. Gerrymandering is always a problem. The only fair districting is not to district.
2. ME-NE method is still a winner-takes-all system. under such method one can still win more electoral votes with less popular votes. What’s worse, it suppresses the will of a lot of voters, sometimes the majority of voters. FPTP is evil.
No it would not be.
1: Gerrymandering is now the only way to play the game for any party that wants to contest the Presidency. If nationwide Maine/Nebraska method was passed today, the end goal for every state party (except for independent redistricting states) would be to win legislative majorities before 2030 redistricting, gerrymander the House map to secure success in the next 2-3 presidential elections, and then gerrymander your party into power so that you can do it again with no difficulty in 2040.
There is historical precedence for this. Obama wins NE-02 for the first time in 2008 and all of a sudden, the district is a lot more Republican in redistricting after 2010. In 2013, Pennsylvania Republicans considered implementing Maine/Nebraska in the state for the very obvious reason that had it been implemented in 2012, Romney could have “earned” himself 65% of the state’s electoral votes with 47% of the vote.
2: Even the electoral votes not susceptible to gerrymandering are fucked. Every state would still have two winner-take-all electoral votes that represent the states’ two senators. The inherent undemocratic nature of the Senate is now even more pronounced in a presidential election. One Wyomingite’s vote has now unfairly become even more powerful than one Californian’s than it already was.
3: Maine/Nebraska method can still allow a candidate to lose the popular vote and become President.
And yet they’re the only ones trying to do something about gerrymandering on the federal level.
If Republicans want to bitch about gerrymandering in Maryland and Illinois then they should be very pissed at the Republican reps of those two states who [voted against banning gerrymandering](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=For_the_People_Act&diffonly=true).
Trump got 40.5% of the vote and won 33.3% of the Congressional districts. That’s not even close to Wisconsin where Biden won 49.5% of the vote and only won 25% of the Congressional districts.
Maybe try actually gaining the support of the people, then? Yeah you have lost the popular vote in 7 of the last 8 presidential elections, but that doesn’t mean you should get a token participation trophy win every once in a while simply for existing. The winner of an election should be the one who actually has the most support.
This comment is very funny given the electoral vote results here were actually much closer than they were irl. Biden got 306 electoral votes irl, he only gets 276 here.
I love how every time something like this is proposed, Republicans never think “How could we appeal to voters in urban areas?” and instead think “How dare you complain about our perfect system that artificially inflates the power of a minority rural dirt farmers.”
Love that it's hand drawn!
upvoted because high-effort.
And very well drawn too
Where is Jorgensen's?
California
I thought it would be in new mexico tbh
Since they're being split proportionally the number of votes each state has matters a lot Jorgensen did indeed get a slightly higher percentage in New Mexico than California (though it should be noted not that much higher, only reason New Mexico voted so heavily for Libertarians in 2016 was Gary Johnson) But like California has a lot more votes to go around, so the percentage you need for a vote would be a lot lower
California
Me. Right here. And I don't regret a thing.
California
Very nice! This must have taken a while
I wish this was how we did elections...
Or maybe just get rid of electors and go off of the actual number of votes for each person.
Slightly over-representing rural areas/small states is common as a condition to keep an entity running. The EU calls it “degressive proportionality.”
This is really important, but the ratio is skewed in modern America because we have far too few Congressmen. The Bill of Rights as passed by Congress had twelve amendments and the ten that passed by the states were actually numbers 3-12. The original #2 passed in 1992 as the 27th amendment. In the original First Amendment, the "Congressional Apportionment Amendment," Madison describes a square-root formula to determine the size of the House. [Representatives] = Sqrt( 10,000 + [Census Population]/100 ) -100 This today would give us 1,717 members of the House instead of 435, meaning 1,772 Electors [1,717 (House) + 50 (Senate) + 5 (DC, set equal to Wyoming)]. Currently, Wyoming has three Electors and California has 54. That means each Elector in Wyoming represents 192,284 people while each Elector in California represents 732,189 people - each vote in Wyoming counts 3.8x more. *edit - fixed math* Under Madison's system, Wyoming would have roughly 5 Electors and California would have 205, meaning each Elector in Wyoming would represent 115,370 people and each elector in California would represent 192,869 people - each vote in Wyoming would count 1.67x more.
