Why no outrage about electoral college?

Great Debates
21

[QUOTE=Jonathan Chance]
And that’s the heart of the matter. The issue isn’t the Electoral College but the ‘Winner Take All’ method that most states use in apportioning which candidate gets the state’s electoral votes.

So the issue is convincing states to redefine how they perform that process. It’s already well-established that they can do so as Maine has been doing it differently for a while. But convincing some of the others, particularly large states, will be a significant challenge.
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Exactly. And why, for instance, would a state like CA change? Its legislature is overwhelmingly Democratic, and the the state tends to favor Democrats in national elections. If the Democratic legislature voted to allocate electors like Nebraska and Maine do, they would be just giving “free” electors to the Republicans (in most cases). Of course when you’re as small as Nebraska or Maine, it really doesn’t make much difference what you do.

22

[QUOTE=Honesty]
Why not?

  • Honesty
    [/QUOTE]

So if a certain class that constituted 60% of the population voted to enslave another class that constituted 12% of the population, that would be fine with you? Because, you know, that actually happened in our nation’s history.

23

[QUOTE=scotandrsn]
The question is not, “Why do we maintain the electoral college?”

The question is, “Why, given that we have always had an electoral college, do the news media persist in providing the sum total national vote, as though it’s something important to the system?”
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Because their guy lost.

If the results had been reversed; that Gore won the electoral vote and Bush had won the popular vote; the media would have casually noted that “this can happen in our system”, and cheerfully moved on.

24

[QUOTE=Honesty]
Why not?

[/QUOTE]

Because.

25

[QUOTE=Bill Door]
I see no way to get rid of the electoral college. The evil part of the system is the disproportionate power it gives the small states. Look at Wyoming, with 3 electoral votes and 509,000 people. It has one electoral vote for every 170,000 people.

California, with 55 electoral votes, and 36,100,000 people has one electoral vote for every 657,000 people. To have the same presidential representation as Wyoming, California would have to have 212 electoral votes.

OK, I took the largest state and the smallest state to accent the unfairness, but even Wisconsin, the 20th most populous state in the union gets 1.2 electoral votes for every 1.0 that California gets, based on population.

It would require a constitutional amendment to change the system, and you only need 17 states to reject it to block the amendment. The smaller states are not going to give up the political pull their uneven distribution of electoral votes gives them.
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What pull? You’ve noticed that nobody cares about Wyoming’s votes, right? Nobody cares about the votes of any small state, because gasp small states don’t give you many votes. Everybody concentrates on Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida: the large states that usually have small margins of victory. What matters in judging the political impact of a state in presidential elections is its swing capacity, not its ratio of people to electoral votes.

26

[QUOTE=Polycarp]
(snip)4. Just because you happen to belong to a majority or plurality does not give you authority or influence to disenfranchise a minority. California may have 20% of 25% of the U.S. population at present; that does not mean that it, or its Congressmen, get to tell Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Nevada, Utah, and Oregon how they should run themselves.
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I fail to see how giving each resident of Wyoming 3.9 electors for every 1.0 electors that California residents gets contributes to the democratic process. You know what’s worse than the tyranny of the majority? The tyranny of the minority.

The 22 states in the union with the lowest population, Wyoming thorough Iowa have a total popultion of 33.8 million people, two million less than California’s 35.8 million. The smaller states combine to have 95 electoral votes, 1.7 electoral votes for every one of California’s 55 electors, and that’s with 2 million fewer people.

The electoral college was designed to keep the election out of the hands of the people, I get that. I just don’t see why giving disproportionate representation to people from small states is any better. Has letting a collection of rubes. hicks, and yokels pick our president been working out for us so far?

27

[QUOTE=Captain Carrot]
Nobody cares about the votes of any small state, because gasp small states don’t give you many votes.
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That’s demonstrably not true, as some small states were highly contested and some big states were barely fought for. States that have a chance to go either way are hotly contested, regardless of how many votes they have. The last two elections show that any electoral votes are important, and if you have a chance you must go for them.

