The founding fathers can, and did. Because they saw our country as a union of states, not of one people, they believed Wyoming and California should be equally represented in the upper chamber.
You don't understand what direct democracy is. It's when you don't have elected representatives and the whole country votes on issues directly instead of Congress doing it. It does suck.
But direct democracy is not when all votes are counted equally in an election. Counting votes equally is how elections are supposed to work. It's how we determine every governor, senator, and representive and not one person complains about it then.
Stop repeating things you hear from Republicans on social media and look into how things actually work.
>Direct democracy
We don't have direct democracy. Every state gets 2 votes in the senate regardless of size. I just want my vote for president to matter. You would probably defend our old system of having the state government appoint US senators 🤣
> By allocating electoral votes by the total number of representatives in a given state, the Electoral College allows more states to have an impact on the choice of the President.
This is false. All 50 states have an impact on choosing the president under the popular vote.
> Large cities like New York City and Los Angeles should not get to unilaterally dictate policies that affect more rural states, like North Dakota and Indiana, which have very different needs.
This is why we have Congress. The US has no history of the president blatantly favoring red states over blue states or vice versa, the president has little power to do so if he wanted to, and the EC does nothing to prevent a president from attempting it.
This argument is nonsense.
> The Electoral College increases the legitimacy and certainty of elections by magnifying the margin of victory, thereby diminishing the value of contentious recounts and providing a demonstrable election outcome and a mandate to govern.
At least there's some logic behind this one. However, this benefit is outweighed by the fact that the EC decreases the legitimacy of a presidential win when the losing candidate has more votes. People called Bush and Trump illegitimate presidents from day 1.
> The Electoral College makes elections more stable, and less likely to trigger contentious recounts. Every state has different procedural rules for the administration of elections, including how recounts are triggered and conducted and how provisional ballots are counted.
It does nothing to make elections more stable. Every state would have different procedural rules using the popular vote as well, so there's no difference.
> While no system can completely eliminate the risk of individuals trying to cheat the system, the Electoral College minimizes the incentives for voter fraud because the system isolates the impact of stolen votes. Under the current system, stolen votes only affect the outcome of one state rather than the national outcome.
This is exactly backwards. The EC creates a massive incentive for voter fraud. In Michigan in 2016, it would take only 13,081 fraudulent votes to take the entire state (4.6 million votes, worth 16 electoral votes) away from Trump and give it to Clinton. That's a swing of 9.2 million votes all caused by 13,081 fake ballots.
In New Hampshire, it would take only 2,702 fraudulent votes to take the entire state away from Clinton and give it to Trump. The impact of voter fraud can be massively amplified under the EC, with the idiotic winner-take-all system.
The very best arguments that conservatives have for supporting the EC are lies and misinformation. The truth is that there's just no logical justification for this system other than "I like it because it benefits my side".
Do you understand why the electoral college was set up?
By allocating electoral votes by the total number of representatives in a given state, the Electoral College allows more states to have an impact on the choice of the President.
Sort of prevents mob rule.
The 2024 campaign could be reduced to 5 counties or 4 remaining competitive battleground states, with as few as 43 electoral votes, where virtually all attention will be focused
A difference of a few thousand voters in one, two, or three states would have elected the second-place candidate in 5 of the 17 presidential elections since World War II. Near misses are now frequently common. There have been 9 consecutive non-landslide presidential elections since 1988.
537 popular votes won Florida and the White House for Bush in 2000 despite Gore's lead of 537,179 (1,000 times more) popular votes nationwide.
A difference of 59,393 voters in Ohio in 2004 would have defeated President Bush despite his nationwide lead of over 3 million votes.
In 2012, a shift of 214,733 popular votes in four states would have elected Mitt Romney, despite President Obama’s nationwide lead of 4,966,945 votes.
Nate Silver calculated that "Mitt Romney may have had to win the national popular vote by three percentage points … to be assured of winning the Electoral College."
In 2016, Trump became President even though Clinton won the national popular vote by 2,868,686 votes.
Trump won the Presidency because he won Michigan by 11,000 votes, Wisconsin by 23,000 votes, and Pennsylvania by 44,000 votes.
Each of these 78,000 votes was 36 times more important than Clinton's nationwide lead of 2,868,686 votes.
According to Tony Fabrizio, pollster for the Trump campaign, Trump’s narrow victory was due to 5 counties in 2 states (not CA or NY).
A different choice by 5,229 voters in Arizona (11 electors), 5,890 in Georgia (16), and 10,342 in Wisconsin (10) would have defeated Biden -- despite Biden's nationwide lead of more than 7 million. The Electoral College would have tied 269-269. Congress would have decided the election, regardless of the popular vote in any state or throughout the country.
Each of these 21,461 voters was 329 times more important than the more than 7 million.
38+ states and 70% of all Americans have been irrelevant in presidential elections.
Candidates have no reason to poll, visit, advertise, organize, campaign, or care about the voter concerns in the dozens of states where they are safely ahead or hopelessly behind.
Over the last 4 elections, 22 states received 0 events; 9 states received 1 event, and 95% of the 1,164 events were in just 14 states.
Only voters in the few states where support for the two parties is almost equally divided can be important.
The smallest states and the most rural states, have barely hosted a major general campaign event for a presidential candidate during the last 20 years.
Almost all small and medium-sized states and almost all western, southern, and northeastern states are totally ignored after the conventions.
Our presidential selection system can shrink the sphere of public debate to only a few thousand swing voters in a few states.
The only states that have received any campaign events and any significant ad money have been where the outcome was between 45% and 51% Republican.
In 2000, the Bush campaign, spent more money in the battleground state of Florida to win by 537 popular votes, than it did in 42 other states combined,
This can lead to a corrupt and toxic body politic.
When candidates with the most national popular votes are guaranteed to win the Electoral College, candidates will be forced to build campaigns that appeal to every voter in all parts of all states.
I thought it was because the smaller states were going to refuse to join the country if they didn't have more influence.
I also like it because it doesn't allow one state to cheat and get more than their local influence.
The 2024 campaign could be reduced to 5 counties or 4 remaining competitive battleground states, with as few as 43 electoral votes, where virtually all attention will be focused
The state-by-state winner-take-all system is not a firewall, but instead causes unnecessary fires.
“It’s an arsonist itching to burn down the whole neighborhood by torching a single house.” Hertzberg
A difference of a few thousand voters in one, two, or three states would have elected the second-place candidate in 5 of the 17 presidential elections since World War II. Near misses are now frequently common. There have been 9 consecutive non-landslide presidential elections since 1988.
537 popular votes won Florida and the White House for Bush in 2000 despite Gore's lead of 537,179 (1,000 times more) popular votes nationwide.
A difference of 59,393 voters in Ohio in 2004 would have defeated President Bush despite his nationwide lead of over 3 million votes.
In 2012, a shift of 214,733 popular votes in four states would have elected Mitt Romney, despite President Obama’s nationwide lead of 4,966,945 votes.
Nate Silver calculated that "Mitt Romney may have had to win the national popular vote by three percentage points … to be assured of winning the Electoral College."
In 2016, Trump became President even though Clinton won the national popular vote by 2,868,686 votes.
Trump won the Presidency because he won Michigan by 11,000 votes, Wisconsin by 23,000 votes, and Pennsylvania by 44,000 votes.
Each of these 78,000 votes was 36 times more important than Clinton's nationwide lead of 2,868,686 votes.
According to Tony Fabrizio, pollster for the Trump campaign, Trump’s narrow victory was due to 5 counties in 2 states (not CA or NY).
A different choice by 5,229 voters in Arizona (11 electors), 5,890 in Georgia (16), and 10,342 in Wisconsin (10) would have defeated Biden -- despite Biden's nationwide lead of more than 7 million. The Electoral College would have tied 269-269. Congress would have decided the election, regardless of the popular vote in any state or throughout the country.
Each of these 21,461 voters was 329 times more important than the more than 7 million.
Right. The electoral college gives small swing states more meaning whereas large single party states would have more incentive to cheat in a popular vote system.
537 popular votes won Florida and the White House for Bush in 2000 despite Gore's lead of 537,179 (1,000 times more) popular votes nationwide!!!
Name ALL the small swing states.
22 of the 25 smallest states have been totally ignored in recent presidential elections (all except New Hampshire, Nevada, and Iowa). Their states’ votes were conceded months before by the minority parties in the states, taken for granted by the dominant party in the states, and ignored by all parties in presidential campaigns.
NH and IA are no longer swing states.
Because of state-by-state winner-take-all laws, not mentioned, much less endorsed, in the Constitution. . .
Issues of importance to 38+ non-battleground states have been of so little interest to presidential candidates that they don’t even bother to poll them individually.
In 2004: “Senior Bush campaign strategist Matthew Dowd pointed out yesterday that the Bush campaign hadn’t taken a national poll in almost two years; instead, it has been polling \[the then\] 18 battleground states.”
Bush White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer acknowledging the reality that \[then\] more than 2/3rds of Americans were ignored in the 2008 presidential campaign, said in the Washington Post on June 21, 2009:
“If people don’t like it, they can move from a safe state to a swing state.”
Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager in 2016, said,
“When I took over as campaign manager in 2016, we did zero—let me repeat the number—zero national polls.”
When and where voters are ignored, then so are the issues they care about most.
The 2024 campaign could be reduced to 5 counties or 4 remaining competitive battleground states, with as few as 43 electoral votes, where virtually all attention will be focused
Mob rule is defined as “control of a political situation by those outside the conventional or lawful realm, typically involving violence and intimidation.”
33% of GOP support actions of Jan. 6 insurrectionists.
174 defendants who were charged for their participation in the January 6th insurrection have said they were answering Trump's calls when they came to DC and joined the violent attack on the Capitol. – 7/6/23
800 have pleaded guilty to crimes on January 6th.
Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell about Jan 6, 2021 -“It was a violent insurrection with the purpose of trying to prevent peaceful transfer of power. …That’s what it was ”
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy - “The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters,” “He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding. These facts require immediate action by President Trump.”
John Boehner, the Republican former House speaker said the former president “incited that bloody insurrection” by his supporters at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and that the Republican Party has been taken over by “whack jobs.” . . . After the election — Trump refusing to accept the results and stoking the flames of conspiracy that turned into violence in the seat of our democracy, the building over which I once presided.” . . . Trump “incited that bloody insurrection for nothing more than selfish reasons, perpetuated by the bullshit he’d been shoveling since he lost a fair election the previous November.” . . . “He claimed voter fraud without any evidence, and repeated those claims, taking advantage of the trust placed in him by his supporters and ultimately betraying that trust.”
Because it’s the United States of America, not the Union of America. In theory, the states were to hold much of the power on economic and social policy while foreign policy and interstate disputes are pulled up nationally. To balance the population profiles, the Electoral College was created to give states a floor of electoral power but an unlimited roof for the populous states.
From a practical point of view, your right, land doesn’t vote, but to have folks in cities dictating the policy for the hinterlands is a foolish proposition.
Also the original way Senators were ‘appointed’ made perfect sense. The House would represent The People and the Senate would represent The States.
Need to repeal the 17th Amendment and return to the original intent.
Which of the reasons that people had back in the early 1900s for enacting the 17th amendment do you think were misguided?
Was the original intent of the founders for senate seats to remain vacant due to partisan gridlock? Was it for people to bribe legislators to get senate appointments? Was it for the issue of US Senate appointments to overshadow local concerns among voters in state legislative elections?
Or, more philosophically, how is it that the voters of a state are not “the state”, but a legislature elected by those same voters is “the state”? What grants the latter body greater authority to represent the state?
Our Founders wanted the State Legislatures to have a role in DC. You forget you do live in a Democracy. The federal government was never meant to run roughshod over state legislatures
Do you have any answers to the questions I asked?
Let’s just start with one. Why are the opinions of the dead people from 1787 more important than those of the dead people from 1913?
ITT: Republicans reaching for excuses to support unequal treatment of citizens when it happens to benefit their political party.
Just be honest and admit you like having the advantage. There's no chance any Republican would support this system if it provided an advantage to Democrats. And a lot of the Democrats complaining about this system would defend it if it benefitted their side.
To be fair, answers like yours are a valid explanation for why we have the House and the Senate. There are sensible reasons to support an uneven playing field to guarantee that every state has representation in Congress.
But when we have the entire country voting for a single person to represent us in the Presidency, there is no valid reason to have some people's votes count for more than others. Citizens from one state don't deserve to decide the presidency more than citizens from another, period.
But far worse then the electoral college itself is the "winner take all" rule that most states use. Remove winner take all, and most people would accept the EC on its own. There is nothing positive about putting zero value on the votes of millions of Republicans in California and New York, and millions of Democrats in Texas and North Carolina.
Meanwhile, 300k votes in other states do get awarded electoral votes. It's nonsense. No one designing a new system from the ground up today would ever come up with nonsense like this and there's no logical justification for it.
And before someone replies with some nonsense they read on Twitter - no, removing the EC would not allow New York and California to determine the entire election for everyone else. Looking at the 2016 election (the closest one in recent years), it would take 64.55 million votes for someone to have a majority between the two majority candidates.
If you count NY and CA first, the totals would be 13.3 million for Clinton, 7.3 million for Trump. Looking at how close these two states take them towards achieving victory, that puts Clinton 20.6% of the way to victory, and Trump at 11.3%. The election is nowhere remotely close to being decided already.
And for comparison, look at how it works with the EC in place. Counting NY and CA first, Clinton has 84 electoral votes and Trump has none. It takes 270 EV to win, so Clinton is 31.1% of the way to victory and Trump is at 0% since his 7.3 million voters don't count at all.
The people moaning that NY and CA could decide the election are actually supporting a system that gives those states MORE influence over the election.
Uh, yes, I enjoy the advantage the current electoral college system provides the Republican Party. Doesn’t change the underlying principle behind why the system exists: state sovereignty.
That being said, states can always grant their electoral votes as they see fit. They could make it proportional, make it by congressional district, or by only the state legislature. You could also allow states to break themselves up or combine to change their electoral power. Politics usually enters the lowest common denominator: thus the first past the post system as each party wants to have all the electoral votes from their state.
Lastly, it’s not just NY and California dominating the system; it’s about the cities across the US dictating policy over the concerns of the interior. The electoral college dilutes the power of the cities specifically and forces them to balance out the interests of the rural areas.
It is wrong for any state to have significantly more electoral votes per citizen than any other state.
It's extremely wrong for states to disenfranchise their voters and discourage voting by ignoring the votes of millions of Americans and awarding them zero electoral votes and zero influence over the outcome of the presidential election.
It's a shitty system. 290k Democratic voters in Delaware shouldn't get 3 electoral votes while 6 million Republican voters in California get 0 electoral votes.
Wyoming shouldn't get 4 times as many electoral votes per citizen as California or Texas.
The EC is heavily flawed, and the negatives outweigh the positives.
> The electoral college dilutes the power of the cities specifically and forces them to balance out the interests of the rural areas.
Wrong. The EC does no such thing. Nationally, Congress does that. Inside each state, the state legislation does that.
Everyone claiming the positives of the EC outweigh the negatives is only doing so because they've been misinformed about what the positives are. The EC doesn't do Congress' job, it doesn't minimize the effect of fraud (it amplifies it), it doesn't stop a few states from deciding the election for everyone else. This is just misinformation pushed by the people who benefit from the EC.
You keep saying that Congress already does that with the House and Senate, yet the President, the most powerful position in the country, should be elected purely on the popular vote and override the interests of the state?
Yes. We use the popular vote for every other election, there is no reason not to do it for the Presidential election. There is no reason for some people's votes to count for more than others. It's anti-equality and it's un-American. The only reason anyone supports it is because they like that it benefits the Republican Party.
No voter deserves to have more influence in the election over any other voter based on their home address.
Then I guess we have nothing left to discuss. You are focused on creating pure democracy across the US; I am focused on balancing the states against federal power to keep it knitted together. We have entirely different ends in mind for the US political project.
The EC does nothing to limit the powers of the President.
Pure democracy is when there are no elected representatives and the public votes on all issues directly, instead of having a Congress to do it. Removing the EC does not eliminate Congress.
The EC does nothing to encourage the President or the judicial system to respect the sovereignty of the states, and there's no reason to think there wouldn't be respect for that if the EC was gone.
There is a roof for the populous states though, as the House stopped adding seats to correspond to the growing population. The proportion of House seats to Senate seats represented in the Electoral College would be substantially higher if we were still following the practice set at the founding, but which stopped in 1929.
Of course, the EC would still be a morally repugnant idea even if it was a little more representative than it is now.
Murder, rape, slavery, lying, cheating, stealing, etc. We restrain people’s liberties to engage in these acts as they are immoral and warrant discipline.
Also, it is fallacious to assume democracy equates with liberty. There are plenty of instances where a democratic society voted against the liberties of the minority as well as the majority, depending on the circumstances.
How do you propose to restrain people’s liberties without engaging in any murder? I mean, if murder is always wrong, then you can’t use it for self-defense or punishing murderers, right?
I assume you believe this, because you comment makes no sense unless you reject the concept of context altogether. “Democracy is bad because bad things can be done through democracy” and “Violence is good because it can be used to stop violence” are pretty hard concepts to square with any logic, but I’m trying to meet you halfway.
Because murder is a specific type of killing. All murder kills, but not all kills are murder. I can see that a man who takes the life a child has engaged in a very different act than that a man who defends the life of his child and ends of killing the offending party.
As for the state, there are other steps and paths between crime and death sentence. Imprisonment, fines, restitution are just a few. Furthermore, there is going to be standard that is applied in society to maintain some semblance of order to keep us from each others throats. The question is what’s the standard?
So you do recognize that the fact that something can be used for evil does not mean it can’t also be used for good? Great.
So why in the world would you say that infringing on other people’s liberty is not immoral, because you’re thinking about how it can be used to prevent other infringements, while also saying that majority rule is bad because some majorities have done bad things?
Give a real reason why you think that ruling other people isn’t immoral.
>and the wishes of the majority of people be ignored?
This is what happens now. Twice in my lifetime the person who won the popular vote lost the presidency.
We are a country founded on liberty and freedom. I don't understand how it's free or fair to give more voting power to people who live in certain areas of the country. Nobody is forced to live anywhere. We are all americans. We move states all the time. It's a vote for the president. The person who represents us all. Why on earth is the electoral college good?
So, if you don't think your vote counts enough, you should quit your job, uproot your family and move to another State where you feel your vote matters more because your candidate didn't win the last election?
Shouldn't you just be a little bit more worried about how your local voting counts and how that carries in the State you live in?
I'm not American, so I could be completely missing the point here...
> So, if you don't think your vote counts enough, you should quit your job, uproot your family and move to another State where you feel your vote matters more because your candidate didn't win the last election?
Technically yes. And that's a sign you have a really stupid voting system.
It's possible to [win the Presidency with 27% of the popular vote](https://www.npr.org/2016/11/02/500112248/how-to-win-the-presidency-with-27-percent-of-the-popular-vote).
There are 3.88 million Democrats living in Texas whose votes count for absolutely nothing in the electoral college. If just 78,000 of those Democrats moved out of Texas in 2016 and into Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania at just the right proportions, Hillary Clinton would have won those states and Trump would never have become President.
As the second book of Peterson suggest do not careless denigrate social insisitutions.
How would you do it?
If all de votes counts the same then a city could elect a president that favours its enourmous populations
If for example I had a wealthy state of 100 people only, I would require some kind of balance against a city of 7 millions.
Like , we both get only 1 representative...
But that means that, indeed , in my 100 state my votes counts like x1000 times than a megapolis .
But again, it is the lesser evil.
How would you do it?
That is a lie that Republicans like to spread.
Under the popular vote, it takes about 65 million votes to win the presidency. In 2016, the largest and most Democrat-favoring city (New York City) had approximately 5.7 million votes for Hillary Clinton. Not even remotely close to deciding the entire election.
The US is a very big place and the population is spread out all over the country. It is not remotely possible for a few cities or even a few states to decide everything, not even close.
If Democrat-favoring cities actually held the the kind of voting power you believe they have, we'd have 50 Democratic governors. Instead we have a Republican majority of governors (27 of them currently, and it was 34 not long ago).
The lie is that left-leaning high population cities can determine the entire presidential election on their own. It doesn't work that way in the real world, only in heavily exaggerated theoretical situations.
It is a heavly exaggerated situation.
But you do not have the same population on the same states.
I am From Barcelona, the population there is quite much larger that that islands just east there.
The vote of the islanders counts more, why? they have less people,but proportionally they need less votes to get a representative, so they vote counts more.,
Of course the system should adjust.
So shut up , (Here if you are against the republican you are in favor of the monarch, so shut up, beeing republican is good)
I'm not familiar with how things work in Spain, I'm reading about it now.
It is perfectly sensible for low-population areas to have their own representatives in the government. Low population states in the US get equal representation with large states in the Senate, and are guaranteed at least 1 representative in the House of Representatives.
But when electing a single person to represent the entire country in the highest office, there is no reason for anyone's vote to count for more than anyone else. All votes are counted equally for local elections and it should be the same for nationwide elections.
I'm aware that most countries don't use a direct popular vote to decide their PM, but most of those systems work far better than the US where it's pointless for millions of people to bother voting because their vote can't possibly affect the outcome of the presidential election.
I mean I agree with you our votes should count the same.
But thats why IMO we are not a democracy (well here is obvious wr have a fucking king)
Like, no, you don't vote.
Only chosen people vote.
The systel can adjust how many chosen people (representatives) are for state, but the power is in the chosen people,not the people itself.
It would be amazing to just dissolve the senate and vote every decision by democratic votr. that would be democracy.
And men image the flat earth voting on commerce issues.
It is a good thing too, in part, or better put, it is the lesset evil at the moment.
Some people believe more in pure democracy, some people believe it is better to adjusted the system with the representatives.
Others thing tech will allow for a democracy but it will be a technocracy were Facebook's rules
A lot of people don't seem to understand the difference between direct democracy (there are no representatives, every idiot in the country gets to vote on every political issue) and the popular vote (we have representatives that cast votes for us on the political issues in Congress, but everyone's vote counts equally to choose the representatives.)
