Then I sincerely beg your pardon - I didn’t know you were in a Commonwealth country and I regret if my explanation seemed at all unnecessary and/or condescending.
The National Popular Vote compact will take effect once it’s enacted by states representing at least 270 electoral votes - so far jurisdictions possessing 165 electoral votes have enacted legislation.
( Maryland actually signed on in 2007, but an old article has been going around the past couple of days)
It’s all good; I figured it would be useful information for our American friends all the same. 
Yet, show me a country that has successfully been run as a pure democracy? There is a reason why Athens and others fell.
The Trump likes would have had power long ago if it was simple majority rule, and those who just want to dump the EC obviously have the privilege of not giving a crap about that.
Go read the Federalist 10, 39 and 84, Go read Eric Hoffer’s the true believer, then come back and explain to me why simple majority rule is better in a large empire.
No it’s not the same thing at all…because the electors all vote for the same party.
A state can have a mixture of Dem and Repub representatives in Congress. But they force all the electors to represent only one party.
I’ve never understood the concept of all-or-nothing. Why not split the electors, to match the popular vote in their state? It should be a no-brainer.
It’s a way of giving your state more weight. If you make most of Florida happy, you score 29 votes. If you split up the electoral votes, making Florida happy might only get you 16-17 votes.
Defenders don’t say that. It’s a complete misrepresentation of both the reality and it’s intended purpose. Why would you say something as silly as some people think “acreage ought to determine our leadership”? The system guarantees individual states a minimum voice in choosing the president but for the most part it’s about population. Maybe you’ve noticed Alaska and Texas don’t have the most Electoral votes that an “acreocracy” would demand.
Well, the last time the electoral college trumped the popular vote, we got Bush.
How’d that go, exactly?
The only times in the last hundred years that the electoral college has been considered above straight democracy, we have elected the two most incompetent, dangerous presidents in American history. If that’s not enough to prove its uselessness (assuming, for the moment, that they don’t revolt and vote in Clinton anyways), I don’t know what is.
Well, Maine and Nebraska have a working compromise and in this election for the first time in modern history, Maine produced a diverse electoral vote - three for Clinton, one for Trump.
I think if the electors don’t vote for Trumpy Wumpy on Dec. 19th, it will be a much worse outcome. We have protestors now, if its reversed, riots all over the place. Hillary gets the White House, republicans go nuts with cock-blocking and four years of investigations on everything. Trump on the news 24/7 threatening to sue everybody, etc.
At least now we’ve got a good chance of impeachment. My guess is he’ll be impeached sometime in 2018, giving President “Pay The Gay Away” Pence only two years doing hardly anything.
And it would likely make it more frequent to throw the contest to the House where the votes are strictly per state delegation, thus even more disproportional. The state political classes would want to avoid that if possible.
I do ***not ***favor the Maine/Nebraska kludge (1 EV to the winner of each congressional district, 2 EVs to at-large winner) for larger states, since being based on House Districts it encourages and is influenced by gerrymandering – some other poster in another thread calculated that had that been the system nationwide, Romney may have been elected with a popular minority, due to the way the House Districts were drawn after 2010.
Yes, the apportionment system as is creates “wasted” majorities – one state with 12 EVs and a majority of a hundred thousand can be balanced out by three states with 4 EVs and a majority of ten thousand each, though the latter add up to at best two thirds the population of the former. Not that “acreage” votes but that the polity votes, so for our purposes Rhode Island = Idaho, Alaska = Vermont. If you were to render all the states and counties equal-area it would still apply.
It also creates a phenomenon where “heartland” areas become if anything more reliably red as the more liberal-trending demographic cohorts simply move away to the big metropolitan areas where they fit in better, and become “wasted majority” votes.
PURE democracies give rise to demagogues (like Trump). They in turn tend to declare a dire emergency and with the blessings of the mob, then do away with democracy.
I’m of the opinion that the Electoral College can do whatever it wants. That’s the rules of the game. I suggest octopus for president. You reading this, electors?
Still not an argument on why pure popular is better.
But lets be honest, us Democrats are directly responsible for electing Trump.
