So, are you in favor of the electoral college, or against it?
strongly against. iâm for the idea of proportionally representative governments. iâm well aware humans manage to fuck up even the best of systems because of greed and power, i just think they are our best choice currently.
And what is your proposed method? The German one, or some other? Personally, I am in favor of direct election of the President, and also of single-representative districts.
The model that almost every single free country in the world has settled on. A form of proportional representation.
Weâd have to craft our own flavor taking the best bits that fit us the best, and do our best to avoid pitfalls that other countries have experienced in the past.
I am as well. And Iâd replace the two house system with a proportionally representational parliament.
Except for the US, the UK, France, Canada, and some others.
Well obviously not the US, that is what we are discussing.
Canada and France are both much closer with the way their parliaments work, and both also are actively working to reform their older systems to be more proportionally representative. Canada has 2 votes this year on changes related to this, I donât know about France personally but it looks like they are also actively working on getting there.
The UK has one foot in the old quagmire (that the US finds itself in) brexit camp, and the other foot in the newer EU progressive model. Like the USA they have some deep internal divide to work out if they are to reform their government into the modern era.
The USA is the only country on your list not actively trying to overhaul our government. We wonât even discuss it.
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Bigger Discussion: I think the USA suffers from early adopter syndrome in government, internet, energy grid, infrastructure like highways, etc. We boldly push into these areas with great innovation as if they were our western frontier. We daringly implement beta version 0.5 of them. Then we somehow lose steam and get locked into those versions while the rest of the world leapfrogs us and continues to iterate to version 1, 2, 3, etc. So we have older inferior versions, not because the USA is worse, but because we were early and now stuck/entrenched in the past. We are the only country on your list not actively trying to overhaul our government. We wonât even discuss it. Same with gun reform. Same things that have caused all the struggle with health care. If the USA wants to stay at all relevant in the modern world it needs to become more agile with its iterations, more quick to adapt and change.
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The Weimar constitution didnât have the threshold and that was widely considered to be a bad idea. The actual number is somewhat arbitrary but you need to have some number. The lower you go the closer you get to Weimar territory, which is where based on past experience you donât want to be. The higher you go the more likely you are to exclude minority viewpoints which the system is originally intended not to do, so again thatâs not a great idea. After almost 80 years of federal Germany, 5% seems to be working reasonably well.
Also note that some state parliaments have special exceptions for ethnic minorities where the 5% cutoff doesnât apply. For example, there is a Danish minority in the state of Schleswig-Holstein that is exempt from the 5% rule.
Iâm not a fan of the AfD, but at 13% theyâre obviously somewhat popular, so in a working democracy they deserve parliamentary representation, for better or worse. We havenât had a far-right party in the federal parliament so far, but experience with state parliaments shows that whenever a party like the NPD (basically the neo-Nazis) does well in an election, they usually do worse in the next one because in the meantime voters get to see that they are, in fact, kooks, and become disillusioned. So far the AfD in the federal parliament has been mostly notable for bluster and ill-advised tweets; they will either have to get their act together and engage in actual policy-making, or else show their voters that no, they wonât âdrain the swampâ any more than Trump does.
As far as the AfDâs result in the most recent general election goes, polls have shown that the majority of AfD voters voted AfD not because they actually like the AfDâs policies, but because they donât like the policies of the other (major) parties â this is like voting for Trump because you donât like Clinton or vice-versa. The actual core of committed AfD voters is apparently more in the vicinity of 5%.
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I think this is really at the core of the problem. After all, the USA is the greatest democracy in the world, and of course doesnât need fixing! Instead, America brings democracy to other places (or tries to, anyway).
The US flavour of federalism was invented at a time when many attributes of a modern state, such as political parties or statutory health insurance for everybody, didnât even exist, and so it comes as no surprise that the US constitution doesnât talk about them. The framers of the constitution didnât give Congress the power to legislate health care because health care as a national issue wasnât on anyoneâs list of priorities back then (they had more pressing things to worry about, such as what to do in case the new country got attacked, hence the 2nd Amendment). And many of the ideas that went into the constitution had unintended consequences, like the fact that the US political system can only support two big parties.
