That’s the same direct democracy straw man that people keep using. Vote parity is not direct democracy. Your concern has been addressed in my reply to Fuzzyfungus.
I guess my mental model of your proposal must be flawed.
It sounded like you want the electors, who are numbered proportional to the population of the state, to vote proportionally the same way as the population of the state. To me that sounds like you just have a smaller number of electors forced to vote the same way the total population voted. There’s no value-add - no consideration, no judgement, no weighting - in that step that I can see.
Edit to add: it would change the functioning of the EC, for sure, to accurately reflect the actual voting of the population, but in doing so would completely lose its purpose. Or so it seems to me.
The number of electors are equal to the number of congresscritters + senators in a state. Each state has the same amount of senators and the smaller states have more congresscritters per population than the big ones, so smaller states have more electors per population than big states and would still have a little more representation via the EC than a popular vote even if those electors were assigned proportionally.
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Ah. Thanks. So the number of electors is sort-of proportional to the popn, but skewed in favour of small states. Got it.
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Maybe. I wonder how many Republican Californians don’t bother voting anymore.
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I thought that congresscritters were assigned proportional to population.
The number of senators, though, is a valid point.
If you have, say, ten total congresscritters and two states, one with sixty percent of the population and one with forty percent, the state with the higher population would get eight electoral votes (six congresscritters and two senators), and other state would get six electoral votes (four congresscritters and two senators). So, instead of a 60%-40% electoral vote split, it’s a 57%-43% vote split, giving the smaller state’s votes slightly more weight per voter.
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It’s meant to be, isn’t it? But it isn’t quite. I think there’s some formula for working it out.
CA: 704,566 per house seat
WY: 568,300 per house seat
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As I understand it there was (it was even written into the … initial constitution?) but for the last hundred years or so no new critters have been added, despite the population growing enormously in that time. I think there has been a little shunting sideways in a few places - California, for a made-up example, gained critters some from Wyoming, even though the national net total has remained the same.
What it sounds like is what it is. The added value is that there’s a more accurate reflection of the desires of voters within the state.
Start with the understanding that there are only “red states” and “blue states” because of the winner-take-all Electoral College system that’s standard for most of the country. In reality, many if not most states are purple, with urban areas and college towns voting Dem and rural areas and exurbs and small towns voting GOP.
But as it stands, the popular vote for Clinton in Dallas, TX is rendered irrelevant as is the popular vote for #nextpresident in Bakersfield, CA – an obvious problem. A system like Nebraska’s or Maine’s would eliminate this problem to a large degree, without making entire states irrelevant in Presidential elections (which would happen if the EC was eliminated entirely in favour of a flat popular referendum on who occupies the executive branch).
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That’s not a straight popular vote system either, is it? IIRC, the popular vote decides the two electors equivalent to the senators, and the other ones go per the popular vote in the congressional district, so you might reflect any gerrymandering in the way those districts were worked out.
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Ok, but if all the EC is doing is accurately reflecting the desires of the voters, why not just do away with the EC and have the voters speak for themselves?
I’m not disagreeing with you proposal, in fact I agree with it. I just don’t see the point of have the EC merely parrot what the population has already said.
(the point @daneel made about the higher proportional number of EC voters in sparse states notwithstanding)
Correct. It’s still better than winner-take-all. I’d find it preferable to allocate by based on the straight popular vote statewide.
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You’d still have the protection of the EC being able to overrule the voters if, god forbid, they were to elect some kind of wildly unsuitable, hopelessly compromised, constitutionally incapable bigoted fascist.
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I see what you did there.
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From that, it looks ,like the congresscritters are being assigned proportionally.
The problem with Wyoming is that you can’t assign states a fraction of a seat.
The third column is each state’s actual number of congress critters.
The fourth column is 435 * each state’s percentage of the national population.
CA 12.05% 53 52.4 TX 8.16% 36 35.5 NY 6.27% 27 27.3 FL 6.10% 27 26.5 IL 4.15% 18 18.1 PN 4.11% 18 17.9 OH 3.73% 16 16.2 MI 3.20% 14 13.9 GE 3.14% 14 13.7 NC 3.09% 13 13.4 NJ 2.84% 12 12.4 VI 2.59% 11 11.3 WA 2.18% 10 9.5 MA 2.12% 9 9.2 IN 2.10% 9 9.1 AZ 2.07% 9 9.0 TE 2.06% 9 9.0 MS 1.94% 8 8.4 MD 1.87% 8 8.1 WI 1.84% 8 8.0 MN 1.72% 8 7.5 CO 1.63% 7 7.1 AL 1.55% 7 6.7 SC 1.50% 7 6.5 LA 1.47% 6 6.4 KY 1.40% 6 6.1 OR 1.24% 5 5.4 OK 1.22% 5 5.3 CT 1.16% 5 5.0 IO 0.99% 4 4.3 MI 0.96% 4 4.2 AK 0.94% 4 4.1 KS 0.92% 4 4.0 UT 0.89% 4 3.9 NV 0.87% 4 3.8 NM 0.67% 3 2.9 WV 0.60% 3 2.6 NE 0.59% 3 2.6 ID 0.51% 2 2.2 HI 0.44% 2 1.9 ME 0.43% 2 1.9 NH 0.43% 2 1.9 RI 0.34% 2 1.5 MT 0.32% 1 1.4 DE 0.29% 1 1.3 SD 0.26% 1 1.1 AK 0.23% 1 1.0 ND 0.22% 1 1.0 VT 0.20% 1 0.9 WY 0.18% 1 0.8
It’s pretty close all the way down (the most blatant thing I see is that there’s an extra seat being given to California, of all places). It’s just not fair that Wyoming is being rounded up to 1 Representative, where Montana is being rounded down to 1, despite having nearly twice the population.
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You just need to increase the number of electors to 1 per person and it’ll work fine.
ETA: you could improve matters by bringing population/rep back to where it was originally. I think you’d have to triple the size of Congress, or thereabouts.
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Well, if you’re concerned about an argument about generations, I wouldn’t fret, because generations don’t really exist. The term exists as a shorthand to describe the general political, social, technological landmarks of a given era, but unfortunately around the mid 20th century it got turned into an element of a persons identity, with the bogus idea of a “generation gap”, where young people became fundamentally different from their elders, instead of being basically the same sort of people living in a slightly different world.
But the fact remains that young people don’t vote as much as older people, partially because the stakes for them are more abstract, as well as simply living more transient lives than older people. We could do better to make those abstract stakes more concrete, as well as making voting easier (or alternati, make it compulsory, which would eventually lead to the same result.)
Because then Alaska and Hawaii and Wyoming and RI as states of the union will be ignored by Presidential candidates, both during campaigns and after elections. This would be as much of a problem of state representation on a federal scale as the in-state examples of Dallas and Bakersfield I provided above.
On that level, the EC system gives those state a bit more weight for the sake of fairness in representation, similar to (but better than) how every state gets two Senators regardless of population.
That’s basically what this does :
