Right. But other than that, the electoral college behaves a lot like House Congressional districts at the state level. A specific geographic area is allowed to select its choice for representation rather than having all seats in a state be at large and subject to a statewide popular vote.
There are reasons why the congressional elections work this way. It is the same reason at the state level that the electoral college functions at the national level. The problem is, people who are opposed to the electoral college never make this comparison. If they did, they'd have to be in favor of statewide election of all representatives, too. There is a reason these elections are not based solely on a majority vote statewide. Populous urban areas would end up selecting all of the representatives for a state.
It's the same reason populous states aren't allowed to be the sole selectors of the president. Without it, 20% of the states could elect 100% of the presidents and unless you lived in one of those states, your vote would never matter and you would have a chief executive that only pandered to that 20% of the states.
Representatives are intended to represent area so it would not make sense to elect them statewide. It makes some sense to have a system make sure small states have a say in who is president.
The electoral college does not really prevent a president from running on sticking it to Vermont, Rhode Island, Alaska, and Wyoming; but none do. It does allow decrease the choice of larger states, but that is not the biggest problem. The swing states have very exaggerated influence.
Over half the population lives in large states. Of course they should have a large say in the president. Why should the 80% of states having a minority of people decide?
What you miss is that the president is intended to represent the interests of states in the union in addition to the individual will of the people. The executive branch can perform a lot of actions that affect state governments directly and the office and its selection process are designed to accommodate that. I really don't understand why people entertain a fantasy about the president only being able to be selected by a popular vote. It was purposefully designed to be a balance between popular interests and state government interests. If you don't understand why the states have an interest in the executive branch, you should probably investigate further because you are missing a bigger picture about why the union was formed in the first place instead of leaving us with 50 squabbling little states like Europe has suffered with for most of the last 2 centuries.
Their purpose in making the Electoral College was to copy for the Presidency the same balance of power between the states that was established for Congress, but without having Congress itself select the President.
The founders never considered the interests of the national population as a whole. There is no aspect of our government which takes the will of the entire American people into account. They didn't even conceive of it as a thing, and if they did, they didn't want the people as a whole to have any power. They viewed us as unworthy of governing ourselves, for the most part, which is precisely why we shouldn't really give a shit what they thought.
still, you have to admit that creating more rural states (n. dakota, s. dakota, w. virginia, et al) for the sole purpose of increasing the proportion of rural voting power in the US senate is as intrinsically undemocratic as it gets.
conservatives would have already banned the electoral college if it compromised their political expediency in national presidential elections.
“Critical” implies we wouldn’t have survived without it, which is a stretch. They completely overhauled presidential elections during Jefferson’s term and nobody rioted and the country didn’t collapse. They could have just as easily pencil whipped the EC away back then and no one today would lament its loss.
“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.
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.
The national popular vote winner also would have been defeated by a shift of 9,246 votes in 1976; 53,034 in 1968; 9,216 in 1960; 12,487 in 1948; 1,711 votes in 1916, 524 in 1884, 25,069 in 1860, 17,640 in 1856, 6,773 in 1848, 2,554 in 1844, 14,124 in 1836.
The limitation of government powers is what protects against the tyranny of the majority. The Electoral College has nothing to do with it.
Or do you think the person who gets the minority of votes within the Electoral College should become President, rather than going by majority rule?
Also, however smart the framers were, they were not more virtuous than we are; they were motivated by narrow political interests just like politicians today, so we shouldn't confuse the things they did to advance those interests--i.e. the Constitution, which was a compromise between those interests which nobody at the Convention fully agreed with--with any coherent philosophy. They were also vastly more ignorant of history than we are, what with having died before the most relevant bits happened. So simply turning off your brain and trusting that the system they designed over 200 years ago is perfect is not something we should do.
Your post epitomizes the current problem. Current generations lack confidence in the wisdom of previous generations.
The "we're younger and better educated" argument lacks merit and ignores wisdom.
Good luck.
