Another vote (heh) that the OP’s difference between popular & electoral percentages is a dumb metric. The campaigns campaign to achieve their goals in the EC vote. What happens in the popular is a 3rd order effect of that campaigning. Said another way, if any prior election were to be rerun under a direct popular vote set of rules, the popular vote that results would be a bunch different from what really happened. More different in most cases than the difference between popular & EC.
Zooming way out, there is no good answer to “fairly” representing 330M people when those people differ so greatly in location, density of living, wealth, etc. Mixing in the archaic concept of “sovereign” states, which also differ mightily in size, wealth, demographics, and internal distribution of populace. just take a hard problem and wraps it inside a Gordian Knot.
We may as well be discussing changing to a metric calendar & clock system on a planet with days & years evenly divisible by powers of 10.
Maybe we’re defining things differently. Infrastructure is a land issue it covers a lot of area and affects relatively few people. These few people only seem to matter when they represent a voting block with power a million people in California’s central valley don’t matter to the state and in some cases their water has been taken for urban people to use.
I’m just thinking some sort of pull-back from straight-up universal suffrage might be worth considering. I mean, European countries and the US did quite well for a long time without it- if anything it avoids the sort of “bread and circuses” type stuff that we would see with a direct popular vote for President.
For the record, I also like the idea of Senators being chosen by the state legislatures; it seems more appropriate for offices representing the State as an entity, not the People (that’s what the House is for).
And YamatoTwinkie is right; there’s nothing in the Constitution that guarantees people a vote for President. So it really is the States’ electors voting for President; the popular vote is merely a mechanism to ensure that the electors vote the way the State voted, in a winner-takes-all style, most of the time.
Most of the popular vote ideas seem to ignore or hand-wave away the role of the States in the US government; keep in mind that the States delegated power TO the Federal government, not the other way around. So in practical terms, they’d have to agree to a Constitutional Amendment, or more likely, a series of amendments to do something like this, which is never going to happen any time soon.
However, you could get some sort of compact or popular movement going to apportion electoral votes in each state, and that wouldn’t require any Federal constitutional amendments. That’s why I suggest it- it’s more viable in the real world than nonsense like 6000 congressmen or national popular votes.
I have not thought through a number for this. There are some good arguments against a strictly popular vote. As much as I dislike the rural voters going for Trump a popular vote would disenfranchise everyone outside of a big city.
It is a tough balance to strike. A tyranny of the majority is something the FFs wanted to avoid and I agree with them. On the flip side with Gerrymandering and how congress is set up rural voters hold voting power that is massively skewed in their favor. If you live in Wyoming you have 3.6x the voting power of someone in California. People talk about multiple vote fraud but in Wyoming you do not need to. Your vote counts as if you were voting 3.6x in one election versus a voter in California.
On the flip side I would encourage you to read this article:
The more Natapoff looked into the nitty-gritty of real elections, the more parallels he found with another American institution that stirs up wild passions in the populace. The same logic that governs our electoral system, he saw, also applies to many sports–which Americans do, intuitively, understand. In baseball’s World Series, for example, the team that scores the most runs overall is like a candidate who gets the most votes. But to become champion, that team must win the most games. In 1960, during a World Series as nail-bitingly close as that year’s presidential battle between Kennedy and Nixon, the New York Yankees, with the awesome slugging combination of Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, and Bill “Moose” Skowron, scored more than twice as many total runs as the Pittsburgh Pirates, 55 to 27. Yet the Yankees lost the series, four games to three. Even Natapoff, who grew up in the shadow of Yankee Stadium, conceded that Pittsburgh deserved to win. “Nobody walked away saying it was unfair,” he says.
Runs must be grouped in a way that wins games, just as popular votes must be grouped in a way that wins states. The Yankees won three blowouts (16-3, 10-0, 12-0), but they couldn’t come up with the runs they needed in the other four games, which were close. “And that’s exactly how Cleveland lost the series of 1888,” Natapoff continues. “Grover Cleveland. He lost the five largest states by a close margin, though he carried Texas, which was a thinly populated state then, by a large margin. So he scored more runs, but he lost the five biggies.” And that was fair, too. In sports, we accept that a true champion should be more consistent than the 1960 Yankees. A champion should be able to win at least some of the tough, close contests by every means available–bunting, stealing, brilliant pitching, dazzling plays in the field–and not just smack home runs against second-best pitchers. A presidential candidate worthy of office, by the same logic, should have broad appeal across the whole nation, and not just play strongly on a single issue to isolated blocs of voters.