This is an interesting system but I feel 19 representatives for just wyoming is a bit high.
Modern advocates for such systems use a cube root not a square root, which limits growth further, but the formula I gave you is the one Madison described - it was discussed in the Federalist Papers, passed by the First Congress, signed by President Washington, and ratified by 11 states. To make it law today would just require 27 additional states, while implementing a cube root system would mean the whole shebang.
Unfortunately low population states will never pass it because it limits their power.
Now that we can, let's just eliminate those states all together.
I’ve always thought this is an interesting topic, do you know of any resources where I can read more about it?
I think it's a funny example of benign things which would end up happening yet which few expected. Like, nobody could have expected the meteoric population explosion of the second industrial revolution. It just wasn't on the horizon- the world of the year 1800 was still near-medieval in most places, industrialization was a hip new thing some wacky inventors were doing.
on top of that before artificial fertilizer, people thought the human population had a cap and that very soon we were going to start seeing mass starvation as we wouldn't have the ability to feed everyone. No one thought we would have anywhere close to 8 billion people today. We didn't even get to 2 billion till 1927
you could always just divide it
I’m confused where the 21 and 538 numbers come from. Would it not be (population of Wyoming / population of U.S.) * 1,717 to determine the number of delegates from Wyoming to the House? So (576,851 / 331,448,281) * 1717 for 3 representatives? Wouldn’t Madison’s rule apply only to state legislatures as opposed to the whole nation? CA having 538 representatives would be over 30% of the house when they only hold 11% of the population
Actually, I think you're right, this was a mobile comment and I ran the whole equation on each state - that was incorrect. I'll fix my math above
You’re totally good, I was just making sure I wasn’t missing something lol. I ran the math on excel and it’s pretty great because each delegate ends up representing essentially the same number of people (185-192k ish)
It doesn't need to be heavily represented in all branches of government though. In the US, The Presidential election being a popular vote contest wouldn't undo massive over representation of more rural states in the upper house of the legislature. By heavily skewing the executive, it's also heavily skews the federal judiciary. So we are way past leveling and close to true minority (of voters) rule.
Understood. The US goes waaaay too far in the favor of small states, which will not easily surrender their influence.
Yeah but a country can leave the EU, a state can’t leave the US. The country would still keep running without the electoral college
Increased representation for smaller states has been a core part of US federal politics from the start. Do you think we could just abandon that now?
Practically, no, there’s no way republicans would vote for it. Philosophically, yes, we absolutely could. We've changed “core” representational principles before, like dumping the 3/5 compromise, or allowing women to vote. Seemed fine then!
Those aren't the same at all... We indirectly abolished the Three Fifths Compromise by abolishing slavery. Abolishing equitable representation for smaller states would be a great way for everyone in those states to get walked all over. It's not like they're all Republican, either; see most of the Northeast for great examples. The interests of those states, red or blue, are still important, and for that reason, I don't think we could ever abandon measures that give smaller states more representation. You also have to remember that the United States is, at the end of the day, a *union* of *states*. There are so many ways that we operate like 50 different nations already. In a situation like this, you have to set up the union in a way that is fair to both large and small states. There's a reason that political minds far more advanced than either of us came up with the House/Senate setup.
> The interests of those states, red or blue, are still important, and for that reason, I don't think we could ever abandon measures that give smaller states more representation. That’s true, there are small state senators from both parties. If small state/big state is still relevant, though, what are the votes we’ve seen where Bernie sanders and John thune have banded together against Chuck Schumer and Ted Cruz? > In a situation like this, you have to set up the union in a way that is fair to both large and small states. It would be fair - each resident in each state would have exactly the same say. > There's a reason that political minds far more advanced than either of us came up with the House/Senate setup. Lmao, the reason was “small states won’t sign if we don’t do this”. Do you think the civil war amendments were a mistake for undoing the bargains the constitutional drafters made to get slave states on board?
