I don’t disagree–there is certainly a whole “if it quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck” aspect to the whole thing. My point to Chronos though was just that the specific addition of “only takes effect if other states do it” doesn’t seem fundamentally different from the other constraints. So where on the spectrum from Joe just walking normally to Joe punching the air does teacher get involved?
A democracy that ignores the majority and is beholden to the minority is not really a democracy.
Yeah, I get that there are words on papers that were signed long, long ago that sets up these bugs, but these are things we should be ironing out, not celebrating.
Let’s put it this way, the president can be elected with less than 25% of the popular vote, the senate can be as much as 70% popular vote towards the minority party, and if the house is well gerrymandered, then it can be at least 66% (or more if they are clever enough) in favor of the party that gets fewer votes.
I realize that these are extremes, and it is unlikely that they will get to quite those levels, but at the same time, many of the anti-popular vote arguments rest on even less likely scenarios to break them.
So, if the government represents less than 33% of the people, and the majority of the people are not represented, how well preserved do you think the union will be?
Would you still consider this a feature, or a legacy bug that needs to be removed from our country’s operating system?
No. You can imagine anything you want, of course, but it was a sufficiently live possibility in the days before the election that Team Bush was already trying to line up Gore electors amenable to the argument that the popular vote winner should be THE winner.
- What does that have to do with anything? Would my being a hypocrite undermine the validity of my argument?
- As a matter of fact, I’m sure most Dems would have, like me, said, “sure we won this one by the EC, but we may lose the next one the same way. Let’s fix it so it doesn’t happen again either way.” Because we’re mostly rational about stuff like that. Whereas since Bush’s win, Republicans’ devotion to the EC has been almost religious in nature. And if things had been reversed, the GOP would have felt the same way about the popular vote. That’s how they are.
In 2000, a coin toss. In 2016, the EC did it.
Is anyone making that claim about 2016? All I’ve heard has been about tipping big states by extremely thin margins.
Bingo. I’m a small-d democrat, and I believe there should be no such thing as a wasted vote.
So? We should have a system where the winner of the popular vote is President, just as is true for Senator, Representative, Governor, state legislature, mayor, city council, etc. If we have a system where the popular vote winner is President no matter what, and the GOP candidate wins the popular vote, then good on him/her. That person ought to be President. I may rue that somehow a Republican won the popular vote, but I won’t rue that we bypassed the EC.
Democracy ought to be straightforward: most votes wins. Some EC pinball shot shouldn’t have the ability to undermine the will of the people.
And in that case the compact would stop taking effect. Big deal; we’re back to the current system.
The conspiracy would be that somehow CA and NY would get all these states to sign on, and then as soon as it looks like there might be a Republican win, conspire with the electors to get them to vote contrary to law (and their own ethics).
But then, we have that same exact risk today. And in practice, it’s not a problem because there are enough inducements (ethical if nothing else) to make the system work.
Again, fine. Some state pulls some legal but shady tactics and the compact goes out of effect. You seem to have some greater risk in mind, like where there is a split vote within the compact because one state didn’t follow the rules.
You can call it whatever you like, but it behaves exactly like a popular vote. And that is in fact the goal.
Any bias towards one party would be short term at best. Candidates would adjust their positioning slightly and we’d have the same rough 50/50 split as today. That’s just natural in a first-past-the-post system (another topic completely…). The difference is that the candidates would have to start paying attention to the entire country instead of just a few swing states.
Democracy does not have to mean majority rule and certainly not on every issue. While I personally favor some form of the EC, if the US passed an amendment changing the system to popular vote, I’d be OK with that. I think that would have little chance of tearing the country apart, but largely because the amendment process itself is, by your definition, not democratic. That is to say, you need to have more than just 50% +1 vote on your side to change it. That is the feature that needs to be preserved. If we got there by some end-run like this Compact, I’m not so sanguine. BTW, I was probably unclear on that above, and I apologize. I don’t think the president being popularly elected would, per se, end the Union. I think it might very well do so if done improperly-- without a super-majority buy-in, as is needed for the amendment process.
Bottom like, though, as much as I revere democracy and majority rule, I’m OK with putting some limits on the former in order to avoid political implosion and possible self-destruction.
Or, you know, even the big states. Out of 399 general campaign events in 2016, how many happened in California? 1. Just a single one, 0.25% of the total events, for a state with 12% of the total US population.
The Democrats are not the only victims of course. Republicans in CA get shafted too. And for that matter, Texas, with a healthy 9% of the US population, also got a single visit. On the other hand, Florida, with 6%, got 71 visits.
Everyone–Democrats and Republicans alike–not in a swing state, gets shafted.
