QFT
Let’s see: NY State has 19.4 million people, and the NYC metro area has 18.9 million people. Admittedly, several million of those live in CT and NJ, but still: of course NYC should dominate state politics.
“With the exception of everyone who’s occupied one of our two U.S. Senate seats for the past 1/3 of a century, and to a lesser extent the guy who’s occupied the other one for the past dozen years, upstate largely gets ignored by New York Senators.”
Cry me a river, dude!
Everyone should have an equal voice, and a system that systematically overrepresents certain groups undermines that principle.
People in rural and smaller areas need a voice proportionate to their population, just like everyone else. In the states that actually happens, because of one-person, one-vote decisions by the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, these decisions don’t apply to the U.S. Senate or the Electoral College.
FWIW, if we did away with the EC, the U.S. Senate would still ensure the overrepresentation of the poor, helpless residents of rural America in our politics. Personally, I think abolishing the Senate is the right initial move, and dicking around with the EC is just dealing with a symptom. (For all the inspiration we supposedly provide to the spread of democracy around the world, you notice that essentially nobody else in the world has followed us into bicameralism. There’s a reason for that.) Of course, I’m also quite aware that we’re stuck with the Senate, but there’s some minute chance that we might free ourselves from the EC.
I would like to believe that but I can’t. A national winner-take-all vote means that every vote would be challenged in any election except for the very rare landslide. Every friggin’ vote. Obama took 54% of the vote, which is normally sizable, but 4% is small enough to be within margin of error. That means that states that normally tilt hugely Republican or Democrat would be in play for the tiny fractions of their votes that now are too small to make any difference.
The only way to have a national election is to have a perfect system of national i.d. and address verification. That would require procedures that would send half the country into a frenzy. I wouldn’t even attempt such a system without implanting chips into all Americans at birth or maybe tattooing bar codes on their foreheads.
Whether you like the Electoral College or not, it will not be changed in my lifetime.
The upside is that people will get to start these futile threads several times a year forever. 
The French manage to do it*, with a population of 66 million. Is that because the French are a lot more clever at running elections than Americans? Or is because the French are much less likely to squabble about political matters?
- Actually, they do it twice, if the first ballot does not produce a winner with more than 50% of the vote, since they then have a run-off ballot between the two leading candidates.
Parties would only challenge the vote total if they had a chance of reversing 4% of all of the votes cast in the entire nation. Even Bush vs. Gore was still a margin of over half a percent, or over half a million votes. By contrast, Florida was down at the hundredth of a percent level, being decided by a mere 537 votes. The national popular vote would never be decided by a margin that small, or even by a margin 50 times that size. Again, the mathematicians who proclaim the superiority of the Electoral College acknowledge this, and it is in fact the core of their argument.
I don’t understand how the electoral college guarantees that the government will care about rural issues. Look at this map. Just about half of the states got no attention at all from the campaigns in 2008. Without the electoral college, a pretty big chunk of the populations of those states would become relevant. Democrats would be worrying about how many votes they would be getting from Oklahoma, and Republicans would be doing the same about New York. Right now, they’re electoral flyover states.
This isn’t true. Electors can’t vote for two people from their own state. Having both the president and vice president be from one state would run a risk of throwing the VP’s election to the Senate, but it would be constitutionally permissible.
What definition of Margin of Error are you using? 4% is something like 6 million votes, thats a pretty huge number of votes to claim were miscounted.
Remember, an election isn’t a poll. There’s no error due to sampling size. The only possible types of error are either fraud or with the actual vote counting systems. I don’t think anyone would find it plausible that 6 million votes were due to some machine glitch (6 million people would be a sizable fraction of the votes in even the largest states), and fraud on that scale would be pretty impossible to perpetrate without someone catching on.
Thats actually an argument to do away with the electoral college, IMHO. With the huge number of voters in the popular vote total, a “close” election where things turn on a couple thousand votes is pretty unlikely, while they’re somewhat common when the Presidential election is actually 51 much smaller elections.
You don’t think that the Republican or Democratic Committees could find six million votes to squabble over in the whole of the United States with the presidency at stake?
They would. What we’ve saw in Florida and more recently in Minnesota would be sideshows by comparison to a true presidential vote-by-vote measure. Every single vote in every single precinct would be recounted. And by 50 or more sets of laws. And by more than 50 sets of what constitutes a valid ballot. And by 50 sets of who is a valid citizen with valid registration. When I say every ballot would be questioned, I mean every, yours, mine, and theirs.
It doesn’t matter that other countries manage to do this. I’m predicting what would happen here to a mathematical certainty. The only way to do would be to nationalize the entire voting system, with one set of ballots, a national database, and universally recognized voting and counting procedures. If you can convince me that we will see those in my lifetime, I’ll grant you the possibility of eliminating the electoral college. But not before.
They routinely accept far far smaller margins in the state by state races, so no, I don’t think they’d squabble over six million votes. The optics when a party contests a couple thousand votes are usually pretty bad, trying to convince voters that you think there were six million mistakes in the last election without a good argument as to why, and that we should engage in an expensive nationwide recount on the off chance you’ll find six million extra votes for your party somewhere are bad enough that I don’t think any party would do it.