No it wasn’t. The analogy makes no sense. I know it’s tempting to make, but it’s wrong.
The purpose of a sporting contest is to determine a winner from amongst the competitors. In the context of the 1960 World Series, while fans had a rooting interest, the people with a direct interest were the Pittsburgh Pirates and New York Yankees. Baseball, like most sports, assigns victory or defeat in the context of games… The Pirates won four games and the Yankees won three, so the Pirates were the winners, and deserved to be.
Elections, however, do not exist primarily to award victory or defeat to the candidates. They exist to provide a service to the VOTERS, to give them the representative democracy that will allow for the continuance of a free country. Fairness to the candidates is really of little to no relative importance.
If I may offer an external opinion, my honest take is that a dizzying number of American posters in this thread are demonstrating a truly astounding level of unconscious, almost sleepwalking logic. The overwhelming reason anyone here supports the Electoral College is purely because they’re simply used to it. Not a single argument in its favour makes any sense and most barely qualify as coherent. The fact that no one seems to argue that their state’s gubernatorial election should use some form of a state level Electoral College pretty much says it all. If someone in Pennsylvania said they should change the way they elect governors so that the vote of a person in Blossburg was four times more valuable than that of a person in Philadelphia, no one would take them seriously. No one ever suggests that. Well, why not? It’s the same thing as the Electoral College, and you could make precisely the same argument.
The “tyranny of the majority” argument is senseless. That is not how a constitutional democracy prevents tyranny of the majority; it’s absolutely imbecilic to say that it’s tyranny if 52% of people choose the President but somehow NOT tyranny if 47% do. The way a constitutional democracy prevents tyranny is they have a constitution, one that imposes limitations on what the government can do no matter how many people voted for the head of state.
Well, that is how the US was setup. Remember the US had the Articles of Confederacy first which failed so we got the US Constitution and even then the setup was distinctly to stop the power of a faction. The idea was to balance the majority (the House of Representatives) with the minority (the Senate). It is literally baked in to the foundations of the US government.
Maybe, in your genius, you know it is senseless but the US FFs did it this way and we are stuck with it.
AMONG the numerous advantages promised by a well constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction. The friend of popular governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate, as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice. He will not fail, therefore, to set a due value on any plan which, without violating the principles to which he is attached, provides a proper cure for it. The instability, injustice, and confusion introduced into the public councils, have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished; as they continue to be the favorite and fruitful topics from which the adversaries to liberty derive their most specious declamations.
< snip >
Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority. However anxiously we may wish that these complaints had no foundation, the evidence, of known facts will not permit us to deny that they are in some degree true.
The Electoral College was another manifestation of this. It may make no sense today but it is what they all decided to do when they made it a major feature of US elections. I think they had good intentions and it looked good on paper (back then) but it pretty much failed almost immediately to do what they wanted. But…as it happens…you need the people who win by such a system to vote to change the system and that almost never happens.
The US was not set up that way. Individual states run as a “top down” governmental system - a state is not a federalized patchwork of semi-autonomous/sovereign counties that were admitted(and in some cases enticed) one-by-one into the state. There is no “E pluribus unum” motto for an individual state. Everyone knows there are 50 states in the US, but I have no idea how many counties my state has, nor could I even name a third of them. If a state was set up that way, sure, I can see value in using something like an EC for a gubernatorial election.
Yes, I realize that the above argument hinges upon “well, that’s the way it has always been.” But I think if you want to be logically consistent, if you have a problem accepting any sort of “unfairness” in the EC, you also should have a (much bigger) problem with the Senate, and with the dual-sovereign nature of states themselves. You should also be demanding that all state borders should be erased (or redrawn to reflect equal population), and the federal government switched over to a “top down” system, where states are merely a local extension of the central government. It’s the only way to guarantee “fairness”.
Ok, here’s my evidence that something is seriously wrong and needs to change: In the 7 Presidential elections that took place between 1992-2016, the Republicans have only won the popular vote once. However, they’ve won the electoral college three times!
I think an even bigger problem than the EC itself is the fact that people in some states are targeted for voter suppression, which would still be the case even if we chucked the EC. It’s just that the EC, coincidentally or not, makes targeted voter suppression more surgical and more likely.