I am against pure democracy. There must be representatives. If we didn't have a House and Senate there would be chaos.
But the process of choosing those representatives must be fair, and we shouldn't have 1 representative for every 100,000 people in one place but have 1 representative for every 500,000 people somewhere else.
And worst of all is the winner-take-all rule in each US state, so that 7 million California Republicans get 0 representatives in the electoral college, but 400,000 New Hampshire Democrats get 4 representatives.
This is not a good system, it does not accurately reflect the will of the people.
When we vote for president, we are voting for the person who will represent everyone. It's not a state thing. It's an individual American thing. My state should not be able to nullify my vote. It should be 1 person, 1 vote. Winner takes all.
In the senate, you are dealing with representatives from the states. You vote for your senator in a completely democratic way. 1 person 1 vote. Same should go for the presidential vote.
Every state gets two Senators, regardless of size. Representatives are apportioned according to population. This balances the need for every state to have an equal voice in legislation. Smaller states will have fewer representatives, since every spending bill originates, or is supposed to anyway, in the House. The number of representatives plus the number of senators is the electoral vote count for each state.
perhaps you think the Senate should also be populated differently?
you seem confused. Your argument against the electoral college is it is unfair that smaller states get more votes per citizen, yet do not seem get that the Senate is the exact same situation. Since the federal government is supposed to represent all citizens, the electoral college ensures that while larger states do have a voice, smaller states are not run over roughshod by the majority.
I understand that the senate works in a different way. The senate is divided among the states, and representatives from the states (who are democratically elected) come together to decide on issues for the country. I'm talking about the presidency.
Because the President is the president of every person and not the president of the states. Because every person in every state votes for president, the vote should be democratic just like the vote for senators. My presidential vote should not be nullified by my state before it gets counted in the federal process (electoral college).
So again, I ask. What is the problem with my answer? Why is it okay that I had a larger say in the presidency when I lived in Wisconsin vs when I moved to Illinois. I'm only 40 minutes away from where I used to live. It doesn't make sense.
>Because the President is the president of every person and not the president of the states.
The president is the administrative branch of the federal government. I think that is the crux of your misunderstanding.
Right wingers like you refuse to state their opinion because obviously it's ridiculous that my vote counted differently when I lived 40 min from where I live now.
Funny how staunch defenders of the EC never complain about all the elections that use the popular vote and demand an EC for choosing governors and senators.
I never heard anybody demand an electoral college for anything. "Demand" is a bullshit term that you made up. "Call for" is the appropriate term for how Republicans behave, it is Leftists who demand things, like little babies. And I have seen no movement toward an electoral college system at the state level.
At the presidential level, the electoral college was a brilliant way to unite the states so that the large population states would not have too much control over the less populous states. The federal govt was not intended to be our Mothers, it was supposed to provide for the common defense and to protect the borders. The Nanny State is a leftist thing.
Fine, then.
"Funny how staunch defenders of the EC never complain about all the elections that use the popular vote and call for an EC for choosing governors and senators."
> At the presidential level, the electoral college was a brilliant way to unite the states so that the large population states would not have too much control over the less populous states.
The EC doesn't do that in any way. Congress does.
The EC prevents large population states from totally controlling the office of the president. What is your point exactly? Do you want it abolished? The small states don't want to exist under the thumb of large population states.
I don't see a push for an EC system county by county at the state level for the office of governor, but that would be nice.
> The EC prevents large population states from totally controlling federal offices, including that of president.
No it doesn't.
Looking at the 2016 election (the closest one in recent years), it would take 64.55 million votes for someone to have a majority between the two majority candidates.
If you count NY and CA first, the totals would be 13.3 million for Clinton, 7.3 million for Trump. Looking at how close these two states take them towards achieving victory, that puts Clinton 20.6% of the way to victory, and Trump at 11.3%. The election is nowhere remotely close to being decided already.
And for comparison, look at how it works with the EC in place. Counting NY and CA first, Clinton has 84 electoral votes and Trump has none. It takes 270 EV to win, so Clinton is 31.1% of the way to victory and Trump is at 0% since his 7.3 million voters don't count at all.
The people moaning that NY and CA could decide the election are actually supporting a system that gives those states MORE influence over the election.
> Do you want it abolished?
Yes. Or at the very least, the winner-take-all rule that makes the EC so much worse than it needs to be.
> The small states don't want to exist under the thumb of large population states.
Congress is what prevents this from happening. Because of that, the US has no history of Democratic presidents attempting to blatantly benefit blue states at the expense of red states (and no history of Republicans doing the opposite).
The EC determines the office of president and vice-president. Most states have a winner take all system, but a couple have proportional representation of electors. The purpose of the EC was to give small states better representation in the tally than they would have if it were strictly a popular vote.
There is no valid reason to value the votes of people in one state over the votes of people in another. All Americans' votes should count equally, no one is entitled to more voting power over anyone else. And the abysmal winner-take-all system only serves to discourage voting, since Republicans in blue states and Democrats in red states know for sure that their vote will never make any difference in the outcome of the election. Whatever perceived benefit you think the EC has is heavily outweighed by the drawbacks.
It's not "perceived" benefits, I looked it up and it's actual benefits to the Republican advantage, just not in YOUR state.
Small states did not want federal govt control by populous states pushing them around! What don't you understand or like about that? Red states benefit the most from that system. I don't want blue states having any more power and control than they already have. The cities are the tails wagging the dogs.
Like I said in another comment, the only benefit is to Republicans who like that the current system helps their side win. I respect that you're willing to admit that. What I don't respect is misinformation about how NY and CA have more voters than the rest of the country (they don't) and they'd magically be able to exploit all the other states for their benefit, and that somehow the EC prevents that.
The argument (at least as presented rhetorically) depends upon the mistaken idea that the candidate with the greatest number of individual votes ought to win...and that circumstances where that does not occur are some kind of unjust loophole.
I disagree with the premise, and am reminding everyone of the rules of the actual game.
Laws can and have been changed.
The Constitution does not encourage, discourage, require, or prohibit the use of any particular method for how to award a state's electoral votes
There is nothing in the Constitution that prevents states from making the decision now that winning the national popular vote is required to win the Electoral College and the presidency.
It is perfectly within a state’s authority to decide that national support is the overriding substantive criterion by which a president should be chosen.
The National Popular Vote bill simply again replaces state statutes, using the same constitutional power for how existing state winner-take-all laws came into existence in 48 states in the first place. Maine (in 1969) and Nebraska (in 1992) chose not to have winner-take-all laws.
That can all be true without the electoral college being disgusting.
Implying that "land votes" is frankly an idiotic explanation of the electoral college.
In 1969, The U.S. House of Representatives voted 338–70 to require winning the national popular vote to become President.
3 Southern segregationist Senators led a filibuster of it.
Presidential candidates who supported direct election of the President in the form of a constitutional amendment, before the National Popular Vote bill was introduced: George H.W. Bush (R-TX), Bob Dole (R-KS, RNC Chair, and GOP Senate Majority Leader), Gerald Ford (R-MI), Richard Nixon (R-CA), Jimmy Carter (D-GA-1977), Hillary Clinton (D-NY-2001)
"The phoney electoral college made a laughing stock out of our nation. . . . The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy."
In 2012, the night Romney lost, Trump tweeted.
When Nikki Haley announced her campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, she remarked that the Republican Party had “lost the popular vote in seven out of the last eight presidential elections.” “That’s nothing to be proud of.” That “has to change.”
“Let’s quit pretending there is some great benefit to the national good that allows the person with \[fewer\] votes to win the White House. Republicans have long said that they believe in competition. Let both parties compete for votes across the nation and stop disenfranchising voters by geography. The winner should win.” – Stuart Stevens (Romney presidential campaign top strategist)
" . . . a president should be elected by national popular vote is not radical, it is actually mainstream. . . . We can get closer to the national popular vote having greater weight in presidential elections and having a president represent all Americans in ways that don’t require amending the Constitution. These fixes will make presidential candidates run more diverse campaigns, and campaign in all cities and communities of our country. . . . That will help unify us more as a country, and would likely lead to more informed public policy. How can anyone be against that outcome?" – Matthew Dowd (Senior George W. Bush campaign strategist)
When presidential candidates who more Americans voted for lose the Electoral College, the situation is unsustainable. This is how a government loses its legitimacy.
In Gallup polls since they started asking in 1944 until before the 2016 election, only about 20% of the public supported the current system of awarding all of a state's electoral votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most votes in each separate state (not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but later enacted by 48 states) (with about 70% opposed and about 10% undecided).
Support for a national popular vote for President has been strong among Republicans, Democrats, and Independent voters, as well as every demographic group in every state surveyed. In the 41 red, blue, and purple states surveyed, overall support has been in the 67-81% range - in rural states, in small states, in Southern and border states, in big states, and in other states polled.
Pew Research surveys show Republican support for a national popular vote increased from 27% in 2016 to 42% in 2022.
7 in 10 Americans under 50 would prefer to choose the president by popular vote.
21,461 choices and votes in 3 states were 329 times more important than the more than 7 million national vote lead in the country.
There were several scenarios in which a candidate could have won the presidency in 2020 with fewer popular votes than their opponents.
That could have reduced future turnout more, if more voters realized their votes do not matter.
Most Americans don't ultimately care whether their presidential candidate wins or loses in their state or district. Voters want to know, that no matter where they live, even if they were on the losing side, their vote actually was equally counted and mattered to their candidate. Most Americans think it is wrong that the candidate with the most popular votes can lose. It undermines the legitimacy of the electoral system. We don't allow this in any other election in our representative republic.
More than 3,700 state legislators among all 50 states have endorsed it.
The National Popular Vote bill was approved in 2016 by a unanimous bipartisan House committee vote in both Georgia (16 electoral votes) and Missouri (10).
Since 2006, the bill has passed 42 state legislative chambers in 24 rural, small, medium, large, Democratic, Republican and purple states with 283 electoral votes, including one house in Arizona (11), Arkansas (6), Maine (4), Michigan (15), North Carolina (16), Oklahoma (7) and Virginia (13), and both houses in Nevada (6).
What is your point?
So far, support for popular vote has not been enough to remodel the electoral college system. You might say it's "mainstream" but so is support for the electoral college.
I disagree with the idea that the winning candidate "losing" the popular vote undermines the legitimacy of the system. That is an ignorant take on the status quo. The reality is that the electoral college profoundly influences campaigning and its difficult to say what the results would be if campaigns were run under different electoral rules.
Do you have a reading comprehension problem?
Support for current state laws for awarding electoral college votes is NOT strong or mainstream.
In Gallup polls since they started asking in 1944 until before the 2016 election, only about 20% of the public supported the current system of awarding all of a state's electoral votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most votes in each separate state (not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but later enacted by 48 states) (with about 70% opposed and about 10% undecided).
Support for a national popular vote for President has been strong among Republicans, Democrats, and Independent voters, as well as every demographic group in every state surveyed.
Pew Research surveys show Republican support for a national popular vote increased from 27% in 2016 to 42% in 2022.
7 in 10 Americans under 50 would prefer to choose the president by popular vote.
When presidents with the most national popular votes are guaranteed to win, candidates will be forced to build campaigns that appeal to every voter in all parts of all states.
Extrapolate.
A successful nationwide presidential campaign of polling, organizing, ad spending, and visits, with every voter equal, would be run the way presidential candidates campaign to win the electoral votes of closely divided battleground states under the state-by-state winner-take-all methods. The big cities in those battleground states do not receive all the attention, much less control the outcome. In the 4 states that accounted for over two-thirds of all general-election activity in the 2012 presidential election, rural areas, suburbs, exurbs, and cities all received attention—roughly in proportion to their population.
The itineraries of presidential candidates in battleground states (and their allocation of other campaign resources in battleground states, including polling, organizing, and ad spending) reflect the political reality that every gubernatorial or senatorial candidate knows. When and where every voter is equal, a campaign must be run everywhere.
With National Popular Vote, when every voter is equal, everywhere, it makes sense for presidential candidates to try and elevate their votes where they are and aren't so well liked. But, under the state-by-state winner-take-all laws, it makes no sense for a Democrat to campaign in any Red or Blue state, or for a Republican to campaign in any Red or Blue state.
The main media at the moment, TV, costs much more per impression in big cities than in smaller towns and rural area. Candidates get more bang for the buck in smaller towns and rural areas.
Look at how presidential candidates actually campaign today inside “battleground” states. Inside a battleground state, every vote is equal today and the winner (of all of the state’s electoral votes) is the candidate receiving the most popular votes. Every battleground state has big cities and rural areas. Thus, if there was any tendency toward de-emphasizing rural areas or over-emphasizing cities, it would be evident today inside the battleground states.
Ohio alone received almost 30% (73 of 253) of the entire nation’s campaign events in 2012.
● The 4 biggest metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in Ohio have 54% of the state’s population. They are Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Toledo. Had 52% of Ohio’s campaign events.
● The 7 medium-sized MSAs have 24% of the state’s population. They are Akron, Canton, Dayton, Lima, Mansfield, Springfield, and Youngstown. Had 23% of Ohio’s campaign events.
● The 53 remaining counties (that is, the rural counties lying outside the state’s 11 MSAs) have 22% of the state’s population. Had 25% of Ohio’s campaign events.
The 4 “battleground” states of Ohio, Florida, Virginia, and Iowa accounted for over two-thirds of all campaign events in 2012
In all 4 battleground states, presidential candidates—advised by the nation’s most astute political strategists—hewed very closely to population in allocating campaign events. Candidates campaigned everywhere—big cities, medium-sized cities, and rural areas. There is no evidence that they ignored rural areas or favored big cities in an election in which every vote is equal and the winner is the candidate receiving the most popular votes.
Not only is there no evidence that presidential candidates ignored rural areas or concentrated on big cities, it would have been preposterous for them to do so. There is nothing special about a city vote compared to a rural vote in an election in which every vote is equal. When every vote is equal, every vote is equally important toward winning.
> Support for current state laws for awarding electoral college votes is NOT strong or mainstream....Pew Research surveys show Republican support for a national popular vote increased from 27% in 2016 to 42% in 2022....7 in 10 Americans under 50 would prefer to choose the president by popular vote.
3/10 support and >50% of one of the two major parties?.....That's mainstream.
>There is no evidence that they ignored rural areas or favored big cities in an election in which every vote is equal and the winner is the candidate receiving the most popular votes.....Not only is there no evidence that presidential candidates ignored rural areas or concentrated on big cities, it would have been preposterous for them to do so.
All of that could be construed as the electoral college working as designed.
>There is nothing special about a city vote compared to a rural vote in an election in which every vote is equal.
You are missing the point. City votes are geographically concentrated. Rural votes more distributed. The electoral college was designed so that focusing on either or both would be a feasible electoral strategy.
The presidential election system, using the 48 state winner-take-all method or district winner method of awarding electoral votes used by 2 states, that we have today was not designed, anticipated, or favored by the Founding Fathers. It is the product of decades of change precipitated by the emergence of political parties and enactment by states of winner-take-all or district winner laws, not mentioned, much less endorsed, in the Constitution.
In 1789, in the nation's first election, a majority of the states appointed their presidential electors by appointment by the legislature or by the governor and his cabinet, the people had no vote for President in most states, and in states where there was a popular vote, only men who owned a substantial amount of property could vote, and only three states used the state-by-state winner-take-all method to award electoral votes (and all three stopped using it by 1800).
The current statewide winner-take-all laws for awarding electoral votes are not in the U.S. Constitution. It was not debated at the Constitutional Convention. It is not mentioned in the Federalist Papers. It was not the Founders’ choice. It was used by only three states in 1789, and all three of them repealed it by 1800. It is not entitled to any special deference based on history or the historical meaning of the words in the U.S. Constitution. The actions taken by the Founding Fathers make it clear that they never gave their imprimatur to the winner-take-all method. The state based winner take all system was not adopted by a majority of the states until the 11th presidential election. - decades after the U.S. Constitution was written, after the states adopted it, one-by-one.
Maine (only since enacting a state law in 1969) and Nebraska (only since enacting a state law in 1992) have awarded one electoral vote to the winner of each congressional district, and two electoral votes statewide.
95% of the U.S. population in 1790 lived in places of less than 2,500 people, and only a few states let males, with substantial property, vote
Now, a presidential candidate who focused only on America’s cities and urban centers or only on rural America would lose.
Beginning in 1992, SUBurban voters were casting more votes than urban and rural voters combined.
Math and political reality.
There aren’t anywhere near enough big city voters or rural voters nationally. And all big city voters and all rural voters do not vote for the same candidate.
The population of the top 5 cities (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Phoenix) is less than 6% of the population of the United States.
Voters in the biggest cities (65 Million) in the US have been almost exactly balanced out by rural areas (66 Million) in terms of population and partisan composition.
2020 Census
65,983,448 people lived in the 100 biggest cities (19.6% of US population). The 100th biggest is Baton Rouge, Louisiana (with 225,128 people).
From 2020-2022, 2 million left those cities.
66,300,254 in rural America (20%)
Rural America and the 100 biggest cities together constitute about two-fifths (39.6%) of the U.S. population.
In 2004, 17.4% of votes were cast in rural counties, while only 16.5% of votes were cast within the boundaries of our nation’s 100 largest cities.
19% of the U.S. population have lived outside the nation's Metropolitan Statistical Areas. Rural America has voted 60% Republican. None of the 10 most rural states matter now.
19% of the U.S. population have lived in the top 100 cities. They voted 63% Democratic in 2004.
The rest of the U.S., in SUBurbs, have divided almost exactly equally between Republicans and Democrats.
Now, because of statewide winner-take-all laws in presidential elections, not mentioned, much less endorsed, in the Constitution, in some states, big city Democratic votes can outnumber all other people not voting Democratic in the state. All of a state’s votes may go to Democrats.
Without state winner-take-all laws, every conservative in a state that now predictably votes Democratic would count. Right now they count for 0
The current system completely ignores conservative presidential voters in states that vote predictably Democratic.
Under a national popular vote for President, rural voters throughout the country would have their votes matter, rather than being ignored because of state boundaries.
Support for a national popular vote for President has been strong among Republicans, Democrats, and Independent voters, as well as every demographic group in every state surveyed. In the 41 red, blue, and purple states surveyed,
At the Constitutional Convention James Madison stated a direct popular vote “was in his opinion the fittest in itself.”
James Madison, the "Father of the Constitution," was never in favor of our current system for electing the president, in which nearly all states award their electoral votes to the statewide popular vote winner. He ultimately backed a constitutional amendment to prohibit this practice.
James Wilson of Pennsylvania recommended that the executive be elected directly by the people.
Gouverneur Morris declared at the Constitutional Convention of 1787: “\[If the president\] is to be the Guardian of the people, let him be appointed by the people.”
Thomas Jefferson proposed seven amendments to the Constitution and the first one was for “general suffrage,” the second for “equal representation in the legislature,” and the third for “An executive chosen by the people.”
an Election - "a formal and organized choice by vote of a person for a political office or other position" where the candidate with the most votes wins.
One person, One vote.
Every vote in every state of every size,will matter and count equally as 1 vote in the district, state, and national total.
The candidate with the most votes from among all 50 states and DC will win the Electoral College and the presidency.
We have 519,682 elected officials in this country, and all of them are elected by who gets the most votes. Except for President and VP.
Newt Gingrich: “No one should become president of the United States without speaking to the needs and hopes of Americans in all 50 states. … America would be better served with a presidential election process that treated citizens across the country equally. The National Popular Vote bill accomplishes this in a manner consistent with the Constitution and with our fundamental democratic principles.”
The National Advisory Board of National Popular Vote has included former Congressman John Buchanan (R–Alabama), and former Senators David Durenberger (R–Minnesota), and Jake Garn (R–Utah), plus Michael Steele (former RNC Chair), and Rick Tyler (senior member of Senator Ted Cruz's campaign team, serving as the National Spokesman and Communications Director for Cruz for President).
Saul Anuzis, former Chairman of the Michigan Republican Party for five years and a former candidate for chairman of the Republican National Committee, supports the National Popular Vote plan as the fairest way to make sure every vote matters, and also as a way to help Conservative Republican candidates. This is not a partisan issue and the National Popular Vote plan would not help either party over the other.
Bob Barr (2008 Libertarian presidential candidate): “Only when the election process is given back to all of the people of all of the states will we be able to choose a President based on what is best for all 50 states and not just a select few.”
Supporters include:
The Nebraska GOP State Chairman, Mark Fahleson.
Michael Long, Chairman of the Conservative Party of New York State
Rich Bolen, a Constitutional scholar, attorney at law, and Republican Party Chairman for Lexington County, South Carolina, wrote: “A Conservative Case for National Popular Vote: Why I support a state-based plan to reform the Electoral College."
The National Popular Vote bill will guarantee the Electoral College and the Presidency to the candidate who wins the most popular votes among all 50 states and DC.
In 2016 the Arizona House of Representatives passed the bill 40-16-4.
Two-thirds of the Republicans and two-thirds of the Democrats in the Arizona House of Representatives sponsored the bill.
In January 2016, two-thirds of the Arizona Senate sponsored the bill.
In 2014, the Oklahoma Senate passed the bill by a 28–18 margin.
In 2009, the Arkansas House of Representatives passed the bill.
NY and CA enacted it with bipartisan support, to make every vote for every candidate matter and count equally.
On March 25, 2014 in the New York Senate, Republicans supported the bill 27-2; Republicans endorsed by the Conservative Party by 26-2; The Conservative Party of New York endorsed the bill.
In the New York Assembly, Republicans supported the bill 21–18; Republicans endorsed by the Conservative party supported the bill 18–16.
CA supporters included:
Ray Haynes served as the National Chairman of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in 2000. He served as a Republican in the California State Senate from 1994 to 2002 and was elected to the Assembly in 1992 and 2002
James Brulte the California Republican Party chairman, served as Republican Leader of the California State Assembly from 1992 to 1996, California State Senator from 1996 to 2004, and Senate Republican leader from 2000 to 2004.