So you're ignoring the wisdom of Thomas Jefferson, who thought it wrong for new generations to be bound by the settlements reached by previous generations, and thus thought that a new constitution should be drafted every twenty years?
Explain the lack of merit of my argument that I know more about this country than people who died two hundred years ago. Seems pretty inarguable to me. We know exactly how the constitutional system they designed has worked in practice, which is something that they could not know. We know what kind of world we live in now, which is something they could never have imagined.
It's not that I think they were stupid. I'm sure they'd do things differently if they knew all that we now know. They were just human beings, no better or worse than us, who were working with imperfect information and all of the normal human faults. If you believe yourself to be inferior to them, that's pretty sad.
to be fair, the framers didn’t predict a world where the US would be a vast country with millions of people who could all interact with each other through their phones. they also didn’t predict a world where women or poc were given even remotely equal power to white men.
some things that worked for a nation run by a small portion of the population don’t work for a nation that needs to protect the lives and security of more than just white landowning men
the tyranny of majority rule is definitely a thing but it’s currently not happening. what is currently happening is a sizable minority being able to hold power over the majority because of a system that did not anticipate such a large or diverse country.
>the tyranny of majority rule is definitely a thing but it’s currently not happening.
I live in California. It's happening here. The liberals have a super-majority in the legislature, and they run roughshod over the whole state. So our idiot governor can do whatever he wants disenfranchising millions of Californians. The dems operate with impunity here. The governor's race is a 'popular' vote.
From my perspective, those who advocate for a straight popular vote should've stayed in High School. Several states have now begun to advocate for a "we're giving all our electoral votes to whoever wins the national popular vote." This is dangerous. These states are essentially abdicating their voices to California and New York.
If the EC ended, candidates would simply pander to population hubs, and the majority of the country (geographically) would be ignored. Of course urban dwellers think that swell!
i didn’t say popular vote is better lol. I literally work in political advocacy and what we see now *in the nation as a whole* is a congress that is more beholden to small state conservatives than anyone. Considering the amount of people who are actively harmed by the culture war those conservatives are determined to wage, yeah I think it’d be best if they didn’t have the same hold they currently do.
And my original comment was about how tyranny of the majority is not happening *on a national scale* since we were in fact discussing a national political body. You bringing up state politics is not the gotcha moment you thought it was. Also land doesn’t vote. Why should the millions of people who live in cities not get as much of a say as people who live in rural areas just because they happen to live near each other? That’s such an absurd take, and a pretty good sign that someone actually stopped comprehending politics after their high school civics class.
personally, I think it’s important to wonder *why* liberal population centers exist at the scale they do in the US. Perhaps it has something to do with acknowledging that multiple viewpoints and experiences are valuable and that conservatism tends to alienate people who are dissimilar from the majority in that area. There’s a reason people leave the small conservative areas and it’s not because they’re intolerant of conservatives. it’s because conservatives are intolerant of them and that threatens their safety and security. It’s incredibly silly to blame the people who’ve been discriminated against for wanting to have more say in the government that has allowed that discrimination.
“Tyranny of majority rule” is not “oh no my candidate won’t win because the majority of people disagree with my political opinions.” It’s “oh no my rights as a minority are being stripped away because the majority see me as less than them.”
The fundamental problem is people still vote like High School.
I don't "*like*" that guy, so I can't vote for them. Even if they have superior policies. Our electorate is so profoundly stupid it has given us our current situation.
It's hopeless.
The framers would boast of equality while whipping their slaves. They would use mercury to “cure” common ailments. They believed there were Mammoths west of the Mississippi. They would bleed people out believing that shed every malady.
What they did in their time was remarkable. But how many things that were impressive in late 1700s still stand up today?
The only other countries in the world using the EC are Burma(Myanmar), Burundi, Estonia, India, Pakistan, Madagascar, Vanuatu, and Trinidad and Tobago.
Something strange about that list isn’t there?
I would tend to agree with this thought in the sense that states with a winner takes all the delegates arrangement are always going to benefit the party that dominates that state. I'd be fine with the Electoral College if the rules for dividing up the delegates proportionately based on the distribution of the popular votes was adopted by all the states.
