Warren calls for end to the Electoral College

[Brainspore]

Sparsely populated areas have other protections against under-representation in the Federal government. For example, a voter in Wyoming has 67 times as much influence in the Senate as a voter in California.

[hecep]

I think I would have taken the chance in 2016.

[skr1]

A constitutional amendment doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting through Congress let alone ratified. The Popular Vote Compact has picked mainly the low hanging fruit and has a damn hard road ahead of it in no small part because Conservatives have incorporated the EC into their Founding Fathers mythology.

The problem isn’t the EC. The problem is the lack of representation in the House. All you need to replace the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 is pass legislation in the House and flip a small handful of Senators. Increased representation isn’t a hard sell. The Founding Fathers argued over whether it should be 30k or 40k per Rep. We’re at 714k now. That’s something you could actually get conservatives to support. Getting rid of the Permanent Apportionment Act would be restablishing the intent of the Founders. The Wyoming Rule would give CA 13 more Reps and thus electors while WY stays at 1. Another alternative is The Cube Root Rule. Not only does this rebalance the EC towards urban populations, it also rebalances the House towards urban populations. So you gain advantage in presidential election and in the power of the purse. Nevermind it would be infinitely easier than getting rid of the EC.

[skr1]

@Brainspore

Sparsely populated areas have other protections against under-representation in the Federal government. For example, a voter in Wyoming has 67 times as much influence in the Senate as a voter in California.

And currently those voters in WY have outsized representation in the House and thus the EC because The Permanent Apportionment Act skewed the population driven counterbalance to the Senate. They have one rep for 500k people whereas other states require 700k+ for each rep.

[anon62577920]

@anon61833566

I am not so sure the electoral college is bad or good at this stage.

Then you should read up on the subject. It’s an undemocratic institution that gives undue weight to rural, conservative districts and has far reaching (and terrible) implications for our democracy.

[anon61833566]

EDIT: I do actually have a good understanding of the EC and why it was formed. I am more snarkily wondering if changing it will actually do any good. Other than getting Nostradumbass out of office, I feel like nothing will actually have any positive effect.

[ficuswhisperer]

@Akimbo_NOT

Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) said Tuesday the Electoral College was “conceived in sin” and originally designed to effectively perpetuate slavery.

He’s not wrong.

[ficuswhisperer]

@Scott_Lindsey

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.

Yup - this is why states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, suddenly super important during presidential elections. A tiny fraction of the population in these swing states can literally control the entire election. The votes of a few hundred or thousand in the states can literally override the votes of millions.

[smulder]

@Jorn_C

Just out of curiosity: Why did this never catch on in the US?

Hadn’t been thought of in 1789

[anon47741163]

Colorado has voted to allocate all its electoral college votes to the winner of the national popular vote. If eough states do this, the electoral college might live on as a vestigal appendage, without having any effect on the outcome.

[AlexG55]

[the Assembly] should be in miniature, an exact portrait of the people at large. It should think, feel, reason, and act like them. That it may be the interest of this Assembly to do strict justice at all times, it should be an equal representation, or in other words equal interest among the people should have equal interest in it

– John Adams, Thoughts on Government, 1776

Although, to be fair, no practical means of achieving this existed at the time.

[evilkolbot]

Qui loquetur ad populum potestatem Latine!

[anotherone]

It’s my understanding that we would need a Article V convention or a 2/3 vote in the house and senate. Either at least 34 state legislatures must call for the convention or we need to get both houses to pass a 2/3 vote. So I think at this point an Article V convention is the only realistic path.

[generic_name]

@Brainspore

Bipartisan consensus! Let’s make this happen

Heh. It won’t happen.

Remember: when Schwarzenegger became Governor of California he was the GOP’s new favorite star for a year or so, complete with a softball Hannity interview. Conservative pundits were discussing if they could change the Constitution to allow him to run for President, as he wasn’t a natural born citizen. When Arnold turned out to be too liberal that died down, but surprise surprise, the election of Obama made them do an about-face, suddenly even a natural born citizen was suspect.

In other words (and we all know this) Republicans don’t really mean a lot of what they say, it’s all posturing in the moment.

As I see it, the electoral college failed when the electors cast votes for Trump. Whether they were supposed to be a fail-safe against traitors and demagogues taking over the White House is open to debate, but they could have acted that way.

[boldeagleuserthing]

@anon61833566

I am not so sure the electoral college is bad or good at this stage.

I think it’s pretty clear that it’s neither - but the right way to implement democracy is to remove the EC.

[bb4me]

There is one single biggest reason to get rid of electoral college and it should be the highlight of every discussion on the subject. It’s deeply rooted in slavery which is the nightmare, original sin of this country we can never totally escape. But pulling down statues is only symbolic. If you truly want to move equality forward and try to balance out some of the horrors of our past, you get rid of it.

The “most votes wins” argument is “duh” it doesn’t even need to be said, the only downside is the right, far right, etc. knows they are a dying breed so they don’t like that argument.

[Wanderfound]

@bb4me

It’s deeply rooted in slavery

http://amp.timeinc.net/time/4558510/electoral-college-history-slavery?__twitter_impression=true

Standard civics-class accounts of the Electoral College rarely mention the real demon dooming direct national election in 1787 and 1803: slavery.

At the Philadelphia convention, the visionary Pennsylvanian James Wilson proposed direct national election of the president. But the savvy Virginian James Madison responded that such a system would prove unacceptable to the South: “The right of suffrage was much more diffusive [i.e., extensive] in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes.” In other words, in a direct election system, the North would outnumber the South, whose many slaves (more than half a million in all) of course could not vote. But the Electoral College—a prototype of which Madison proposed in this same speech—instead let each southern state count its slaves, albeit with a two-fifths discount, in computing its share of the overall count.

Virginia emerged as the big winner—the California of the Founding era—with 12 out of a total of 91 electoral votes allocated by the Philadelphia Constitution, more than a quarter of the 46 needed to win an election in the first round. After the 1800 census, Wilson’s free state of Pennsylvania had 10% more free persons than Virginia, but got 20% fewer electoral votes. Perversely, the more slaves Virginia (or any other slave state) bought or bred, the more electoral votes it would receive. Were a slave state to free any blacks who then moved North, the state could actually lose electoral votes.

If the system’s pro-slavery tilt was not overwhelmingly obvious when the Constitution was ratified, it quickly became so. For 32 of the Constitution’s first 36 years, a white slaveholding Virginian occupied the presidency.

Southerner Thomas Jefferson, for example, won the election of 1800-01 against Northerner John Adams in a race where the slavery-skew of the electoral college was the decisive margin of victory: without the extra electoral college votes generated by slavery, the mostly southern states that supported Jefferson would not have sufficed to give him a majority. As pointed observers remarked at the time, Thomas Jefferson metaphorically rode into the executive mansion on the backs of slaves.

[anon62577920]

a lot of the issues with our democracy stem from politicians being incentivized to cater to a group of people that differs from the broad makeup of the US.

things like getting rid of voter ID, making voting day a holiday, early voting, removing the electoral college - these are all pieces that will help restore sanity

[j9c]

Nate Silver has some useful graphs and stuff.

The Movement To Skip The Electoral College Is About To Pass A Major Milestone

Nate Silver (NateSilver538)

[n8_zilla]

@Amstrad

I’m not sure the electoral college is actually acting in accordance with the will of the people

not sure? someone else got 3 million more votes. whatever your political preference, what we ended up with was pretty obviously not the people’s stated preference.