Not to mention that if there’s any congressional elections going on, the Presidential candidate is probably going to want to publicly appear with any candidates from his party who were running for at least Congress, if not state office (say the governor, or a candidate who could flip the statehouse towards the Presidential candidate’s party).
Then there’s the candidate who knows he can’t win the major city in an area, but he can win in the surrounding suburbs.
So that their interests aren’t completely lost.
Smaller states may be less emphasized in any event, but the EC minimizes that effect. The more disproportionate the weight of your vote, the more attractive it is to a candidate. If the point is that solidly red or blue states don’t get a lot of attention, that’s because it’s already a given that a given party best serves their needs (and deserves their electoral votes). When that’s no longer true, their electoral votes will be up for grabs.
The presidential election doesn’t exist in isolation. People are also represented in the House, Senate, and state and local governments. And there are individual methods of promoting your interests by using freedom of speech and assembly to organize and get your message out. A person isn’t rendered completely powerless merely by having “only” an equal vote in the selection of the POTUS.
And even if that weren’t true… Even if we were electing an all powerful dictator… Even then you can only give someone extra electoral power at the expense of others. So the privileged electors may have their interests protected only by threatening those of others.
Again the assumption that a person’s neighbors should determine someone’s best interest. Why allow voting at all if you already know what’s best for people? After all, they live in heavily Democratic or Republican areas. They must have the same wants and needs as everyone around them, right?
How can you protect minority opinions by taking away their vote? If anything is tyranny of the majority in an electoral system, that is it.
We’re going around in circles, with different axioms. I understand your position, it is reasonable, but I don’t agree with it. I’ve already stated why I think the EC is a good balance. It seems clear we won’t agree on which factor is most important.
I would use the verb “minimizing,” but, yeah, that’s kind of the point.
You realize that would be a “flaw” you could assign in some manner to a straight popular vote, right?
As to the argument that the EC is a check on the “tyranny of the majority”…
We have a number of countermajoritarian structures in our Federal government. There’s the bicameral legislature, the supermajority requirement for amending the Constitution, the non-proportional nature of the Senate, the Senate filibuster, the Federal court system and its lifelong tenure for judges, the checks and balances between the three branches of government, and the sharing of power between the Feds and the states. I suppose the EC adds an extra theoretical layer of protection from the “tyranny of the majority,” but I question whether, when we have so many other countermajoritarian features, that it is necessary.
Additionally, if the EC does provide protection from tyranny of the majority, there must be some real world evidence of it, and I’m just not seeing it. We had tyranny of the majority in this country for quite a long time, and I’d credit the passage of the post-Civil War Amendments, the 19th Amendment and the Civli Rights Act, along with the development of Equal Protection and one-man/one-vote legal theories by the Federal courts far more with reducing tyranny of the majority then the EC.
If we lived in a country where people strongly identified with regional groupings or where geographical areas were strongly associated with ethnic or religious identities (such as in India or Yugoslavia), then I could see the utility of this kind of system. But it’s not clear to me that we do. Take California for example. The most populous areas are urban and reliably blue, but the interior and northern portions of the state are rural and conservative. People living in those areas might have more in common with people living in other rural parts of the country then with the coastal parts of California.
If we’re really worried about tyranny of the majority, then it seems to me it would make more sense to have the electoral votes grouped along other lines, such as race, religion, gender, urban vs. rural, political ideology, or something else for which some commonality of oppression seems more likely. Grouping votes by state isn’t arbitrary, by any means, but we’ve had far more instances of people oppressing each other over race or religion than state origin in our history.
People align and disalign for all sorts of reasons in today’s US, though, and I don’t think any other grouping is going to be very satisfactory either. A wealthy, say Catholic person, may have different political interests then a middle class Catholic person, and it may not make sense to group their votes together solely on the basis of religion. So, I don’t want to shift to that type of system either (although allocation of votes on the basis of gender, religion, etc. is used in other countries). I just don’t see it as having any more justification then state boundaries as a method of preventing tyranny of the majority.
So, given that we have other ways in our system to deal with tyranny of the majority, and given that the EC hasn’t been particularly effective at preventing tyranny of the majority, I don’t buy this argument as a rationalization for the EC. If the electoral logistics can be worked out for a nationwide popular vote, I’m in favor of getting rid of the EC.