And no I am not talking about the “Bern”, Hillary was a known problem candidate and not because of her gender.
While I voted for her, and I am a progressive costal middle aged white male I fully realize that if we ignore the entire rest of the country that we will not survive over time.
This is exactly the “factions” that were called out in Federalist #10. Moving to a pure popular vote may have won us this election but it would result in us losing our country over time.
But it’s funny. The election was rigged, and the electoral college was terrible, UNTIL he won. Imagine that. But this is the guy who is still mad that his show never got an Emmy.
Hint… it didn’t deserve one.
It’s been YEARS since I read any of the federalist papers. I do know many at that time were against factions and parties. I suspect they were right. Look at us now.
I wanted Bernie. He didn’t get the nomination. So I voted for Hillary. No apologies. I’d do it again.
The parliamentary system accomplishes the same goal as the EC by virtue of the fact that you can allocate electoral districts to give different population centers whatever weighting you want, but it’s much more fine-grained, since the EC system resolves allocations only to the state level.
But there’s a rather crucial detail that argues against the EC electors being absolutely mandated to faithfulness. If they were, the human electors could be eliminated and the whole thing completely automated. But that’s not quite how it works in a parliamentary system, where it isn’t truly automatic, either. In a parliamentary system, the party with the plurality of seats is presumed to have won and its leader presumed to be the next PM, just exactly the same way that the candidate with the most EC electors is presumed to have won. The crucial difference is that the party leader then has to toddle off to the Queen or her appointed representative, the Governor General, and get permission to form a government. This is almost always automatic, but among the reserve powers of the monarchy is the right to refuse in sufficiently extraordinary circumstances.
ISTM that this is analogous to the role of electors in the US system. They are in theory a bulwark between the democratic mandate and the best interests of the nation that can be invoked in the appropriate exceptional circumstances.
That way both branches of government are pulling the same way. Government becomes more effective.
You aren’t from around here are you? 
In America we prefer government to strangle itself. Ideally the Congress should spend its libido impeaching the President; that way it has no time to raise taxes or solve problems.
Republican Trump now has a Republican House and Republican Senate. That’s an aberration; our hope is that Democrats will take back one or both Houses in 2018.
[Moderating]
Hooleehootoo, I removed the link in your OP. We have a rule against using the boards to stump for petition signatures. I recognize that this isn’t exactly what you’re doing - you don’t support the petition, you’re just talking about it - but it’s close enough to the line that it warranted editing. No warning issued.
[/Moderating]
In 1960. CA had 32 Electoral votes; in 2016 it has 55. Because every 10 years, there is a new census and the number of the 435 US Representatives is re-shuffled by population.
Inversely, the solid red Midwest states are losing population.
Just for giggles, compare:
1960: 1960 United States presidential election - Wikipedia (the map is not a separate cite)
2016: United States Electoral College - Wikipedia
#/media/File:ElectoralCollege2016.svg){kind=link}
The bad news is that the Northeast is losing population while the old CSA is gaining (very slowly)
TX went from 24 to 38.
Once fracking (we are scraping the bottom of the barrel for oil - this stuff is quite expensive to extract) pollutes the drinking water*, causes massive settling of earth and/or earthquakes and is abandoned, the populations of TX and OK may well decrease.
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- AIUI, the fracking wells are much deeper than the drinking water aquifers - and there are casings around the oil wells. But: keeping water out is a long-term disaster, and they probably wont bother extracting all the crap they inject. Once the well is abandoned, that crap wants out of the casing. Long-term, it WILL find a way.
Flint MI’s water will be pure compared to the crap found in OK 100 years from now.
AIUI, they are already finding level of drill solutions in potable water.
Solution: change the “Safe Level” to something greater than is found.
- AIUI, the fracking wells are much deeper than the drinking water aquifers - and there are casings around the oil wells. But: keeping water out is a long-term disaster, and they probably wont bother extracting all the crap they inject. Once the well is abandoned, that crap wants out of the casing. Long-term, it WILL find a way.
The EC exists by design, because the Founding Fathers were designing a constitutional republic, not a democracy. Personally, I think that the EC delegates should be locked down so that there is no chance of them changing their vote, but that’s just me.