So when pro-EC people says that a popular vote would cause candidates to ignore region X, I laugh because it would be virtually impossible to get worse than it is today. Also, the usual claim (“candidates would ignore rural areas and focus on cities”) is especially bogus because to whatever extent it’s true, it’s already true, because every state has both cities and rural areas–and within a state the popular vote holds. The EC doesn’t fix that aspect in the slightest.
I think we may be talking past each other. I’m just going to straighten out one thing, and then agree to disagree.
On the issue of NY and CA, I did not mean to imply that they were trying to trick the other states into joining the Compact. I only singled them out because they were the largest states, and could have the biggest impact by withdrawing. It’s conceivable that a very smaller state could withdraw without impacting the result. And I specifically included CA because it’s my state, and I’ve lived here for 40 years and I know it pretty well.
Justice isn’t a black/white concept, IMO. Some things are more or less just. IMO, the electoral college is a less just means of electing presidents than a national popular vote, including via the method suggested in this thread.
Sure, Justice is not black and white. I can agree to that to some extent. Things are either just or unjust, but some injustices are greater than others. Why, though, is the popular vote for president more just than the current system? What informs your opinion?
Is a parliamentary system such as the UK’s less just than a system like the US? In that system, citizens don’t even cast a vote for the executive. The selection process is left to the legislative branch.
It’s about strengthening and improving our democracy, John. That’s a fundamental precept, not subject to explanation. If you haven’t seen that by now, after all this discussion, is that due to something more than obstinate both-sides-ism?
I don’t know enough about the parliamentary system to make that judgment.
But comparing the two possible systems in the US, it’s very clear to me that ensuring every American has the exact same voting power and influence is more just than a system in which some Americans have significantly more or less voting power and influence than others. And I don’t see any benefits in the electoral college system that make up for that glaring injustice.
First of all — Color me elitist or hypocritic, but I wanted Hillary to become President NOT because she got more votes than Trump but because she would put the country on a better saner path.
Yes, if we want outrageous counterexamples we might start with FOUR candidates, with defectors throwing the election to the House but where the guy with the highest traditional EC count scored well in the Compact states, but their Compact puts him into 4th place. (The House picks from among the highest THREE candidates.)
But this far-fetched scenario is not what concerns me. I’m dismayed by the contrast between two scenarios, if the Compact is in effect:
(1) The R’s win the pop, D’s the traditional elec-col. R becomes President.
(2) The D’s win the pop, R’s the traditional elec-col. The R’s defect or litigate and R becomes President.
Basically I expect the R’s to win, under the Compact, if they win EITHER the pop vote or the traditional elec-college. (Interchange D and R if you prefer a counterfactual view of American politics.)
That’s a good angle that I hadn’t thought of, but it would seem to me that it only means the parliamentary system might be unjust in a different way. Or, one can argue that if you voted for a minority party that ends up not being part of the government that gets formed, you get no vote at all towards picking the PM.
But primarily I’m interested in iiandyiiii’s reasoning that straying from the popular vote puts you in less just territory. Is this always the case, or is there something about the presidency that makes it particularly prone to this problem.
Increased likelihood of matching the popular vote is not the objective. Having a popular vote is the objective.
Mismatched EC/popular results for close races actually the smallest problem in my mind. The more serious problem is that candidates can completely ignore huge swaths of the country. This is not theoretical stuff; it’s what actually happens under the current system.
What does a candidate do with a state like Texas that’s already secure, and then promises to match the popular vote? They still get ignored! Because flipping a vote in Florida is worth the same as flipping a vote in Texas as far as the popular vote is concerned, plus you get the benefit of the Florida EVs. So, just like today, candidates would spend all their time in Florida or wherever and no time in Texas, California, and New York. So that approach is entirely a net loss for anyone that tried it.
I don’t support the popular vote because it’s somehow more purely democratic. I support it because the EC is defective with respect to encouraging candidates to gather support from the whole US instead of a few key places.
I’m not following this at all. The EC indeed encourages a candidate to get support from wide swaths of the country instead of just a few key places.
Take the 2000 election: Gore wins the national popular vote 48.5% to 48%. That’s a coin flip. However, Bush wins 30 states to Gore’s 20 states. That is significant and shows a wider and broader base of support.
You’ve seen the maps: Gore support was clustered in a few key areas whereas you could drive coast to coast while driving through all Bush counties.
Putting aside partisan politics, when the vote is close, isn’t the broad base of support worth more? I could see the argument if you have a 60%-40% election where the 60% candidate loses. Then we could seriously talk about disenfranchisement. But when the election is razor thin, basically statistical noise, the broad base of support, IMHO, is an important factor to determine who should govern a large and diverse country.