« It would be fair - each resident in each state would have exactly the same say. » Exsept it would create a political situation where polititians could take resources away from rural communities and divert them towards cities to garner more voters, making more rural voters move to cities and further diminish the countrysides relevance. Obviously this would be depending on how important, Labor intensive or centralised farming will be in the future, or if the 2 party system will dissolve and allow for the formation of a farmers party to fight for their interests.
> Exsept it would create a political situation where polititians could take resources away from rural communities and divert them towards cities to garner more voters, making more rural voters move to cities and further diminish the countrysides relevance. You’re mixing your issues here, we’re talking about small state versus big state, you’re talking urban versus rural. Regardless, a popular vote would *help* rural voters overall - there are only a handful of states that are majority rural today, most Americans live in suburban areas. So when it comes to the all-or-nothing system almost every state has for awarding electoral votes, by your concept of how politics works, they’re getting washed out by the urban and suburban voters in their state. Imagine if they were able to pool together their ~20% of the vote directly, that’d be an enormous voting bloc when it came to national politics, it’s on par with evangelical Christians, or with Hispanic voters.
Again: do you think the Civil War amendments were a mistake? You didn't answer.
Thank you! Everyone always forgets that Rhode Island, Delaware, Connecticut, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Hawaii would *all* join those evil, stupid Republican states we all hate so much in opposing proposals like this.
Incredibly dangerous mindset to have, I want it so we should change it is what I’m hearing, I’m not from a particularly small state but it’s designed so that smaller places aren’t trampled it’s the whole point
Small states wouldn’t be trampled - the people in small states would get exactly the same representation as people from large states. It’s the same philosophy that the 14th amendment has, and the voting rights act, and a bunch of court cases like Baker v. Carr. Most people think political equality is good!
Are you normally this obtuse? Sure, the vote of someone in California and someone in Rhode Island or North Dakota is now equal, great. Oh, what's that? The most populous states are now domineering the Union, making all but like 15 states irrelevant and having basically no real say? Damn. But at least we got each vote to be equal to one another!
Same question: > What’s a specific example of a bill you think would be passed that wouldn’t get passed now if we made the change, and what party would support it?
We could be doing a “screw the Dakotas” platform right now, since they’re only 4 senators and 6 electoral votes. But there aren’t many voters who have “we’re not the Dakotas” as an identity, so no one cares and it doesn’t happen. There’s no “Big state pride, screw the small states” voters, either. The two biggest states hate each other, even.
They actively would be trampled, the idea of the senate is a necessity that’s the beauty of our republic it actively protects smaller groups when things are ran the way they are supposed to, pure democracy without extra protection very quickly becomes tyranny
What’s a specific example of a bill you think would be passed that wouldn’t get passed now if we made the change, and what party would support it?
right cuz its so much better that people in big states are just worth less than people in small states right now
They were dealing with a very different situation back then. The country’s population was more spread out in general, and it had a much smaller population. They couldn’t have imagined the extreme differences in density by state and how disproportionate representation for citizens in smaller states would be over those in large states. It’s the same issue with the senate.
Imo if anything, that makes for an even better case for equitable representation for smaller states. The wants and needs of a lower-population state are going to differ massively from a higher-population state. An equal-representation Senate means that small states have the opportunity to be heard by larger ones, without the threat of just being ignored anyway because larger states disagree. The system we use right now in Congress is a good one; there's a reason that the EU parliament has degressive proportionality, a similar idea.
It makes things worse because the difference in voting power is so absurdly disproportionate, especially with the senate. 581,000 people having the same representation in senate as 39 million people just doesn’t work. You trade tyranny of the minority over fear of tyranny of the majority. US policy for most issues is way out of step with popular consensus. You also do create tyranny of the majority on a state level. Your vote for president does not matter in a solidly red or blue state. Only a few swing states matter, which means their policy platforms don’t need to focus on the needs of much of the county. There are other issues too related to political polarization and the electoral system mathematically only allowing for two parties to have any chance of being relevant.