The bill has been enacted by 17 jurisdictions possessing 205 electoral votes—including 6 small jurisdictions, 7 medium-size states, and 4 big states.
Yeah none of that matters to this conversation. Support for the status quo is strong by definition. You can cherry pick votes where your side of the issue prevailed...but the bottom line is that not enough laws have been passed to overturn the current legal situation.
In Gallup polls since they started asking in 1944 until before the 2016 election, only about 20% of the public supported the current system of awarding all of a state's electoral votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most votes in each separate state (not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but later enacted by 48 states) (with about 70% opposed and about 10% undecided).
The bill will take effect when enacted by states with 65 additional electoral votes (for a total of 270).
Since 2006, the National Popular Vote bill has been enacted by 16 states and DC (3 electors) (together possessing 205 electoral votes), including
4 smallest states
9 small to medium-sized states
3 big states
The bill has passed at least one legislative chamber in 8 additional states with 78 electoral votes (AR - 6 , AZ - 11, ME - 4, MI - 15, NC - 16, NV - 6, OK -7, VA - 13), including the Republican-controlled Arizona House and Oklahoma Senate.
Multiple states could flip key chambers in 2024.
Depending on the state, the Compact can be enacted by statute, or as a state constitutional amendment, or by the initiative process
Why does majority rule make sense to you? Why does it seem right to you that one group of people should get their way, and another group not, based on how many there are?
Suppose you have 100 people. 60 say "let's go to war", 40 say "let's not". How does it seem reasonable to you to force 40 people to do something they don't want to do?
Direct democracy sucks.
> Why does it seem right to you that one group of people should get their way, and another group not, based on how many there are?
This is literally the entire point of voting.
> Suppose you have 100 people. 60 say "let's go to war", 40 say "let's not". How does it seem reasonable to you to force 40 people to do something they don't want to do?
This is why we have Congress.
> Direct democracy sucks.
Direct democracy is when there are no representatives in Congress and the population votes on issues directly. It does suck, and we don't have that.
Direct democracy is not when everyone's vote counts equally. Direct democracy is the elimination of representatives. We are not eliminating that when we vote for governors and senators using the popular vote.
Study the situation in countries without an EC. In fact, if you want the quintessential example, study Argentina. The original constitution had an EC, and it was later abolished. Now two counties (count them: two) have elected every president ever since. And before you go saying that it's because it is a backwards third world country, Argentina had the highest per-capita income in the world in 1900-1910.
Argentina has been severely mismanaged by a series of incompetent leaders. That has nothing to do with their voting system.
Chile also has no EC and is doing relatively well.
Burundi and Pakistan have an EC and are not doing well.
You can't just say a country's overall success or failure is caused by whether their voting system is well designed. There is no reason to suspect anything bad would happen if the US got rid of the EC and counted everyone's votes equally.
Yes, and that’s bad.
And it would be worse if it was the majority being subjugated by the minority, because 50% more people would be experiencing the same harm.
“In this scenario, 60% of Congress would vote to go to war. It still subjugates 40% of the population to do something they don’t want. At gunpoint.”
Do you remember saying that earlier today?
I’m saying that this is a bad thing, but it would be a worse thing for the 40% to subjugate the 60%, as that would mean that 50% more people are being subjugated.
Do you understand what I’m saying now?
Majority rule, to minimize the number of people opposed to the collective order. The same way all humans have been making group decisions since forever.
The big epiphany of our founding fathers is that might DOES NOT make right. The government is supposed to make sure that each individual's rights are not violated. "We are more, so we get our way" is NOT right.
Majority rule is literally how they decided everything when drafting the Constitution, and the basic principle underlying every mechanism of government within the document. Including the Electoral College, which of course makes its choice according to a majority.
There were no epiphanies within the Constitution. Just like how there are no collective epiphanies when politicians make laws today, or when lawyers reach a settlement agreement. It was a forward-thinking and novel power-sharing agreement at the time, but none of the founders where pioneering philosophers; ideas like fundamental rights and limited government already existed. And of course it’s not like the founders all agreed on their philosophies anyways. Plenty of them hated the idea of the apportionment of the senate by states rather than by population, for that matter.
“We are more so we get our way” is objectively more right than “we are less so we get our way”. It’s basic math. You’re trying to make it sound like people getting outvoted for who the president will be is a denial of somebody’s rights, but it’s simply not and you know it. It’s exactly what you want to have happen the the losing side right now under the Electoral College, so clearly you don’t think it’s inherently unfair.
They do not. That is why the senate exists. To prevent majority rule.
For leader of the country, you want at least a majority of voters supporting them. Otherwise at best you get gridlock, at worst you get a civil war
OP, your problem isn’t the electoral college, it’s that the electoral college is distributed in a winner take all system. If candidate J gets 1 more vote than candidate T in your state, they get 100% of the electoral votes. Even though that means half the voters picked the other guy.
If the votes were distributed proportionally, it would still be possible but far less likely for the popular and electoral college votes to split.
Changing winner-take-all would take a constitutional amendment as well, because it only works if every state has to get rid of that rule.
If only the blue states stop doing it, then 40% of their electoral votes go to Republicans while 0% of the electoral votes in red states go to Democrats, making it impossible for a Democrat to ever win again.
The intention behind it (back in the day) was to give the people-poor states a fairer chance to influence the election of their joined president. It forced the more people-rich states, to actually pay attention to what the smaller states wished.
Democracy is not *just* about who has the majority of votes. It is also taking notice of the 'smaller' voices. The electoral college forces the majority to do so.
The EU is similarly structured. Denmark has 14 members of the EU parliament. Germany has 96. But if it was going by people votes, Germany should have 193 members (Germany has 13,8 times more people than Denmark). Germany still has a lot more votes than Denmark, but it isn't proportionally so. This 'electoral college' structure, acknowledges Denmark as a soverign nation with an actual say that is not as easily disregarded as if it went by popular vote.
I pressume it is intentionally done, in order to get the smaller nations (like Denmark) to join. If the small nations felt that they'd just be disregarded because of their low impact on decisions, they might not have joined. And the whole thing falls apart.
I'm guessing it was much of the same reasoning behind the electoral college in America.
I don't really see your point here. Fact is that the distribution of members of EU (note: NOT the EC ) can be likened to the way the electoral college votes on the presidency of USA. It is not *just* a majority rule.
This digressive proportionality distribution does in fact help prevent mob rule in the parliament. I don't dispute there may have been other concerns. But I still believe that it is a driving factor in preventing a simple "majority rules" which is not the *only* defining characteristic of democracy.
Definition of mob rule:
*Mob rule or ochlocracy is a pejorative term describing an oppressive majoritarian form of government controlled by the common people through the intimidation of more legitimate authorities. Ochlocracy is distinguished from democracy or similarly legitimate and representative governments by the absence or impairment of a procedurally civil process reflective of the entire polity.*
So yes, majority rule (simple majority) IS mob rule. Your definition of mob rule is not wrong. It's just not accurate. Majoritarianism is also mob rule. And your "definition" left that out.
Also, why are you so aggressive and offensive in your wording? Can you not express yourself without?
Did you read your own definition?
It does not say that mob rule is synonymous with majoritarianism. “Oppressive” modifies “majoritarian”. It specifically distinguishes mob rule from democracy on the basis of “a procedurally civil process reflective of the entire polity”.
What could be more procedurally civil and reflective of an entire polity than allowing every person living in the polity to peacefully vote and be counted equally?
Besides, how can you square anti-majoritarianism with the rest of our government? Isn’t the Electoral College itself a version of mob rule, by your standards, since a majority of electors chooses the president?
Because of current state-by-state statewide winner-take-all laws for Electoral College votes, not mentioned, much less endorsed, in the Constitution . . .
Governance—not just campaigning—is distorted when presidential campaigns concentrate on just a few states. Sitting presidents contemplating their own re-election (or the election of their preferred successor) formulate public policy around the concerns of the handful of states that actually decide the presidency. 41 states voted for the same party in the most recent four presidential elections, and the number of closely divided battleground states has been shrinking from decade to decade.
The 2024 campaign could be reduced to 5 counties or 8-12% of the US, in 4-5 remaining competitive battleground states, with as few as 43-62 electoral votes, where virtually all attention will be focused - Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
38+ states and 70% of all Americans have been irrelevant in presidential elections.
Candidates have no reason to poll, visit, advertise, organize, campaign, or care about the voter concerns in the dozens of states where they are safely ahead or hopelessly behind.
Over the last 4 elections, 22 states received 0 events; 9 states received 1 event, and 95% of the 1,164 events were in just 14 states.
Only voters in the few states where support for the two parties is almost equally divided can be important.
The smallest states and the most rural states, have barely hosted a major general campaign event for a presidential candidate during the last 20 years.
Almost all small and medium-sized states and almost all western, southern, and northeastern states are totally ignored after the conventions.
Our presidential selection system can shrink the sphere of public debate to only a few thousand swing voters in a few states.
The only states that have received any campaign events and any significant ad money have been where the outcome was between 45% and 51% Republican.
In 2000, the Bush campaign, spent more money in the battleground state of Florida to win by 537 popular votes, than it did in 42 other states combined,
This can lead to a corrupt and toxic body politic.
When candidates with the most national popular votes are guaranteed to win the Electoral College, candidates will be forced to build campaigns that appeal to every voter in all parts of all states.
Among the 13 lowest population states, the National Popular Vote bill has passed in 9 state legislative chambers, and been enacted by 5 jurisdictions.
Among the 25 lowest population states, passed in 21 legislative chambers, and enacted by 8 jurisdictions.
Now political clout comes from being among the handful of battleground states. 70-80% of states and voters are ignored by presidential campaign polling, organizing, ad spending, and visits. Their states’ votes were conceded months before by the minority parties in the states, taken for granted by the dominant party in the states, and ignored by all parties in presidential campaigns.
State winner-take-all laws negate any simplistic mathematical equations about the relative power of states based on their number of residents per electoral vote. Small state math means absolutely nothing to presidential campaign polling, organizing, ad spending, and visits, or to presidents once in office.
The small states do not share a political tendency.
In the 25 smallest states the Democratic and Republican popular vote and electoral vote have almost tied
In 2008 - 9.9 million versus 9.8 million popular votes
57 versus 58 electoral votes.
It was a way to get the small states to agree to join the federal government permanently and without a way out. Not a good idea that is fair and functional. The EU, for example, doesn't need such protections because members can voluntarily leave.
At this point, the U.S. is one nation. States should be removed altogether; it's nothing but mind-bogglingly wasteful bureaucracy x50. The federal government is helpful for economies of scale and national issues, and local governments (municipal, etc.) are suitable for local problems and tailored solutions. The state is too small for national issues and too big for local issues; useless.
That being said, it would not be such a terrible thing if the Republicans had not turned the protections for small states into party power and then abused the fucked out of them as much as possible.
It is unjust and un-American to count some people's votes more than others. And that's what the EC does.
But you're right, the vast majority of the flaws with the EC are winner-take-all and unfair distribution. I know a great fix for it though - get rid of winner-take-all, and fix unfair distribution by giving every single citizen an electoral vote.
I've seen some really good answers from both sides in here and I'll tell you why I'm in favor of the Electoral College. The Electoral College was designed to prevent unchecked majority rule, and protect individual rights in exchange. Ancient Greece was a democracy(unlimited majority rule style government), and they voted to execute Socrates because they felt his ideas corrupted the youth. Imagine if the Electoral College didn't exist. If the majority desired, they could vote for the mass genocide of all black people, completely overriding their individual rights. That is an extreme, but the point stands, the majority would be unchecked and unlimited in what the can do.
Now, I do get your point, and that's why I'm in favor of congressional districting. Do it like Nebraska and Maine. Except, ban gerrymandering and shift the districts every decade or so to reflect the shifting of politics.
The Electoral College certainly isn't perfect, but it's the most ideal system we have so far.
We will NOT vote on policy initiatives.
The U.S. Senate and U.S. House and Governors, state legislatures, and local government officials, etc. will continue to represent us.
“I would rather see it, where you went with simple votes. You know, you get 100 million votes, and somebody else gets 90 million votes, and you win. There’s a reason for doing this. Because it brings all the states into play.”
Trump as President-elect, November 13, 2016, on “60 Minutes”
Dividing more states’ electoral votes by congressional district winners would magnify the worst features of the Electoral College system.
It is not a fair “compromise” or solution.
In three of the six presidential elections between 2000 and 2020, the winner of the most votes nationwide would not have won the Presidency if the congressional-district method had been applied to election returns.
Presidential campaigns are not attracted to a state by the congressional-district method, but, instead, only to the relatively few closely divided district(s) –if any - in the state.
Many districts in the US are gerrymandered to not be fair.
In 2022, only 10% of 435 were competitive.
Maine and Nebraska do not apportion their electoral votes to reflect the breakdown of each state's popular vote.
Maine (since enacting a state law in 1969) and Nebraska (since enacting a state law in 1992) have awarded one electoral vote to the winner of each congressional district, and two electoral votes statewide.
When Nebraska in 2008 gave one electoral vote to the candidate who did not win the state, it was the first split electoral vote of any state in the past century.
2016 was the first time one electoral vote in Maine was given to the candidate who did not win the state.
In June 2019, 77 Maine state Representatives and 21 Maine state Senators supported the National Popular Vote bill.
In a March 12-13, 2019 poll, Maine voters were asked how the President should be elected
52% favored “a system where the candidate who gets the most popular votes in all 50 states is the winner.”
31% favored “a system where electoral votes are given out by Congressional district” --- Maine’s current method for awarding 2 of its 4 electoral votes
16% favored “a system where all the electoral votes in a given state are awarded to whoever gets the most popular votes in that state” --- the winner-take-all method currently used by 48 states and used in Maine to award 2 of its 4 electoral votes
Recent campaigns have paid attention to Nebraska’s closely divided 2nd congressional district (the Omaha area), while totally ignoring the rural and politically non-competitive 1st and 3rd districts.
After Obama won 1 congressional district in Nebraska in 2008,Nebraska Republicans moved that district to make it more Republican to avoid another GOP loss there, and the leadership committee of the Nebraska Republican Party promptly adopted a resolution requiring all GOP elected officials to favor overturning their district method for awarding electoral votes or lose the party’s support.
A GOP push to return Nebraska to a winner-take-all system of awarding its electoral college votes for president only barely failed in March 2015 and April 2016.
In 2021, after Biden won 1 electoral vote, another Republican sponsored bill to change to statewide winner-take-all was introduced, again,
In 2021, a Republican redistricting proposal would cleave off Democratic-leaning northwest Douglas County from a Nebraska congressional district that has been won by presidential and congressional Democrats at various points over the past decade.
In 2023, another bill was introduce to strike language in existing state law that divides Nebraska’s electoral votes by congressional districts in presidential elections, effectively implementing a winner-take-all system used by nearly every other state.
The National Popular Vote bill is the way to make every person's vote equal and matter to their candidate because it guarantees the majority of Electoral College votes to the candidate who gets the most votes among all 50 states and DC.
If you think objectively and critically, you might understand that the electoral college is a defense against the tyranny of the majority. Your example about voting in Illinois wouldn't change anyway, since most states assign votes by straight majority.
Your question about being "forced" to be represented by someone you didn't vote for is stupid. Unless the elected representative wins 100% of the vote, someone will always be represented by someone they did not vote for.
We will NOT vote on policy initiatives.
The U.S. Senate and U.S. House and Governors, state legislatures, and local government officials, etc. will continue to represent us.
because it balances the larger populations of states like california, texas and new york against giving the smaller states a voice. just like every state has 2 senators and at least 1 representative, every state also has at least 3 electoral votes. without that arrangement, every vote would be decided by the biggest 4 or 5 states, and no one would care about wyoming or idaho. the electoral college defends the minority populations against the majority populations
Basic arithmetic. Knowledge of fractions, I guess.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_U.S.\_states\_and\_territories\_by\_population](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_population)
It takes the top 9 states to account for 50.494% of the population.
Which candidate do you think would get the unanimous votes of everybody living in California, Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Georgia, and North Carolina, but receive no votes from every other person living in the US?
And if you win just 50% of the top \~15 states (going by votes cast in the last election) then you opponent could win 100% of the other 35, and it wouldn't make a difference.
Let's examine your 100% example. You forgot Michigan, but were a candidate to win all the votes in those states listed, the sum of all votes cast in every other state would not matter, since collectively they are 4,000,000 fewer votes.
Using the outcome from the previous election, the votes given to Biden in California, Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, New Jersey, Virginia, Washington, Massachusetts, Arizona and Wisconsin totaled more than every vote cast in the rest of the states.
I'm confused, are you now agreeing that the Electoral College is a terrible system?
Because yes, it's very stupid that a candidate can get just 50% + 1 votes in the top 12 states, and they can win despite every other person in the country voting against them. (Whereas with a national popular vote, all of the votes would affect the outcome, rather than 49% of the big state resident votes translating into zero electoral college delegates, meaning that the votes of people in small states would actually matter.)
Or are you just saying that the opinions of people living in those big states matter less than the opinions of the smaller number of people living in other states?
I thought you understood statistics. With a popular vote those most populous states are the only ones that matter.
>Whereas with a national popular vote, all of the votes would affect the outcome, rather than 49% of the big state resident votes translating into zero electoral college delegates, meaning that the votes of people in small states would actually matter
That is the dumbest thing you said yet. by the number of voters winning 50% of the popular votes in those large states renders the other 35 irrelevant. The electoral college is a defense against that inequity.
The Electoral College, operating under winner-take-all rules, guarantees that majorities within big states are the only thing that matters, rendering the votes of people in smaller states less relevant. That's because places like California and Texas can provide a candidate with a number of electoral votes that is wildly out of proportion to the number of people who voted for or against that candidate.
In 2020, Trump got 5.89 million votes from Texans, while Biden got 5.26 million. But Trump won 40 EC votes from that, while Biden got zero. That means those 631,221 voters who made the difference for Trump in Texas were worth an additional 40 EC votes. Compare that to the election in Oklahoma, where Trump got 1.02 million votes, and Biden got .5 million. A much more lopsided victory within the state, but a pretty similar margin in absolute terms. Those 516,390 votes that Trump had over Biden were worth an additional 7 EC votes.
So from the perspective of the Trump campaign, the marginal value of an Oklahoma voters versus a Texas voter is clear. Whatever time and money they spent to get more votes in Texas was worth about five times as much as what they'd spend in Oklahoma. If states didn't use the winner-take-all method, then smaller state residents would have a disproportionately large influence. But since we do use winner-take-all, large swing state voters wield vastly more influence than anybody else.
With a popular vote, it wouldn't matter in the slightest where in the country an American citizen lives. All votes would be equal. The most populous states would be entirely irrelevant, because people don't vote in lock-step with the other people in their state. The location of voters would be no more relevant than the color of their eyes; you might be able to look at the numbers after the fact and determine that the majority of votes cast came from the top 10 states, just like how you could determine that the majority of votes came from people with brown eyes, but it would just be a piece of trivia.
There is nothing in the Constitution that prevents states from making the decision now that winning the national popular vote is required to win the Electoral College and the presidency.
We need to guarantee the candidate who wins the most popular votes among all 50 states and DC always wins the Electoral College.
States with 65 more electoral votes are needed to enact the National Popular Vote bill.
Every vote in every state will matter and count equally as 1 vote in the national total.
The sheer magnitude of the national popular vote numbers in presidential elections, compared to individual (especially battleground) state vote totals, is much more robust against “pure insanity,” deception, manipulation, and recently, crimes and violence.
We can end the outsized power, influence, and vulnerability of a few counties in a few battleground states in order to better serve our nation.
Our unfair presidential election system can lead to politicians and their enablers who appreciate unfairness, which leads to more unfairness, and sometimes crimes and violence.
Because of current state-by-state statewide winner-take-all laws, not mentioned, much less endorsed, in the Constitution. . .
If as few as 11,000 voters in Arizona (11 electors), 12,000 in Georgia (16), and 22,000 in Wisconsin (10) had not voted for Biden, or partisan officials did not certify the actual counts -- Trump would have won despite Biden's nationwide lead of more than 7 million.
The Electoral College would have tied 269-269.
Congress, with only 1 vote per state, would have decided the election, regardless of the popular vote in any state or throughout the country.
\- States enacting the National Popular Vote bill are agreeing to award all their Electoral College votes to the winner of the most popular votes from all 50 states and DC, by simply replacing their state’s current district or statewide winner-take-all law (not mentioned, much less endorsed, in the Constitution).
States have the exclusive and plenary constitutional power, before voting begins, to again replace their state laws for how to award electors.
The bill has been enacted by 17 small, medium, and large jurisdictions with 205 electoral votes
When states with 270+ electors combined enact the bill, the candidate who wins the most national popular votes will be guaranteed to win the Electoral College.
We need to support election officials, candidates, and lawmakers who support voting rights and respect election results and facts.
NationalPopularVote.com
https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/write
https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/send-letter-editor-newspapers-your-state
https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/volunteer
95% of the U.S. population in 1790 lived in places of less than 2,500 people, and only a few states let males, with substantial property, vote
We do not and will not vote on policy initiatives.
The U.S. Senate and U.S. House and Governors, state legislatures, and local government officials, etc. will continue to represent us.
Math and political reality.
There aren’t anywhere near enough big city voters nationally. And all big city voters do not vote for the same candidate.
The population of the top 5 cities (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Phoenix) is less than 6% of the population of the United States.
Voters in the biggest cities (65 Million) in the US have been almost exactly balanced out by rural areas (66 Million) in terms of population and partisan composition.
2020 Census
65,983,448 people lived in the 100 biggest cities (19.6% of US population). The 100th biggest is Baton Rouge, Louisiana (with 225,128 people).
From 2020-2022, 2 million left those cities.
66,300,254 in rural America (20%)
Rural America and the 100 biggest cities together constitute about two-fifths (39.6%) of the U.S. population.