But I think if we were to find a way to maximize voter participation in each and every state, the EC would be more in line with the national results 95-98% of the time, I think. The exception would be a really close election, and close elections are not a reason to invalidate the concept of the EC.
My biggest problem with the EC as it is enshrined in the Constitution is the specter of the faithless elector, and contrary to what some have concluded about the recent court ruling, I don’t think that this threat has been adequately dealt with. It’s still the electors who cast the final vote, and it is still conceivably possible to corrupt them and install an undemocratically “elected” leader. Remotely possible, I acknowledge, but even a slightly non-zero chance is worrisome. If we could somehow bind electors through congressional law to accept the certified results of the states, I’d sleep more comfortably.
Let’s think about it this way: Mars has just been terraformed, and we’re now sending a million people to colonize it. We’re starting a new society, entirely from scratch, and drafting a brand new constitution. Would you include an electoral college system in this planet?
The vast history of humanity, we haven’t had democracy. Despotism and Feudalism did quite well for a long time, for those in charge. Problem is, is that any time those who had no voice in the government wanted a change, they had to do it through violence.
Democracy is as much to protect the leaders as it is to give power to the people. In a democracy, if people want a change, they tell that to the ones currently governing, and they get to retire with a pension. In other systems, the retirement often is more violent.
Bread and circuses is a common epithet, but a confusing one. Is not the job of the government to provide its citizenry with food security and purpose?
As to the idea of looting the treasury for providing such, isn’t that what we are doing right now, under the system that used the disproportionate power of small states to put the people in charge who are currently running up massive deficits?
By the time of the amendment, most states had already relegated the senate choice to the people. Would you want to just get rid of the amendment, or to actually change it to require that they are chosen by the legislature, forbidding their being chosen by the people?
How about a compromise there? One is chosen by the people of the state, the other by the state itself.
The senate was a compromise that barely flew at the time of the Constitution. Most people were against it at the time, but states were willing to sign on to it for the good of the union. Not because they thought it was a good idea, or that it would lead to better outcomes, but because states with smaller populations demanded more voice in the government than their populations justified, and wouldn’t allow the union to be formed otherwise.
If you give a kid candy as a compromise to get them to stop having a tantrum, it may be what is necessary to get them to stop causing a scene, but that’s not really a good precedent to set.
While this is the case, that does not mean that it is ideal. Between a completely different world, where information’s maximum speed was that of a fast horse, and a new experiment in self governance, the Electoral college was set up partly for practical reasons, and also because the founders were concerned about electing a demagogue that would appeal to the base nature of the masses, and wanted a final check to make sure that anyone appointed to that office would be fit for it.
The first item is no longer relevant, and if electors are beholden by the states to act in the way that the states demand, the second is nullified. The only thing it does now is to provide voters in smaller states more power over the vote, and in a practical sense, just means that the voters in 4-5 states are the only ones that matter.
It does not ignore or handwave, it explains why it is an outdated, anti-democratic, and even harmful institution.
It also does not ignore or handwave the fact that, yes, states that receive disproportionate power are not likely to give that inequity up. That is acknowledged. However, it is sometimes hoped that arguments as to the principles of self governance could appeal to even those with selfish interests, though it is a hope, not an expectation. It is also sometimes hoped that these small states would recognize that having the EC doesn’t mean that anyone pays attention to them. No one pays attention to Wyoming. They pay attention to Ohio and Florida, Wisconsin and Michigan. Big states that are in play. Even though that Wyoming voter enjoys an oversized share of the power of electing the president, they still don’t matter, as they only bring 3 electoral votes to the table. A candidate’s time is much better spent pandering to those in Ohio or Florida than addressing the needs of a voter in Wyoming, even if it were in play. With a popular vote, every voter is in play, every voter is important.
A compact would require pretty much the same amount of buy in as getting an amendment ratified, so it’s not really a solution to get around that.
And having the number of Representative suggested in the Constitution would be more than just “watering down the EC”. It would also have the benefits of making gerrymandering much more difficult and ineffectual, as well as allow the representatives do their actual jobs of being the average citizens liaison to the federal government.
Most of the time when people say that you should talk to your congressman, that is because they are saying that you should try to sway them on a vote. But, talking to your congressman is also a way of finding out what it going on in congress and the government and as a way of helping to navigate federal bureaucracies. That part of it has gone away, as when they are representing the best part of a million voters each, they don’t have time for that sort of thing. But, if they were only representing 30-50k, as recommended in the Constitution, then they would have the time to actually respond to the needs of the individual citizen.