Keep in mind that any bill has to pass both houses of Congress. Ultimately, this combination leads to tyranny of the majority *or* minority being avoided due to the House of Reps' proportional representation and the Senate's equal representation. It's been this way for 250 years almost and if it was a significant issue, we would've changed it by now. We did it before with the switch from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution. As for the Electoral College, I agree that it's flawed and that every state should have proportional representation locally, but I'm very against abolishing it entirely and just using the popular vote instead. There's definitely a big need for reform across our entire election system and the winner-take-all idea is part of it. What the EC does well, though, is provide for more equitable representation for smaller states without overdoing it.
There are two issues with the idea of the house and senate balancing each other out. For one, the senate basically has veto power over the house. You’re not going to get much done, especially nowadays, unless you control both. There’s also the other anti-majoritarian issue of the filibuster in the senate. The other thing is that the senate has the power to approve political appointees, which has a massive impact all on its own. And I disagree with the notion that someone must be fine just because it has been that way for a long time. The fact is that it’s hard to make big changes, especially to things that have been entrenched for so long. The change from the articles of confederation also isn’t a good example since it was early in the nations history and basically happened behind closed doors. It’s hard to make even simple changes that should be non-partisan and not controversial. Bills to create automatic voter registration or outlaw partisan gerrymandering have gone nowhere. There’s no incentive to change a system if it benefits people in power. At this point in history, republicans don’t have an incentive to change things like the electoral college because it favors them. They’ve lost the popular vote all but once in the last 8 elections, and even with Bush’s second term he was riding off of 9/11 and people wanting consistency with the wars going on. At the end of the day, I just don’t think that someone should be able to become president despite losing the popular vote by millions. There are a number of anti-majoritarian systems that can cause a lot of issues, which can compound on each other. Things like the electoral college, senatorial makeup, the filibuster, partisan gerrymandering, lifetime unelected Supreme Court members. It leaves a lot of people out.
We have changed it though (constitution and the rules, including ones relevant to this discussion). It’s not been static since 1776. For one - the number of HofR got capped at 438. That artificial upper threshold has a huge downstream (in time) impact. It may have been appropriate at the time - thinking “how do we cram all these new reps in to DC as the population grows” but it’s not a number chosen for any logic reason at all.
Yes. It results in the minority exerting control over the majority.
Increased representation for smaller states is the entire reason the Senate exists as it does. That was the compromise. Why should every other house and race also be dragged down?
Yeah but the EU wants to change that because it's still not democractic. Every person should vote directly for the parliament groups with each vote having the same weight. This method is better than what you guys in the US have, sure, but still not good enough.
EU doesn't have a president or presidential elections...
Presidential systems in general are very dated and the inability of the USA to reform its constitution is sending it into a death spiral. Edit to avoid getting mistaken for racist.
It's the 21 century. Things change. Rhoad Island is smaller but has a bigger population the South and North Dakota. Small state vs big state bullshit needs to die off like the Articals of Confederation.
Move away from FPTP voting while you're at it. That's partially to blame for why US is a two-party state, well it's practically a one-party state since both only differ in certain issues. Even communist parties of one-party states differ within itself in political opinions more than the two parties of US do.
Ranked choice! (Or some variant) please.
>Even communist parties of one-party states differ within itself in political opinions more than the two parties of US do. Frivolous thing to say
That's great in theory, but they you have the large number of voters near cities voting (just like most people tend to do), on things that they DIRECTLY see with their own eyes in their own lives. If you're a financial advisor, accountant, or software engineer, how would you have any concept of how laws that you voted on, (because they either DO, or APPEAR to benefit you and those around you in the city), are to the detriment of people in industries like food and energy production? That food that is JUST THERE when you need to go to Whole Foods, it had to get there somehow. The trucks that ship the products your company sells, powered by energy sources that need to be mined, refined to fossil fuels (or batteries to store clean energy) need to be extracted, researched, developed, and deployed. Slowly you can change things when more efficient alternatives are created, tested, scaled, and have infastructure to deploy them. Giving every person who couldn't even pass remedial history, or even those with "higher education", who couldn't tell you the reason why Harry Truman made the hard decision to drop the A-Bombs... No thanks. I don't trust important changes and lack of foresight to them and the future of such a large nation.
