I sure hope they adopt it. Protecting democracy was part of their platform and this is a workable solution that will do just that.
Strongly disagree.
Yup.
Gotta love a C&H reference.
Who was flying over states in 1787? Presidential candidates didn’t even travel around the country to campaign until almost a hundred years later.
The framers of the Constitution feared the tyranny of the majority but overshot and we now sometimes get the tyranny of the minority.
Just so. There is no real reason the number of representatives should be frozen except for how unwieldy the the chamber would get. Wyoming gets one representative for its 590k population and the rest get one for every 590k they have, rounding up or down as necessary.
Then you should oppose the Electoral College, because it makes it much easier to do that.
Again, the Electoral College does the exact opposite. New York and Los Angeles between them aren’t nearly large enough to swing the election. But thanks to the Electoral College, candidates give no damns about any states but the “swing states”.
Complaints about “but then the places with more people would have more say!” are fundamentally anti-democracy. More people having more say is exactly how it’s supposed to work.
It’s only a bait and switch if she campaigned against it, and AFAIK she did not.
Then I think politicians are elected to use their current judgment, period. So if she did campaign against the Compact, she should reconsider.
If we got just barely enough states to vote for the Compact, it would be especially important to add Texas so as to minimize the chances SCOTUS would dare to upset legally binding majority rule.
This.
Fallacy of the excluded middle.
I don’t know. I think the election of POTUS is an election by the states, not the people. Each of the 50 states gets to decide how they will choose a candidate to put their EVs behind.
Within each state there is a popular vote to “guide” the state’s electors in choosing a candidate (these days it’s really “compel” not “guide”). That is where the people have “1 person, 1 vote.”
I’m not sure it would be fair to say that “Well, Wyoming selected Fred the GOP guy for president. Fred won Wyoming by 45,000 votes. Now, California voters choose Susie the Dem for prez and she won by 1,000,000 votes. So why don’t we move some extra Dem votes from CA into the WY election which will result in WY choosing the DEM even though almost nobody in WY voted for her?”
That doesn’t seem fair. Each state has the right to choose a candidate for POTUS. If you just had a nation-wide popular vote then states would no longer have the right to choose for themselves their favored candidate.
All that being said the EC system just feels wrong and unfair and if it was abolished I would be very happy. But it would severely damage one of the USAs fundamental elements, that is, federalism. My happiness would be a hypocritical one.
I think you misunderstood my point.
A state can’t vote. The people who live in a state vote.
Yet for the election of POTUS there is a meeting between representatives from all 50 states where each state (not each person) casts their electors’ EVs (even if some states divide those EVs between different congressional districts) for president of the US or A.
Yes, those are human beings representing the states so it is humans, rather than gorillas or gerbils or AI that performs the manual work of that vote.
I think it’s fair to classify that as the states voting. It’s a bit like how you can say: “The USA won the gold in Olympic basketball!” even as you know that it was actual humans that won the medal.
I still feel you’re missing the key point here.
Let me put it this way. If states can vote, what happens if the people in Wyoming vote one way in an election and the state of Wyoming votes in a different way?
They can’t. The state votes as directed by the state’s voters. The only way for the state to vote differently that the will of its voters if if there is something like the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
Exactly. That’s my point. A state can’t vote. Only the people who live in a state can vote.
Now explain why a person who lives in one state should have their vote counted differently than a person who lives in a different state.
Oh i think i see what you mean. You know that each state is different and that they all get to make a choice for president (you don’t like the term “voting” because “states can’t vote” so I’ll call it “choosing” if that helps.
I think all states count their votes the same way, more or less. It’s seems you are asserting that (e.g.) California’s “spare” Democratic votes should somehow be combined with Wyoming’s vote in order to magically make WY vote Blue even though the voters wanted a GOP.
That’s not fair.
California has a population of 39,355,309 and has fifty-four votes in the electoral college. That works out to 728,802 Californians getting one vote in the electoral college. So each California voter gets 1/728,802th of a vote.
Wyoming has a population of 588,753 and has 3 votes in the electoral college. That works out to 196,251 Wyomingites getting one vote in the electoral college. So each Wyoming voter gets 1/196,251th of a vote.
So a Wyomingite gets a vote that is worth 3.71 times as much as a Californian gets. One Wyomingite outvotes three Californians.
I think that is wrong. Everybody’s vote should be equal, regardless of where they live.
I also don’t think it’s right that some people’s votes get ignored. If you’re a Democrat in a state with a Republican majority or a Republican in a state with a Democratic majority, your vote won’t be counted. The majority will determine how all the votes in your state are credited.
I think that everyone’s votes should be added to the grand total, regardless of how the people around them voted.
But again, you’re back to the idea that the state is somehow voting separately from the people in the state.
What that means is if a person votes the wrong way in a state, their vote doesn’t get counted.
Per Article I of the Constitution, the State votes however its legislature wants it to vote. Every State has now passed laws requiring itself to hold a popular vote to decide how its Electoral votes will be cast, but they don’t have to do it that way. Back in the day some State legislatures just picked the Electors themselves. This is why the NPVIC is Constitutional.
And then there are places like Guam. People on Guam are citizens of the United States, as Guam is part of the US, but they have no voting representative and can’t participate in the election of the president who rules over them. Other territories like Puerto Rico, American Samoa, US Virgin Islands, and so on are in the same boat. With a true popular vote, they’d at least be able to have a chance to participate in electing their president. Heck, even the District of Columbia gets 3 electors despite not being a state.
Unfortunately, even the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact wouldn’t help with a situation like that. But clearly the Electoral College does an extremely terrible job of representing the will of the people and at least it would be a step in the right direction.
Well, Puerto Rico should just be a State, and the other territories have really tiny populations. But yeah, I think it would take a Constitutional amendment to let the people in those territories vote for President, just like it did for DC.
Or maybe those territories could just decide to let their residents cast ballots for President, and a new revised version of the NPVIC could be passed which would specify that the “official” total would include the votes from those territories? Easier than an amendment, but still a problem for another day.