Yes, that’s part of it, but you’re missing my objection to the Lincoln example. Part of what makes EC beneficial (but not all of it) is that it provides a layer of protection for the minorities. Using the Lincoln example is like pointing out that a guy who was wearing a bullet-proof vest was shot and killed, and someone else who wasn’t wearing it was shot and live, therefore the vest is useless. IOW, sometimes it’s not enough to protect the minority, other times, it’s not necessary, but sometimes it will make a difference. However, this point is difficult to analyze in practice because even the strict popular vote right now is effected by the EC system since they’re forced to alter their campaign strategies to win under that system.
I’m not completely sure I understand what you’re asking here, so if I’m interpretting wrong, I’m sorry. But, qutie frankly, it’s a fact of how elections are. The issues that are most important to me may or may not be what’s most important to a number of other people. For instance, neither my job nor my financial situation is even the least bit affected by the current economic crisis going on; I have no personal incentive to care about it at this point, does that mean it shouldn’t still be a major issue for me to consider when I vote? At the same time, there are plenty of people out there who have probably lost their jobs or their mortgages or had any number of other hardships because of it, does that mean it should be the only thing they consider when they vote, just because it is their single most pressing need?
Sure, people SHOULD be responsible voters and consider how it effects people other than themselves, but not everyone does and, in fact, I’d imagine a number of people don’t look past themselves when they vote. That’s part of the benefit of the EC, it forces the candidates to give consideration to these sorts of things because, certainly economic downturn hurts different regions in different ways. For instance, areas with many military bases are probably affected by economic downturn than areas that depend more on tourism which is different from areas that depend on agriculture, etc. EC helps ensure that these sorts of things are taken into consideration, and not just a blanket poll where 51% may find Solution X to be best for them without knowing that it really hurts another group, but really Solution Y isn’t AS good for them, but it is generally better for more people.
I really don’t get this objection to battleground states. Sure, you may get the impression that your vote doesn’t count for a whole lot in a place like Texas or New York or wherever. However, at the same time if a large percentage of the people in a given area happen to agree on a particular candidate, maybe your problems already are adequately handled by him. Meanwhile, there’s an issue in another area that isn’t well handled by either candidate, which is why there’s no clear winner in that area. I don’t think it’s unreasonable that those concerns should now take more of the foreground because they’re not handled, while the issues from another state are already adequately handled.
For instance, Virginia is a battleground state and for good reason. Some of the national issues effect Virginian’s very differently than they do much of the rest of the country. We’ve got a large number of military installations. We’ve got a lot of federal government jobs. There’s a very contentious political shift going on in this state. Meanwhile, a non-battleground state like Texas already has more of their immediate issues well addressed by McCain, and New York likewise with Obama. Why is it so bad that Virginia gets extra attention? If not for EC, more of the concerns of places like Texas and New York would still be under debate, even though they’re more or less handled well by one candidate or the other, and Virginian’s concerns would not be getting addressed.
Fair enough, but that isn’t true of every state, so I’ll speak about Virginia then to make my point. Virginia over the last few decades is a very real example of tyranny of the majority. Over that time, Northern Virginia has easily brought in the largest portion of the state’s GDP and it’s the most densely populated area, but it was easily out voted by the rest of the state. As a result, politicians were using tax revenue from Northern Virginia and spending it elsewhere in the state to keep those voters happy, while major issues for Northern Virginia, particularly transportation, went almost completely ignored. At one point I think I remember seeing that we were only getting back somewhere around 60-70% of what we paid in taxes while virtually every other district in the state got as much or more.
However, the population in Northern Virginia has continued to grow very quickly with all of the technical, military, and government jobs; in fact, I think just a year or two ago (last I remember bothering to check), the the fastest growing county in the country was in Northern Virginia, and a couple others weren’t far behind. This made transportation even worse and, rather than give us more of our funds back, they actually tried to levy a Northern Virginia only extra sales tax to manage our transportation issues rather than give us more funding.
Recently, the last 5-10 years, Northern Virginia has grown enough that we now have enough population where the rest of the state can’t just roll over us anymore. Politicians have realized they can’t just play the rest of the state and easily win anymore; they have to compaign here. So, we’re only just now starting to see some of our transportation issues addressed.
The thing is, Texas and New York aren’t all one party. One party is dominant, true, but the other party is alive and fighting, and holds a fair amount of power. Yet both states are completely ignored, because the minority party in the state doesn’t have a whole lot of chance to change things right now (which for Texas might well not be true much longer). There are far more people being ignored in this – and every – election than there are people whose votes are being courted, and I think that’s out of whack.
You’re right, and that only emphasizes the point that our founding fathers thought it was a very important issue. It may or may not be necessary anymore, but it’s hard to judge just how necessary it is without first experimenting without having it.
