Just get enough states to pass this proposed amendment still waiting ratification
After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred; after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons.
Unless there’s a typo somewhere there, the terms of that amendment would be satisfied by 200 representatives. It wouldn’t necessarily grow the House at all.
I think if you do this you are still going to want to amend the constitution. With proportional representation of votes there is the likelihood of third party electors. If you get enough of those then you don’t get any candidate having a majority, and it gets kicked to the house with each state getting a single vote. Which is even more of an undemocratic anachronism the the electoral college.
It would be much better than the current system where a handful of states get to stomp on everyone else by giving out huge tranches of electoral votes based on tiny margins, but as I said in another recent thread, the procedural difficulties for doing this by ordinary legislation are greater than for a constitutional amendment. No one state has a veto over a constitutional amendment, but any state or at least any large state could make this unworkable. So you’re looking at a constitutional amendment, or something that’s harder and less stable than a constitutional amendment, either of which would require a broad consensus that the electoral college is bad in its current form.
Not exactly. Each of them chooses one elector per congressional district and two at large. Maine has only two congressional districts, and Nebraska has only three, so the two at-large electors skew things significantly.
Gerrymandering also skews things. For example, 5 of Louisiana’s 6 representatives (83.3%) are Republican, despite the fact that Republicans won only 68.28% of the vote in 2022. This is because majority-Democratic areas are gerrymandered into a single district. If Louisiana used the same system as Maine and Nebraska for choosing electors, this gerrymandering would have affected the presidential election as well (assuming that the presidential vote would have followed the voting for Congress).
I’m not sure what you’re arguing here. One per district is proportional, and having the two senatorial electors chosen for the state as a whole also makes sense and isn’t unfair. That’s as close as is feasible, with the current structure of our government.
The thing that keeps being forgotten or overlooked here is that presidential elections aren’t popular vote, and never have been. It’s the States electing a president via their electors, and therefore, the rules that govern that are set at the State level.
It would take a Constitutional amendment to force that at a national level, whether it’s by abolishing the Electoral College, or by forcing all states to have some unified elector choosing method. And from what I see, that isn’t going to happen anytime soon; there are more states with less than ten electors than there are with more, and there are a LOT more with less than fifteen than there are with more than 15. Basically the EC benefits the smaller states (2/3 of them, more or less) and disadvantages the population of the larger states, albeit not necessarily the states themselves. But that’s a pervasive problem with having a cap of 435 House seats and having to divide them up between 50 states where each state gets at least one, especially when the largest state is 67 times larger than the smallest.
Gerrymandering is its own problem that I don’t think there’s enough support to amend the Constitution or the constitutions of the various states to remedy. I half suspect that what’ll happen is that over time there’ll be civil rights cases and the like that’ll constrain the practice to some degree. But even then, there’s always going to be questions of minority/majority and equal representation on a local level.
No, the claim that states can somehow vote is something that people understand and rightfully see as nonsense (although some of them see it as useful nonsense).
People vote. States do not. And there is no good reason why the people who live in some states should get substantially bigger votes than the people who live in other states.
So the OP’s suggestion isn’t the right solution. But it’s closer to the right solution than what we’re doing now, so I’d support it as a step in the right direction.
Nebraska has 5 electors, and in 2020, Trump won 58.5% of the vote, Biden 39.4%. If electors were assigned proportionately, that would be 3 electors for Trump, and 2 for Biden. Instead, the state sent 4 for Trump and 1 for Biden. And even that was unusual: In most years, the state has sent all five of their electors to the Republican candidate, even though the statewide margin is usually pretty close to the 60-40 split that would give the Democrat 2 proportionately.
Of course we all know that. That’s the reason why we have threads like this. We know that the current system is broken, and so we’re trying to figure out ways to fix it.
No, that is not what proportional means. The only way to make one per district proportional involves a bone saw.
There’s nothing about the constitutional structure that would stop a state from simply legislating that presidential electors should be chosen by the D’Hondt method or whatever other proportional calculation method they might prefer. There are a lot of political reasons why they wouldn’t, but proportional election of presidential electors is very possible and very simple. It was even on the ballot in Colorado in 2004 (but failed for basic partisan reasons, in that it was an attempt to get the then-majority to unilaterally cede power).
Well yeah, that’s why I said “within the current structure of our government”. Meaning that each state still has to decide; there’s no way the Feds can just impose that without it being a constitutional amendment.
I agree that getting all 50 states plus DC to implement this of their own accord would actually be harder than passing a Constitutional amendment. And even if in some miracle world you got everyone on board, states can always change how they allocate electors and the incentive to do so would be immense. You could well see some states playing chicken, waiting until just before election day to revert to a winner-take-all system if it looks like the candidate preferred by a majority in the state is going to lose in the electoral college.
Actually, I suppose there is ONE place where Congress could require that electors be awarded proportionately. The 23rd Amendment provides that the District of Columbia, “shall appoint in such manner as Congress may direct” a number of electors equal to what they would be entitled to if they were a state (but no more than the least populous state).
So, there’s no reason Congress could not require DC to award its three electors proportionately. Not that it would make a difference – the District went 92% for Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
No, it isn’t proportional. Under the Maine/Nebraska system, it would be possible for a candidate to get 45% of the vote in a state but 0% of the electors.
As for the two at-large electors: even if you accept that it’s a good thing for the number of electors for each state to be that state’s number of senators plus representatives, there’s nothing in the constitution that says how those electors should be assigned or distributed. It would be constitutional for a state to assign all its electors proportionally to the popular vote in the state as a whole, so that, say, winning 40% of the vote in a state would give a candidate 40% of that state’s electors.
“We have serious representation problems that threaten our country and can’t be fixed because of the constitution” is really concerning to those of us want to make the US the world’s greatest democracy. And I think that’s where we are now.
Hey, if the people have a problem with a system designed to make sure that their votes are ineffective, then they ought to elect representatives who will change that.