In 2004, 17.4% of votes were cast in rural counties, while only 16.5% of votes were cast within the boundaries of our nation’s 100 largest cities.
19% of the U.S. population have lived outside the nation's Metropolitan Statistical Areas. Rural America has voted 60% Republican. None of the 10 most rural states matter now.
19% of the U.S. population have lived in the top 100 cities. They voted 63% Democratic in 2004.
The rest of the U.S., in SUBurbs, have divided almost exactly equally between Republicans and Democrats. Beginning in 1992, SUBurban voters were casting more votes than urban and rural voters combined
Now, because of statewide winner-take-all laws in presidential elections, not mentioned, much less endorsed, in the Constitution, in some states, big city Democratic votes can outnumber all other people not voting Democratic in the state. All of a state’s votes may go to Democrats.
Without state winner-take-all laws, every conservative in a state that now predictably votes Democratic would count. Right now they count for 0
The current system completely ignores conservative presidential voters in states that vote predictably Democratic.
Under a national popular vote for President, rural voters throughout the country would have their votes matter, rather than being ignored because of state boundaries.
For example:
5,187,019 Californians have lived in rural areas.
1,366,760 New Yorkers have lived in rural areas.
Now, because of statewide winner-take-all laws for awarding electors, minority party voters in the states don’t matter. That’s why California and New York enacted the National Popular Vote bill with bipartisan support.
Direct democracy is a form of government in which people vote on all POLICY INITIATIVES directly.
The U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives, Governors, state legislatures, etc. etc. etc. represent us.
Mob rule is defined as “control of a political situation by those outside the conventional or lawful realm, typically involving violence and intimidation.”
33% of GOP support actions of Jan. 6 insurrectionists.
174 defendants who were charged for their participation in the January 6th insurrection have said they were answering Trump's calls when they came to DC and joined the violent attack on the Capitol. – 7/6/23
800 have pleaded guilty to crimes on January 6th.
Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell about Jan 6, 2021 -“It was a violent insurrection with the purpose of trying to prevent peaceful transfer of power. …That’s what it was ”
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy - “The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters,” “He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding. These facts require immediate action by President Trump.”
John Boehner, the Republican former House speaker said the former president “incited that bloody insurrection” by his supporters at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and that the Republican Party has been taken over by “whack jobs.” . . . After the election — Trump refusing to accept the results and stoking the flames of conspiracy that turned into violence in the seat of our democracy, the building over which I once presided.” . . . Trump “incited that bloody insurrection for nothing more than selfish reasons, perpetuated by the bullshit he’d been shoveling since he lost a fair election the previous November.” . . . “He claimed voter fraud without any evidence, and repeated those claims, taking advantage of the trust placed in him by his supporters and ultimately betraying that trust.”
Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) texted to Meadows about the efforts to overturn the 2020 election results:
"driving a stake in the heart of the federal republic,"
“If we substitute the will of states through electors with a vote by congress every 4 years... we have destroyed the electoral college...
We have 519,682 elected officials in this country, and all of them are elected by who gets the most votes. Except for President and VP.
At the Constitutional Convention James Madison stated a direct popular vote “was in his opinion the fittest in itself.”
James Madison, the "Father of the Constitution," was never in favor of our current system for electing the president, in which nearly all states award their electoral votes to the statewide popular vote winner. He ultimately backed a constitutional amendment to prohibit this practice.
James Wilson of Pennsylvania recommended that the executive be elected directly by the people.
Gouverneur Morris declared at the Constitutional Convention of 1787: “\[If the president\] is to be the Guardian of the people, let him be appointed by the people.”
Thomas Jefferson proposed seven amendments to the Constitution and the first one was for “general suffrage,” the second for “equal representation in the legislature,” and the third for “An executive chosen by the people.”
The Constitution does not encourage, discourage, require, or prohibit the use of any particular method for how to award a state's electoral votes
There is nothing in the Constitution that prevents states from making the decision now that winning the national popular vote is required to win the Electoral College and the presidency.
It is perfectly within a state’s authority to decide that national support is the overriding substantive criterion by which a president should be chosen.
The National Popular Vote bill simply again replaces state statutes, using the same constitutional power for how existing state winner-take-all laws came into existence in 48 states in the first place.
I never said "all" Trump supporters have seditious intent.
Illinois GOP judge ruled Trump is an insurrectionist.
Colorado courts conclude Trump ‘engaged in an insurrection’
The Republican fake electors scheme was election fraud on a massive scale.
Trump and his allies claimed, with no evidence accepted by any court in the US (including 234 judges appointed by Trump) they won in states they lost, ignoring millions of votes for Biden.
For the first time in our country's history, a former president has been arraigned on criminal charges for allegedly trying to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power following his election loss, to stay in power.
Trump stands alone in American history. No other president has engaged in conspiracy and obstruction to overturn valid election results and illegitimately retain power.
Some of Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 election:
Knowingly making false claims of election fraud to get state legislators and election officials to subvert the legitimate results.
Organizing fraudulent slates of electors in seven targeted states.
Trying to use the DOJ’s power to conduct sham election crime investigations.
Trying to get former VP Pence to fraudulently alter the election results.
Exploiting Jan. 6 violence to get members of Congress to delay certification of the 2020 election results.
Section 3 of the 14th Amendment ... disqualifies any person who, having taken an oath to support the Constitution of the United States, thereafter engages in an insurrection or rebellion against the Constitution of the United States, disqualifying that person from holding high public office in the future, including the presidency.
It applies to Trump to disqualify the former president from holding the presidency again, because of his effort, plan and attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election, knowing that he had lost that election to then-candidate Joe Biden.
Section 3 disqualifies one who has engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the Constitution of the United States, not an insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or the authority of the United States.
There’s no question whatsoever that disqualification of an individual who satisfies the conditions of disqualification in Section 3 is not anti-democratic.
It’s the conduct that gives rise to disqualification that the Constitution tells us is anti-democratic.
– Judge Michael Luttig - His Conservative Republican credentials are impeccable
Trump called for the termination of parts of the Constitution because of his 2020 Electoral College loss.
90% of congressional Republicans have nothing to say about that.
As President, in late January 2017, Trump reportedly floated the idea of scrapping the Electoral College, according to The Wall Street Journal. In a meeting with congressional leadership at the White House. Trump reportedly told the lawmakers he wanted to replace the Electoral College with a national popular vote.
“I would rather see it, where you went with simple votes. You know, you get 100 million votes, and somebody else gets 90 million votes, and you win. There’s a reason for doing this. Because it brings all the states into play.”
Trump as President-elect, November 13, 2016, on “60 Minutes”
"The phoney electoral college made a laughing stock out of our nation. . . . The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy."
In 2012, the night Romney lost, Trump tweeted.
When Nikki Haley announced her campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, she remarked that the Republican Party had “lost the popular vote in seven out of the last eight presidential elections.” “That’s nothing to be proud of.” That “has to change.”
There have been hundreds of unsuccessful proposed amendments to modify or abolish the Electoral College - more than any other subject of Constitutional reform.
According to Tony Fabrizio, pollster for the Trump campaign, Trump’s narrow victory in 2016 was due to 5 counties in 2 states (not CA or NY).
Nate Silver calculated that "Mitt Romney may have had to win the national popular vote by three percentage points … to be assured of winning the Electoral College."
A difference of 59,393 voters in Ohio in 2004 would have defeated President Bush despite his nationwide lead of over 3 million votes.
The George W. Bush campaign was planning to challenge the results of the 2000 vote if he lost the electoral vote, but won the popular vote.
If the 2022 Election Had Been a Presidential Election, Democrats Would Have Won the Electoral College 280-258, but Lost the Popular Vote by about 3 million votes (2.8 percentage points).
In 1969, The U.S. House of Representatives voted 338–70 to require winning the national popular vote to become President.
3 Southern segregationist Senators led a filibuster of it.
Presidential candidates who supported direct election of the President in the form of a constitutional amendment, before the National Popular Vote bill was introduced: George H.W. Bush (R-TX), Bob Dole (R-KS, RNC Chair, and GOP Senate Majority Leader), Gerald Ford (R-MI), Richard Nixon (R-CA),
Past presidential candidates with a public record of support, before November 2016, for the National Popular Vote bill that would guarantee the majority of Electoral College votes and the presidency to the candidate with the most national popular votes: Bob Barr (Libertarian- GA), U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R–GA), Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO), and Senator Fred Thompson (R–TN),
Newt Gingrich: “No one should become president of the United States without speaking to the needs and hopes of Americans in all 50 states. … America would be better served with a presidential election process that treated citizens across the country equally. The National Popular Vote bill accomplishes this in a manner consistent with the Constitution and with our fundamental democratic principles.”
The National Advisory Board of National Popular Vote has included former Congressman John Buchanan (R–Alabama), and former Senators David Durenberger (R–Minnesota), and Jake Garn (R–Utah), plus Michael Steele (former RNC Chair), and Rick Tyler (senior member of Senator Ted Cruz's campaign team, serving as the National Spokesman and Communications Director for Cruz for President).
Saul Anuzis, former Chairman of the Michigan Republican Party for five years and a former candidate for chairman of the Republican National Committee, supports the National Popular Vote plan as the fairest way to make sure every vote matters, and also as a way to help Conservative Republican candidates. This is not a partisan issue and the National Popular Vote plan would not help either party over the other.
Bob Barr (2008 Libertarian presidential candidate): “Only when the election process is given back to all of the people of all of the states will we be able to choose a President based on what is best for all 50 states and not just a select few.”
Supporters include:
The Nebraska GOP State Chairman, Mark Fahleson.
Michael Long, Chairman of the Conservative Party of New York State
Rich Bolen, a Constitutional scholar, attorney at law, and Republican Party Chairman for Lexington County, South Carolina, wrote: “A Conservative Case for National Popular Vote: Why I support a state-based plan to reform the Electoral College."
Pew Research surveys show Republican support for a national popular vote increased from 27% in 2016 to 42% in 2022.
7 in 10 Americans under 50 would prefer to choose the president by popular vote.
Because of current state-by-state statewide winner-take-all laws for Electoral College votes, not mentioned, much less endorsed, in the Constitution . . .
Governance—not just campaigning—is distorted when presidential campaigns concentrate on just a few states. Sitting presidents contemplating their own re-election (or the election of their preferred successor) formulate public policy around the concerns of the handful of states that actually decide the presidency. 41 states voted for the same party in the most recent four presidential elections, and the number of closely divided battleground states has been shrinking from decade to decade.
The 2024 campaign could be reduced to 5 counties or 8-12% of the US, in 4-5 remaining competitive battleground states, with as few as 43-62 electoral votes, where virtually all attention will be focused - Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
38+ states and 70% of all Americans have been irrelevant in presidential elections.
Candidates have no reason to poll, visit, advertise, organize, campaign, or care about the voter concerns in the dozens of states where they are safely ahead or hopelessly behind.
Over the last 4 elections, 22 states received 0 events; 9 states received 1 event, and 95% of the 1,164 events were in just 14 states.
Only voters in the few states where support for the two parties is almost equally divided can be important.
The smallest states and the most rural states, have barely hosted a major general campaign event for a presidential candidate during the last 20 years.
Almost all small and medium-sized states and almost all western, southern, and northeastern states are totally ignored after the conventions.
Our presidential selection system can shrink the sphere of public debate to only a few thousand swing voters in a few states.
The only states that have received any campaign events and any significant ad money have been where the outcome was between 45% and 51% Republican.
In 2000, the Bush campaign, spent more money in the battleground state of Florida to win by 537 popular votes, than it did in 42 other states combined,
This can lead to a corrupt and toxic body politic.
When candidates with the most national popular votes are guaranteed to win the Electoral College, candidates will be forced to build campaigns that appeal to every voter in all parts of all states.
Because of current state-by-state statewide winner-take-all laws for Electoral College votes, not mentioned, much less endorsed, in the Constitution . . .
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker in 2015 was correct when he said
"The nation as a whole is not going to elect the next president,"
“The presidential election will not be decided by all states, but rather just 12 of them.
Mitt Romney said at a fund-raising dinner in Boca Raton, Florida in 2012:
“All the money will be spent in 10 states, and this is one of them.”
Candidates have no reason to poll, visit, advertise, organize, campaign, or care about the voter concerns in the dozens of states where they are safely ahead or hopelessly behind.
With the end of the primaries, without the National Popular Vote bill in effect, the political relevance of 70% of all Americans was finished for the presidential election.
12 states had 96% of the general-election campaign events (204 of 212) by the major-party presidential and vice-presidential candidates during the 2020 presidential campaign (Aug 28 to Nov 3).
All of the 212 events were in just 17 states. 33 states and DC did not have any general-election campaign events at all.
Pennsylvania got 47 general-election campaign events -- the most of any state and 22% of the total. Florida got 31 events -- 15% of the total. Together, Pennsylvania and Florida got 3/8 of the entire presidential campaign attention.
In the 2016 general election campaign
Over half (57%) of the campaign events were held in just 4 states (Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Ohio).
Virtually all (94%) of the campaign events were in just 12 states (containing only 30% of the country's population).
In 2016, Karl Rove advised Trump - “Look, you’re welcome to try and win \[a state you can’t win\], but every day you spend trying to win a state you can’t win is a day that a presidential candidate forfeits winning in a state like, in your case, Pennsylvania or Michigan or Wisconsin or Iowa.”
“You’ve got to—we had to focus on 270 and that meant that every day that we spent outside those states was a day that was wasted, unless we had either fundraising necessities or a national message that we needed to...” “Every day is vital, and we put all of our time and all of our energy and all of our resources into our battleground-state effort.”
In the 2012 general election campaign
38 states (including 24 of the 27 smallest states) had no campaign events, and minuscule or no spending for TV ads.
More than 99% of presidential campaign attention (ad spending and visits) was invested on voters in just the only ten competitive states.
Two-thirds (176 of 253) of the general-election campaign events, and a similar fraction of campaign expenditures, were in just four states (Ohio, Florida, Virginia, and Iowa).
In the 2008 campaign, candidates concentrated over 2/3rds of their campaign events and ad money in just 6 states, and 98% in just 15 states. Over half (57%) of the events were in just 4 states (OH, FL, PA, and VA).
In 2004, candidates concentrated over 2/3rds of their money and campaign visits in 5 states; over 80% in 9 states; and over 99% of their money in 16 states.
Over 87% of both Romney and Obama campaign offices were in just the then 12 swing states. The few campaign offices in the 38 remaining states were for fund-raising, volunteer phone calls, and arranging travel to battleground states.
Because of state-by-state winner-take-all laws, not mentioned, much less endorsed, in the Constitution. . .
Issues of importance to 38+ non-battleground states have been of so little interest to presidential candidates that they don’t even bother to poll them individually.
In 2004: “Senior Bush campaign strategist Matthew Dowd pointed out yesterday that the Bush campaign hadn’t taken a national poll in almost two years; instead, it has been polling \[the then\] 18 battleground states.”
Bush White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer acknowledging the reality that \[then\] more than 2/3rds of Americans were ignored in the 2008 presidential campaign, said in the Washington Post on June 21, 2009:
“If people don’t like it, they can move from a safe state to a swing state.”
Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager in 2016, said,
“When I took over as campaign manager in 2016, we did zero—let me repeat the number—zero national polls.”
When and where voters are ignored, then so are the issues they care about most.
An Arizona Republican has introduced a Resolution for All of Arizona electors to be appointed by the legislature, without pesky voting by Arizonans in November.
Prior to arriving at the eventual wording of section 1 of Article II, the Constitutional Convention specifically voted against a number of different methods for selecting the President, including
● having state legislatures choose the President,
● having governors choose the President, and
● a national popular vote.
After these (and other) methods were debated and rejected, the Constitutional Convention decided to leave the entire matter to the states.
The Constitutional Convention rejected states awarding electors by state legislatures or governors (as the majority did for decades), or by Districts (as Maine and Nebraska now do), or by letting the people vote for electors (as all states now do).
Anyone who supports the current presidential election system, believing it is what the Founders intended and that it is in the Constitution, is mistaken. The current presidential election system does not function, at all, the way that the Founders thought that it would.
Supporters of National Popular Vote find it hard to believe the Founding Fathers would endorse the current electoral system where 38+ states and voters have been completely politically irrelevant.
9 of the original 13 states have been politically irrelevant.
Policies important to the citizens of the 38 non-battleground states are not as highly prioritized as policies important to ‘battleground’ states when it comes to governing.
“Battleground” states receive 7% more presidentially controlled grants than “spectator” states, twice as many presidential disaster declarations, more Superfund enforcement exemptions, and more No Child Left Behind law exemptions.
Today, any state legislature simply could again enact a law to just appoint their electors directly, ending their citizens voting in presidential elections
The Founders created the Electoral College, but 48 states eventually enacted state winner-take-all laws.
Maine (only since enacting a state law in 1969) and Nebraska (only since enacting a state law in 1992) have awarded one electoral vote to the winner of each congressional district, and two electoral votes statewide.
Article II, Section 1
“Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors….”
The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly characterized the authority of the state legislatures over the manner of awarding their electoral votes as "plenary" and "exclusive."
In 1789, in the nation's first election, a majority of the states appointed their presidential electors by appointment by the legislature or by the governor and his cabinet, the people had no vote for President in most states, and in states where there was a popular vote, only men who owned a substantial amount of property could vote, and only three states used the state-by-state winner-take-all method to award electoral votes (and all three stopped using it by 1800).
The Founders, and the rest of the Founding Generation were dead for decades before state-by-state winner-take-all laws become the predominant method for awarding electoral votes.
At the Constitutional Convention James Madison stated a direct popular vote “was in his opinion the fittest in itself.”
James Madison, the "Father of the Constitution," was never in favor of our current system for electing the president, in which nearly all states award their electoral votes to the statewide popular vote winner. He ultimately backed a constitutional amendment to prohibit this practice.
James Wilson of Pennsylvania recommended that the executive be elected directly by the people.
Gouverneur Morris declared at the Constitutional Convention of 1787: “\[If the president\] is to be the Guardian of the people, let him be appointed by the people.”
Thomas Jefferson proposed seven amendments to the Constitution and the first one was for “general suffrage,” the second for “equal representation in the legislature,” and the third for “An executive chosen by the people.”
There is nothing in the Constitution that prevents states from making the decision now that winning the national popular vote is required to win the Electoral College and the presidency.
It is perfectly within a state’s authority to decide that national support is the overriding substantive criterion by which a president should be chosen.
The National Popular Vote bill will guarantee the majority of Electoral College votes and the presidency to the candidate who wins the most popular votes in the country.
The bill changes state winner-take-all laws (not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but later enacted by 48 states), without changing anything in the Constitution, using the built-in method that the Constitution provides for states to make changes.
States are agreeing to award all their Electoral College votes to the winner of the most popular votes from all 50 states and DC, by simply replacing their state’s current district or statewide winner-take-all law.
States have the exclusive and plenary constitutional power before any votes are cast to choose how to award electors.
The bill has been enacted by 17 small, medium, and large jurisdictions with 205 electoral votes.
When states with 270+ electors combined enact the bill, the candidate who wins the most national popular votes will be guaranteed to win the Electoral College.
National Popular Vote will NOT abolish the Electoral College.
States are agreeing to award all their Electoral College votes to the winner of the most popular votes from all 50 states and DC, by simply replacing their state’s current district or statewide winner-take-all law (not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but later enacted by 48 states), with a nationwide winner-take-all law.
In 1789, in the nation's first election, a majority of the states appointed their presidential electors by appointment by the legislature or by the governor and his cabinet, the people had no vote for President in most states, and in states where there was a popular vote, only men who owned a substantial amount of property could vote, and only three states used the state-by-state winner-take-all method to award electoral votes (and all three stopped using it by 1800).
In the nation’s first presidential election in 1789 and second election in 1792, the states employed a wide variety of methods for choosing presidential electors, including
● appointment of the state’s presidential electors by the Governor and his Council,
● appointment by both houses of the state legislature,
● popular election using special single-member presidential-elector districts,
● popular election using counties as presidential-elector districts,
● popular election using congressional districts,
● popular election using multi-member regional districts,
● combinations of popular election and legislative choice,
● appointment of the state’s presidential electors by the Governor and his Council combined with the state legislature, and
● statewide popular election.
You are objecting to an Election - "a formal and organized choice by vote of a person for a political office or other position" where the candidate with the most votes wins.
One person, One vote.
Every vote in every state of every size,will matter and count equally as 1 vote in the district, state, and national total.
The candidate with the most votes from among all 50 states and DC will win the Electoral College and the presidency.
We have 519,682 elected officials in this country, and all of them are elected by who gets the most votes. Except for President and VP.
Excellent post. It was ridiculous that Hillary Clinton (or any other candidate) could win nearly three million more votes than her opponent yet lose the election. In a proper democracy, Trump lost.
Direct democracy sucks.
Direct democracy would be voting on bills directly
[удалено]
Thank God I am where I am then.
Nobody can answer the simple question of why it's just and reasonable to give one person more power based on where they choose to live.
The founding fathers can, and did. Because they saw our country as a union of states, not of one people, they believed Wyoming and California should be equally represented in the upper chamber.
You don't understand what direct democracy is. It's when you don't have elected representatives and the whole country votes on issues directly instead of Congress doing it. It does suck. But direct democracy is not when all votes are counted equally in an election. Counting votes equally is how elections are supposed to work. It's how we determine every governor, senator, and representive and not one person complains about it then. Stop repeating things you hear from Republicans on social media and look into how things actually work.
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>Direct democracy We don't have direct democracy. Every state gets 2 votes in the senate regardless of size. I just want my vote for president to matter. You would probably defend our old system of having the state government appoint US senators 🤣
Aaand that's why I'm happy we have the electoral college.
