What's great about the electoral college is you need to have cross-regional appeal to win. So its less about which states are going to be battleground but that you generally can't just appeal to 1 or 2 regions and win. In a goal of preserving the union, it's better to have a system that pushes cross-regional appeal than a system based strictly on number of votes IMO.
My recollection from civics was that the college is to prevent populist candidates from winning. Someone very popular only in densely populated areas may have an agenda that hurts rural ones (eg, noting that federal taxes disproportionately go to rural areas for things like maintaining highways, make it “fair” and leave rural people with shit roads and diminished services).
> My recollection from civics was that the college is to prevent populist candidates from winning
The college was a compromise to give a larger voting share to slave owning states that had a high overall population, despite having a relatively smaller number of possible voters.
They worked hand in hand. In other words, given the 3/5s compromise, how to you implement it from a voting perspective? For example, if your state has a population that was 50/50 slave/non-slave, then each non-slave vote was theoretically worth 1 and 3/5s of a vote, but giving individual voters differing weights was deemed unacceptable. The solution was the electoral college in which the votes available to the state could reflect the extra voting power of the non-voting population.
I don't think the electoral college was intended to work the way it does today. If I'm remembering correctly, it was originally a "Frank from town is really smart and well-informed, so I'll send him to DC to choose the president" type of institution. (This is also part of why there was such a long gap between election day and inauguration - the electors still had to get together in DC)
So while the electoral college might have also functioned as a way to redistribute votes within a state... I don't think that was its main purpose.
> If this were the case you'd expect to see a lot more faithless electors in our history than we have seen.
...other than the large numbers in the late 1700s and early 1800s, you mean?
And in any case, "intent" and "actual practice" were pretty different here. But that doesn't mean that the Connecticut Compromise [0] (which split the US legislative body into the House with representation apportioned by population and the Senate with set representation per state) was solely or even primarily due to slavery. And once you had that, using the total of Senators and Representatives for your number of electors makes a good amount of sense.
The 3/5 compromise was to reduce the power of slave owning states as they wanted slaves to count fully for determining the states’ representation in the house so they could maintain more control of the house.
The compromise reduced the control the slave states had.
It was indeed intended to prevent populism; the idea is that instead of voting for the president you vote for a group of people who you trust to then choose a president. But it has never in practice worked that way.
Interesting, though this sounds like it would really hamper the idea of the national popular vote compact which I'm personally pulling for. And really calls into question the whole electoral system if the electors cannot be constrained by their states at all. Just bribe or threaten 271 people and the whole presidency is yours really since states can't invalidate faithless votes...
> though this sounds like it would really hamper the idea of the national popular vote compact which I'm personally pulling for.
I'm a supporter of NPV. I don't think it's likely to be a problem, although this feels like something that will shake out a lot further in the federal courts.
As I recall, the electoral college was primarily for logistical reasons— a number of people come to Washington, meet together, and the outcome of that meeting determines the next President, with no appeals because the people in the room are empowered to choose.
Communication happened at the speed of a horse, so if you need a decision quickly, you can’t have electors asking for instructions from their home government. For better or worse, the founders favored a definitive result in this case over a correct one.
That assumes that "only appeals to cities" is the only type of populist that we need protection from. The electoral college does nothing to protect against things like "only appeals to white people" or "only appeals to Christians" populists, which were not a big concern for America's founders or the much whiter and more Christian rural population today.
English and its ambiguous grammar... I mean when the founding fathers designed the electoral college, they wouldn't have been concerned about it taking power away from minority groups. In addition, the people in rural areas today who are so concerned about removing the electoral college giving more power to cities are not concerned about how the electoral college disenfranchises minorities because they are much less likely to be minorities or have many close friends who are than people in cities and suburbs so it's not something they'd normally think about.
> Why is cross regional appeal of any value, if these region don't make up even 10% of the combined US population.
Because those people control a large fraction of the country’s food supply and it would be a disaster if they decided to stop selling it to the rest of us.
You're probably being facetious, but I have heard some version of this argument before. It's akin to saying "give us what we want or we'll hold the country hostage."
In reality, free markets being a thing, this wouldn't happen. We can import from other countries and they need to sell their goods to live.
Do you want to eat unregulated Chinese mystery meat? Not that I agree with the sentiment of 'holding the urban areas hostage' but the US and the world need the agricultural production of the central US
California actually provides most of the produce (vegetables fruits and nuts) for the nation. The midwestern corn / soy / beef states are focused on producing bulk commodities for export to other countries.
More hyperbolic than facetious. It can’t be a good thing to disenfranchise the holders of your strategic resources en masse, and farmland was the easiest to point at.
You’re right that it’s extremely unlikely to get so bad that they get forcibly nationalized. However, my understanding is that market conditions are pretty bad for farmers right now, and have been for years. Any change that makes things worse for them will likely drive some to other lines of work and reduce overall production, driving food prices up.
This particular effect is probably extremely small in practice, but I felt the need to remind HN that not all value is produced in cities.
