This is why Trump likes to call out voter fraud in California where there is none. Ohio and Florida seem to always need a 2nd and 3rd look and then the State Elections Boards close down the investigations.
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The TGOP just shit their collective pants.
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Degree quality from the electoral college has been dropping in the past few years anyways.
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Isn’t the Electoral College mandated in the constitution? Good luck getting an amendment through to change that. (Ie., not going to happen.)
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Apparently you missed it up thread, but fortunately since the constitution doesn’t mandate exactly how states choose to apportion their electoral votes there is a legal work-around that doesn’t require a constitutional amendment, as long as states with a sufficient number of electoral votes (not necessarily a majority of states) agree to join:
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Fun fact…Republicans have never lost the election after winning the popular vote. And this will become increasingly less likely as demographic changes means that more immigrants and young people move to states with larger populations.
True…it’s only happened 5 times in US history, but the last two were within the last 20 years, so that seems like a trend.
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I’ve never quite understood the Elector College and would love to see it go away, however that would make voter suppression an even more effective and direct way of controlling who becomes president.
So, I think the opposite is true. As it stands, suppressing a few percentage points of voters in one state will flip the entire state, which means that a small manipulation can have an outsized effect.
In a system which values each vote equally, there are no special votes to target, meaning that voter suppression becomes a much more difficult undertaking.
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An important fact that many people often lose sight of in this discussion: the current system is inequitable and unfair to members of both parties even when the winner happens to be the one who got the most votes. This is because rather that tailor their messages and policies to help the greatest number of voters possible, politicians who want to maximize their odds of winning concentrate their efforts on a few key constituencies in swing states. As a result nobody is even trying to win the votes of, for example, Republicans in California or Democrats in Mississippi, who may have entirely different needs than Republicans or Democrats that reside in swing states or in states that are considered “safe” for their party. Due to its population California has more Republicans than almost any state even though they’re a hopeless minority here. If I was a California Republican I’d be demanding a popular vote system so that my vote would count for something and politicians would have a reason to listen to my needs.
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Let alone if that was the way the last two consecutive Democratic Presidents took office.
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It’s a scale thing. @alahmnat mentioned it in Washington, and I bet that upstate NY hates that the city has more influence. In Rhode Island, nobody would care, it’s just not big enough.
Think of all the federal land management that would work different if there wasn’t some representation based on geographic size. (some not all, definitely not all) Need a new place to put a dump, waste site, power plant, whatever I don’t want right outside my city boarders, sure just plonk it down in vast empty (except for the people that live there) area over there. They don’t get enough of a say to stop us.
While congress still has this division of representation, more power has fallen on the president. Simply removing the geographic component completely from a third (or half since the court isn’t elected) of government representation feels like it’ll lead to issues. Some way to reduce it’s impact is probably a good idea.
I agree that you can’t replace one rigged winner take all with another rigged distribution. Both should be fixed. I can’t tell exactly how Maine and Colorado districts are set up. At first glance, they look mostly by county. But there may be a lot hiding in that “mostly”, especially in Colorado’s 1, 6, and 7.
The issue of poor district boundaries should be fixed either way.
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Woot woot! End it!
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Yeah, significant populations of GOP in CA, or Dems in TX etc. are disenfranchised by the EC.
Also, unless you live in one of the 12 states that candidates pay attention to (and where 94% of campaign events took place in 2016), then no one’s really trying to win your vote for the presidency at all.
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The new process would be the exact same as the old one, minus the part where you ignore the popular winner
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Scale has nothing to do with it. The State of California is many times larger in population and on the same order of magnitude in acreage as all the original 13 colonies put together, yet the State of California doesn’t give voters in some counties more power in statewide elections than voters in other counties. Whether you live in Barstow or Bel Air your vote is counted exactly the same.
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Just out of curiosity: Why did this never catch on in the US?
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Lindsey Graham is certainly crapping in his. Hint: He has no major metro in his district, just a few thousand former slave owners. (Ancestors of course)
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Bigots were loath to grant voting rights to people of color as it was. Imagine the establishment’s horror if a huge portion of our elected government was suddenly chosen by former slaves.
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So Trump got himself elected and proved his point. He’s smarter than he looks.
Of course, if the Democrats try to eliminate the EC, then all loyal Republicans will fight to save it.
Doesn’t California have the exact problem that the more populated areas ignore the concerns of the less populated areas? I don’t know how the population is distributed across the the state. But, I seem to remember this issue on the many articles about breaking it into multiple states.
Came here to make a similar comment.
What happens when we have the national popular vote (most likely via the backdoor mechanism upthread)?
The efficient way to collect votes will be to campaign in densely populated areas. Once you’re doing that, you’ll tailor your message, and policy proposals, to the people who live in such areas.
I would expect huge movement in Overton windows.