You’re not seeing the evidence because we’ve never had a pure majority system. Even the 2000 election isn’t good evidence because both candidates still had to try to win under the EC system rather than the PV system. It’s entirely possible that, had they been fighting for votes under a PV system that their campaigns would have been different, their platforms would have been different, and that Bush quite possibly could have pulled out victory there. There just isn’t a way of knowing.
As for the other things you mention like the amendments and such, those serve a different purpose. They addressed things like racial oppression and such. Those are very real and they deserved to be addressed. However, just as much as the issues may be different between a black man and a white man, or a rich man and a poor man, or a man and a woman, the issues that face a man from a Southern agricultural community are different than a man living in a New York apartment. I think that just as much as we should respect racial, religious, financial, and gender issues, we can’t forget that there are also regional issues.
I’m sorry but, are you serious? We very much live in that sort of country. A number of the non-Americans I’ve met have commented to me just how odd it is to them that we do identify ourselves by state. It’s a foreign concept to them. Beyond that, sure there is some homogenization of culture thanks to the mass media, but there is no way you can reasonably convince someone that the culture in Mobile, Alabama is like the culture in Boston or that the Cutlure in Detroit is like the culture in LA.
Sure, California isn’t a great example because it is a very diverse state in and over itself, but it’s definitely more the exception to the rule than the standard. Many of the North Eastern states more or less have similar cultures and needs across the state, largely because they’re much smaller. The same can be said of many of the Southern states as well.
The problem with that is, sure, you can easily group by gender, but the rest are very subjective or unprovable. Besides, as I mentioned above, region is just as important of a demographic as race, religion, gender, or whatever else. You can have a white, protestant, conservative man living in El Paso, and I still bet you his concerns will be different from a white, protestant, conservative man living in Boston even though both cities have roughly similar populations (598k and 559k respectively in 2005).
Okay, I’ve seen this several times in this thread, that it isn’t effective at preventing tyranny of the majority. This really isn’t something you can say conclusively because we don’t live in that sort of world. And, even if it isn’t particularly effective, even if it’s only a little bit effective, why isn’t that worth it? Even if it’s only a slightly effective, and the alternative, which isn’t demonstratably any more or less effective, doesn’t have any really compelling reason to be superior, but has several drawbacks that should be included like how much of a hassle it would be to change, not to mention potential nationwide recounts, why get rid of it?
I get that, but there’s probably a good reason why a solidly red state is solidly red and a solidly blue state is solidly blue. Yes, the other party is alive and well, and they should be fighting to gain influence in those states, but as long as one party is addressing the issues of a particular state by a significant margin, why do we need to continue to rehash those specific issues over and over.
I don’t know what the tops issues are in New York, but clearly the Democrats are doing a much better job of addressing those issues. Meanwhile a state like Virginia has ones that aren’t well addressed and they as such, probably deserve a little more attention, no?
And sure, if in the future Texas is no longer easily served best by the Republicans, they rightfully should become a battleground state, because it means that party has lost touch with those people and they rightfully should get more attention as such. And if Virginia goes back to solidly red, or turns solidly blue and our issues become less of a national spotlight, then that’s fine too, because it means they are getting addressed.
I don’t see that we’ve been reduced to irreconcilable differences yet. I don’t see what alternative axiom is served by the EC.
And again we are back to the question of why some voters deserve extra voting power. What is so special about them?
Not so. Under a popular vote every individual’s vote would be reflected in the final outcome. That is, if they vote or fail to vote the result will be different. Under the EC this is not so. Instead a person’s share of electoral power can only go to their prefered candidate if they agree with enough of their neighbors to translate into electoral votes.
As mentioned I think you could smooth out voting power and maintain the EC. For example make the EC reflect the number of reps you have in the House only. Of course there is still some imbalance technically since you cannot have less than one Rep but it would help some.
Don’t know why you keep harping on this.
The same is true of a popular vote system, maybe even moreso. All a candidate needs to get is a particular group that represents 50%+1 of the population. If you are on the outside of that group your vote doesn’t count. May as well stay home. At least with the EC the candidate must try to pander to more groups. And while the candidate may not pander in your state there is a chance some or many of your concerns will be addressed in swing states (maybe you are a farmer in a solidly red state but there are a lot of farmers in a different purple state so the candidate must try to address their concerns). In a PV system the candidate need only pander to whatever that one group is (or a very small collection of a few groups) and to hell with everyone else.
No. It’s like pointing to an example of a chest shot killing someone wearing a bulletproof vest and saying that people shouldn’t claim that the vests stop all bullets when in fact they don’t. People claim the EC forces (not encourages) candidates to seek a broad base of support. They are wrong and should stop misleading people.