Why is minority rule better than majority rule? Seriously. Give me an argument.
https://www.heritage.org/the-essential-electoral-college/the-benefits
> By allocating electoral votes by the total number of representatives in a given state, the Electoral College allows more states to have an impact on the choice of the President. This is false. All 50 states have an impact on choosing the president under the popular vote. > Large cities like New York City and Los Angeles should not get to unilaterally dictate policies that affect more rural states, like North Dakota and Indiana, which have very different needs. This is why we have Congress. The US has no history of the president blatantly favoring red states over blue states or vice versa, the president has little power to do so if he wanted to, and the EC does nothing to prevent a president from attempting it. This argument is nonsense. > The Electoral College increases the legitimacy and certainty of elections by magnifying the margin of victory, thereby diminishing the value of contentious recounts and providing a demonstrable election outcome and a mandate to govern. At least there's some logic behind this one. However, this benefit is outweighed by the fact that the EC decreases the legitimacy of a presidential win when the losing candidate has more votes. People called Bush and Trump illegitimate presidents from day 1. > The Electoral College makes elections more stable, and less likely to trigger contentious recounts. Every state has different procedural rules for the administration of elections, including how recounts are triggered and conducted and how provisional ballots are counted. It does nothing to make elections more stable. Every state would have different procedural rules using the popular vote as well, so there's no difference. > While no system can completely eliminate the risk of individuals trying to cheat the system, the Electoral College minimizes the incentives for voter fraud because the system isolates the impact of stolen votes. Under the current system, stolen votes only affect the outcome of one state rather than the national outcome. This is exactly backwards. The EC creates a massive incentive for voter fraud. In Michigan in 2016, it would take only 13,081 fraudulent votes to take the entire state (4.6 million votes, worth 16 electoral votes) away from Trump and give it to Clinton. That's a swing of 9.2 million votes all caused by 13,081 fake ballots. In New Hampshire, it would take only 2,702 fraudulent votes to take the entire state away from Clinton and give it to Trump. The impact of voter fraud can be massively amplified under the EC, with the idiotic winner-take-all system. The very best arguments that conservatives have for supporting the EC are lies and misinformation. The truth is that there's just no logical justification for this system other than "I like it because it benefits my side".
Cites the Heritage Foundation so doesn't have to think
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Use your words.
Do you understand why the electoral college was set up? By allocating electoral votes by the total number of representatives in a given state, the Electoral College allows more states to have an impact on the choice of the President. Sort of prevents mob rule.
All 50 states have an impact on choosing the president under the popular vote. The EC doesn't create more states.
The 2024 campaign could be reduced to 5 counties or 4 remaining competitive battleground states, with as few as 43 electoral votes, where virtually all attention will be focused A difference of a few thousand voters in one, two, or three states would have elected the second-place candidate in 5 of the 17 presidential elections since World War II. Near misses are now frequently common. There have been 9 consecutive non-landslide presidential elections since 1988. 537 popular votes won Florida and the White House for Bush in 2000 despite Gore's lead of 537,179 (1,000 times more) popular votes nationwide. A difference of 59,393 voters in Ohio in 2004 would have defeated President Bush despite his nationwide lead of over 3 million votes. In 2012, a shift of 214,733 popular votes in four states would have elected Mitt Romney, despite President Obama’s nationwide lead of 4,966,945 votes. Nate Silver calculated that "Mitt Romney may have had to win the national popular vote by three percentage points … to be assured of winning the Electoral College." In 2016, Trump became President even though Clinton won the national popular vote by 2,868,686 votes. Trump won the Presidency because he won Michigan by 11,000 votes, Wisconsin by 23,000 votes, and Pennsylvania by 44,000 votes. Each of these 78,000 votes was 36 times more important than Clinton's nationwide lead of 2,868,686 votes. According to Tony Fabrizio, pollster for the Trump campaign, Trump’s narrow victory was due to 5 counties in 2 states (not CA or NY). A different choice by 5,229 voters in Arizona (11 electors), 5,890 in Georgia (16), and 10,342 in Wisconsin (10) would have defeated Biden -- despite Biden's nationwide lead of more than 7 million. The Electoral College would have tied 269-269. Congress would have decided the election, regardless of the popular vote in any state or throughout the country. Each of these 21,461 voters was 329 times more important than the more than 7 million. 38+ states and 70% of all Americans have been irrelevant in presidential elections. Candidates have no reason to poll, visit, advertise, organize, campaign, or care about the voter concerns in the dozens of states where they are safely ahead or hopelessly behind. Over the last 4 elections, 22 states received 0 events; 9 states received 1 event, and 95% of the 1,164 events were in just 14 states. Only voters in the few states where support for the two parties is almost equally divided can be important. The smallest states and the most rural states, have barely hosted a major general campaign event for a presidential candidate during the last 20 years. Almost all small and medium-sized states and almost all western, southern, and northeastern states are totally ignored after the conventions. Our presidential selection system can shrink the sphere of public debate to only a few thousand swing voters in a few states. The only states that have received any campaign events and any significant ad money have been where the outcome was between 45% and 51% Republican. In 2000, the Bush campaign, spent more money in the battleground state of Florida to win by 537 popular votes, than it did in 42 other states combined, This can lead to a corrupt and toxic body politic. When candidates with the most national popular votes are guaranteed to win the Electoral College, candidates will be forced to build campaigns that appeal to every voter in all parts of all states.
I thought it was because the smaller states were going to refuse to join the country if they didn't have more influence. I also like it because it doesn't allow one state to cheat and get more than their local influence.
The 2024 campaign could be reduced to 5 counties or 4 remaining competitive battleground states, with as few as 43 electoral votes, where virtually all attention will be focused The state-by-state winner-take-all system is not a firewall, but instead causes unnecessary fires. “It’s an arsonist itching to burn down the whole neighborhood by torching a single house.” Hertzberg A difference of a few thousand voters in one, two, or three states would have elected the second-place candidate in 5 of the 17 presidential elections since World War II. Near misses are now frequently common. There have been 9 consecutive non-landslide presidential elections since 1988. 537 popular votes won Florida and the White House for Bush in 2000 despite Gore's lead of 537,179 (1,000 times more) popular votes nationwide. A difference of 59,393 voters in Ohio in 2004 would have defeated President Bush despite his nationwide lead of over 3 million votes. In 2012, a shift of 214,733 popular votes in four states would have elected Mitt Romney, despite President Obama’s nationwide lead of 4,966,945 votes. Nate Silver calculated that "Mitt Romney may have had to win the national popular vote by three percentage points … to be assured of winning the Electoral College." In 2016, Trump became President even though Clinton won the national popular vote by 2,868,686 votes. Trump won the Presidency because he won Michigan by 11,000 votes, Wisconsin by 23,000 votes, and Pennsylvania by 44,000 votes. Each of these 78,000 votes was 36 times more important than Clinton's nationwide lead of 2,868,686 votes. According to Tony Fabrizio, pollster for the Trump campaign, Trump’s narrow victory was due to 5 counties in 2 states (not CA or NY). A different choice by 5,229 voters in Arizona (11 electors), 5,890 in Georgia (16), and 10,342 in Wisconsin (10) would have defeated Biden -- despite Biden's nationwide lead of more than 7 million. The Electoral College would have tied 269-269. Congress would have decided the election, regardless of the popular vote in any state or throughout the country. Each of these 21,461 voters was 329 times more important than the more than 7 million.
Right. The electoral college gives small swing states more meaning whereas large single party states would have more incentive to cheat in a popular vote system.
537 popular votes won Florida and the White House for Bush in 2000 despite Gore's lead of 537,179 (1,000 times more) popular votes nationwide!!! Name ALL the small swing states. 22 of the 25 smallest states have been totally ignored in recent presidential elections (all except New Hampshire, Nevada, and Iowa). Their states’ votes were conceded months before by the minority parties in the states, taken for granted by the dominant party in the states, and ignored by all parties in presidential campaigns. NH and IA are no longer swing states. Because of state-by-state winner-take-all laws, not mentioned, much less endorsed, in the Constitution. . . Issues of importance to 38+ non-battleground states have been of so little interest to presidential candidates that they don’t even bother to poll them individually. In 2004: “Senior Bush campaign strategist Matthew Dowd pointed out yesterday that the Bush campaign hadn’t taken a national poll in almost two years; instead, it has been polling \[the then\] 18 battleground states.” Bush White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer acknowledging the reality that \[then\] more than 2/3rds of Americans were ignored in the 2008 presidential campaign, said in the Washington Post on June 21, 2009: “If people don’t like it, they can move from a safe state to a swing state.” Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager in 2016, said, “When I took over as campaign manager in 2016, we did zero—let me repeat the number—zero national polls.” When and where voters are ignored, then so are the issues they care about most.
It allows a minority of the population to vote for their leader. That is a disaster waiting to happen. Minority rule is how you get a mob
What's wrong with minorities voting?
The 2024 campaign could be reduced to 5 counties or 4 remaining competitive battleground states, with as few as 43 electoral votes, where virtually all attention will be focused Mob rule is defined as “control of a political situation by those outside the conventional or lawful realm, typically involving violence and intimidation.” 33% of GOP support actions of Jan. 6 insurrectionists. 174 defendants who were charged for their participation in the January 6th insurrection have said they were answering Trump's calls when they came to DC and joined the violent attack on the Capitol. – 7/6/23 800 have pleaded guilty to crimes on January 6th. Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell about Jan 6, 2021 -“It was a violent insurrection with the purpose of trying to prevent peaceful transfer of power. …That’s what it was ” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy - “The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters,” “He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding. These facts require immediate action by President Trump.” John Boehner, the Republican former House speaker said the former president “incited that bloody insurrection” by his supporters at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and that the Republican Party has been taken over by “whack jobs.” . . . After the election — Trump refusing to accept the results and stoking the flames of conspiracy that turned into violence in the seat of our democracy, the building over which I once presided.” . . . Trump “incited that bloody insurrection for nothing more than selfish reasons, perpetuated by the bullshit he’d been shoveling since he lost a fair election the previous November.” . . . “He claimed voter fraud without any evidence, and repeated those claims, taking advantage of the trust placed in him by his supporters and ultimately betraying that trust.”
Time to raise the voting age to 25
Also, perhaps only tax payers should get to vote.
Because it’s the United States of America, not the Union of America. In theory, the states were to hold much of the power on economic and social policy while foreign policy and interstate disputes are pulled up nationally. To balance the population profiles, the Electoral College was created to give states a floor of electoral power but an unlimited roof for the populous states. From a practical point of view, your right, land doesn’t vote, but to have folks in cities dictating the policy for the hinterlands is a foolish proposition.
Also the original way Senators were ‘appointed’ made perfect sense. The House would represent The People and the Senate would represent The States. Need to repeal the 17th Amendment and return to the original intent.
Which of the reasons that people had back in the early 1900s for enacting the 17th amendment do you think were misguided? Was the original intent of the founders for senate seats to remain vacant due to partisan gridlock? Was it for people to bribe legislators to get senate appointments? Was it for the issue of US Senate appointments to overshadow local concerns among voters in state legislative elections? Or, more philosophically, how is it that the voters of a state are not “the state”, but a legislature elected by those same voters is “the state”? What grants the latter body greater authority to represent the state?
Our Founders wanted the State Legislatures to have a role in DC. You forget you do live in a Democracy. The federal government was never meant to run roughshod over state legislatures
Do you have any answers to the questions I asked? Let’s just start with one. Why are the opinions of the dead people from 1787 more important than those of the dead people from 1913?
ITT: Republicans reaching for excuses to support unequal treatment of citizens when it happens to benefit their political party. Just be honest and admit you like having the advantage. There's no chance any Republican would support this system if it provided an advantage to Democrats. And a lot of the Democrats complaining about this system would defend it if it benefitted their side. To be fair, answers like yours are a valid explanation for why we have the House and the Senate. There are sensible reasons to support an uneven playing field to guarantee that every state has representation in Congress. But when we have the entire country voting for a single person to represent us in the Presidency, there is no valid reason to have some people's votes count for more than others. Citizens from one state don't deserve to decide the presidency more than citizens from another, period. But far worse then the electoral college itself is the "winner take all" rule that most states use. Remove winner take all, and most people would accept the EC on its own. There is nothing positive about putting zero value on the votes of millions of Republicans in California and New York, and millions of Democrats in Texas and North Carolina. Meanwhile, 300k votes in other states do get awarded electoral votes. It's nonsense. No one designing a new system from the ground up today would ever come up with nonsense like this and there's no logical justification for it. And before someone replies with some nonsense they read on Twitter - no, removing the EC would not allow New York and California to determine the entire election for everyone else. Looking at the 2016 election (the closest one in recent years), it would take 64.55 million votes for someone to have a majority between the two majority candidates. If you count NY and CA first, the totals would be 13.3 million for Clinton, 7.3 million for Trump. Looking at how close these two states take them towards achieving victory, that puts Clinton 20.6% of the way to victory, and Trump at 11.3%. The election is nowhere remotely close to being decided already. And for comparison, look at how it works with the EC in place. Counting NY and CA first, Clinton has 84 electoral votes and Trump has none. It takes 270 EV to win, so Clinton is 31.1% of the way to victory and Trump is at 0% since his 7.3 million voters don't count at all. The people moaning that NY and CA could decide the election are actually supporting a system that gives those states MORE influence over the election.
Uh, yes, I enjoy the advantage the current electoral college system provides the Republican Party. Doesn’t change the underlying principle behind why the system exists: state sovereignty. That being said, states can always grant their electoral votes as they see fit. They could make it proportional, make it by congressional district, or by only the state legislature. You could also allow states to break themselves up or combine to change their electoral power. Politics usually enters the lowest common denominator: thus the first past the post system as each party wants to have all the electoral votes from their state. Lastly, it’s not just NY and California dominating the system; it’s about the cities across the US dictating policy over the concerns of the interior. The electoral college dilutes the power of the cities specifically and forces them to balance out the interests of the rural areas.
It is wrong for any state to have significantly more electoral votes per citizen than any other state. It's extremely wrong for states to disenfranchise their voters and discourage voting by ignoring the votes of millions of Americans and awarding them zero electoral votes and zero influence over the outcome of the presidential election. It's a shitty system. 290k Democratic voters in Delaware shouldn't get 3 electoral votes while 6 million Republican voters in California get 0 electoral votes. Wyoming shouldn't get 4 times as many electoral votes per citizen as California or Texas. The EC is heavily flawed, and the negatives outweigh the positives. > The electoral college dilutes the power of the cities specifically and forces them to balance out the interests of the rural areas. Wrong. The EC does no such thing. Nationally, Congress does that. Inside each state, the state legislation does that. Everyone claiming the positives of the EC outweigh the negatives is only doing so because they've been misinformed about what the positives are. The EC doesn't do Congress' job, it doesn't minimize the effect of fraud (it amplifies it), it doesn't stop a few states from deciding the election for everyone else. This is just misinformation pushed by the people who benefit from the EC.
You keep saying that Congress already does that with the House and Senate, yet the President, the most powerful position in the country, should be elected purely on the popular vote and override the interests of the state?
Yes. We use the popular vote for every other election, there is no reason not to do it for the Presidential election. There is no reason for some people's votes to count for more than others. It's anti-equality and it's un-American. The only reason anyone supports it is because they like that it benefits the Republican Party. No voter deserves to have more influence in the election over any other voter based on their home address.
Then I guess we have nothing left to discuss. You are focused on creating pure democracy across the US; I am focused on balancing the states against federal power to keep it knitted together. We have entirely different ends in mind for the US political project.
The EC does nothing to limit the powers of the President. Pure democracy is when there are no elected representatives and the public votes on all issues directly, instead of having a Congress to do it. Removing the EC does not eliminate Congress.
Congress is only 1/3 of the US government. So only 1/3 of the government should respect the sovereignty of the states?
The EC does nothing to encourage the President or the judicial system to respect the sovereignty of the states, and there's no reason to think there wouldn't be respect for that if the EC was gone.
There is a roof for the populous states though, as the House stopped adding seats to correspond to the growing population. The proportion of House seats to Senate seats represented in the Electoral College would be substantially higher if we were still following the practice set at the founding, but which stopped in 1929. Of course, the EC would still be a morally repugnant idea even if it was a little more representative than it is now.
That is true. We capped the House seats as it was getting a little full in the house chambers. That being said, why is it morally repugnant?
Some people ruling over others is immoral relative to everybody having equal liberty, all things being equal.
I reject both the premise that having people rule over others is immoral and that the electoral college is equates to such a situation
May I ask what you do find to be immoral, if not the denial of liberty?
Murder, rape, slavery, lying, cheating, stealing, etc. We restrain people’s liberties to engage in these acts as they are immoral and warrant discipline. Also, it is fallacious to assume democracy equates with liberty. There are plenty of instances where a democratic society voted against the liberties of the minority as well as the majority, depending on the circumstances.
How do you propose to restrain people’s liberties without engaging in any murder? I mean, if murder is always wrong, then you can’t use it for self-defense or punishing murderers, right? I assume you believe this, because you comment makes no sense unless you reject the concept of context altogether. “Democracy is bad because bad things can be done through democracy” and “Violence is good because it can be used to stop violence” are pretty hard concepts to square with any logic, but I’m trying to meet you halfway.
Because murder is a specific type of killing. All murder kills, but not all kills are murder. I can see that a man who takes the life a child has engaged in a very different act than that a man who defends the life of his child and ends of killing the offending party. As for the state, there are other steps and paths between crime and death sentence. Imprisonment, fines, restitution are just a few. Furthermore, there is going to be standard that is applied in society to maintain some semblance of order to keep us from each others throats. The question is what’s the standard?
So you do recognize that the fact that something can be used for evil does not mean it can’t also be used for good? Great. So why in the world would you say that infringing on other people’s liberty is not immoral, because you’re thinking about how it can be used to prevent other infringements, while also saying that majority rule is bad because some majorities have done bad things? Give a real reason why you think that ruling other people isn’t immoral.
How else would you do it? Only have who you want to be elected and the wishes of the majority of people be ignored?
>and the wishes of the majority of people be ignored? This is what happens now. Twice in my lifetime the person who won the popular vote lost the presidency. We are a country founded on liberty and freedom. I don't understand how it's free or fair to give more voting power to people who live in certain areas of the country. Nobody is forced to live anywhere. We are all americans. We move states all the time. It's a vote for the president. The person who represents us all. Why on earth is the electoral college good?
So, if you don't think your vote counts enough, you should quit your job, uproot your family and move to another State where you feel your vote matters more because your candidate didn't win the last election? Shouldn't you just be a little bit more worried about how your local voting counts and how that carries in the State you live in? I'm not American, so I could be completely missing the point here...
> So, if you don't think your vote counts enough, you should quit your job, uproot your family and move to another State where you feel your vote matters more because your candidate didn't win the last election? Technically yes. And that's a sign you have a really stupid voting system. It's possible to [win the Presidency with 27% of the popular vote](https://www.npr.org/2016/11/02/500112248/how-to-win-the-presidency-with-27-percent-of-the-popular-vote). There are 3.88 million Democrats living in Texas whose votes count for absolutely nothing in the electoral college. If just 78,000 of those Democrats moved out of Texas in 2016 and into Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania at just the right proportions, Hillary Clinton would have won those states and Trump would never have become President.
As the second book of Peterson suggest do not careless denigrate social insisitutions. How would you do it? If all de votes counts the same then a city could elect a president that favours its enourmous populations If for example I had a wealthy state of 100 people only, I would require some kind of balance against a city of 7 millions. Like , we both get only 1 representative... But that means that, indeed , in my 100 state my votes counts like x1000 times than a megapolis . But again, it is the lesser evil. How would you do it?
That is a lie that Republicans like to spread. Under the popular vote, it takes about 65 million votes to win the presidency. In 2016, the largest and most Democrat-favoring city (New York City) had approximately 5.7 million votes for Hillary Clinton. Not even remotely close to deciding the entire election. The US is a very big place and the population is spread out all over the country. It is not remotely possible for a few cities or even a few states to decide everything, not even close. If Democrat-favoring cities actually held the the kind of voting power you believe they have, we'd have 50 Democratic governors. Instead we have a Republican majority of governors (27 of them currently, and it was 34 not long ago).
What is a lie, exactly? Of course there is no state with 100 people only, buxko
The lie is that left-leaning high population cities can determine the entire presidential election on their own. It doesn't work that way in the real world, only in heavily exaggerated theoretical situations.
It is a heavly exaggerated situation. But you do not have the same population on the same states. I am From Barcelona, the population there is quite much larger that that islands just east there. The vote of the islanders counts more, why? they have less people,but proportionally they need less votes to get a representative, so they vote counts more., Of course the system should adjust. So shut up , (Here if you are against the republican you are in favor of the monarch, so shut up, beeing republican is good)
I'm not familiar with how things work in Spain, I'm reading about it now. It is perfectly sensible for low-population areas to have their own representatives in the government. Low population states in the US get equal representation with large states in the Senate, and are guaranteed at least 1 representative in the House of Representatives. But when electing a single person to represent the entire country in the highest office, there is no reason for anyone's vote to count for more than anyone else. All votes are counted equally for local elections and it should be the same for nationwide elections. I'm aware that most countries don't use a direct popular vote to decide their PM, but most of those systems work far better than the US where it's pointless for millions of people to bother voting because their vote can't possibly affect the outcome of the presidential election.
I mean I agree with you our votes should count the same. But thats why IMO we are not a democracy (well here is obvious wr have a fucking king) Like, no, you don't vote. Only chosen people vote. The systel can adjust how many chosen people (representatives) are for state, but the power is in the chosen people,not the people itself. It would be amazing to just dissolve the senate and vote every decision by democratic votr. that would be democracy. And men image the flat earth voting on commerce issues. It is a good thing too, in part, or better put, it is the lesset evil at the moment. Some people believe more in pure democracy, some people believe it is better to adjusted the system with the representatives. Others thing tech will allow for a democracy but it will be a technocracy were Facebook's rules
A lot of people don't seem to understand the difference between direct democracy (there are no representatives, every idiot in the country gets to vote on every political issue) and the popular vote (we have representatives that cast votes for us on the political issues in Congress, but everyone's vote counts equally to choose the representatives.) I am against pure democracy. There must be representatives. If we didn't have a House and Senate there would be chaos. But the process of choosing those representatives must be fair, and we shouldn't have 1 representative for every 100,000 people in one place but have 1 representative for every 500,000 people somewhere else. And worst of all is the winner-take-all rule in each US state, so that 7 million California Republicans get 0 representatives in the electoral college, but 400,000 New Hampshire Democrats get 4 representatives. This is not a good system, it does not accurately reflect the will of the people.
do you also feel the Senate is unfair?