Then why don’t we see that now? If they have the resources to find 6 million challenges in the whole country, then they have the resources to find 120 thousand in each state. Or 240 thousand in each of 25 different states. Flip 240 thousand votes in each of the right 25 states, and I’ll bet you could change the outcome of any presidential election since the Era of Good Feelings. So why is this never done?
Here’s the problem with that. If NY and CA do it, but Texas and Florida don’t, that’s like unilateral disarmerment, isn’t it? Assuming that a third of the districts in those states go GOP, that’s about 30 electoral votes the GOP picks up, but a third of texas won’t go to the Dem…
I think it maybe should be done that way, I think that would be more fair, but it only really works if everyone goes along.
Two states, (Maine and Nebraska) already do it that way, but they have so few electoral votes, it doesn’t make a difference.
Did you forget what an insane circus Florida was when Al Gore tried to do just that?
Err..Gore tried to flip something like 500 votes. Thats a little more reasonable then 240,000. But thats why just using the winner of the popular vote is less likely to cause recounts, the chances of an electorate of 120 million people in a single election coming within a few hundred votes of each other is a lot smaller then 51 elections in states of a few million.
No, the laws only go into effect once states representing half the electoral college adopt them. Once thats true, it doesn’t matter what the other states do, the winner of the popular vote will win the electoral college, regardless.
Of course I didn’t forget; that’s what I’m basing my argument on. Situations like that are much more common with an electoral college than they would be without it.
Can you show me an election in which 25 states were decidable by that margin?
The closeness of a total election is not dependent on the closeness of individual states. This site breaks out state-by-state results. For the 2000 election, 28 states and DC had margins of more than 10%. Five were really close. It’s an oddity that the states are increasingly polarized but the population as a whole is split very closely. The Electoral College hides that. An individual vote count wouldn’t. And the psychology would be hugely different.
To nitpick myself. Obama won 54% of the big two vote. He won 53% of the total vote when the smaller parties are counted.
IMHO - eliminating the EC could improve voter turnout, and I think this would be a good thing.
Consider - a rational voter in say, California or Illinois, might surmise that the state will go Democratic in the Presidential election because of the EC. If they are a Republican voter they might not vote at all for the Presidential candidate - as it would be a “wasted” vote.
Eliminate the EC and now every vote everywhere counts. If you are in the minority party in a state, your vote is still valuable for the overall count.
Not even close. Only 61 million Americans live in cities with populations over 200,000. It goes up to 84 million if you include cities > 100,000.
Because of the hard to comprehend way the census defines things it is easy to get confused about this.
It is absolutely true that something like 80% live within a “metropolitan area” but a much, much smaller percent actually live in what the census deems the “central city.” Additionally many, many areas most people would consider extremely rural are classified as urban by the census, any census designated place with a population over 2,500 is considered urban.
Cite for above.
It’s true that the census definitions for urban and the way people live are often at odds. Metro areas can be very large and include farming regions and what might otherwise be considered rural areas. Metro Los Angeles is actually more densely populated than metro New York City according to one chart I saw recently in a magazine (and can’t remember where).
However, your cite is for central cities only and that is simply the worst way to define urban areas. Central cities, especially in the older areas of the country, are almost totally artificial boundaries of urban life. Most of those areas have suburbs that would otherwise qualify on their own for this list. Only in the sunbelt, where annexation is still possible, is there any semblance of correlation between a central city and metro area.
The 80% who live in metro areas are different from the other 20% even if they live on farms. They get the same television stations and newspapers as the downtown folk. They root for the same sports teams. They have the same malls. They suffer from the same pollution, congestion, and traffic. They share representatives at the local, state, country, and national levels. The major employers impact them and the major layoffs impact them. Using central cities as you guide is a guarantee that even major issue of social or political dimension will be misrepresented.
For all the census faults, metro areas are mandatory groupings. In fact, Consolidated Areas are even better for many analyses because they are larger. I don’t know why this site goes only to 2003, but it gives a total population in the 56 CAa as 177,510,088 but a core city population of only 43,350,520. That latter number is ludicrous as a measure of urbanization. I’d go with the former in 99 of 100 specifics.
The problem with the EC is that states are not creative in how to divide up the electors and except for 2 have a winner take all system. Let’s just say California with its 55 electoral votes decides on the folowing breakdown
Winner gets 50-52.5% of the state vote: Winner 30 EV, Loser 25 EV
Winner gets 52.5-55% of the state vote: Winner 40 EV, Loser 15 EV
Winner gets 55-57.5% of the state vote: Winner 50 EV, Loser 5 EV
Winner gets more than 57.5% of the state vote: Winner 55 EV, Loser 0 EV
All of the sudden, California is relevant again because a swing of less than 10 million votes is worth up to 25 electoral votes. And while we’re at it, any candidate gets 2 EV for breaking 2% of the vote.
Not saying that’s the best way to deal with electoral votes, but it is certainly better than a winner take all system.