Wyoming isn’t hotly contested because the Republicans know they have it sewn up and the Democrats know they can never win there. The reverse was true for Massachusetts.

28

[QUOTE=Telemark]
That’s demonstrably not true, as some small states were highly contested and some big states were barely fought for. States that have a chance to go either way are hotly contested, regardless of how many votes they have. The last two elections show that any electoral votes are important, and if you have a chance you must go for them.

Wyoming isn’t hotly contested because the Republicans know they have it sewn up and the Democrats know they can never win there. The reverse was true for Massachusetts.
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Right, and as I said what matters in judging a state’s importance in presidential elections is its swing status, not its population. New Hampshire is the one small swing state, and the swing state part is what makes it important.

You disagreed with what I said in the first part of my post, and didn’t notice that I ended up elaborating on that; thus, we actually agree.

29

I continue to fail to see what is so hard to grasp about the concept that our government was set up to help enfranchise the rural and less populous states.

In retrospect it is such a necessity that I am always a bit boggled by the anti-electoral college sentiment that floats around.

Without the electoral college, presidents wouldn’t have to pay any attention to much of the midwest. Heck, forget that, presidents wouldn’t have to pay any attention to anyone in rural areas (the 1990 census states that less than 25% of the US lives in rural areas).

30

[QUOTE=BwanaBob]
Because their guy lost.

If the results had been reversed; that Gore won the electoral vote and Bush had won the popular vote; the media would have casually noted that “this can happen in our system”, and cheerfully moved on.
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I’m not talking about contrasting them when they don’t match, I’m talking about broadcasting the national popular total AT ALL. It has no bearing on the outcome and never has.

I’ve been watching election return broadcasts since childhood, and all evening long, we get updates on the national popular total, like it means something.

31

[QUOTE=Cheesesteak]
There is actually a sneaky, backdoor way to effectively eliminate the electoral college. It depends on the fact that the individual States are allowed to assign their EC votes via any process they wish (as long as it isn’t discriminatory)

States change their process to align their EC votes with the national popular vote, as long as there are enough states using this process to swing an election. Once that last swing state signs in, winning the popular vote will get you enough EC votes to win the election.
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I’ve heard this proposed many times and I genuinely think one of two things would happen if people tried an end-run around the EC:

  1. State A would sue State B and the SCOTUS would rule the practice unconstitutional

  2. An amendment would be proposed to the U.S. Constitution which would specifically forbid that system in order to protect the current system. The number of states that would benefit from the back-door route isn’t enough that I think it would survive an effort to reverse it via constitutional amendment.

The practical reason such a thing would never work is a Democratic state like California or a Republican state like Texas, even if they were willing to try the system once, would abandon it the second a GOPer won the national vote and forced California to give him their ECs or a Dem won the national vote and forced Texas to give him theirs.

32

[QUOTE=Bill Door]
I fail to see how giving each resident of Wyoming 3.9 electors for every 1.0 electors that California residents gets contributes to the democratic process. You know what’s worse than the tyranny of the majority? The tyranny of the minority.

The 22 states in the union with the lowest population, Wyoming thorough Iowa have a total popultion of 33.8 million people, two million less than California’s 35.8 million. The smaller states combine to have 95 electoral votes, 1.7 electoral votes for every one of California’s 55 electors, and that’s with 2 million fewer people.

The electoral college was designed to keep the election out of the hands of the people, I get that. I just don’t see why giving disproportionate representation to people from small states is any better. Has letting a collection of rubes. hicks, and yokels pick our president been working out for us so far?
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It’s not about being fair to the people, it’s about being fair to the States. As an earlier poster mentioned, we’re the United States of America. If we had told Rhode Island and Delaware (and New Jersey etc) that we were only going to decide things based strictly on who had the biggest population, they never would have ratified the Constitution in the first place.

