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Majority of Americans continue to favor moving away from Electoral College
(www.pewresearch.org)
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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No. It's because states that have huge populations would choose the president with basically zero say from most others. Technically a non representative government.
Except using the popular vote means that States wouldn't decide who was president like they do now, the people would.
Under the current system if I vote Red in Chicago I just completely wasted my time. Cook County is so blue that I don't have a voice. Get rid of the Electoral College, however, and now my vote worth just as much as everyone elses.
People seem to think that if we moved away from the College that the population of a blue state will 100% vote blue or a red state will only have red votes. It's just not true. The northern half of California or the southern half Illinois votes way different than their counterparts.
The Electoral College is an outdated system designed for a time when the US had relatively low Literacy and the public couldn't be reliably counted on to be informed. There is no excuse for it nowadays.
So instead, states with populations smaller than some cities get to completely override the will of the majority of the country.
You solve the 'problem' of 'tyranny of the majority' by having a strong constitution and good rights and protections for minorities, not by switching to the indisputably worse option of 'tyranny of the minority'. Because that causes the exact same problem, but for even more people instead.
The version of the tyranny of the majority that he's warning against is already solved in the American system. The ward against it is the Senate. Every state has exactly 2 votes in the Senate and no legislation can be passed and enacted into law without passing a vote in the Senate.
The senate is a terrible way to deal with it though. But it's at least better than the EC.
The issue is while a strong constitution is nice, it's necessary to have at least some people in office who would respect the constitution to be effective, including at least a partially originality supreme court.
Alternatively, more clearly written constitutional laws. It's wild that you have judges who cannot agree on what an article of the constitution really means, and the language should have been amended years ago.
In the Netherlands, we have a clearly written constitution, but no real 'supreme court' in the American sense. And that setup seems to work quite well.
Agreed some should be clarified, but a lot are pretty clear but are denied as unclear for political reasons. One obvious example is the 2nd amendment of the bill of rights. Also, keep in the mind the US constitution is the oldest constitution still in use, so language does evolve somewhat.
As opposed to our current system, where 80% of states don't matter because they're not swing states.
What do you mean? They do matter? A democrat doesn't campaign in California not because it doesn't matter but because they know most Californians will already vote for them, same with Republicans in Texas
They don't matter because most states use winner take all for their EC votes. Every additional vote past 50% is absolutely worthless, as is any vote cast in a state where there's no chance to hit 50%.
With a popular vote system, every vote would still be worth something. It would be worth a politician's while to campaign in California because even if they'd normally get 60%, as it's still worth it to drive higher turnout or try to increase that to 65%. It'd be worth going to a hostile state because a vote is a vote. It doesn't matter where it comes from; they'd all have equal worth.
Every vote past 50% just then wouldn't matter at a national level. Yes it would increase the total number of votes that voted for the winning candidate, but it would also centralize power more into cities.
States with more diversity of opinion have more say. Seems reasonable to me.
Why should states have more say? We elect the president nationally. It's not a state election, or it shouldn't be.
Because we have 50 of them and not 350 million. It's a simple and effective way to get a weighted average.
Why should there be a 'weighted average' for a federal election?
Because there's a lot of people that don't live in cities and they need different things from the people that live in cities.
Yes, and that's why there are state and local elections. We're talking about voting for president.
Literally every thread you have to argue with me. Are you doing that with everyone or just me?
Aside from that, there's things federal government can legislate against that the state will absolutely have no say in. I'm more left wing in my politics but guns, despite being a fundamental right seems most fought against by the left and fought for by the right.
I don't even notice usernames most of the time. Maybe I "have to" argue with you because you say a lot of disputable things. Turn down the paranoia a few notches.
You have an average of a post/comment to Lemmy every 15 minutes over 3 months. You most certainly do not "have to" spend every waking moment of your day on here arguing with people. It's unhealthy.
When did I say I had to do anything? And if your job doesn't give you lots of free time to kill, that's not my problem.
Also, do you think I post when I'm asleep?
Actually no, I don't think you post while you're asleep, that's an excellent point.
When I take away 8 hours a day you would spend sleeping, it's actually less than 10 minutes between posts on average.
Thanks for correcting my oversight.
I'm also working right now, I just don't spend an unhealthy amount of time using Lemmy.
And you got your medical degree from where?
I mean since you're talking about health... by the way, speaking of health, I'm semi-disabled because of it, which is another reason I post so much. So I'm already not healthy.
Not that you give a shit. You're not actually interested in me beyond telling me how awful I am.
I don't need a medical degree to know that spending all day long arguing with people online is not healthy, other people with medical degrees have already studied and proven that.
I also don't need a medical degree to know that your mental health can decline from an unhealthy behavior even if you already have another ailment (or disability even), not sure where you got that from. It's not like there are only two states of "healthy" and "unhealthy".
I didn't say you're awful, I said you're engaging in an unhealthy behavior.
Guess it's good I don't spend "all day long arguing with people online." That would be false.
And, again, I am unhealthy. I have trigeminal neuralgia, (aka the suicide disease) and, due to an ulcer, I haven't had a morsel of food in my stomach for five weeks now. So frankly, the fact that I haven't thrown myself in front of a bus right now is pretty fucking mentally healthy thank you very much.
Now, any more pop psychiatry or are you done?
By the way, you didn't have to say I'm awful. I can read between the lines. I guess you think I'm stupid as well as unhealthy.
I don't think I implied either of those things, but it's fine, I'll be done now. I don't want to be an enabler for you any more than I already have here.
You absolutely implied them. And your being intentionally obtuse about it is pretty fucking transparent. But good. I'm glad you won't "enable" me any more because I don't need to deal with people being jerks to me.
What we have now is non-representative. Rather, it's representative of land, not voters.
Horse feathers. There are 535 total EC votes and only 100 of those come from the Senate. The other 435 are come from the House whichis based on population.
The solution to this mess is to upsize the HoR and tilt the ratio back to where it was prior to 1929 when we fucked it up.