The electoral votes system make voting seem meaningless.

[MaxTheVool]

@CarnalK

@octopus:
There are examples of something like that out there though, “reserved political positions”. Usually in places that have had historical contentious divisions along some demographic divide. A western example would be Belgium that reserves specific numbers of Minister positions and Senate seats for either French or Dutch/Flemmish Belgians. India reserves some parliamentary seats for “untouchables”.

Right. Thanks for bringing that up. People who are claiming that without its extra weight, Wyoming would just get crushed into irrelevance are implicitly acting as if Wyomingans are by their very nature unique and different and special. Which is why I brought up Native Americans. I can well imagine a slightly different political history of the US ending up in a situation where some fixed number of presidential electors are reserved for Native Americans, or something of that sort. That’s the kind of thing that makes sense when you’re trying to form a government in Iraq which has a sizable but very distinct Kurdish minority, and the Kurds won’t join the country at all without protections being put in place to keep them from being voiceless in the government.

And arguably that’s what happened way back in 1789, when Georgians thought of themselves as Georgians first and Americans second, and very distinct from South Carolina, and my goodness don’t even COMPARE them to those New Yorkers or those Yankees from Boston, etc, etc.

But to think that in the 21st century that level of protection needs to be applied to the people who randomly happen to live in the states which randomly happen to currently have small populations…

[Chronos]

Quoth John Mace:

Let’s look at the whole preamble:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union…

Yes, exactly. The point is to create a union of the people, not to accentuate the division of them into separate states. We had already tried a union of nearly-autonomous states, and found that it didn’t work. So we replaced it with a more perfect union of the people.

Quoth Frank:

Leaving aside the elections that went to the House, and the corrupt bargain of 1876, there have been six elections with a popular vote margin of less than one percentage point, including Kennedy, Nixon’s first election, and the younger Bush’s first election.

And on the scale of the entire nation, one percentage point is not nearly close enough to be ambiguous. No recount is needed with such a large margin.

[octopus]

@Chronos

Yes, exactly. The point is to create a union of the people, not to accentuate the division of them into separate states. We had already tried a union of nearly-autonomous states, and found that it didn’t work. So we replaced it with a more perfect union of the people.
And on the scale of the entire nation, one percentage point is not nearly close enough to be ambiguous. No recount is needed with such a large margin.

Right. A union of states. It’s actually in the name of the country. Furthermore, if states weren’t meant to be treated as political units with rights and privileges then that’s how the constitution would have been written.

[Trinopus]

@MaxTheVool

. . . The constitution and the whole great compromise business give Wyoming a louder per-capita voice in presidential elections than California. It just does. It’s not fair or good or just, it’s just the way it is. . . .

I believe it is good and just. I agree it isn’t “fair.”

. . . except that some people’s votes basically count 20 times more than others. . . .

??? Twenty? I can see how you can calculate it to be around five or six. How do you get to twenty?

[MaxTheVool]

@Trinopus

I believe it is good and just. I agree it isn’t “fair.”

You mean Wyoming specifically getting loudened? Or the entire process of small population states, which includes places like Rhode Island, getting loudened?

??? Twenty? I can see how you can calculate it to be around five or six. How do you get to twenty?

You’re right, I was way off. In fact, it seems to be even less than 5 or 6.

Currently California has 55 electors, Wyoming had 3.

California’s current population is 39.1 million, Wyoming’s is 586 thousand.

CA has one elector for every 711000 residents, Wyoming has one for every 195000, so each Wyoming voter has 3.6 times the influence of every California voter. (Granted that would only be meaningful in a hypothetical system where we still had the electoral college, but it was NOT winner-take all. Currently, CA and WY voters all have basically zero influence, with only voters in swing states having measurable influence, but that’s a separate issue.) (Well, that might be the original issue of this thread, but it’s separate from the tangent about loudening.)