Now, the 2016 election wasn’t as close, but 2 to 3 percentage points is still very small. A national popular vote would forever disenfranchise over 30 states and the President would only represent the coastal urban areas. That is a recipe for disunion and dissatisfaction.
An absurd metric. Who cares about the geographical distribution of votes? It’s nonsense; like looking at who got the most votes from sea level voters vs. 5,000 feet.
Take a look at this map. It shows the number of campaign events in the 2016 election. You can see that the majority of the country–both rural and urban, red state and blue state–was ignored to a large degree. It’s all about the swing states.
This is a proxy, of course–campaign events don’t matter all that much by themselves. But they’re a very good indication of where the candidates think they have the greatest influence. And that isn’t California or Texas, despite their high population. A number of states got zero visits.
You say a popular vote would disenfranchise 30 states, but that’s nonsense, because a vote in Wyoming is worth the same as one in California. A candidate will show up as long as there’s some reasonable population density.
Only 12 states on that map got more than 3 visits. The remaining 38 states include both the top 3 most populated states and most of the least-populated states. That’s what I call disenfranchisement.
What about the rural/urban divide, you say? Doesn’t abandoning the EC mean candidates will ignore places with low population density? Yes, but no more than what’s already the case. No one visited Podunk, Iowa with 10 people. They went to the cities.
Maybe you can explain what you mean by “broader base of support” without bringing geography or other bizarre metrics into play.
Unfortunately, a lot of opponents of the electoral college get caught up in this issue as well. I’ve heard from a lot of Democrats who think the reason Trump won the electoral college is that it’s biased toward “small states.” And it is, but that doesn’t mean a lot in our current partisan divide. I’m pretty sure Donald Trump would have won even if every state had an exactly proportional number of electoral votes. In fact, Hillary Clinton may even have gotten a very tiny boost from the small state bias. She lost the aggregate popular vote of the ten smallest states by pretty big margin, but won their combined electoral votes by something like one vote. Whereas Trump lost the combined vote of the ten largest states but got a pretty massive percentage (75% or something like that) of their electoral votes.
The main absurdity of the system is the bloc voting used by 48 states and DC (which leads to a 50k vote margin in Florida being worth almost ten times a 50k vote margin in Wyoming). And that isn’t actually in the Constitution, but all of the solutions that fix that but retain the EC are pretty imperfect as well, and it probably wouldn’t be easier to fix either.
When every last EV counts, as it did once again in 2016, yes, it does mean a lot. When it results in overruling democracy, it means a hell of a lot.
The small-state issue is really a rural/urban issue, meaning rural people (stereotype them all you like) and their interests have outsized influence. That’s nothing new; and hasn’t been since that was understood at the Constitutional Convention to be the price of keeping the slave states in the Union. You even see that pattern in electoral maps today.
UltraVires: We have a government of/by/for We the People. Not dirt. Glad to help clear that up for ya.
I do not consider the amendment process to be undemocratic. It is not undemocratic for it to require a supermajority in order to change the status quo, especially on something as fundamental as the constitution. So, by my “definition”, that process is not ‘not democratic’.
What I do consider undemocratic is when the minority is able to change the status quo. When the minority is able to pass legislation and make policies that the majority of the voters are against.
The current set up allows low population states along with gerrymandered districts to put into power people who will change things, even if they only represent a small minority of the voter’s interests.
The senate was a compromise needed in order to get the smaller states on board, but at that time, the difference in state size was not nearly what it is today. That compromise is being more and more in the small states interest against that of the states where people live.
Personally, if I were Soros, rather than paying homeless people to go illegally vote in california and alabama, I’d be bussing them up to north dakota, south dakota, or minnesota, where the vote counts far more.
I don’t know the exact numbers, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Ohio got most of the campaign visits. Seems they were here at least once a week throughout the campaign. I would not mind sharing the candidates with other states.
Not iiandyiiii, but representing the interests of the majority of the voters is more just than ignoring the majority of voters in favor of the minority.
The Compact isn’t exactly clear about what it means to “win” the popular vote. Does a plurality win, or does it have to be a clear majority? In the current system, if no candidate gets a majority of the EV vote, the election goes to the House. With the increased likelihood of faithless electors, I think this Compact will increase the probability of an election going to the House (if we can suspend all reality for a moment and pretend that this Compact could pass). As noted above, then each state gets an equal vote, with no weighting for population.
But what should happen with this Compact if the votes come out: 45% - 40% - 15%? Does the 45% candidate “win”?
Some of you are probably too young to remember, but it wasn’t that long ago that we had a 43.4% - 42.7% - 13.5% election (1968). And let’s not forget 1992, which was 43.0% - 37.4% - 18.9%.