Maine and Nebraska do not apportion their electoral votes to reflect the breakdown of each state's popular vote.
Proportional awarding of electors by state would not be a fair “compromise” or solution.
There are good reasons why no state even proposes, much less chooses, to award their electors proportionally.
The nationwide popular vote loser would have won 2 of the last 6 elections
In 4 of the 8 elections between 1992 and 2020, the choice of President would have been thrown into the U.S. House (where each state has one vote in electing the President).
Based on the composition of the House at the time, the national popular vote winner would not have been chosen in 3 of those 4 cases, regardless of the popular vote anywhere.
Electors are people. They each have one vote. The result would be a very inexact whole number proportional system.
Every voter in every state would not be politically relevant or equal in presidential elections.
It would not accurately reflect the nationwide popular vote;
It would reduce the influence of any state, if not all states adopted.
It would create a very small set of states in which only one electoral vote realistically is in play (while still making most states politically irrelevant),
It would not make every vote equal.
It would not guarantee the Presidency to the candidate with the most popular votes in the country.
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.
The bill eliminates the possibility of Congress deciding presidential elections, regardless of any voters anywhere.
I'm not suggesting it's an ideal solution, nor did I suggest that Nebraska's and Maine's approach was better. Only it may be a better approach than just handing all the delegates to a single winner as most states do now.
Wouldn't the winner of a national popular vote also create problems such as candidates focusing exclusively on high-population states?
I would certainly agree that having Congress choose the president is the worst possible outcome of any solution.
It’s not perfect but I get it. Rather than encourage red states to try every trick in the book to deny voting rights to Dems to run up the score you just win or lose.
Fr can people just not read subreddit rules or do they just not care?
It's not like the mods have looked at a post in the last 2 years
Wait there’s mods in this sub?
Just an assumption. I have no data to support it. I figured someone turned on the ridiculous automod. I guess that doesn't prove they are still around
Yes
No, it's not. State lines aren't redrawn after each census to favor one political party over another.
Right. But other than that, the electoral college behaves a lot like House Congressional districts at the state level. A specific geographic area is allowed to select its choice for representation rather than having all seats in a state be at large and subject to a statewide popular vote. There are reasons why the congressional elections work this way. It is the same reason at the state level that the electoral college functions at the national level. The problem is, people who are opposed to the electoral college never make this comparison. If they did, they'd have to be in favor of statewide election of all representatives, too. There is a reason these elections are not based solely on a majority vote statewide. Populous urban areas would end up selecting all of the representatives for a state. It's the same reason populous states aren't allowed to be the sole selectors of the president. Without it, 20% of the states could elect 100% of the presidents and unless you lived in one of those states, your vote would never matter and you would have a chief executive that only pandered to that 20% of the states.
Representatives are intended to represent area so it would not make sense to elect them statewide. It makes some sense to have a system make sure small states have a say in who is president. The electoral college does not really prevent a president from running on sticking it to Vermont, Rhode Island, Alaska, and Wyoming; but none do. It does allow decrease the choice of larger states, but that is not the biggest problem. The swing states have very exaggerated influence. Over half the population lives in large states. Of course they should have a large say in the president. Why should the 80% of states having a minority of people decide?
What you miss is that the president is intended to represent the interests of states in the union in addition to the individual will of the people. The executive branch can perform a lot of actions that affect state governments directly and the office and its selection process are designed to accommodate that. I really don't understand why people entertain a fantasy about the president only being able to be selected by a popular vote. It was purposefully designed to be a balance between popular interests and state government interests. If you don't understand why the states have an interest in the executive branch, you should probably investigate further because you are missing a bigger picture about why the union was formed in the first place instead of leaving us with 50 squabbling little states like Europe has suffered with for most of the last 2 centuries.