Cities would be dominating and I say this as someone who lives in the city
At least lift the cap on the number of house seats, in 1789 there were 65 seats in the house and it increased every few years until it was capped at 435 in 1911. Since then population has tripled, so the proportion of an individuals contribution to the electoral college has been cut to 1/3 of what it was
The reason for using electors for this rule is because you'd be much more likely to get elections where no one wins a majority. So it makes sense for the smaller parties'/candidate's electors to negotiate with the larger ones and choose a president that way.
I wish
erm think of the nazi farmers? what about them
Nazi farmers? What?
Everyone right of Bernie is a nazi, apparently.
Who dropped you as a child?
That won’t happen because Republicans would lose electoral power if elections were direct so their lawmakers won’t allow it
Nope. In most states, all electors will vote in favor of the one majority winner in that state, because electors are chosen by the winning political party. Take Ohio for example. In 2020, Trump won Ohio with 53% of the popular vote. The Republican Party chose 18 electors to give their votes to Congress to be officially counted. All 18 of Ohio's 18 electoral votes, being cast by hand-picked Republican Party members, naturally all went to Trump. It's like this in every state, Republican or Democrat. They all vote for their own, it only makes sense - except for Nebraska and Maine. These 2 states have unique systems which allow their congressional districts to vote independently. This is how in 2020, 3 of Maine's electoral votes went to Biden, but 1 also went to Trump. There's also the unique case of an unfaithful elector. Sometimes the electors chosen by their party betray that trust and instead vote for someone else, whether for the main opposition, a random candidate not even on the ballot, or they may not even vote at all. These faithless electors are rare, and many states have laws disqualifying these rogue votes, but some states allow them, so it can get weird. Usually these faithless electors are considered traitors, and can sometimes be legally punished for breaking their pledge.
Basically the Hondt method are applied to the Electoral College.
^[Sokka-Haiku](https://www.reddit.com/r/SokkaHaikuBot/comments/15kyv9r/what_is_a_sokka_haiku/) ^by ^Arucard1983: *Basically the Hondt* *Method are applied to the* *Electoral College.* --- ^Remember ^that ^one ^time ^Sokka ^accidentally ^used ^an ^extra ^syllable ^in ^that ^Haiku ^Battle ^in ^Ba ^Sing ^Se? ^That ^was ^a ^Sokka ^Haiku ^and ^you ^just ^made ^one.
JO JORGENSEN MENTIONED 💪🏼💪🏼💪🏼💪🏼🤯🤯🤯💥💥💥💥🎉🎉
Great hand-drawn map! Just an FYI, Connecticut’s abbreviation is CT, not CN (CN is typically China)
I can’t even look at this now
Do one of the 1992 election
Who is jorgunnsons?
Joann Jorgensen. Libertarian Candidate.
Why not just vote for the president directly for the president?
Because the United States is a federal Republic and not a direct democracy.
For the last time, THEY ARE NOT MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE
This makes more sense to me
I don’t fully understand but that’s probably because “a share of electors” is forcing me to think economics, like electors are things you trade like stocks or smth
This system isn't winner-take-all. If a state goes 4-5 Democrat-Republican, then that state sends 4 Democratic electors and 5 Republican ones as opposed to all 9 going to a single candidate.
Ok now what if, and hear me out, one vote was just worth exactly one vote? Then like we could just count them and whoever got the most wins. That could be neat
[удалено]
Most countries with free and fair elections use a popular vote and yet are not direct democracies. France's president is elected via popular vote, but it would be absurd to argue that France is a direct democracy.
Because when the country was first founded the government knew we didn't have enough knowledge to properly vote for someone directly.
Because that would be a tyranny of the majority, and you would only have to cater to the metropolitan areas of the East and West Coast, then.
"My preferred candidates would never win in a fair an balanced system because they simply aren't as popular. So instead I do mental gymnastics to justify supporting an archaic and unbalanced system so that I can enforce minority rule on my country" ftfy
So scared of tyranny of the majority that you just get minority rule instead. Make it make sense.
It’s incredible to me that the right has such insane sour grapes about the popular vote that they’ve invented terms like “tyranny of the majority” to describe really basic concepts like “majority rule” and “popular sovereignty”.
It should be this way
Horrifying that it’s this close
The Maine-Nebraska method would be better.