I haven’t read the thread carefully enough to see if this point has already been made, but:
You can’t necessarily assume that the popular vote we get is the same as the popular vote we would have gotten if that were what determined the winner. If you change the rules, you change the strategy. Candidates might campaign differently, and voters might vote differently. (For example, I’m thinking of voters who don’t vote, or who “throw their vote away” on a third-party candidate, because their state is so safely blue or red.)
No. Or at least not in the way that the US EC is set up. If you’re just assigning arbitrary borders for “Mars colony district no.27”, and ensured that districts were equally balanced by population, I could maybe see value in ensuring that the “president of mars” has a wide base support across a majority of geographical districts (and not just 51% of the population clustered in a few dense areas around Mega-city-one), and using something like a EC system to weight voting accordingly (balancing overall popular vote against the winner of the most districts), but I wouldn’t really feel strongly on the matter. We’d be starting from a clean sheet here, without the prior baggage of a 100 years of autonomous colony rule across dozens of colonies spread out over Mars.
These two quotes sort of get at the heart of my question. When you are balancing two interests, it is useful to ask “are they balanced?” Or maybe, “What does balance look like?”.
My (perhaps dumb) metric was meant to highlight one possible way of measuring that balance - how far towards the interest of the separate states and away from the interest of the population can we go before we are no longer “balanced”?
(And I do fully acknowledge that the popular vote results are not necessarily probative since they are produced within the system we have - nobody campaigns for the popular vote and many states are non-competitive so the vote totals are not reflective of real voter intentions in those states)
Perhaps there is no limit. Perhaps Wyoming still deserves it’s say even if it turns into an apocalyptic wasteland and nobody lives there anymore. Perhaps even if 90% of the people move to CA for some reason the current system still makes sense.
But if there are limits, then it’s useful I think to try to define what those limits are beyond the obviously fanciful one.
Personally I really like the point made above that if a candidate achieves >50% of the vote and still manages to lose that would be a sign that perhaps things were out of balance. I think anything much over 5% difference in popular vote should be a pretty clear sign that the states’ interests are being overweighted.
I also agree that such a large diverse country, with extremely large urban centers compared and vast rural areas is not exactly what the founders were thinking about when they created the Electoral College. But I do get the intent, especially in the days when the notion of “sovereign states” was much more the focus.
I also wonder if perhaps the increased power of the Presidency has exacerbated the problem. One thing that is pretty clear reading about the founders is that most of them thought that the House and the Senate would have all of the power beyond leading the military (which could only be called by Congress). The breadth of Presidential power today would astound them, I believe.
And the fact that very few countries use this method, and of the ones that do, not really what I would consider to be paragons of democracy.
It doesn’t balance against the minority. The majority party can have a majority in the senate. It just creates a situation where the minority can tyrannize the majority.
Your quote from the federalist papers describes why they didn’t want political parties, and that they were trying to set up the system to avoid that.
Doesn’t the fact that they utterly failed in what they claimed was the point of this system give a very good reason to examine what they got wrong and try to fix it?
Right, it is hard to fix. But the argument keeps being made that we shouldn’t try, because somehow it is a superior system. You are acknowledging that it failed in its primary purpose, but claiming that because it is hard to change, it shouldn’t be.
Well, yeah, I do.
This does not follow. Unless you are saying that that would be the only way for equality in suffrage, which I disagree is the case.
It’s not as if they aren’t already, more or less. States have subsumed most of their “rights” to the federal government. They can’t regulate their borders or trade between states, they can’t impose tariffs or quotas. They can’t print money. They can’t even control immigration into their states.
The rights that were left over really don’t mean all that much, in the end. They are the sort of things that you would give to a semi-autonomous zone in order to make the governance of the smaller divisions more manageable.
Interestingly, those who proclaim the loudest for state’s rights, those who say that states should not be allowed to make gun laws, and those who would welcome Trump declaring martial law and sending in federal troops to deal with civil unrest would make a nearly perfect circle on a Venn diagram.
The idea of “dual-sovereignty” has been a fairly preposterous notion from the get-go. The states have never been true sovereign entities, they were colonies of European powers, and then they were components of the US, starting with the Articles of Confederation. They were “dual sovereign” at that time only in that there were two sovereign nations that could make claim to them.
Texas is about the only one that can make any such claim, and their sovereignty lasted a very short while before they realized that they were not able to make it independently and asked to be be admitted into the union.