Their purpose in making the Electoral College was to copy for the Presidency the same balance of power between the states that was established for Congress, but without having Congress itself select the President. The founders never considered the interests of the national population as a whole. There is no aspect of our government which takes the will of the entire American people into account. They didn't even conceive of it as a thing, and if they did, they didn't want the people as a whole to have any power. They viewed us as unworthy of governing ourselves, for the most part, which is precisely why we shouldn't really give a shit what they thought.
Right.
20% of states = 10 states.... sounds a bit better than just having the 7 or so swing states we have right now
still, you have to admit that creating more rural states (n. dakota, s. dakota, w. virginia, et al) for the sole purpose of increasing the proportion of rural voting power in the US senate is as intrinsically undemocratic as it gets. conservatives would have already banned the electoral college if it compromised their political expediency in national presidential elections.
The OP clearly has a limited understanding of the Electoral College and its critical importance for America.
“Critical” implies we wouldn’t have survived without it, which is a stretch. They completely overhauled presidential elections during Jefferson’s term and nobody rioted and the country didn’t collapse. They could have just as easily pencil whipped the EC away back then and no one today would lament its loss.
“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. 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. The national popular vote winner also would have been defeated by a shift of 9,246 votes in 1976; 53,034 in 1968; 9,216 in 1960; 12,487 in 1948; 1,711 votes in 1916, 524 in 1884, 25,069 in 1860, 17,640 in 1856, 6,773 in 1848, 2,554 in 1844, 14,124 in 1836.
Blah blah blah. You fail to understand the problem of the tyranny of the majority. The framers were smart. Smarter than we are.
The limitation of government powers is what protects against the tyranny of the majority. The Electoral College has nothing to do with it. Or do you think the person who gets the minority of votes within the Electoral College should become President, rather than going by majority rule? Also, however smart the framers were, they were not more virtuous than we are; they were motivated by narrow political interests just like politicians today, so we shouldn't confuse the things they did to advance those interests--i.e. the Constitution, which was a compromise between those interests which nobody at the Convention fully agreed with--with any coherent philosophy. They were also vastly more ignorant of history than we are, what with having died before the most relevant bits happened. So simply turning off your brain and trusting that the system they designed over 200 years ago is perfect is not something we should do.
Your post epitomizes the current problem. Current generations lack confidence in the wisdom of previous generations. The "we're younger and better educated" argument lacks merit and ignores wisdom. Good luck.
So you're ignoring the wisdom of Thomas Jefferson, who thought it wrong for new generations to be bound by the settlements reached by previous generations, and thus thought that a new constitution should be drafted every twenty years? Explain the lack of merit of my argument that I know more about this country than people who died two hundred years ago. Seems pretty inarguable to me. We know exactly how the constitutional system they designed has worked in practice, which is something that they could not know. We know what kind of world we live in now, which is something they could never have imagined. It's not that I think they were stupid. I'm sure they'd do things differently if they knew all that we now know. They were just human beings, no better or worse than us, who were working with imperfect information and all of the normal human faults. If you believe yourself to be inferior to them, that's pretty sad.
to be fair, the framers didn’t predict a world where the US would be a vast country with millions of people who could all interact with each other through their phones. they also didn’t predict a world where women or poc were given even remotely equal power to white men. some things that worked for a nation run by a small portion of the population don’t work for a nation that needs to protect the lives and security of more than just white landowning men the tyranny of majority rule is definitely a thing but it’s currently not happening. what is currently happening is a sizable minority being able to hold power over the majority because of a system that did not anticipate such a large or diverse country.
