I agree that no matter what you can never get perfect balance and I think it’d be foolish to try. I think the Wyoming Rule, combined with not setting the maximum size of the body but allowing it to increase every ten years solves most of the problems with both the House and the EC. It has the benefit of being possible purely through normal legislation as well.
I assume you mean the rule that would set the house size so that the smallest state gets on representative. That does absolutely nothing with regard to the issue except to right size the specific state of Wyoming. You still have basically the same level of granularity with the same amount of winners and losers, at the low end, they are just different winners and different losers. The problem with the EC will be exactly the same since it isn’t due to the house its due to the senate.
Somebody posted the math earlier. If you make the size of a district the population of Wyoming (or whatever the lowest population state is in the future), divide the total population of the US by that number to get a total amount of districts, and apportion appropriately not only will the House theoretically be more representative of the people (gerrymandering caveated) but you start to dilute out the effect of the Senate being equal representation for the states when it comes to the Electoral College. Will it be perfectly equal? No. But I’m of the opinion it doesn’t have to be and it’s still theoretically much easier to do than changing the Constitution.
I was concentrating specifically on the effect on the house since in a previous thread I had a long back and forth about how the house of representatives wasn’t really biased, and that increasing its size would have a minimal effect on its fairness. So I compulsively try to fight ignorance about this oft repeated line of thinking. As such I didn’t recognize that increasing the house size would mean that it would make up a larger proportion if the EC relative to a fixed Senate, helping to reduce the small state bias at about half the proportion of the house size increase.
How much to increase it is of course open to question. There is nothing particularly magical about the Wyoming rule. More is better from the EC point of view, but if you make it too large it becomes unwieldy (can you imagine a house of 2000 members with the equivalent of 5 Gaetzs, 5 Boeberts and 5 MTGs all screaming for attention).
Yeah, but there’ll also be five times as many reps to scream back “STFU”. I think a bigger Congress would do a better job of diluting the crazies while giving others the opportunity to cross party lines without as much attention or ostracization.
Oddly enough, and germane to this discussion, if the House of Representatives ends up electing the President, the do, in fact, vote by state, not by individual members.
But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice.
It doesn’t matter that California has 52 Representatives while Wyoming has one - they both get exactly one vote. So all you need is the minority party having a majority of Representatives in 26 states and they elect their candidate.
That’s in the 12th Amendment, so that’s one more thing in the Constitution we’d have to change.
At some point the representatives will have to have representatives. As it is, most major legislation in the House is referred to committees to hash out the details and only have the whole House give a final yea/nay vote.
Again, just like the Electoral Collage, because the office of President was seen as something that affected the states as political entities, not the general populace.
I think there are more crazies out there that could be STFU’d no matter how many non-crazies are there to outnumber them.
As has been pointed out already, the system wasn’t meant to be “democratic”. The Founders didn’t trust a pure democracy and basically considered it mob rule. The word doesn’t even appear in the Constitution.
Why aren’t you bitching that you don’t get to vote who the next SCOTUS Justice is, or Attorney General, or Speaker of the House? Originally U.S. Senators were elected by state legislatures and represented their interests, not the whole people. I’m thinking you would have really hated that!
The system was set up to specifically not be a pure democracy. Once that is understood the purpose and intent of the Electoral College is more understandable even if you still don’t like it.
The deliberate conflating with direct democracy with representative democracy will never not be tiresome.
The Founders have been dead for 200 years. Let’s make our own decisions.
I vote (ha) for better democracy.
And those problems are swamped by the fact that a big state like Georgia might give out a large tranche of electoral votes based on a margin of 11,000 votes. Lots of small states in fact have their power diminished by the electoral college.* It’s a lot stupider than the Senate, because at least the Senate was a conscious choice for a particular reason. It would be good if it was just a trick of the House apportionment, because that does have an easy fix, but unfortunately there is no single legislature that can just arbitrarily change how electors are chosen in every state at once.
*In the 2020 election, a national popular vote with the same results (you can’t necessarily assume that, but I don’t think it would have been hugely different in these states based on what we see in state elections) would have made Wyoming more powerful than Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin combined. The 110,000 vote margin in Wyoming wasn’t amplified by Wyoming having the most electoral votes per capita, but rather suppressed by Wyoming getting just a tiny three-vote slice of the electoral college no matter how big of a landslide it produces. Wyoming would only benefit from its apportionment if it had close elections, which it doesn’t.
Arguments about the electoral college always seem to be based on the idea that it’s some intentional distribution of power toward small states, and this turns into pro (democracy!) and con (federalism!) arguments for that kind of structure, but the actual electoral college is just so much more stupid and chaotic than that. Nobody even built this, it just kind of happened.
I do not follow your argument here. Can you explain further?
ISTM that if we have a national popular vote, then it doesn’t matter a whit in which state people happen to live.
Trump’s margin of victory in Wyoming was about 120,000 votes. Biden’s margins of victory in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin added up to about 43,000.
My point is that Wyoming is often in held up as a state that benefits from the electoral college, when in fact it has its power substantially diminished.
Every state that is heavily one candidate or another has it’s power diminished, or at least the power of individual voters is practically nil. If CA is a lock for Biden, every single CA voter casts a virtually worthless vote, there’s no point even engaging with them on anything.
Seems like as long as we’re trying to stick to what the founders intended, we should strip away most of the power of the POTUS and make the legislature do its job. We wouldn’t really care about some slight hiccup in the math if we simply didn’t allow our leader to rule via executive order.
We’d solve the administrative state problem, we’d stop worrying about the next president being able to create a dictatorship, we’d force the legislature do to its job, and we’d not be dependent on the whims of a senile old man or an evil old man or anyone else who’s elected to be an executive, not a king.
Before the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment the people were scarcely citizens of the USA as whole, any more than most of us consider ourselves “citizens” of the United Nations. They were almost completely citizens of their state. So the Fourteenth was passed, but then a series of regressive Supreme Court decisions were passed limiting its scope. Then in the 20th century the Fourteenth snuck in the back door under the heading of selective incorporation and substantive due process.
In short we’ve inherited a system in which originally the Federal government wasn’t even supposed to either have direct jurisdiction over or be directly responsible to the public, which has since been badly jury-rigged to sorta kinda be the government of the entire country except where it isn’t.
The flaw here is in presuming that “states” have interests that supercede those of their residents. States would not vote and neither, especially would “coasts”, just people.
Oh, you can argue for keeping the EC, but those that do so believe inherently that the votes of some people should count more than the votes of other people. At the very least such folks should be banned from referring to anybody else as “elitists” ever again.
It’s obvious to me that under the current regime/Constitution, the Electoral College will never be repealed.
But it doesn’t need to be. Increase the size of the House by an order of magnitude (or two), coupled with States applying two statewide ECs and one for each Congressional district, and the discrepancy between the EC and a popular vote can be minimized to the point of being negligible.
That won’t require a Constitutional Convention, or even an Amendment. Congress literally just has to pass a normal law. (And the States have to give up their all-or-nothing elector policies.)
Another alternative is for larger states (California, etc.) to split into smaller states, which would result in +2 senators for each split, and a less lopsided EC / senate count.