As governor he got his state signed on to the national popular vote interstate compact
As a Canadian, can anyone ELi5 how the electoral college works? Is it like every state gets the same amount of votes regardless of population?
No, you get a number of votes equal to your total representatives in Congress, so it’s a compromise between population size and statehood, as the House is based on population and every state gets two votes in the Senate.
The problem is that the votes are really electors. The specifics of that get beyond ELI5 because it’s largely up to the states individually but in general whoever wins the popular vote of a state is supposed to get all of their votes.
But without the electoral college, politicians would suddenly have to care about states with a lot of people living in them
100% correct.
Trump in 2012: The electoral college is garbage and needs to go. Trump in 2016: The electoral college is genius. What a great system. Trump in 2020: The electoral college is garbage and needs to go
I remember his tweets each time.
As an Alabamian I dream of the day that my vote actually matters, fuck the electoral college.
As a Washingtonian I also dream of that. It is ridiculous that only people in states that are kinda purple have their opinions heard.
I’d prefer at least to maintain districts, 1 vote for 1 district, remove states and the extra two votes. Each district exactly the same number of people, give or take 1%. Give the low populated counties out in the boonies a chance to be heard.
But failing that, straight popular vote is a better option than the current cluster fuck.
If it is equal representation, why does having districts make the rural vote heard? Whether it is one person one vote or 100,000 people one vote it won’t make a difference.
Everyone will still have their representatives and senators to hear them. In fact I think we need to increase the number of representatives. It needs to be a number that a person can reasonably represent. Say 50 or 100 thousand people per representative. This would also help with gerrymandering as having a lot of small districts would make everyone’s voice louder.
But for national positions like the president, we should have proportional votes, preferably with getting rid of first past the post that got us stuck with the two party system to start with.
Congress of going to need to expand a little bit, if all 3,330-6,660 reps should be able to gather at the same time.
This would be a problem if it were 1924, but we’re living in 2024. The solutions for this are right in front of us and have been for decades. Get all these guys and gals on a secure teleconference and turn the Capitol building into a museum, or renovate it to have smaller private offices.
There, now we can get 10,000 reps in if we need to. The bigger concern is how are they going to decide who gets to speak with that many representatives. They can’t realistically give everybody equal floor time and expect government to be anything other than completely paralyzed. So the number probably still needs to be capped, but it should be capped at a value where whatever the state that has the lowest population sets the value at 1 and every other state divides their population by that number to figure out how many representatives they get.
There was an article (Archive Link) in The Washington Post discussing the nuts and bolts of how expanded representation could work. It wouldn’t be hard.
A quote from the article: To my surprise and delight, the team’s last proposal reveals that we could actually take the House of Representatives up to 1,725 members without having to construct a new building.
Districts open things up to gerrymandering…
Which is a problem that needs to be solved regardless.
Absolutely, but let’s not make it worse by putting the presidential election behind it… It’s bad enough it causes an imbalance in the House of Representatives. It would be far worse than the Electoral College.
As a pretty left person who lives in Tennessee, please get rid of it. Anytime I have this conversation with folks on the right, I always point out that there are more Republican voters in California than Texas. That usually gets them to concede.
It’s a great argument, and incredibly depressing that the only thing that will convince them is that it’s also their people are being hurt, not that it’s the most fair and just thing to do.
Brilliant.
Of course, there’s no guarantee republicans would understand the point.
Republicans aren’t any dumber than Democrats, they’re just more evil.
California gets 54 electoral votes; Wyoming gets 3.
California has 38.94 million citizens; Wyoming has 0.575 million.
California gets one electoral vote for every 721,110 people. Wyoming gets one for every 191,660. This means that per capita, Wyoming gets 3.76 times as much say in who gets to be the president as California.
And that’s even before the bullshit that is swing states.
Indeed. Scrap electoral college and remove the arbitrary cap on House reps.
Don’t forget to implement proportional representation in the House, blow up the senate, and implement ranked choice voting or something similar in all elections
remove the arbitrary cap on House reps.
I think thats what they meant?
If you’re thinking about proportional representation, that’s a separate thing
That is it’s own different thing yes, but the house members were supposed to be proportional to the USA population, except they capped it and it’s out of whack now.
Instead smaller states have out proportioned power.
Made up numbers, but in some states it might be 100k people per house member, and another state it’s 300k people.
remove the arbitrary cap on House reps.
proportional representation
I thought you were conflating these two. If not, then I have no idea what you were talking about when you said
I think thats what they meant?