Why have those protections in the Presidency though who is the face of America. Low population states (more accurate than saying the EC favors small states really) already have an even more disproportional impact in the Senate where 40 Senators representing just 38.4M people can completely control the laws that get passed via filabuster (lowest 20 population states + 1 to prevent cloture). That's a little of 10% over the population that can in theory decide 100% what can get passed in the US. (Granted the 20 lowest population states do include a few democratic states, but it is largely consistently republican states)
Senators get elected at best about 70% to 30% in votes also so assume that only 70% of that 38.4M people actually 'control' the laws. "Completely control" is a bit of an exaggeration though, I think you mean not allow new laws to get passed. Having a small population with the ability to prevent new laws is less concerning to me than a populous majority with the ability to pass laws. New laws should have broad support and broad appeal before getting enacted. Due to the internet there is much more spread of culture and thought between states than ever before and I think we could see much more laws getting passed very soon if democrats and republicans, and the media, could stop acting like every single day is election day again and are contrarian to every single word that comes from the other party.
True they can only block but that's a lot of power just look at the whole last 4 years (plus a stolen SC seat) when Mitch was in charge in the Senate, it's a strong position. Also there's a lot of stuff that needs to pass just day to day that you can attach force things to be attached to if you have a solid anti cloture vote and are willing to use it.
I'm not so sure it's just the 24/7 life or death coverage that makes that happen though. In solidly red or blue seats the main threat to a senators seat is a challenge from the extreme of their party, left or right, which also pulls them further towards the extremes of their parties.
I don't think that was the core assumption. Recall that lack of representation in government was one of the reasons for the revolution that created the US.
Why do we only give disproportionate representation to people on the basis of their zip code?
Why not give disproportional representation to them on the basis of their race, or religion, or sexual orientation, or on whether or not they prefer big, or little-endian notation? Surely, it would only be appropriate that politicians should have cross-demographic appeal to win?
Every argument for why we should give extra influence to voters living in particular zip codes is just as valid, as any argument for giving extra influence to voters based on some other semi-arbitrary distinction.
Rural people have special, marginalized concerns, and are outnumbered by urban voters? Great. So do LGBT people, for example.
You don't get extra consideration for your vote for being a ______. Why should you get it on the basis of geography?
because the US is a union of quasi independent states. US government is built around that fact. The Senate, for example, represents each state equally Originally and by intent these were chosen by state legislatures. Similarly, originally and by intent, states governments play a large role in how Presidents get elected. Personally, I think the changes we've made have confused people about the basic theory of our constitutional system. People should be asking: why do we have states.
There is two methods that can be done by removing the electoral college that have vastly different results. First, without "removing" the electoral college, just deem that all electoral votes from a state are proportionate to that state's popular vote. So if a state is split 50-50 then electoral votes are split 50-50. The 2nd method is awarding all the state's electoral votes based on who wins the popular vote. This gives a vastly different outcome if only a few states implement this. It means even if you win even 80 percent of the votes of that state but lose the national popular vote then you still lose that state. I've seen more news about states leaning towards the 2nd option which is actually much worse than the electoral college in its current state.
> There is two methods that can be done by removing the electoral college that have vastly different results. First, without "removing" the electoral college, just deem that all electoral votes from a state are proportionate to that state's popular vote.
You can't do that with national effect by concerted state action with less than 100% of the states (you can simulate it by casting all votes for the candidate that would win by that rule with a bare makority, but that's just a chunky version of national popular vote.)
> I've seen more news about states leaning towards the 2nd option which is actually much worse than the electoral college in its current state.
It's worse if you care about the per-state vote and not the national outcome; it's better if you care about the outcome, since it produces the desired outcome of adopted by states with a majority of electoral votes (and the NPV only goes into effect in states adopting it when it has been adopted by states with a majority of electoral votes), while proportional allocation for electors needs universal adoption to implement it's effect.
What's the point of having "cross regional appeal" if you are appealing to virtually no one?
This isn't some discrimination thing. Those people can still vote. They just aren't given more representation than they deserve. That's the con of the electoral college.
Can you elaborate? You can't win while appealing to "virtually no one". In cases where the national popular vote didn't win - we're talking about a few % points of a difference.
What I mean is the states that are overrepresented based on their population. In EC, every state, regardless of population gets 3 electoral votes. Meaning low population states get more say than they should because they get electoral votes for free. This has caused elections in the past to be won because of this overrepresentation when they wouldn't have if the electoral college didn't exist.
A few percentage points is a big deal in an election where every vote is supposed to count. And this overrepresentation isn't a narrow margin like Brexit, we're talking about at least 5% more represented.
It has not produced that result. Instead it shifts the power from "most populated" (which at lease resembles SOME democratic values) to "most swing", which is totally arbitrary.
Define region and how the electoral college requires cross-regional appeal to win. You could technically win the electoral college with the 13 biggest states in the country, so I'm not seeing how the electoral college forces any kind of broad-based appeal.
Not the OP, but you could technically win the popular vote with those same 13 state's voters. When there is overwhelming support for one candidate the electoral college and popular vote would always be exactly the same. It actually only matters on a closely contest election and in that case the edge goes to the person with more broad support.