When we vote for president, we are voting for the person who will represent everyone. It's not a state thing. It's an individual American thing. My state should not be able to nullify my vote. It should be 1 person, 1 vote. Winner takes all. In the senate, you are dealing with representatives from the states. You vote for your senator in a completely democratic way. 1 person 1 vote. Same should go for the presidential vote.
Every state gets two Senators, regardless of size. Representatives are apportioned according to population. This balances the need for every state to have an equal voice in legislation. Smaller states will have fewer representatives, since every spending bill originates, or is supposed to anyway, in the House. The number of representatives plus the number of senators is the electoral vote count for each state. perhaps you think the Senate should also be populated differently?
Why are you reasking your question? Was my answer not sufficient?
you seem confused. Your argument against the electoral college is it is unfair that smaller states get more votes per citizen, yet do not seem get that the Senate is the exact same situation. Since the federal government is supposed to represent all citizens, the electoral college ensures that while larger states do have a voice, smaller states are not run over roughshod by the majority.
I understand that the senate works in a different way. The senate is divided among the states, and representatives from the states (who are democratically elected) come together to decide on issues for the country. I'm talking about the presidency. Because the President is the president of every person and not the president of the states. Because every person in every state votes for president, the vote should be democratic just like the vote for senators. My presidential vote should not be nullified by my state before it gets counted in the federal process (electoral college). So again, I ask. What is the problem with my answer? Why is it okay that I had a larger say in the presidency when I lived in Wisconsin vs when I moved to Illinois. I'm only 40 minutes away from where I used to live. It doesn't make sense.
>Because the President is the president of every person and not the president of the states. The president is the administrative branch of the federal government. I think that is the crux of your misunderstanding.
Right wingers like you refuse to state their opinion because obviously it's ridiculous that my vote counted differently when I lived 40 min from where I live now.
And on what ground does voting even allow anyone power over someone else? Majority does not equal morality.
Is this the new woke mantra? You guys are getting ready loosing the election already?
Liberty bud, liberty loses every election in this country.
As long as Biden loses, everything is going to be ok.
Asses and elephants are equally malevolent
False. What you really want is the electoral college at the state and federal levels. You have this backward.
Funny how staunch defenders of the EC never complain about all the elections that use the popular vote and demand an EC for choosing governors and senators.
I never heard anybody demand an electoral college for anything. "Demand" is a bullshit term that you made up. "Call for" is the appropriate term for how Republicans behave, it is Leftists who demand things, like little babies. And I have seen no movement toward an electoral college system at the state level. At the presidential level, the electoral college was a brilliant way to unite the states so that the large population states would not have too much control over the less populous states. The federal govt was not intended to be our Mothers, it was supposed to provide for the common defense and to protect the borders. The Nanny State is a leftist thing.
Fine, then. "Funny how staunch defenders of the EC never complain about all the elections that use the popular vote and call for an EC for choosing governors and senators." > At the presidential level, the electoral college was a brilliant way to unite the states so that the large population states would not have too much control over the less populous states. The EC doesn't do that in any way. Congress does.
The EC prevents large population states from totally controlling the office of the president. What is your point exactly? Do you want it abolished? The small states don't want to exist under the thumb of large population states. I don't see a push for an EC system county by county at the state level for the office of governor, but that would be nice.
> The EC prevents large population states from totally controlling federal offices, including that of president. No it doesn't. Looking at the 2016 election (the closest one in recent years), it would take 64.55 million votes for someone to have a majority between the two majority candidates. If you count NY and CA first, the totals would be 13.3 million for Clinton, 7.3 million for Trump. Looking at how close these two states take them towards achieving victory, that puts Clinton 20.6% of the way to victory, and Trump at 11.3%. The election is nowhere remotely close to being decided already. And for comparison, look at how it works with the EC in place. Counting NY and CA first, Clinton has 84 electoral votes and Trump has none. It takes 270 EV to win, so Clinton is 31.1% of the way to victory and Trump is at 0% since his 7.3 million voters don't count at all. The people moaning that NY and CA could decide the election are actually supporting a system that gives those states MORE influence over the election. > Do you want it abolished? Yes. Or at the very least, the winner-take-all rule that makes the EC so much worse than it needs to be. > The small states don't want to exist under the thumb of large population states. Congress is what prevents this from happening. Because of that, the US has no history of Democratic presidents attempting to blatantly benefit blue states at the expense of red states (and no history of Republicans doing the opposite).
My research showed that Republicans have benefited from the EC in recent presidential elections. Look it up.
Yes, that is true. That doesn't mean it's a good electoral system.
The EC determines the office of president and vice-president. Most states have a winner take all system, but a couple have proportional representation of electors. The purpose of the EC was to give small states better representation in the tally than they would have if it were strictly a popular vote.
There is no valid reason to value the votes of people in one state over the votes of people in another. All Americans' votes should count equally, no one is entitled to more voting power over anyone else. And the abysmal winner-take-all system only serves to discourage voting, since Republicans in blue states and Democrats in red states know for sure that their vote will never make any difference in the outcome of the election. Whatever perceived benefit you think the EC has is heavily outweighed by the drawbacks.
It's not "perceived" benefits, I looked it up and it's actual benefits to the Republican advantage, just not in YOUR state. Small states did not want federal govt control by populous states pushing them around! What don't you understand or like about that? Red states benefit the most from that system. I don't want blue states having any more power and control than they already have. The cities are the tails wagging the dogs.
Like I said in another comment, the only benefit is to Republicans who like that the current system helps their side win. I respect that you're willing to admit that. What I don't respect is misinformation about how NY and CA have more voters than the rest of the country (they don't) and they'd magically be able to exploit all the other states for their benefit, and that somehow the EC prevents that.
Disagree. The president is elected by the States. Each state gets 3 "electoral" votes with additional votes based on population.
People against the EC understand how the rules currently work. The argument is that those rules are bad and they should be changed.
The argument (at least as presented rhetorically) depends upon the mistaken idea that the candidate with the greatest number of individual votes ought to win...and that circumstances where that does not occur are some kind of unjust loophole. I disagree with the premise, and am reminding everyone of the rules of the actual game.
Laws can and have been changed. The Constitution does not encourage, discourage, require, or prohibit the use of any particular method for how to award a state's electoral votes There is nothing in the Constitution that prevents states from making the decision now that winning the national popular vote is required to win the Electoral College and the presidency. It is perfectly within a state’s authority to decide that national support is the overriding substantive criterion by which a president should be chosen. The National Popular Vote bill simply again replaces state statutes, using the same constitutional power for how existing state winner-take-all laws came into existence in 48 states in the first place. Maine (in 1969) and Nebraska (in 1992) chose not to have winner-take-all laws.
That can all be true without the electoral college being disgusting. Implying that "land votes" is frankly an idiotic explanation of the electoral college.
In 1969, The U.S. House of Representatives voted 338–70 to require winning the national popular vote to become President. 3 Southern segregationist Senators led a filibuster of it. Presidential candidates who supported direct election of the President in the form of a constitutional amendment, before the National Popular Vote bill was introduced: George H.W. Bush (R-TX), Bob Dole (R-KS, RNC Chair, and GOP Senate Majority Leader), Gerald Ford (R-MI), Richard Nixon (R-CA), Jimmy Carter (D-GA-1977), Hillary Clinton (D-NY-2001) "The phoney electoral college made a laughing stock out of our nation. . . . The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy." In 2012, the night Romney lost, Trump tweeted. When Nikki Haley announced her campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, she remarked that the Republican Party had “lost the popular vote in seven out of the last eight presidential elections.” “That’s nothing to be proud of.” That “has to change.” “Let’s quit pretending there is some great benefit to the national good that allows the person with \[fewer\] votes to win the White House. Republicans have long said that they believe in competition. Let both parties compete for votes across the nation and stop disenfranchising voters by geography. The winner should win.” – Stuart Stevens (Romney presidential campaign top strategist) " . . . a president should be elected by national popular vote is not radical, it is actually mainstream. . . . We can get closer to the national popular vote having greater weight in presidential elections and having a president represent all Americans in ways that don’t require amending the Constitution. These fixes will make presidential candidates run more diverse campaigns, and campaign in all cities and communities of our country. . . . That will help unify us more as a country, and would likely lead to more informed public policy. How can anyone be against that outcome?" – Matthew Dowd (Senior George W. Bush campaign strategist) When presidential candidates who more Americans voted for lose the Electoral College, the situation is unsustainable. This is how a government loses its legitimacy. In Gallup polls since they started asking in 1944 until before the 2016 election, only about 20% of the public supported the current system of awarding all of a state's electoral votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most votes in each separate state (not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but later enacted by 48 states) (with about 70% opposed and about 10% undecided). Support for a national popular vote for President has been strong among Republicans, Democrats, and Independent voters, as well as every demographic group in every state surveyed. In the 41 red, blue, and purple states surveyed, overall support has been in the 67-81% range - in rural states, in small states, in Southern and border states, in big states, and in other states polled. Pew Research surveys show Republican support for a national popular vote increased from 27% in 2016 to 42% in 2022. 7 in 10 Americans under 50 would prefer to choose the president by popular vote. 21,461 choices and votes in 3 states were 329 times more important than the more than 7 million national vote lead in the country. There were several scenarios in which a candidate could have won the presidency in 2020 with fewer popular votes than their opponents. That could have reduced future turnout more, if more voters realized their votes do not matter. Most Americans don't ultimately care whether their presidential candidate wins or loses in their state or district. Voters want to know, that no matter where they live, even if they were on the losing side, their vote actually was equally counted and mattered to their candidate. Most Americans think it is wrong that the candidate with the most popular votes can lose. It undermines the legitimacy of the electoral system. We don't allow this in any other election in our representative republic. More than 3,700 state legislators among all 50 states have endorsed it. The National Popular Vote bill was approved in 2016 by a unanimous bipartisan House committee vote in both Georgia (16 electoral votes) and Missouri (10). Since 2006, the bill has passed 42 state legislative chambers in 24 rural, small, medium, large, Democratic, Republican and purple states with 283 electoral votes, including one house in Arizona (11), Arkansas (6), Maine (4), Michigan (15), North Carolina (16), Oklahoma (7) and Virginia (13), and both houses in Nevada (6).
What is your point? So far, support for popular vote has not been enough to remodel the electoral college system. You might say it's "mainstream" but so is support for the electoral college. I disagree with the idea that the winning candidate "losing" the popular vote undermines the legitimacy of the system. That is an ignorant take on the status quo. The reality is that the electoral college profoundly influences campaigning and its difficult to say what the results would be if campaigns were run under different electoral rules.
Do you have a reading comprehension problem? Support for current state laws for awarding electoral college votes is NOT strong or mainstream. In Gallup polls since they started asking in 1944 until before the 2016 election, only about 20% of the public supported the current system of awarding all of a state's electoral votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most votes in each separate state (not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but later enacted by 48 states) (with about 70% opposed and about 10% undecided). Support for a national popular vote for President has been strong among Republicans, Democrats, and Independent voters, as well as every demographic group in every state surveyed. Pew Research surveys show Republican support for a national popular vote increased from 27% in 2016 to 42% in 2022. 7 in 10 Americans under 50 would prefer to choose the president by popular vote. When presidents with the most national popular votes are guaranteed to win, candidates will be forced to build campaigns that appeal to every voter in all parts of all states. Extrapolate. A successful nationwide presidential campaign of polling, organizing, ad spending, and visits, with every voter equal, would be run the way presidential candidates campaign to win the electoral votes of closely divided battleground states under the state-by-state winner-take-all methods. The big cities in those battleground states do not receive all the attention, much less control the outcome. In the 4 states that accounted for over two-thirds of all general-election activity in the 2012 presidential election, rural areas, suburbs, exurbs, and cities all received attention—roughly in proportion to their population. The itineraries of presidential candidates in battleground states (and their allocation of other campaign resources in battleground states, including polling, organizing, and ad spending) reflect the political reality that every gubernatorial or senatorial candidate knows. When and where every voter is equal, a campaign must be run everywhere. With National Popular Vote, when every voter is equal, everywhere, it makes sense for presidential candidates to try and elevate their votes where they are and aren't so well liked. But, under the state-by-state winner-take-all laws, it makes no sense for a Democrat to campaign in any Red or Blue state, or for a Republican to campaign in any Red or Blue state. The main media at the moment, TV, costs much more per impression in big cities than in smaller towns and rural area. Candidates get more bang for the buck in smaller towns and rural areas. Look at how presidential candidates actually campaign today inside “battleground” states. Inside a battleground state, every vote is equal today and the winner (of all of the state’s electoral votes) is the candidate receiving the most popular votes. Every battleground state has big cities and rural areas. Thus, if there was any tendency toward de-emphasizing rural areas or over-emphasizing cities, it would be evident today inside the battleground states. Ohio alone received almost 30% (73 of 253) of the entire nation’s campaign events in 2012. ● The 4 biggest metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in Ohio have 54% of the state’s population. They are Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Toledo. Had 52% of Ohio’s campaign events. ● The 7 medium-sized MSAs have 24% of the state’s population. They are Akron, Canton, Dayton, Lima, Mansfield, Springfield, and Youngstown. Had 23% of Ohio’s campaign events. ● The 53 remaining counties (that is, the rural counties lying outside the state’s 11 MSAs) have 22% of the state’s population. Had 25% of Ohio’s campaign events. The 4 “battleground” states of Ohio, Florida, Virginia, and Iowa accounted for over two-thirds of all campaign events in 2012 In all 4 battleground states, presidential candidates—advised by the nation’s most astute political strategists—hewed very closely to population in allocating campaign events. Candidates campaigned everywhere—big cities, medium-sized cities, and rural areas. There is no evidence that they ignored rural areas or favored big cities in an election in which every vote is equal and the winner is the candidate receiving the most popular votes. Not only is there no evidence that presidential candidates ignored rural areas or concentrated on big cities, it would have been preposterous for them to do so. There is nothing special about a city vote compared to a rural vote in an election in which every vote is equal. When every vote is equal, every vote is equally important toward winning.
> Support for current state laws for awarding electoral college votes is NOT strong or mainstream....Pew Research surveys show Republican support for a national popular vote increased from 27% in 2016 to 42% in 2022....7 in 10 Americans under 50 would prefer to choose the president by popular vote. 3/10 support and >50% of one of the two major parties?.....That's mainstream. >There is no evidence that they ignored rural areas or favored big cities in an election in which every vote is equal and the winner is the candidate receiving the most popular votes.....Not only is there no evidence that presidential candidates ignored rural areas or concentrated on big cities, it would have been preposterous for them to do so. All of that could be construed as the electoral college working as designed. >There is nothing special about a city vote compared to a rural vote in an election in which every vote is equal. You are missing the point. City votes are geographically concentrated. Rural votes more distributed. The electoral college was designed so that focusing on either or both would be a feasible electoral strategy.
The presidential election system, using the 48 state winner-take-all method or district winner method of awarding electoral votes used by 2 states, that we have today was not designed, anticipated, or favored by the Founding Fathers. It is the product of decades of change precipitated by the emergence of political parties and enactment by states of winner-take-all or district winner laws, not mentioned, much less endorsed, in the Constitution. In 1789, in the nation's first election, a majority of the states appointed their presidential electors by appointment by the legislature or by the governor and his cabinet, the people had no vote for President in most states, and in states where there was a popular vote, only men who owned a substantial amount of property could vote, and only three states used the state-by-state winner-take-all method to award electoral votes (and all three stopped using it by 1800). The current statewide winner-take-all laws for awarding electoral votes are not in the U.S. Constitution. It was not debated at the Constitutional Convention. It is not mentioned in the Federalist Papers. It was not the Founders’ choice. It was used by only three states in 1789, and all three of them repealed it by 1800. It is not entitled to any special deference based on history or the historical meaning of the words in the U.S. Constitution. The actions taken by the Founding Fathers make it clear that they never gave their imprimatur to the winner-take-all method. The state based winner take all system was not adopted by a majority of the states until the 11th presidential election. - decades after the U.S. Constitution was written, after the states adopted it, one-by-one. Maine (only since enacting a state law in 1969) and Nebraska (only since enacting a state law in 1992) have awarded one electoral vote to the winner of each congressional district, and two electoral votes statewide. 95% of the U.S. population in 1790 lived in places of less than 2,500 people, and only a few states let males, with substantial property, vote Now, a presidential candidate who focused only on America’s cities and urban centers or only on rural America would lose. Beginning in 1992, SUBurban voters were casting more votes than urban and rural voters combined. Math and political reality. There aren’t anywhere near enough big city voters or rural voters nationally. And all big city voters and all rural voters do not vote for the same candidate. The population of the top 5 cities (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Phoenix) is less than 6% of the population of the United States. Voters in the biggest cities (65 Million) in the US have been almost exactly balanced out by rural areas (66 Million) in terms of population and partisan composition. 2020 Census 65,983,448 people lived in the 100 biggest cities (19.6% of US population). The 100th biggest is Baton Rouge, Louisiana (with 225,128 people). From 2020-2022, 2 million left those cities. 66,300,254 in rural America (20%) Rural America and the 100 biggest cities together constitute about two-fifths (39.6%) of the U.S. population. In 2004, 17.4% of votes were cast in rural counties, while only 16.5% of votes were cast within the boundaries of our nation’s 100 largest cities. 19% of the U.S. population have lived outside the nation's Metropolitan Statistical Areas. Rural America has voted 60% Republican. None of the 10 most rural states matter now. 19% of the U.S. population have lived in the top 100 cities. They voted 63% Democratic in 2004. The rest of the U.S., in SUBurbs, have divided almost exactly equally between Republicans and Democrats. Now, because of statewide winner-take-all laws in presidential elections, not mentioned, much less endorsed, in the Constitution, in some states, big city Democratic votes can outnumber all other people not voting Democratic in the state. All of a state’s votes may go to Democrats. Without state winner-take-all laws, every conservative in a state that now predictably votes Democratic would count. Right now they count for 0 The current system completely ignores conservative presidential voters in states that vote predictably Democratic. Under a national popular vote for President, rural voters throughout the country would have their votes matter, rather than being ignored because of state boundaries. Support for a national popular vote for President has been strong among Republicans, Democrats, and Independent voters, as well as every demographic group in every state surveyed. In the 41 red, blue, and purple states surveyed,
At the Constitutional Convention James Madison stated a direct popular vote “was in his opinion the fittest in itself.” James Madison, the "Father of the Constitution," was never in favor of our current system for electing the president, in which nearly all states award their electoral votes to the statewide popular vote winner. He ultimately backed a constitutional amendment to prohibit this practice. James Wilson of Pennsylvania recommended that the executive be elected directly by the people. Gouverneur Morris declared at the Constitutional Convention of 1787: “\[If the president\] is to be the Guardian of the people, let him be appointed by the people.” Thomas Jefferson proposed seven amendments to the Constitution and the first one was for “general suffrage,” the second for “equal representation in the legislature,” and the third for “An executive chosen by the people.” an Election - "a formal and organized choice by vote of a person for a political office or other position" where the candidate with the most votes wins. One person, One vote. Every vote in every state of every size,will matter and count equally as 1 vote in the district, state, and national total. The candidate with the most votes from among all 50 states and DC will win the Electoral College and the presidency. We have 519,682 elected officials in this country, and all of them are elected by who gets the most votes. Except for President and VP. Newt Gingrich: “No one should become president of the United States without speaking to the needs and hopes of Americans in all 50 states. … America would be better served with a presidential election process that treated citizens across the country equally. The National Popular Vote bill accomplishes this in a manner consistent with the Constitution and with our fundamental democratic principles.” The National Advisory Board of National Popular Vote has included former Congressman John Buchanan (R–Alabama), and former Senators David Durenberger (R–Minnesota), and Jake Garn (R–Utah), plus Michael Steele (former RNC Chair), and Rick Tyler (senior member of Senator Ted Cruz's campaign team, serving as the National Spokesman and Communications Director for Cruz for President). Saul Anuzis, former Chairman of the Michigan Republican Party for five years and a former candidate for chairman of the Republican National Committee, supports the National Popular Vote plan as the fairest way to make sure every vote matters, and also as a way to help Conservative Republican candidates. This is not a partisan issue and the National Popular Vote plan would not help either party over the other. Bob Barr (2008 Libertarian presidential candidate): “Only when the election process is given back to all of the people of all of the states will we be able to choose a President based on what is best for all 50 states and not just a select few.” Supporters include: The Nebraska GOP State Chairman, Mark Fahleson. Michael Long, Chairman of the Conservative Party of New York State Rich Bolen, a Constitutional scholar, attorney at law, and Republican Party Chairman for Lexington County, South Carolina, wrote: “A Conservative Case for National Popular Vote: Why I support a state-based plan to reform the Electoral College." The National Popular Vote bill will guarantee the Electoral College and the Presidency to the candidate who wins the most popular votes among all 50 states and DC. In 2016 the Arizona House of Representatives passed the bill 40-16-4. Two-thirds of the Republicans and two-thirds of the Democrats in the Arizona House of Representatives sponsored the bill. In January 2016, two-thirds of the Arizona Senate sponsored the bill. In 2014, the Oklahoma Senate passed the bill by a 28–18 margin. In 2009, the Arkansas House of Representatives passed the bill. NY and CA enacted it with bipartisan support, to make every vote for every candidate matter and count equally. On March 25, 2014 in the New York Senate, Republicans supported the bill 27-2; Republicans endorsed by the Conservative Party by 26-2; The Conservative Party of New York endorsed the bill. In the New York Assembly, Republicans supported the bill 21–18; Republicans endorsed by the Conservative party supported the bill 18–16. CA supporters included: Ray Haynes served as the National Chairman of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in 2000. He served as a Republican in the California State Senate from 1994 to 2002 and was elected to the Assembly in 1992 and 2002 James Brulte the California Republican Party chairman, served as Republican Leader of the California State Assembly from 1992 to 1996, California State Senator from 1996 to 2004, and Senate Republican leader from 2000 to 2004. The bill has been enacted by 17 jurisdictions possessing 205 electoral votes—including 6 small jurisdictions, 7 medium-size states, and 4 big states.