They viewed themselves (correctly) as independent sovereign states, and before they signed away that, they wanted something built into the system so they would still wield power as sovereign states even though they are small (population-wise) sovereign states. They ultimately got three things:

  1. Equal representation in the Senate to every other state

  2. The ability for State governments to choose their Senator (changed via Amendment)

  3. An electoral system for choosing the President that gives them some degree of a voice regardless of their population.

The Electoral college isn’t necessarily a glaring example of disproportionate representation. The real area of disproportionate representation is the Senate, where California with its 35.8m citizens and Wyoming with its 400,000 or so both get precisely two votes.

The EC simply has to mimic the apportionment of the Congress itself, number of Senators + Representatives. There’s nothing in the Constitution that would prevent us from raising the number of Representatives which would give more representation to the larger states in the EC than they currently have.

The thing about the EC is, it seems to be working pretty well. The biggest States are of primary importance:

New York, Florida, California, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas and Illinois.

Then you have the moderate sized states which also are usually important:

Georgia, Virginia, New Jersey, North Carolina, Tennessee, Michigan and etc.

In general, most of the States with under 5 ECs are usually irrelevant. The ones with 5-10 are often irrelevant, the ones with 10-55 are all pretty important, with the most important ones being the ones at the top.

However people in California or New York probably feel disaffected and that’s not really because they are underrepresented in the EC (they are, but they still represent a huge number of votes in the EC) the real reason they feel disaffected is because they are both pretty much only going to go one way in a Presidential election, so they are already in the “Democrat” column. States like Pennsylvania and Ohio end up being more important not because of their EVs but because they are swing states and California and New York are not. CA/NY could eliminate this problem by dividing up their votes like Maine, that way neither State would be in the “guaranteed” column for either party. However, in doing that, they would no longer represent a large chunk of votes and would thus be diluting their importance.

33

[QUOTE=Eonwe]
I continue to fail to see what is so hard to grasp about the concept that our government was set up to help enfranchise the rural and less populous states.

In retrospect it is such a necessity that I am always a bit boggled by the anti-electoral college sentiment that floats around.

Without the electoral college, presidents wouldn’t have to pay any attention to much of the midwest. Heck, forget that, presidents wouldn’t have to pay any attention to anyone in rural areas (the 1990 census states that less than 25% of the US lives in rural areas).
[/QUOTE]

The U.S. Census defines rural/urban a lot differently than most people. To be in an “urban” area you simply have to live in a “Census designated area” with a population greater than 2,500.

That means the town I grew up in, Wytheville, VA (pop: 7,804) is urban, its neighbor Rural Retreat (pop: 1,350) is still actually rural, but it’s starting to get dangerously close to becoming urban. Richlands, not too far to the north (pop: 4,144) is also urban, and is in fact part of the Bluefield WV-VA micropolitan area! (pop: 105,000.)

Generally though, I think a lot of people who self-identify as urban dwellers would laugh out loud if I told them my home town was urban.

34

[QUOTE=Eonwe]
I continue to fail to see what is so hard to grasp about the concept that our government was set up to help enfranchise the rural and less populous states.
[/QUOTE]
The reality is that it doesn’t actually enfranchise rural people, it only enfranchises low population states, rural or not. Rural dwellers who live in texas, california or new york get the shaft. City slickers living in rhode island and delaware get more power than people who live in largely identical conditions 20 miles away over the state line.

It may have been a nice idea 200 years ago when the original states WERE separate and the little guys didn’t want to give up their sovereignty to Virginia, but that was a long time ago.

35

[QUOTE=Martin Hyde]
I’ve heard this proposed many times and I genuinely think one of two things would happen if people tried an end-run around the EC:

  1. State A would sue State B and the SCOTUS would rule the practice unconstitutional.
    [/QUOTE]

How could it possibly be unconstitutional? Each state has the power to distribute its electoral votes however it wishes, whether by the vote in that state, the vote nationwide, or the vote of Rudy the Magic Rooster. I believe NY brought suit against several smallish states a few decades ago, alleging that the system robbed NY of political importance (apparently back then NY was a swing state), and the SC basically said “if you want more influence, change the system yourselves”, so that (if I am recalling the case and precedent correctly) would seem to indicate that Roberts and co. would not have any problem with several states deciding to award their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote overall.