The problem with fixing many of these issues is that the people who would have to push for the fixes are the same people who would stand to lose when the fixes are implemented. For example, any change to the electoral system that would enhance the influence of smaller parties (like a move towards proportional representation) would obviously hurt the big established parties, so counting on the big established parties, which not only control Congress but also the state governments that would need to ratify any constitutional amendments, to enact the requisite constitutional changes is futile.
Similarly, the Electoral College sounded like a great idea at the start (when the only model that the founding fathers had was the British system â incidentally also âfirst past the postâ â, where the king wasnât actually an elected official, and it was infeasible to hold a general election for president in a geographically large area with comparatively very few people in it) but must admit to a variety of reasonable criticisms like the one that the President should actually have a popular majority, not just a majority in the EC, or that one vote in the EC should be based on roughly the same number of voters across the USA. It is true that simply going by the popular vote across the USA would disadvantage people in thinly populated rural areas, but the current system in turn overemphasises âswing statesâ, which is arguably even worse. But again the big established parties have most to gain by perpetuating the status quo, so any changes are unlikely.
this is indeed the issue. a broken system is easy to manipulate for the consolidation of money and power, the same money and power that holds the strings of government. it is in their self interest to maintain the flaws they are exploiting.
the argument that counting each vote equally disadvantages x group because there are less of them is an argument that applies to any division in a winner takes all system. that is how voting works for winner takes all.
since counting each persons vote equally is the only fair system, the only practical way to implement that is through proportional representation, so that government more closely represents the will of the people.
The way I see it, the primary argument for the electoral college- and it is sort of a valid one- is to provide each state with a voice proportional to itâs population, while also providing a balance between the big states and the smaller states.
That is what we have Congress for.
The president doesnât represent the states, he represents the country. It should be one person = one vote.
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Hereâs whatâs happening to deem the electoral college irrelevant. Youâll have to hold your nose and deal w Robert Reich.
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Even if you got rid of the electoral college, you would still have the root of the problem, which is the US Senate.
Bicameral legislatures with an upper house modeled after the 18th century House of Lords have this problem all over the world.
You can argue that the decline of the territorial vote is pretty much a feature of our advanced military industrial complex; there was a time when all territory needed to be held down by local militia in order to ensure that someone couldnât just march an army in, but by the middle of the 19th century, this is less true. Today, itâs an absurd relic that enables billionaires like the Kochs and Mercers to buy out entire states on the cheap to further their revanchist agenda.
https://twitter.com/_waleedshahid/status/938055378021085184
Stateâs Rights economic policy is one of the first successful neoliberal advances in the US, capitalizing on skepticism over federal efficacy to create block grants that are administered by ALEC-affiliated state legislatures (which again, are also handicapped by the same upper-house bicameralism as the federal legistlaure.) These bought-and-sold Banana States, like Kansas, get to experiment with all sorts of novel ways of skimming-off tax-payer money back to rich people, because their two Senators have as much control over federal appropriation as the two Senators from Texas, or California, and so can capture an outsized portion of tax revenue, compared to their tax receipts.
Even the noted libertarian Tyler Cowen thinks Federalism isnât quite shaking out as the founders intended:
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-03-21/having-50-states-is-a-bit-of-a-drag
Clearly, this is a near impossible ask. What could we possibly put on the table to establish enough good faith in the proposal to abolish or neuter the senate in a 2026 or 2050 constitutional convention (tks, Jay-Z)? My humble proposal is to be open to changing state borders in order to redistribute territorial power; chopping Texas and California into smaller states, combining less dense states into larger ones, and deciding what to do with the hand-full of territories that we have that never quite made it to Hawaii or Alaska status; put a ring on it, or let them go. I think a shake up of state definitions at the same time as a Senate downgrade would be complimentary.
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I donât know what the answer is but we U.S. citizens better do something to increase our trust in our government. The current situation is dangerous. At least half of us have no representation. If we canât change that then we should at least reduce the presidentâs power, all presidents. It is apparently too easy for a one sided situation to arise.
One of the problems with our political system is gerrymandering. My own state is solidly Republican when it comes to apportioned offices (state senators, delegates. united states representatives), and solidly democratic when it comes to statewide offices (governor, lt governor, attorney general, united states senators)
So, right now, Iâm loving the Senate.
It turns out that gerrymandered districts can be made so exceedingly complicated that they interfere with the running of elections.
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