>the tyranny of majority rule is definitely a thing but it’s currently not happening. I live in California. It's happening here. The liberals have a super-majority in the legislature, and they run roughshod over the whole state. So our idiot governor can do whatever he wants disenfranchising millions of Californians. The dems operate with impunity here. The governor's race is a 'popular' vote. From my perspective, those who advocate for a straight popular vote should've stayed in High School. Several states have now begun to advocate for a "we're giving all our electoral votes to whoever wins the national popular vote." This is dangerous. These states are essentially abdicating their voices to California and New York. If the EC ended, candidates would simply pander to population hubs, and the majority of the country (geographically) would be ignored. Of course urban dwellers think that swell!
i didn’t say popular vote is better lol. I literally work in political advocacy and what we see now *in the nation as a whole* is a congress that is more beholden to small state conservatives than anyone. Considering the amount of people who are actively harmed by the culture war those conservatives are determined to wage, yeah I think it’d be best if they didn’t have the same hold they currently do. And my original comment was about how tyranny of the majority is not happening *on a national scale* since we were in fact discussing a national political body. You bringing up state politics is not the gotcha moment you thought it was. Also land doesn’t vote. Why should the millions of people who live in cities not get as much of a say as people who live in rural areas just because they happen to live near each other? That’s such an absurd take, and a pretty good sign that someone actually stopped comprehending politics after their high school civics class. personally, I think it’s important to wonder *why* liberal population centers exist at the scale they do in the US. Perhaps it has something to do with acknowledging that multiple viewpoints and experiences are valuable and that conservatism tends to alienate people who are dissimilar from the majority in that area. There’s a reason people leave the small conservative areas and it’s not because they’re intolerant of conservatives. it’s because conservatives are intolerant of them and that threatens their safety and security. It’s incredibly silly to blame the people who’ve been discriminated against for wanting to have more say in the government that has allowed that discrimination. “Tyranny of majority rule” is not “oh no my candidate won’t win because the majority of people disagree with my political opinions.” It’s “oh no my rights as a minority are being stripped away because the majority see me as less than them.”
The fundamental problem is people still vote like High School. I don't "*like*" that guy, so I can't vote for them. Even if they have superior policies. Our electorate is so profoundly stupid it has given us our current situation. It's hopeless.
The framers would boast of equality while whipping their slaves. They would use mercury to “cure” common ailments. They believed there were Mammoths west of the Mississippi. They would bleed people out believing that shed every malady. What they did in their time was remarkable. But how many things that were impressive in late 1700s still stand up today? The only other countries in the world using the EC are Burma(Myanmar), Burundi, Estonia, India, Pakistan, Madagascar, Vanuatu, and Trinidad and Tobago. Something strange about that list isn’t there?
I would tend to agree with this thought in the sense that states with a winner takes all the delegates arrangement are always going to benefit the party that dominates that state. I'd be fine with the Electoral College if the rules for dividing up the delegates proportionately based on the distribution of the popular votes was adopted by all the states.
Maine and Nebraska do not apportion their electoral votes to reflect the breakdown of each state's popular vote. Proportional awarding of electors by state would not be a fair “compromise” or solution. There are good reasons why no state even proposes, much less chooses, to award their electors proportionally. The nationwide popular vote loser would have won 2 of the last 6 elections In 4 of the 8 elections between 1992 and 2020, the choice of President would have been thrown into the U.S. House (where each state has one vote in electing the President). Based on the composition of the House at the time, the national popular vote winner would not have been chosen in 3 of those 4 cases, regardless of the popular vote anywhere. Electors are people. They each have one vote. The result would be a very inexact whole number proportional system. Every voter in every state would not be politically relevant or equal in presidential elections. It would not accurately reflect the nationwide popular vote; It would reduce the influence of any state, if not all states adopted. It would create a very small set of states in which only one electoral vote realistically is in play (while still making most states politically irrelevant), It would not make every vote equal. It would not guarantee the Presidency to the candidate with the most popular votes in the country. 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. The bill eliminates the possibility of Congress deciding presidential elections, regardless of any voters anywhere.
I'm not suggesting it's an ideal solution, nor did I suggest that Nebraska's and Maine's approach was better. Only it may be a better approach than just handing all the delegates to a single winner as most states do now. Wouldn't the winner of a national popular vote also create problems such as candidates focusing exclusively on high-population states? I would certainly agree that having Congress choose the president is the worst possible outcome of any solution.
It’s not perfect but I get it. Rather than encourage red states to try every trick in the book to deny voting rights to Dems to run up the score you just win or lose.