36

[QUOTE=Captain Carrot]
How could it possibly be unconstitutional? Each state has the power to distribute its electoral votes however it wishes, whether by the vote in that state, the vote nationwide, or the vote of Rudy the Magic Rooster. I believe NY brought suit against several smallish states a few decades ago, alleging that the system robbed NY of political importance (apparently back then NY was a swing state), and the SC basically said “if you want more influence, change the system yourselves”, so that (if I am recalling the case and precedent correctly) would seem to indicate that Roberts and co. would not have any problem with several states deciding to award their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote overall.
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Maybe it wouldn’t be, but as I said, that’s only one of two things I think could happen. I think it would be tested in the SCOTUS first and if that failed, you’d have at least 38 states deciding to put in an amendment to stop the practice.

Electoral votes have been given out in undemocratic manners in the past, for example State legislators have chosen them before (the problem with that was, the legislature of a state is far more likely to be deadlocked than thousands of voters–in one incident early on New York didn’t send any electors because the legislature couldn’t come to agreement.) However, even then, it was representatives of the people choosing the electors. While the Constitution is vague on the Electoral College, I’m just not sure how accepting the powers that be would feel about an innately undemocratic system (one which apportions New York’s votes not based on the feelings of the citizens of that State but on the citizens of the other 49 States.)

The Electoral College is clearly supposed to represent the interests of the citizens of the State from which the electors are appointed, not the rest of the country at large.

Of course, the practical reasons I listed as to why New York/Texas/California would never buy into the “back door” fix are a far bigger obstacle than the backlash from the smaller states.

37

[QUOTE=morgantire]
Why no outrage about electoral college?
[/QUOTE]

There is some. Every presidential election cycle. Just not enough to make a difference.

38

It’s a system that means one person’s vote will mean more than another’s. An infinitesimal amount, of course, but I would say in things like this it’s the principle that matters.

39

[QUOTE=Captain Carrot]
How could it possibly be unconstitutional? Each state has the power to distribute its electoral votes however it wishes, whether by the vote in that state, the vote nationwide, or the vote of Rudy the Magic Rooster.
[/QUOTE]
But the Constitution guarantees to the people that the states will have a republican form of government. I don’t think allowing Rudy to choose electors should withstand judicial scrutiny. At the very least, a republican form of government has got to mean that the votes of constituents mean something: if 100% of Georgians vote for a Republican, but the electors are chosen to be Democrats because of the national vote, I think that people’s voting rights in Georgia has been subverted.

As it stands now, I think everyone’s vote is actually worth the same, at least in proportion to the population of the state, no matter what state they live in. However, the value of the electors differs from state to state. If some states allocate electors based on the vote of that state (system A), and other states allocate electors based on the national vote (system B), then clearly some people’s votes are worth less than others – namely, the voters in the states with system B.

I don’t have any problem with allocating electors proportionally. Nor would I have a lot of grief over the end of the EC. But I think it’d be very unfair to have some states respect the vote of their citizens, and other states completely disregard it.

40

[QUOTE=Bill Door]
Has letting a collection of rubes. hicks, and yokels pick our president been working out for us so far?
[/QUOTE]

Certainly no worse than a bunch of Godless homosexual big city slickers has done in the past with their own politics? *

(*see how that worked?)

I just wanted to show this part of that particular post as a very strong reason why we continue to have a need for the EC.

If our friend Bill Door had his way, the EC would be abolished, and then the only places that would see candidates stumping would be New York City, LA, Chicago and a handful of larger cities on the coasts.

Upthread it was noted that California, population wise, has more potential votes than the lowest ranked 22 states combined. This means that it would make no sense for any candidate to give a tinkers-damn about those 22 states, and instead focus on CA.

Bill Doors, are you willing to effectively disengranchise 33 million citizens to focus on another 35 million?