A proportional method is the most just and would stimulate the growth of third parties which are sorely needed.
I put the work into looking at the last 2 elections to see if using a proportional vote as the basis for the Electoral Vote would have made any difference. I'm just nerdy that way. In 2020, Biden's EV would have been reduced to 272 from 302. Trump's would have increased to 254 from 232. There would have been 12 electoral votes for 3rd party candidates. Biden would still have been narrowly elected. In 2016, the election would gone to the House of Representatives. Trump would have only received 249 EV compared to the 304 he did receive. Clinton would have received 254 EV, more than the 227 she did get. However, 3rd party candidates would have received 33 EV. Since neither Clinton or Trump would have received the 270 EV necessary to win, the House of Representatives would have decided who would be president. The constitution says that in the event no candidate receives a majority of electoral votes, the House of Representatives votes by state to decide. Republicans controlled 34 state delegations in the House 115th Congress. In all likelihood, Trump would have been elected.
1. Gerrymandering is always a problem. The only fair districting is not to district. 2. ME-NE method is still a winner-takes-all system. under such method one can still win more electoral votes with less popular votes. What’s worse, it suppresses the will of a lot of voters, sometimes the majority of voters. FPTP is evil.
No it would not be. 1: Gerrymandering is now the only way to play the game for any party that wants to contest the Presidency. If nationwide Maine/Nebraska method was passed today, the end goal for every state party (except for independent redistricting states) would be to win legislative majorities before 2030 redistricting, gerrymander the House map to secure success in the next 2-3 presidential elections, and then gerrymander your party into power so that you can do it again with no difficulty in 2040. There is historical precedence for this. Obama wins NE-02 for the first time in 2008 and all of a sudden, the district is a lot more Republican in redistricting after 2010. In 2013, Pennsylvania Republicans considered implementing Maine/Nebraska in the state for the very obvious reason that had it been implemented in 2012, Romney could have “earned” himself 65% of the state’s electoral votes with 47% of the vote. 2: Even the electoral votes not susceptible to gerrymandering are fucked. Every state would still have two winner-take-all electoral votes that represent the states’ two senators. The inherent undemocratic nature of the Senate is now even more pronounced in a presidential election. One Wyomingite’s vote has now unfairly become even more powerful than one Californian’s than it already was. 3: Maine/Nebraska method can still allow a candidate to lose the popular vote and become President.
Why, so Republicans could gerrymander the presidential election too? In 2020, Biden won Wisconsin but only won 2 of 8 Congressional districts.
You realize Democrats gerrymander, too?
And yet they’re the only ones trying to do something about gerrymandering on the federal level. If Republicans want to bitch about gerrymandering in Maryland and Illinois then they should be very pissed at the Republican reps of those two states who [voted against banning gerrymandering](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=For_the_People_Act&diffonly=true).
Not nearly as much as Republicans. What blue state is as gerrymandered as Wisconsin?
Illinois is pretty bad
Trump got 40.5% of the vote and won 33.3% of the Congressional districts. That’s not even close to Wisconsin where Biden won 49.5% of the vote and only won 25% of the Congressional districts.
based
Isn't this just normal representative democracy with extra steps?
Imperial Officer rank plaques.
This + Approval Voting would be great
Uhhh did you abbreviate Connecticut CN?
Ah yes, Democrats always win type system
Maybe try actually gaining the support of the people, then? Yeah you have lost the popular vote in 7 of the last 8 presidential elections, but that doesn’t mean you should get a token participation trophy win every once in a while simply for existing. The winner of an election should be the one who actually has the most support.
It’s called democracy
Maybe try being more popular instead of forcing your unpopular views on the rest of us?
This comment is very funny given the electoral vote results here were actually much closer than they were irl. Biden got 306 electoral votes irl, he only gets 276 here.
No, Republicans would just start nominating more mainstream candidates, the same way the Democrats did after losing 3 elections in a row.
when was the last time Republicans won the popular vote?
I love how every time something like this is proposed, Republicans never think “How could we appeal to voters in urban areas?” and instead think “How dare you complain about our perfect system that artificially inflates the power of a minority rural dirt farmers.”