“If.”
Being on the losing side doesn’t mean that you are disenfranchised. It just means that your side lost.
Yes. But if you have a system where the losing side got more votes than the winning side, then it’s a good indication the system has problems that need to be fixed. Of course, the winning side - the ones who are benefiting from these problems - have very little incentive to fix them.
A meaningless vote isn’t any better than no vote at all. That’s kind of the argument in the gerrymandering cases, where it has gotten traction.
“The politics of the time” is not some abstract thing independent of the mechanisms of elections. In the 2016 election, Florida had 77 campaign events between Democrats and Republicans. In California, there was one.
And really–1988? You really think it’s ok that the youngest Californians that could have voted in a competitive race are 48 years old?
And frankly, the years don’t even really matter. It’s inherent to the EC system that some states will be close races, and the campaigns will concentrate on those and exclude the rest. The people voting in those elections, in non-swing states, are disenfranchised. So what if N years ago it was their state’s turn to be a swing state and some other state got shafted?
There is nothing inherent in the EC that makes some, all or none of the states will be a close race
You are NOT “disenfranchised” if you are voting for the losing side. You are NOT “disenfranchised” if you are voting for a significant minority party (or are you saying that anyone who is a member of the Green Party in the US is inherently disenfranchised?). The Constitution of the United States in no way, shape or form entitles a citizen to a competitive race. Indeed, that’s precisely WHY political gerrymandering cases are failing to gain traction at the Supreme Court.
If a party wants to overcome a competitive disadvantage in a given state (say, for example, South Carolina, where I live), the answer is to go about demonstrating to the people of that state that they’d be better off voting for someone from the currently disfavored party. If you cannot do that, complaining that the system is unfair is just whining. :rolleyes:
That’s a complete mischaracterization of the argument, and it’s absurd that both you and UltraVires are making the claim.
Republicans in California voted for the winning side but are also disenfranchised. The candidates didn’t show up and show almost no concern for problems that voters face, either on the left or right.
No amount of demonstrating will fix this. On the contrary; it’s only going to get worse over time, as data-driven campaigning gets more sophisticated. Hillary lost in part because her campaign wasn’t focused enough on competitive states–she wasted time in states that probably weren’t going to affect the outcome in either direction. This is a direct result of the EC and the winner-take-all rules that most states employ. It inherent unfairness has nothing to do with whether a particular voter cast for the winning side or not.
If that had anything to do with anything I’ve posted here, I’d react to it. But it doesn’t.
Just this: Who are “people like me”?
NO they did NOT. They voted for the losing side. The election they participated in was the determination of who will be California’s electors, and they lost. Indeed, THAT’S YOUR WHOLE POINT (to the extent you have any). Your assertion is that California’s Republicans have no point in attending the polls, because no matter what lever they pull, the Democrats will win as a foregone conclusion.
But it’s NOT a foregone conclusion, as this former California voter can tell you. If the Republican Party hadn’t tried so hard to crack down on “illegal aliens” in the early 1990s (thank you, Pete Wilson, you know, a Republican Governor of the state), the state would still be tipping back and forth between the two parties. Republicans don’t win the election of electors because they screwed themselves with the state’s demographic.
The trouble that you, and others like you, have with the election of a President is that you still believe it’s some sort of national contest, which should be determined by the outcome of aggregated national votes. It never was this, it isn’t this, and it will never BE this (for some very good reasons we won’t go into here, because this theoretically isn’t a debate about the EC itself). Given the set up, to claim unconstitutionality, you have to claim that somehow voters in some state somewhere are being denied equal protection of the law. I have yet in this thread to see someone actually try to flesh that claim out with, you know, actual constitutional law… :dubious:
And now we get to the last refuge of every EC supporter: that’s the way it is because that’s the way it is. You got there more quickly than usual.
Pretty glib claim for a guy who just said he has “some very good reasons we won’t go into here.”
I won’t argue what’s in the Constitution. I’ve already acknowledged the Electoral College is authorized by the Constitution. No argument there.
But it’s a bad part of the Constitution, like slavery or prohibition or our original method of picking the Vice President. And like those bad ideas, it should be amended out of existence.
And here’s a reason; we’re supposed to be a democracy. The candidate who gets the most votes should win the election. I can’t think of any good reason why the second-place candidate should get elected. Winning the most voters bestows legitimacy on the people who hold political office; they are representing the largest group of people. Having a system where that first-place winner gets bypassed casts doubts on both the legitimacy of the office holder and on the system that elected him.
If you start basing your system on what results you think should occur and then rigging the system to produce those results, where does it end? I’ve already seen threads where people who support third parties feel that our political system should be changed so they should receive some share of political power. Maybe we should just set aside some seats in Congress for the Libertarians and the Greens and the Socialist Workers Party.
So the Presidency and the Vice Presidency should be national elections where everyone gets an equal vote. Governors represent states. Senators represent states. Members of the House represent their districts. But the President and the Vice President represent everyone in the country.