I’m talking about actual proportional representation, single member house districts are way too easy to gerrymander
This isn’t the electoral college causing the problem. It’s Congress capping the size of the house 100 years ago. It needs to be increased, but it won’t happen without force as it requires Congress to agree to reduce their individual power.
sigh
Yes, it is the EC causing the problem. You’ll never get 1:1 with it in place no matter what congress does.
There’s 0 reason the president, representative of all people, should use this shitty system for election
It’s a federalist Republic, direct democracy is the opposite of the design.
This isn’t direct democracy, we aren’t voting on every issue that would otherwise come across the presidents desk. We are still electing representatives to make decisions on our behalf.
We are still a federation of states (federalist) represented by elected decision making leaders (Republic).
Our current system is far more direct than intended. The masses weren’t supposed to pick senators and presidents, that isolated from populist candidates. Leaning even harder to systems vulnerable to populism is a poor choice.
I don’t care what it was meant to be. I really don’t. What it is is bullshit.
We don’t have to stick with the original design, the founders were in no way perfect
We should have a good reason to to swap, especially to something they purposely avoided.
What is the good reason to keep it? That our slave-driving wealthy elite founders were infallible?
Tread on me harder, daddy.
And we do. It seems silly to hold their wishes in such high regard compared to our own anyway though, we know more about how our system works in practice than they did when thinking of it after all, both because things dont often go completely as planned and we have the actual experience of using the result for a significant time, and because the system has been already changed in various ways already over that time.
Sure but I don’t think anyone could look at it and critically think the current system is for the benefit of the common man in any way shape or form.
It was designed to prevent Trump, instead Trump happened. That’s a flaw in our current system that needs to be fixed.
Can we get rid of the senate too?
The Electoral College is allowing more an more manipulation from these small states. It is time for that to end. They are holding this country back much too much.
ONE PERSON
ONE VOTE
ONE CAGE
ONE BELT
ONE CHAMPION
SUNDAY
SUNDAY
SUNDAY
MONSTER TRUCK!
Yup, I understand it was meant to give smaller states an equal voice but he GOP weaponized it and now the minority is speaking for the majority. Tell me the system isn’t broken when ONE vote in shitty red state Wyoming is equal to TEN THOUSAN VOTES in Blue California?
Just to be clear: Also, “states” don’t have a voice, only the people in them. Giving a state a disproportionate voice is exactly as just as it is giving its people a disproportionate voice. When the right uses that argument, it’s injustice laundering, it’s not a valid concern.
Hey hey! Ho ho! The electoral college has got to go!
I’m glad someone is saying it! Stupid ass lines on a map determines who becomes president
Why do we keep having this discussion when IT WONT ever happen? It’s a grift at this point. A boogie man to raise funds against, like Trump.
Abolishing the Electoral College would require the approval of some of the states that would lose power.
The only way it happens is if we pay them off for their vote.
He’ll never mention it again after the election.
He got his state on the national popular vote interstate compact as govenor. He’s talked about it before and done more than most to make the popular vote a reality
Without a constitutional amendment, the electoral college is going nowhere.
The popular vote compact is a work around that doesn’t require constitutional ammendment. It’s an agreement to put their states delegates vote toward the winner of the national popular vote. (And only goes into effect once a majority of the electoral votes have signed on to it)
So far 209 of the needed 270 electoral votes have already signed on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
The national popular vote interstate compact is a pipe dream.
In the extremely unlikely event it is ever enacted, it will be dissolved as soon as a supporting state realizes it is likely to affect the outcome of the upcoming election.
If it ever actually affects an election, it will likely be deemed unconstitutional at the supreme court.
Even if it is not deemed unconstitutional, states bound to vote against their own voters will withdraw from it immediately.
At most, it will directly affect no more than one election, and probably not in the direction expected.
There’s still the electoral college which needs to go, creating a half-assed workaround which could easily be dissolved is not a fix. It’s nothing other than a spit and a handshake
It’s more than a “handshake”. States are actually passing laws for this. Plus there’s nothing stopping you from going above 270 electoral votes
Once it’s been in effect for a while, it would make a formal constitutional ammendment to fully remove it a lot easier to get though
Once it’s been in effect for a while
It will never be in effect “for awhile”. If they ever get to 270, it will last one election cycle at most. More likely, it will be dissolved between the time it comes into effect and the first general election afterward.