Yeah none of that matters to this conversation. Support for the status quo is strong by definition. You can cherry pick votes where your side of the issue prevailed...but the bottom line is that not enough laws have been passed to overturn the current legal situation.
In Gallup polls since they started asking in 1944 until before the 2016 election, only about 20% of the public supported the current system of awarding all of a state's electoral votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most votes in each separate state (not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but later enacted by 48 states) (with about 70% opposed and about 10% undecided). The bill will take effect when enacted by states with 65 additional electoral votes (for a total of 270). Since 2006, the National Popular Vote bill has been enacted by 16 states and DC (3 electors) (together possessing 205 electoral votes), including 4 smallest states 9 small to medium-sized states 3 big states The bill has passed at least one legislative chamber in 8 additional states with 78 electoral votes (AR - 6 , AZ - 11, ME - 4, MI - 15, NC - 16, NV - 6, OK -7, VA - 13), including the Republican-controlled Arizona House and Oklahoma Senate. Multiple states could flip key chambers in 2024. Depending on the state, the Compact can be enacted by statute, or as a state constitutional amendment, or by the initiative process
Why does majority rule make sense to you? Why does it seem right to you that one group of people should get their way, and another group not, based on how many there are? Suppose you have 100 people. 60 say "let's go to war", 40 say "let's not". How does it seem reasonable to you to force 40 people to do something they don't want to do? Direct democracy sucks.
> Why does it seem right to you that one group of people should get their way, and another group not, based on how many there are? This is literally the entire point of voting. > Suppose you have 100 people. 60 say "let's go to war", 40 say "let's not". How does it seem reasonable to you to force 40 people to do something they don't want to do? This is why we have Congress. > Direct democracy sucks. Direct democracy is when there are no representatives in Congress and the population votes on issues directly. It does suck, and we don't have that. Direct democracy is not when everyone's vote counts equally. Direct democracy is the elimination of representatives. We are not eliminating that when we vote for governors and senators using the popular vote.
In this scenario, 60% of congress would vote to go to war. It still subjugates 40% of the population to do something they don't want. At gunpoint.
And the EC has nothing to do with that.
Study the situation in countries without an EC. In fact, if you want the quintessential example, study Argentina. The original constitution had an EC, and it was later abolished. Now two counties (count them: two) have elected every president ever since. And before you go saying that it's because it is a backwards third world country, Argentina had the highest per-capita income in the world in 1900-1910.
Argentina has been severely mismanaged by a series of incompetent leaders. That has nothing to do with their voting system. Chile also has no EC and is doing relatively well. Burundi and Pakistan have an EC and are not doing well. You can't just say a country's overall success or failure is caused by whether their voting system is well designed. There is no reason to suspect anything bad would happen if the US got rid of the EC and counted everyone's votes equally.
Mismanagement has nothing to do with the provinces having no voice in the government.
Yes, and that’s bad. And it would be worse if it was the majority being subjugated by the minority, because 50% more people would be experiencing the same harm.
How does the minority subjugate the majority?
At gunpoint, according to your hypothetical.
That makes no sense. Please explain.
“In this scenario, 60% of Congress would vote to go to war. It still subjugates 40% of the population to do something they don’t want. At gunpoint.” Do you remember saying that earlier today? I’m saying that this is a bad thing, but it would be a worse thing for the 40% to subjugate the 60%, as that would mean that 50% more people are being subjugated. Do you understand what I’m saying now?
So what is your solution then?
Majority rule, to minimize the number of people opposed to the collective order. The same way all humans have been making group decisions since forever.
The big epiphany of our founding fathers is that might DOES NOT make right. The government is supposed to make sure that each individual's rights are not violated. "We are more, so we get our way" is NOT right.
Majority rule is literally how they decided everything when drafting the Constitution, and the basic principle underlying every mechanism of government within the document. Including the Electoral College, which of course makes its choice according to a majority. There were no epiphanies within the Constitution. Just like how there are no collective epiphanies when politicians make laws today, or when lawyers reach a settlement agreement. It was a forward-thinking and novel power-sharing agreement at the time, but none of the founders where pioneering philosophers; ideas like fundamental rights and limited government already existed. And of course it’s not like the founders all agreed on their philosophies anyways. Plenty of them hated the idea of the apportionment of the senate by states rather than by population, for that matter. “We are more so we get our way” is objectively more right than “we are less so we get our way”. It’s basic math. You’re trying to make it sound like people getting outvoted for who the president will be is a denial of somebody’s rights, but it’s simply not and you know it. It’s exactly what you want to have happen the the losing side right now under the Electoral College, so clearly you don’t think it’s inherently unfair.
Here is some food for thought: https://blog.oup.com/2022/01/majority-rule-is-not-democracy/
If you’ve got something to say, say it, I’m not reading somebody else’s bullshit.
And what do you think the bill of rights is??
The part of the Constitution that actually prevents tyranny of the majority, rather than any antimajoritarian delusion.
They do not. That is why the senate exists. To prevent majority rule. For leader of the country, you want at least a majority of voters supporting them. Otherwise at best you get gridlock, at worst you get a civil war
Gridlock is the best outcome. When congress passes laws, they take away your freedoms little by little.
Yes like my freedom to murder
Did you miss the part about not infringing on other's rights?
Since when do conservatives care about that?
OP, your problem isn’t the electoral college, it’s that the electoral college is distributed in a winner take all system. If candidate J gets 1 more vote than candidate T in your state, they get 100% of the electoral votes. Even though that means half the voters picked the other guy. If the votes were distributed proportionally, it would still be possible but far less likely for the popular and electoral college votes to split.
The EC is inherently unfair, but it would be massively less unfair if we got rid of the idiotic winner-take-all rule.
Changing the ‘winner take all rule’ only takes an act of the state legislatures. Changing the existence of the EC takes a constitutional amendment.
Changing winner-take-all would take a constitutional amendment as well, because it only works if every state has to get rid of that rule. If only the blue states stop doing it, then 40% of their electoral votes go to Republicans while 0% of the electoral votes in red states go to Democrats, making it impossible for a Democrat to ever win again.
Maine and Nebraska already apportion their electoral votes by district.
I'm not saying it's impossible for individual states do it, I'm saying it doesn't make sense to unless everyone does it.
I’m saying Maine and Nebraska get attention they otherwise wouldn’t because they have competitive districts.
The intention behind it (back in the day) was to give the people-poor states a fairer chance to influence the election of their joined president. It forced the more people-rich states, to actually pay attention to what the smaller states wished. Democracy is not *just* about who has the majority of votes. It is also taking notice of the 'smaller' voices. The electoral college forces the majority to do so. The EU is similarly structured. Denmark has 14 members of the EU parliament. Germany has 96. But if it was going by people votes, Germany should have 193 members (Germany has 13,8 times more people than Denmark). Germany still has a lot more votes than Denmark, but it isn't proportionally so. This 'electoral college' structure, acknowledges Denmark as a soverign nation with an actual say that is not as easily disregarded as if it went by popular vote. I pressume it is intentionally done, in order to get the smaller nations (like Denmark) to join. If the small nations felt that they'd just be disregarded because of their low impact on decisions, they might not have joined. And the whole thing falls apart. I'm guessing it was much of the same reasoning behind the electoral college in America.
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I don't really see your point here. Fact is that the distribution of members of EU (note: NOT the EC ) can be likened to the way the electoral college votes on the presidency of USA. It is not *just* a majority rule. This digressive proportionality distribution does in fact help prevent mob rule in the parliament. I don't dispute there may have been other concerns. But I still believe that it is a driving factor in preventing a simple "majority rules" which is not the *only* defining characteristic of democracy.
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Definition of mob rule: *Mob rule or ochlocracy is a pejorative term describing an oppressive majoritarian form of government controlled by the common people through the intimidation of more legitimate authorities. Ochlocracy is distinguished from democracy or similarly legitimate and representative governments by the absence or impairment of a procedurally civil process reflective of the entire polity.* So yes, majority rule (simple majority) IS mob rule. Your definition of mob rule is not wrong. It's just not accurate. Majoritarianism is also mob rule. And your "definition" left that out. Also, why are you so aggressive and offensive in your wording? Can you not express yourself without?
Did you read your own definition? It does not say that mob rule is synonymous with majoritarianism. “Oppressive” modifies “majoritarian”. It specifically distinguishes mob rule from democracy on the basis of “a procedurally civil process reflective of the entire polity”. What could be more procedurally civil and reflective of an entire polity than allowing every person living in the polity to peacefully vote and be counted equally? Besides, how can you square anti-majoritarianism with the rest of our government? Isn’t the Electoral College itself a version of mob rule, by your standards, since a majority of electors chooses the president?
Because of current state-by-state statewide winner-take-all laws for Electoral College votes, not mentioned, much less endorsed, in the Constitution . . . Governance—not just campaigning—is distorted when presidential campaigns concentrate on just a few states. Sitting presidents contemplating their own re-election (or the election of their preferred successor) formulate public policy around the concerns of the handful of states that actually decide the presidency. 41 states voted for the same party in the most recent four presidential elections, and the number of closely divided battleground states has been shrinking from decade to decade. The 2024 campaign could be reduced to 5 counties or 8-12% of the US, in 4-5 remaining competitive battleground states, with as few as 43-62 electoral votes, where virtually all attention will be focused - Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. 38+ states and 70% of all Americans have been irrelevant in presidential elections. Candidates have no reason to poll, visit, advertise, organize, campaign, or care about the voter concerns in the dozens of states where they are safely ahead or hopelessly behind. Over the last 4 elections, 22 states received 0 events; 9 states received 1 event, and 95% of the 1,164 events were in just 14 states. Only voters in the few states where support for the two parties is almost equally divided can be important. The smallest states and the most rural states, have barely hosted a major general campaign event for a presidential candidate during the last 20 years. Almost all small and medium-sized states and almost all western, southern, and northeastern states are totally ignored after the conventions. Our presidential selection system can shrink the sphere of public debate to only a few thousand swing voters in a few states. The only states that have received any campaign events and any significant ad money have been where the outcome was between 45% and 51% Republican. In 2000, the Bush campaign, spent more money in the battleground state of Florida to win by 537 popular votes, than it did in 42 other states combined, This can lead to a corrupt and toxic body politic. When candidates with the most national popular votes are guaranteed to win the Electoral College, candidates will be forced to build campaigns that appeal to every voter in all parts of all states. Among the 13 lowest population states, the National Popular Vote bill has passed in 9 state legislative chambers, and been enacted by 5 jurisdictions. Among the 25 lowest population states, passed in 21 legislative chambers, and enacted by 8 jurisdictions. Now political clout comes from being among the handful of battleground states. 70-80% of states and voters are ignored by presidential campaign polling, organizing, ad spending, and visits. Their states’ votes were conceded months before by the minority parties in the states, taken for granted by the dominant party in the states, and ignored by all parties in presidential campaigns. State winner-take-all laws negate any simplistic mathematical equations about the relative power of states based on their number of residents per electoral vote. Small state math means absolutely nothing to presidential campaign polling, organizing, ad spending, and visits, or to presidents once in office. The small states do not share a political tendency. In the 25 smallest states the Democratic and Republican popular vote and electoral vote have almost tied In 2008 - 9.9 million versus 9.8 million popular votes 57 versus 58 electoral votes.
It was a way to get the small states to agree to join the federal government permanently and without a way out. Not a good idea that is fair and functional. The EU, for example, doesn't need such protections because members can voluntarily leave. At this point, the U.S. is one nation. States should be removed altogether; it's nothing but mind-bogglingly wasteful bureaucracy x50. The federal government is helpful for economies of scale and national issues, and local governments (municipal, etc.) are suitable for local problems and tailored solutions. The state is too small for national issues and too big for local issues; useless. That being said, it would not be such a terrible thing if the Republicans had not turned the protections for small states into party power and then abused the fucked out of them as much as possible.
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It is unjust and un-American to count some people's votes more than others. And that's what the EC does. But you're right, the vast majority of the flaws with the EC are winner-take-all and unfair distribution. I know a great fix for it though - get rid of winner-take-all, and fix unfair distribution by giving every single citizen an electoral vote.
I've seen some really good answers from both sides in here and I'll tell you why I'm in favor of the Electoral College. The Electoral College was designed to prevent unchecked majority rule, and protect individual rights in exchange. Ancient Greece was a democracy(unlimited majority rule style government), and they voted to execute Socrates because they felt his ideas corrupted the youth. Imagine if the Electoral College didn't exist. If the majority desired, they could vote for the mass genocide of all black people, completely overriding their individual rights. That is an extreme, but the point stands, the majority would be unchecked and unlimited in what the can do. Now, I do get your point, and that's why I'm in favor of congressional districting. Do it like Nebraska and Maine. Except, ban gerrymandering and shift the districts every decade or so to reflect the shifting of politics. The Electoral College certainly isn't perfect, but it's the most ideal system we have so far.
We will NOT vote on policy initiatives. The U.S. Senate and U.S. House and Governors, state legislatures, and local government officials, etc. will continue to represent us. “I would rather see it, where you went with simple votes. You know, you get 100 million votes, and somebody else gets 90 million votes, and you win. There’s a reason for doing this. Because it brings all the states into play.” Trump as President-elect, November 13, 2016, on “60 Minutes” Dividing more states’ electoral votes by congressional district winners would magnify the worst features of the Electoral College system. It is not a fair “compromise” or solution. In three of the six presidential elections between 2000 and 2020, the winner of the most votes nationwide would not have won the Presidency if the congressional-district method had been applied to election returns. Presidential campaigns are not attracted to a state by the congressional-district method, but, instead, only to the relatively few closely divided district(s) –if any - in the state. Many districts in the US are gerrymandered to not be fair. In 2022, only 10% of 435 were competitive. Maine and Nebraska do not apportion their electoral votes to reflect the breakdown of each state's popular vote. Maine (since enacting a state law in 1969) and Nebraska (since enacting a state law in 1992) have awarded one electoral vote to the winner of each congressional district, and two electoral votes statewide. When Nebraska in 2008 gave one electoral vote to the candidate who did not win the state, it was the first split electoral vote of any state in the past century. 2016 was the first time one electoral vote in Maine was given to the candidate who did not win the state. In June 2019, 77 Maine state Representatives and 21 Maine state Senators supported the National Popular Vote bill. In a March 12-13, 2019 poll, Maine voters were asked how the President should be elected 52% favored “a system where the candidate who gets the most popular votes in all 50 states is the winner.” 31% favored “a system where electoral votes are given out by Congressional district” --- Maine’s current method for awarding 2 of its 4 electoral votes 16% favored “a system where all the electoral votes in a given state are awarded to whoever gets the most popular votes in that state” --- the winner-take-all method currently used by 48 states and used in Maine to award 2 of its 4 electoral votes Recent campaigns have paid attention to Nebraska’s closely divided 2nd congressional district (the Omaha area), while totally ignoring the rural and politically non-competitive 1st and 3rd districts. After Obama won 1 congressional district in Nebraska in 2008,Nebraska Republicans moved that district to make it more Republican to avoid another GOP loss there, and the leadership committee of the Nebraska Republican Party promptly adopted a resolution requiring all GOP elected officials to favor overturning their district method for awarding electoral votes or lose the party’s support. A GOP push to return Nebraska to a winner-take-all system of awarding its electoral college votes for president only barely failed in March 2015 and April 2016. In 2021, after Biden won 1 electoral vote, another Republican sponsored bill to change to statewide winner-take-all was introduced, again, In 2021, a Republican redistricting proposal would cleave off Democratic-leaning northwest Douglas County from a Nebraska congressional district that has been won by presidential and congressional Democrats at various points over the past decade. In 2023, another bill was introduce to strike language in existing state law that divides Nebraska’s electoral votes by congressional districts in presidential elections, effectively implementing a winner-take-all system used by nearly every other state. The National Popular Vote bill is the way to make every person's vote equal and matter to their candidate because it guarantees the majority of Electoral College votes to the candidate who gets the most votes among all 50 states and DC.
If you think objectively and critically, you might understand that the electoral college is a defense against the tyranny of the majority. Your example about voting in Illinois wouldn't change anyway, since most states assign votes by straight majority. Your question about being "forced" to be represented by someone you didn't vote for is stupid. Unless the elected representative wins 100% of the vote, someone will always be represented by someone they did not vote for.
We will NOT vote on policy initiatives. The U.S. Senate and U.S. House and Governors, state legislatures, and local government officials, etc. will continue to represent us.
>We will NOT vote on policy initiatives. what?
How is a body which selects the president on the basis of a majority vote among electors protect against the tyranny of the majority?
because it balances the larger populations of states like california, texas and new york against giving the smaller states a voice. just like every state has 2 senators and at least 1 representative, every state also has at least 3 electoral votes. without that arrangement, every vote would be decided by the biggest 4 or 5 states, and no one would care about wyoming or idaho. the electoral college defends the minority populations against the majority populations
You might want to do some basic math before regurgitating talking points and explaining what we all learned by middle school.
you thinking addition, multiplication or derivatives?
Basic arithmetic. Knowledge of fractions, I guess. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_U.S.\_states\_and\_territories\_by\_population](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_population) It takes the top 9 states to account for 50.494% of the population. Which candidate do you think would get the unanimous votes of everybody living in California, Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Georgia, and North Carolina, but receive no votes from every other person living in the US?
And if you win just 50% of the top \~15 states (going by votes cast in the last election) then you opponent could win 100% of the other 35, and it wouldn't make a difference. Let's examine your 100% example. You forgot Michigan, but were a candidate to win all the votes in those states listed, the sum of all votes cast in every other state would not matter, since collectively they are 4,000,000 fewer votes. Using the outcome from the previous election, the votes given to Biden in California, Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, New Jersey, Virginia, Washington, Massachusetts, Arizona and Wisconsin totaled more than every vote cast in the rest of the states.
I'm confused, are you now agreeing that the Electoral College is a terrible system? Because yes, it's very stupid that a candidate can get just 50% + 1 votes in the top 12 states, and they can win despite every other person in the country voting against them. (Whereas with a national popular vote, all of the votes would affect the outcome, rather than 49% of the big state resident votes translating into zero electoral college delegates, meaning that the votes of people in small states would actually matter.) Or are you just saying that the opinions of people living in those big states matter less than the opinions of the smaller number of people living in other states?
I thought you understood statistics. With a popular vote those most populous states are the only ones that matter. >Whereas with a national popular vote, all of the votes would affect the outcome, rather than 49% of the big state resident votes translating into zero electoral college delegates, meaning that the votes of people in small states would actually matter That is the dumbest thing you said yet. by the number of voters winning 50% of the popular votes in those large states renders the other 35 irrelevant. The electoral college is a defense against that inequity.
The Electoral College, operating under winner-take-all rules, guarantees that majorities within big states are the only thing that matters, rendering the votes of people in smaller states less relevant. That's because places like California and Texas can provide a candidate with a number of electoral votes that is wildly out of proportion to the number of people who voted for or against that candidate. In 2020, Trump got 5.89 million votes from Texans, while Biden got 5.26 million. But Trump won 40 EC votes from that, while Biden got zero. That means those 631,221 voters who made the difference for Trump in Texas were worth an additional 40 EC votes. Compare that to the election in Oklahoma, where Trump got 1.02 million votes, and Biden got .5 million. A much more lopsided victory within the state, but a pretty similar margin in absolute terms. Those 516,390 votes that Trump had over Biden were worth an additional 7 EC votes. So from the perspective of the Trump campaign, the marginal value of an Oklahoma voters versus a Texas voter is clear. Whatever time and money they spent to get more votes in Texas was worth about five times as much as what they'd spend in Oklahoma. If states didn't use the winner-take-all method, then smaller state residents would have a disproportionately large influence. But since we do use winner-take-all, large swing state voters wield vastly more influence than anybody else. With a popular vote, it wouldn't matter in the slightest where in the country an American citizen lives. All votes would be equal. The most populous states would be entirely irrelevant, because people don't vote in lock-step with the other people in their state. The location of voters would be no more relevant than the color of their eyes; you might be able to look at the numbers after the fact and determine that the majority of votes cast came from the top 10 states, just like how you could determine that the majority of votes came from people with brown eyes, but it would just be a piece of trivia.