The idea of “equal protection” has little or nothing to do with the electoral college. For one thing, individual people don’t vote for president; electors do. It’s just that, in recent years, the electors have, for the most part, faithfully carried out popular will. Still, individuals don’t actually vote for the president directly; consequently, a person can’t claim being denied equal protection if nobody actually votes; in fact, that’s the essence of equal protection. Everyone is treated according to the same standard.
Oh dear.
When all you have is a US election model, everything just looks like a partisan winner takes all.
Yes, I accept the mathematical reality that in Wyoming less than 200,000 voters get one elector while for California the quorum is over 700,000.
But wouldn’t you reckon, after a century plus of disproportional political leverage, that Wyoming would be growing fat and rich on the bestowal of pork and largess from grateful legislators. Is it? Or is it ranked mid table to lower? (economy #47/50, infrastructure #36/50 by McKinsey). How much lower would they be if they didn’t have disproportional representation in Washington?
Why so?
Take a simple US constituency with;
- a rabid right wing candidate who polls 27%
- a rabid left wing candidate who polls 25%
- two moderate candidates who split the middle bloc and poll 24% each.
FPTP/winner takes all give the result to 1).
If those are your electoral rules then break out the brass band for the winner.
If the rules ain’t working then agitate to change the rules. Your prerogative.
But even a US-centric viewer might consider that possibly this isn’t necessarily the best result. It might be. But 73% didn’t vote for the right wing-nut. And that’s without considering the probability that barely half the eligible voters fronted the ballot box.
How about the constituents get the representative who has the majority support, rather than who has support of the largest minority? Neither a new or radical concept, being around before the US was founded. The old greatest good for the greatest number meme?
Again, why so?
#1 In 2017 Emmanuel Macron won the French Presidency in the second ballot 66% to Le Pen’s 34%. Sounds quite emphatic, but may I remind you of the context?
In the first ballot Macron received 11.4m (24%) of votes out of 47.6mil registered voters with 78% turn out.
The Far Right’s Len Pen won the second spot on the second ballot with 21.3%
If either the main party leaders in Melechon or Fillon had squeaked past Le Pen, they would have won the Presidency in a canter, from primary vote of a touch over 1/5th the vote.
#2 The newly installed 30th Australian Prime Minister is Scott Morrison.
His constituency is the safe NSW seat of Cook with 104k electors.
In 2016 93% of them voted and 53k of them ticked a box on their ballot beside Morrisons name. That’s 0.47% of Australians who voted.
#3 Morrison leads the Liberal Party who have 66 of the 150 seats in Federal Parliament.
In coalition with the Nationals they have 76, a single seat majority.
Of the 150 electorates, Cook is one of 48 electorates whose member won a majority of primary votes.
In 86 electorates the leading candidate on primary votes won the seat after the distribution of preferences.
In 16 electorates the leading candidate on primary votes did not win the seat after the distribution of preferences.
And, notwithstanding your view of what bestows legitimacy, every one of them is absolutely democratically elected and we are totally sanguine, indeed rather proud of our democratic process.
When the winner of the popular vote has lost the presidential election twice in the last five elections, you don’t think that serves us poorly? It’s fine that 40% of the time the will of the majority of voters is thwarted by an archaic system?
“One man, one vote.”
No, it’s not, because it skews what is supposed to be a purely democratic process.
The Electoral College doesn’t give the sparsely populated states equal representation, it give them MORE representation than they actually should have.
Exactly. I’d also add that the reasoning being offered here would also mean that the Senate would be abolished (or turned into another version of the House). The idea that any SCOUTS appointed by any president would find the EC and the Senate to be unconstitutional is beyond laughable. But I encourage anyone who feels passionately about this to put as much effort into bringing such a case before the SCOTUS as they think is appropriate.
Nice cherry picking. It’s happened four times in 200 years is another way to look at it. And guess what? Gore and Clinton were not the “will of the majority of voters”, neither garnering 50% of the popular vote.
The EC is such a monumental red herring in terms of electoral fairness. Or rather, the fact the debate is always framed in terms of “EC vs popular vote” is a huge red herring. The EC is an easy target because it’s effectively a slightly more exploitable FPTP system (with some extra ramifications for congress due to districting in some cases). It also allows people to say “well, it hasn’t failed that much” via a bad comparison. “Failed” by what metric? It’s certainly produced the same result FPTP would have, but I’m not sure that’s “succeeding”, just asserting a near-isomorphism between the two.
Almost any system would be better than a popular vote for president – ranked voting, condorcet, whatever (and something proportional for congress). My fear with over-targeting the EC is that if we ever somehow get popular vote via an interstate compact or whatever else, people will just assume everything is somehow perfect without looking into alternate voting systems.
As for the EC being unconstitutional – it’s grasping at straws. I can see how you can make the case, but it strikes me as a form of rules lawyering. Like, yes, the law maybe technically says it from a certain point of view, but interpreting it that way is immensely uncharitable and stems more from a really intentionally skewed reading of the laws in question. Cases have been made and won on less, but it strikes me as a poor way to enact change.
The EC is clearly not unconstitutional. It’s just another anachronism in an increasingly dysfunctional constitution. Who in their right minds, given the opportunity to design a constitution now, one for the 21st century, would design an electoral system like the one we have?