And that’s not the half of it. The fact is that it is only in the swing states that a major candidate need seek support. That’s hardly a broad section of the nation. Therefor the point is not mere exageration but completely false and misleading.
I think we should leave it up to individuals to decide what prevailing issues to base their vote on. Thus I object to suggestions that “if an overwhelming majority from [their] state feels a certain way, maybe the prevailing issues for [their] region are handled by a particular candidate and don’t necessarily need to be addressed.”
Again, this is wrongheaded. The EC doesn’t encourage or require broad support. If some economic factor decimates only Wyoming then there is no incentive for the Democratic candidate to address it. He isn’t going to get those electoral votes anyways. Same goes for Republicans and California. It was easy for President Bush to ignore the California electricity crisis (exacerbated by his Enron buddies) because he wasn’t going to win any electoral support in that state in 2004. If we had a popular vote he might have thought twice about alienating millions of potential supporters there.
I want a system that responds to what each individual believes is important and not what I think is important. Why bother with elections if you think you already know what is best for everyone?
Others disagree with your opinion that the issues of people in New York and Texas are more or less well handled. Why should your opinion be more important than theirs?
This is tyranny? A region gets less of a return on tax dollars than others? It doesn’t get enough transportation funding? I’m sure people living under Saddam or Stalin would shed a tear for the trials and tribulations of the people of NoVa. 
Not getting everything you want is not the same thing as being tyrannized. I’m sure that candidates for statewide office campaigned in Northern Virginia just like they did elsewhere in the state. Obviously that’s no guarantee that will make everything hunky dory.
Non sequitur. This doesn’t explain why some are so special they deserve extra voting power.
You don’t get it becuase you don’t understand the point. In every electoral system there is are collections of voters that will win and once a candidate gains that support it doesn’t matter how everyone else votes. Since this applies to every system it makes no sense to use it as a criticism of any one particular system.
There is a difference between a candidate having no incentive to earn people’s support after he has built a strong enough voting coalition to win and lacking that incentive before such a coalition is established. Under a popular vote every vote counts. Thus there is an incentive to seek votes everywhere. Under the EC this is just not so.
The problem (or advantage, depending on your view) of discussing groups rather than individuals is that you can group them in convenient ways to make your point. Sure, you can divide people so that you consider a majority of the electorate to be a single group and everyone else as a series of smaller groups. So what? We have only to try to make the same point with individuals to see it doesn’t stand up.
“In a PV system the candidate need only pander to [most individuals] and to hell with everyone else.”
In fact, this is merely the same nonsensicle objection I already deflated. Since a similar criticism applies to every electoral system it detracts from none.
Fine, let’s try it for a few elections and see if it’s necessary. But many countries don’t use this type of system for electing their head of state, and I don’t see that there’s any correlation with tyrannyical behavior and PV.
I think you’re misunderstanding my point. We’ve had a ton of tyranny of the majority historically in this country, and the EC didn’t do anything to stop it. We had to do all these other things in order to get away from tyranny of the majority. And I would say that the EC actually helped perpetrate tyranny of the majority because of the Tilden-Hayes compromise which put an end to Reconstruction and ushered in the era of Jim Crow. From my perspective the EC has at best been useless to prevent tyranny of the majority and at worst it has been a tool that was used to oppress the minority.
Yes, I am serious, and there’s a lot of data out there that the country is sorting itself ideologically along urban, suburban/exurban, and rural lines. I (in Los Angeles) probably have more in common with someone in Austin or New York then I do with someone in Northern California.
But you find this urban, suburban/exurban, and rural divide appearing all over the country. Cities face different issues than rural areas. Of course, the people in a state are going to have issues in common because they’re living in the same state and have to decide how to use that state’s resources. But on national issues, I’m just not seeing how rural Oregon is that different from rural Colorado, etc.
Well, of course people are going to have different concerns, particularly when it comes to local issues. But the white conservative man from El Paso must have enough similar concerns to the Boston guy, or why would they both be identifying as conservative?
I addressed the tyranny issue at the beginning of the post, so I’ll move on to the second thought here. In my original post, I stated that I would favor abolishing the EC if an effective system for popular vote could be implemented. And I don’t really see why one couldn’t. It’s not rocket science, and plenty of countries with populations similar to ours or larger have nationwide votes. Our voting process generally (not talking about EC, talking about how we vote and how those votes are counted) is archaic and inefficient, and there’s no reason for it except budgetary contrainsts and inertia. If we could reform the voting process so that it actually worked well, then I think it’s certainly fair to consider abolishing the EC.