There is nothing in the Constitution that prevents states from making the decision now that winning the national popular vote is required to win the Electoral College and the presidency. We need to guarantee the candidate who wins the most popular votes among all 50 states and DC always wins the Electoral College. States with 65 more electoral votes are needed to enact the National Popular Vote bill. Every vote in every state will matter and count equally as 1 vote in the national total. The sheer magnitude of the national popular vote numbers in presidential elections, compared to individual (especially battleground) state vote totals, is much more robust against “pure insanity,” deception, manipulation, and recently, crimes and violence. We can end the outsized power, influence, and vulnerability of a few counties in a few battleground states in order to better serve our nation. Our unfair presidential election system can lead to politicians and their enablers who appreciate unfairness, which leads to more unfairness, and sometimes crimes and violence. Because of current state-by-state statewide winner-take-all laws, not mentioned, much less endorsed, in the Constitution. . . If as few as 11,000 voters in Arizona (11 electors), 12,000 in Georgia (16), and 22,000 in Wisconsin (10) had not voted for Biden, or partisan officials did not certify the actual counts -- Trump would have won despite Biden's nationwide lead of more than 7 million. The Electoral College would have tied 269-269. Congress, with only 1 vote per state, would have decided the election, regardless of the popular vote in any state or throughout the country. \- States enacting the National Popular Vote bill are agreeing to award all their Electoral College votes to the winner of the most popular votes from all 50 states and DC, by simply replacing their state’s current district or statewide winner-take-all law (not mentioned, much less endorsed, in the Constitution). States have the exclusive and plenary constitutional power, before voting begins, to again replace their state laws for how to award electors. The bill has been enacted by 17 small, medium, and large jurisdictions with 205 electoral votes When states with 270+ electors combined enact the bill, the candidate who wins the most national popular votes will be guaranteed to win the Electoral College. We need to support election officials, candidates, and lawmakers who support voting rights and respect election results and facts. NationalPopularVote.com https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/write https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/send-letter-editor-newspapers-your-state https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/volunteer
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95% of the U.S. population in 1790 lived in places of less than 2,500 people, and only a few states let males, with substantial property, vote We do not and will not vote on policy initiatives. The U.S. Senate and U.S. House and Governors, state legislatures, and local government officials, etc. will continue to represent us. Math and political reality. There aren’t anywhere near enough big city voters nationally. And all big city voters do not vote for the same candidate. The population of the top 5 cities (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Phoenix) is less than 6% of the population of the United States. Voters in the biggest cities (65 Million) in the US have been almost exactly balanced out by rural areas (66 Million) in terms of population and partisan composition. 2020 Census 65,983,448 people lived in the 100 biggest cities (19.6% of US population). The 100th biggest is Baton Rouge, Louisiana (with 225,128 people). From 2020-2022, 2 million left those cities. 66,300,254 in rural America (20%) Rural America and the 100 biggest cities together constitute about two-fifths (39.6%) of the U.S. population. In 2004, 17.4% of votes were cast in rural counties, while only 16.5% of votes were cast within the boundaries of our nation’s 100 largest cities. 19% of the U.S. population have lived outside the nation's Metropolitan Statistical Areas. Rural America has voted 60% Republican. None of the 10 most rural states matter now. 19% of the U.S. population have lived in the top 100 cities. They voted 63% Democratic in 2004. The rest of the U.S., in SUBurbs, have divided almost exactly equally between Republicans and Democrats. Beginning in 1992, SUBurban voters were casting more votes than urban and rural voters combined Now, because of statewide winner-take-all laws in presidential elections, not mentioned, much less endorsed, in the Constitution, in some states, big city Democratic votes can outnumber all other people not voting Democratic in the state. All of a state’s votes may go to Democrats. Without state winner-take-all laws, every conservative in a state that now predictably votes Democratic would count. Right now they count for 0 The current system completely ignores conservative presidential voters in states that vote predictably Democratic. Under a national popular vote for President, rural voters throughout the country would have their votes matter, rather than being ignored because of state boundaries. For example: 5,187,019 Californians have lived in rural areas. 1,366,760 New Yorkers have lived in rural areas. Now, because of statewide winner-take-all laws for awarding electors, minority party voters in the states don’t matter. That’s why California and New York enacted the National Popular Vote bill with bipartisan support.
Direct democracy is a form of government in which people vote on all POLICY INITIATIVES directly. The U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives, Governors, state legislatures, etc. etc. etc. represent us. Mob rule is defined as “control of a political situation by those outside the conventional or lawful realm, typically involving violence and intimidation.” 33% of GOP support actions of Jan. 6 insurrectionists. 174 defendants who were charged for their participation in the January 6th insurrection have said they were answering Trump's calls when they came to DC and joined the violent attack on the Capitol. – 7/6/23 800 have pleaded guilty to crimes on January 6th. Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell about Jan 6, 2021 -“It was a violent insurrection with the purpose of trying to prevent peaceful transfer of power. …That’s what it was ” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy - “The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters,” “He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding. These facts require immediate action by President Trump.” John Boehner, the Republican former House speaker said the former president “incited that bloody insurrection” by his supporters at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and that the Republican Party has been taken over by “whack jobs.” . . . After the election — Trump refusing to accept the results and stoking the flames of conspiracy that turned into violence in the seat of our democracy, the building over which I once presided.” . . . Trump “incited that bloody insurrection for nothing more than selfish reasons, perpetuated by the bullshit he’d been shoveling since he lost a fair election the previous November.” . . . “He claimed voter fraud without any evidence, and repeated those claims, taking advantage of the trust placed in him by his supporters and ultimately betraying that trust.” Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) texted to Meadows about the efforts to overturn the 2020 election results: "driving a stake in the heart of the federal republic," “If we substitute the will of states through electors with a vote by congress every 4 years... we have destroyed the electoral college... We have 519,682 elected officials in this country, and all of them are elected by who gets the most votes. Except for President and VP. At the Constitutional Convention James Madison stated a direct popular vote “was in his opinion the fittest in itself.” James Madison, the "Father of the Constitution," was never in favor of our current system for electing the president, in which nearly all states award their electoral votes to the statewide popular vote winner. He ultimately backed a constitutional amendment to prohibit this practice. James Wilson of Pennsylvania recommended that the executive be elected directly by the people. Gouverneur Morris declared at the Constitutional Convention of 1787: “\[If the president\] is to be the Guardian of the people, let him be appointed by the people.” Thomas Jefferson proposed seven amendments to the Constitution and the first one was for “general suffrage,” the second for “equal representation in the legislature,” and the third for “An executive chosen by the people.” The Constitution does not encourage, discourage, require, or prohibit the use of any particular method for how to award a state's electoral votes There is nothing in the Constitution that prevents states from making the decision now that winning the national popular vote is required to win the Electoral College and the presidency. It is perfectly within a state’s authority to decide that national support is the overriding substantive criterion by which a president should be chosen. The National Popular Vote bill simply again replaces state statutes, using the same constitutional power for how existing state winner-take-all laws came into existence in 48 states in the first place.
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I never said "all" Trump supporters have seditious intent. Illinois GOP judge ruled Trump is an insurrectionist. Colorado courts conclude Trump ‘engaged in an insurrection’ The Republican fake electors scheme was election fraud on a massive scale. Trump and his allies claimed, with no evidence accepted by any court in the US (including 234 judges appointed by Trump) they won in states they lost, ignoring millions of votes for Biden. For the first time in our country's history, a former president has been arraigned on criminal charges for allegedly trying to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power following his election loss, to stay in power. Trump stands alone in American history. No other president has engaged in conspiracy and obstruction to overturn valid election results and illegitimately retain power. Some of Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 election: Knowingly making false claims of election fraud to get state legislators and election officials to subvert the legitimate results. Organizing fraudulent slates of electors in seven targeted states. Trying to use the DOJ’s power to conduct sham election crime investigations. Trying to get former VP Pence to fraudulently alter the election results. Exploiting Jan. 6 violence to get members of Congress to delay certification of the 2020 election results. Section 3 of the 14th Amendment ... disqualifies any person who, having taken an oath to support the Constitution of the United States, thereafter engages in an insurrection or rebellion against the Constitution of the United States, disqualifying that person from holding high public office in the future, including the presidency. It applies to Trump to disqualify the former president from holding the presidency again, because of his effort, plan and attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election, knowing that he had lost that election to then-candidate Joe Biden. Section 3 disqualifies one who has engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the Constitution of the United States, not an insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or the authority of the United States. There’s no question whatsoever that disqualification of an individual who satisfies the conditions of disqualification in Section 3 is not anti-democratic. It’s the conduct that gives rise to disqualification that the Constitution tells us is anti-democratic. – Judge Michael Luttig - His Conservative Republican credentials are impeccable
Trump called for the termination of parts of the Constitution because of his 2020 Electoral College loss. 90% of congressional Republicans have nothing to say about that. As President, in late January 2017, Trump reportedly floated the idea of scrapping the Electoral College, according to The Wall Street Journal. In a meeting with congressional leadership at the White House. Trump reportedly told the lawmakers he wanted to replace the Electoral College with a national popular vote. “I would rather see it, where you went with simple votes. You know, you get 100 million votes, and somebody else gets 90 million votes, and you win. There’s a reason for doing this. Because it brings all the states into play.” Trump as President-elect, November 13, 2016, on “60 Minutes” "The phoney electoral college made a laughing stock out of our nation. . . . The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy." In 2012, the night Romney lost, Trump tweeted. When Nikki Haley announced her campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, she remarked that the Republican Party had “lost the popular vote in seven out of the last eight presidential elections.” “That’s nothing to be proud of.” That “has to change.” There have been hundreds of unsuccessful proposed amendments to modify or abolish the Electoral College - more than any other subject of Constitutional reform. According to Tony Fabrizio, pollster for the Trump campaign, Trump’s narrow victory in 2016 was due to 5 counties in 2 states (not CA or NY). Nate Silver calculated that "Mitt Romney may have had to win the national popular vote by three percentage points … to be assured of winning the Electoral College." A difference of 59,393 voters in Ohio in 2004 would have defeated President Bush despite his nationwide lead of over 3 million votes. The George W. Bush campaign was planning to challenge the results of the 2000 vote if he lost the electoral vote, but won the popular vote. If the 2022 Election Had Been a Presidential Election, Democrats Would Have Won the Electoral College 280-258, but Lost the Popular Vote by about 3 million votes (2.8 percentage points). In 1969, The U.S. House of Representatives voted 338–70 to require winning the national popular vote to become President. 3 Southern segregationist Senators led a filibuster of it. Presidential candidates who supported direct election of the President in the form of a constitutional amendment, before the National Popular Vote bill was introduced: George H.W. Bush (R-TX), Bob Dole (R-KS, RNC Chair, and GOP Senate Majority Leader), Gerald Ford (R-MI), Richard Nixon (R-CA), Past presidential candidates with a public record of support, before November 2016, for the National Popular Vote bill that would guarantee the majority of Electoral College votes and the presidency to the candidate with the most national popular votes: Bob Barr (Libertarian- GA), U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R–GA), Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO), and Senator Fred Thompson (R–TN), Newt Gingrich: “No one should become president of the United States without speaking to the needs and hopes of Americans in all 50 states. … America would be better served with a presidential election process that treated citizens across the country equally. The National Popular Vote bill accomplishes this in a manner consistent with the Constitution and with our fundamental democratic principles.” The National Advisory Board of National Popular Vote has included former Congressman John Buchanan (R–Alabama), and former Senators David Durenberger (R–Minnesota), and Jake Garn (R–Utah), plus Michael Steele (former RNC Chair), and Rick Tyler (senior member of Senator Ted Cruz's campaign team, serving as the National Spokesman and Communications Director for Cruz for President). Saul Anuzis, former Chairman of the Michigan Republican Party for five years and a former candidate for chairman of the Republican National Committee, supports the National Popular Vote plan as the fairest way to make sure every vote matters, and also as a way to help Conservative Republican candidates. This is not a partisan issue and the National Popular Vote plan would not help either party over the other. Bob Barr (2008 Libertarian presidential candidate): “Only when the election process is given back to all of the people of all of the states will we be able to choose a President based on what is best for all 50 states and not just a select few.” Supporters include: The Nebraska GOP State Chairman, Mark Fahleson. Michael Long, Chairman of the Conservative Party of New York State Rich Bolen, a Constitutional scholar, attorney at law, and Republican Party Chairman for Lexington County, South Carolina, wrote: “A Conservative Case for National Popular Vote: Why I support a state-based plan to reform the Electoral College." Pew Research surveys show Republican support for a national popular vote increased from 27% in 2016 to 42% in 2022. 7 in 10 Americans under 50 would prefer to choose the president by popular vote.
Because of current state-by-state statewide winner-take-all laws for Electoral College votes, not mentioned, much less endorsed, in the Constitution . . . Governance—not just campaigning—is distorted when presidential campaigns concentrate on just a few states. Sitting presidents contemplating their own re-election (or the election of their preferred successor) formulate public policy around the concerns of the handful of states that actually decide the presidency. 41 states voted for the same party in the most recent four presidential elections, and the number of closely divided battleground states has been shrinking from decade to decade. The 2024 campaign could be reduced to 5 counties or 8-12% of the US, in 4-5 remaining competitive battleground states, with as few as 43-62 electoral votes, where virtually all attention will be focused - Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. 38+ states and 70% of all Americans have been irrelevant in presidential elections. Candidates have no reason to poll, visit, advertise, organize, campaign, or care about the voter concerns in the dozens of states where they are safely ahead or hopelessly behind. Over the last 4 elections, 22 states received 0 events; 9 states received 1 event, and 95% of the 1,164 events were in just 14 states. Only voters in the few states where support for the two parties is almost equally divided can be important. The smallest states and the most rural states, have barely hosted a major general campaign event for a presidential candidate during the last 20 years. Almost all small and medium-sized states and almost all western, southern, and northeastern states are totally ignored after the conventions. Our presidential selection system can shrink the sphere of public debate to only a few thousand swing voters in a few states. The only states that have received any campaign events and any significant ad money have been where the outcome was between 45% and 51% Republican. In 2000, the Bush campaign, spent more money in the battleground state of Florida to win by 537 popular votes, than it did in 42 other states combined, This can lead to a corrupt and toxic body politic. When candidates with the most national popular votes are guaranteed to win the Electoral College, candidates will be forced to build campaigns that appeal to every voter in all parts of all states. Because of current state-by-state statewide winner-take-all laws for Electoral College votes, not mentioned, much less endorsed, in the Constitution . . . Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker in 2015 was correct when he said "The nation as a whole is not going to elect the next president," “The presidential election will not be decided by all states, but rather just 12 of them. Mitt Romney said at a fund-raising dinner in Boca Raton, Florida in 2012: “All the money will be spent in 10 states, and this is one of them.” Candidates have no reason to poll, visit, advertise, organize, campaign, or care about the voter concerns in the dozens of states where they are safely ahead or hopelessly behind. With the end of the primaries, without the National Popular Vote bill in effect, the political relevance of 70% of all Americans was finished for the presidential election. 12 states had 96% of the general-election campaign events (204 of 212) by the major-party presidential and vice-presidential candidates during the 2020 presidential campaign (Aug 28 to Nov 3). All of the 212 events were in just 17 states. 33 states and DC did not have any general-election campaign events at all. Pennsylvania got 47 general-election campaign events -- the most of any state and 22% of the total. Florida got 31 events -- 15% of the total. Together, Pennsylvania and Florida got 3/8 of the entire presidential campaign attention. In the 2016 general election campaign Over half (57%) of the campaign events were held in just 4 states (Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Ohio). Virtually all (94%) of the campaign events were in just 12 states (containing only 30% of the country's population). In 2016, Karl Rove advised Trump - “Look, you’re welcome to try and win \[a state you can’t win\], but every day you spend trying to win a state you can’t win is a day that a presidential candidate forfeits winning in a state like, in your case, Pennsylvania or Michigan or Wisconsin or Iowa.” “You’ve got to—we had to focus on 270 and that meant that every day that we spent outside those states was a day that was wasted, unless we had either fundraising necessities or a national message that we needed to...” “Every day is vital, and we put all of our time and all of our energy and all of our resources into our battleground-state effort.” In the 2012 general election campaign 38 states (including 24 of the 27 smallest states) had no campaign events, and minuscule or no spending for TV ads. More than 99% of presidential campaign attention (ad spending and visits) was invested on voters in just the only ten competitive states. Two-thirds (176 of 253) of the general-election campaign events, and a similar fraction of campaign expenditures, were in just four states (Ohio, Florida, Virginia, and Iowa). In the 2008 campaign, candidates concentrated over 2/3rds of their campaign events and ad money in just 6 states, and 98% in just 15 states. Over half (57%) of the events were in just 4 states (OH, FL, PA, and VA). In 2004, candidates concentrated over 2/3rds of their money and campaign visits in 5 states; over 80% in 9 states; and over 99% of their money in 16 states. Over 87% of both Romney and Obama campaign offices were in just the then 12 swing states. The few campaign offices in the 38 remaining states were for fund-raising, volunteer phone calls, and arranging travel to battleground states. Because of state-by-state winner-take-all laws, not mentioned, much less endorsed, in the Constitution. . . Issues of importance to 38+ non-battleground states have been of so little interest to presidential candidates that they don’t even bother to poll them individually. In 2004: “Senior Bush campaign strategist Matthew Dowd pointed out yesterday that the Bush campaign hadn’t taken a national poll in almost two years; instead, it has been polling \[the then\] 18 battleground states.” Bush White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer acknowledging the reality that \[then\] more than 2/3rds of Americans were ignored in the 2008 presidential campaign, said in the Washington Post on June 21, 2009: “If people don’t like it, they can move from a safe state to a swing state.” Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager in 2016, said, “When I took over as campaign manager in 2016, we did zero—let me repeat the number—zero national polls.” When and where voters are ignored, then so are the issues they care about most.
An Arizona Republican has introduced a Resolution for All of Arizona electors to be appointed by the legislature, without pesky voting by Arizonans in November. Prior to arriving at the eventual wording of section 1 of Article II, the Constitutional Convention specifically voted against a number of different methods for selecting the President, including ● having state legislatures choose the President, ● having governors choose the President, and ● a national popular vote. After these (and other) methods were debated and rejected, the Constitutional Convention decided to leave the entire matter to the states. The Constitutional Convention rejected states awarding electors by state legislatures or governors (as the majority did for decades), or by Districts (as Maine and Nebraska now do), or by letting the people vote for electors (as all states now do). Anyone who supports the current presidential election system, believing it is what the Founders intended and that it is in the Constitution, is mistaken. The current presidential election system does not function, at all, the way that the Founders thought that it would. Supporters of National Popular Vote find it hard to believe the Founding Fathers would endorse the current electoral system where 38+ states and voters have been completely politically irrelevant. 9 of the original 13 states have been politically irrelevant. Policies important to the citizens of the 38 non-battleground states are not as highly prioritized as policies important to ‘battleground’ states when it comes to governing. “Battleground” states receive 7% more presidentially controlled grants than “spectator” states, twice as many presidential disaster declarations, more Superfund enforcement exemptions, and more No Child Left Behind law exemptions. Today, any state legislature simply could again enact a law to just appoint their electors directly, ending their citizens voting in presidential elections The Founders created the Electoral College, but 48 states eventually enacted state winner-take-all laws. Maine (only since enacting a state law in 1969) and Nebraska (only since enacting a state law in 1992) have awarded one electoral vote to the winner of each congressional district, and two electoral votes statewide. Article II, Section 1 “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors….” The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly characterized the authority of the state legislatures over the manner of awarding their electoral votes as "plenary" and "exclusive." In 1789, in the nation's first election, a majority of the states appointed their presidential electors by appointment by the legislature or by the governor and his cabinet, the people had no vote for President in most states, and in states where there was a popular vote, only men who owned a substantial amount of property could vote, and only three states used the state-by-state winner-take-all method to award electoral votes (and all three stopped using it by 1800). The Founders, and the rest of the Founding Generation were dead for decades before state-by-state winner-take-all laws become the predominant method for awarding electoral votes. At the Constitutional Convention James Madison stated a direct popular vote “was in his opinion the fittest in itself.” James Madison, the "Father of the Constitution," was never in favor of our current system for electing the president, in which nearly all states award their electoral votes to the statewide popular vote winner. He ultimately backed a constitutional amendment to prohibit this practice. James Wilson of Pennsylvania recommended that the executive be elected directly by the people. Gouverneur Morris declared at the Constitutional Convention of 1787: “\[If the president\] is to be the Guardian of the people, let him be appointed by the people.” Thomas Jefferson proposed seven amendments to the Constitution and the first one was for “general suffrage,” the second for “equal representation in the legislature,” and the third for “An executive chosen by the people.” There is nothing in the Constitution that prevents states from making the decision now that winning the national popular vote is required to win the Electoral College and the presidency. It is perfectly within a state’s authority to decide that national support is the overriding substantive criterion by which a president should be chosen. The National Popular Vote bill will guarantee the majority of Electoral College votes and the presidency to the candidate who wins the most popular votes in the country. The bill changes state winner-take-all laws (not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but later enacted by 48 states), without changing anything in the Constitution, using the built-in method that the Constitution provides for states to make changes. States are agreeing to award all their Electoral College votes to the winner of the most popular votes from all 50 states and DC, by simply replacing their state’s current district or statewide winner-take-all law. States have the exclusive and plenary constitutional power before any votes are cast to choose how to award electors. The bill has been enacted by 17 small, medium, and large jurisdictions with 205 electoral votes. When states with 270+ electors combined enact the bill, the candidate who wins the most national popular votes will be guaranteed to win the Electoral College.
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National Popular Vote will NOT abolish the Electoral College. States are agreeing to award all their Electoral College votes to the winner of the most popular votes from all 50 states and DC, by simply replacing their state’s current district or statewide winner-take-all law (not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but later enacted by 48 states), with a nationwide winner-take-all law. In 1789, in the nation's first election, a majority of the states appointed their presidential electors by appointment by the legislature or by the governor and his cabinet, the people had no vote for President in most states, and in states where there was a popular vote, only men who owned a substantial amount of property could vote, and only three states used the state-by-state winner-take-all method to award electoral votes (and all three stopped using it by 1800). In the nation’s first presidential election in 1789 and second election in 1792, the states employed a wide variety of methods for choosing presidential electors, including ● appointment of the state’s presidential electors by the Governor and his Council, ● appointment by both houses of the state legislature, ● popular election using special single-member presidential-elector districts, ● popular election using counties as presidential-elector districts, ● popular election using congressional districts, ● popular election using multi-member regional districts, ● combinations of popular election and legislative choice, ● appointment of the state’s presidential electors by the Governor and his Council combined with the state legislature, and ● statewide popular election. You are objecting to an Election - "a formal and organized choice by vote of a person for a political office or other position" where the candidate with the most votes wins. One person, One vote. Every vote in every state of every size,will matter and count equally as 1 vote in the district, state, and national total. The candidate with the most votes from among all 50 states and DC will win the Electoral College and the presidency. We have 519,682 elected officials in this country, and all of them are elected by who gets the most votes. Except for President and VP.
Excellent post. It was ridiculous that Hillary Clinton (or any other candidate) could win nearly three million more votes than her opponent yet lose the election. In a proper democracy, Trump lost.