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The US Redrawn As 50 Equally Populated States
First time accepted submitter Daniel_Stuckey writes "Bam! For anyone that's paid a speck of attention to the tedium of political redistricting, which happens while a state grows unevenly, (and must dynamically respond to density, electorate disparity, natural resources and ridgelines, etc.), this is straight out of some psychedelic dream. For Democrats, it could be straight out of a nightmare. That's because Freeman's map necessitates 50 equally populous United States. His methods for creating the map are explained thusly: 'The algorithm was seeded with the fifty largest cities. After that, manual changes took into account compact shapes, equal populations, metro areas divided by state lines, and drainage basins. In certain areas, divisions are based on census tract lines... The suggested names of the new states are taken mainly from geographical features.'"
Geography is beautiful. I made this my wallpaper yesterday.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
Where is Puerto Rico, USVI and others in this map?
IF you are going to remap stuff at least put them in as well.
Popular vote is the only method to accurately capture the desire of the entire population. It does NOT mean only the coasts will be visited since every vote counts those 10 democrats in Nebraska and the 5 republicans in Vermont now count for a national win.
Of course this is a much easier solution then just switching to popular vote...
This is correct. The whole indirect voting systems like the US Electoral College were created to deal with the logistical problems of giving every citizen the vote.
In this day and age, the only purpose of indirect elections is to give undue weight to rural areas.
No sig for the moment.
They're not states. One of his key design constraints was the Electoral College, and only states get to vote in the Electoral College.
Washington, DC gets included since it does have EC votes. That messes with the Congressional representation, but he didn't make than explicit design constraint.
Becaused centralized government sucks.
The purpose of the electoral college was to avoid having the most important office in the federal gov't be victim to popular fervor. In a direct election, radicals can be too easily elected (see tea party). This system prevents that in theory (along with the voting system of the electors: in seperate areas. This prevented one guy from giving a moving speech and changing the minds of everyone.)
I forgot to add my example for illustration. Imagine being in New Hampshire now where the gun laws are fairly liberal and getting licensed to own firearms is generally a non-issue, to now being a member of my state, Massachusetts, where the local sheriff can deny your license for just any old reason, up to including he doesn't like your haircut. I'm sure there wouldn't be riots, protests, demonstrations, and just a general displeasure over that one issue in one area alone. Now multiple that buy thousands of areas and thousands of issues. Want a few more: income tax, property tax, and sales tax.
Right, because the US government has *always* being in hands of responsible adults...
No sig for the moment.
Not to nitpick (so, here comes the nitpicking), but he quite clearly stated this wasn't a serious proposal...
The idea here was more about raising the issue and making people think about it in a different light.
The Digital Sorceress
Tyranny of the majority is the reason to avoid a republic and a pure popular vote. That is to say, people need adult supervision, and there's a reason we have a republic instead of a democracy.
Uhm. Tyranny of the majority is a reason to avoid pure democracies.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I've always loved these thought experiments, carving up the world into new and improved political alignments. This stemmed from encountering C. Etzel Pearcy's proposed 38 State map published in the 1975 People's Almanac; his notions of a better functioning nation arising from a more equitable distribution of state alignments really had an impact on me, growing up as I did on the mostly barren east side of Oregon, and listening to my elders constantly complaining about getting shafted via taxes by the moneygrubbers in Portland/Salem/Eugene. The Almanac also featured another new map of the US, with 22 states I think; can't find any info about it at the moment though.
Also an interesting read was Joel Garreau's book The Nine Nations of North America, which was more about the cultural mass regions that make up the continent.
This assumes people from different parts of the country are interchangable and are going to be happy no matter how you group them. The problem is that isn't the case; you think things are politically polarized now, a plan like this would be even worse.
You think the people in Highway are going to be happy being governed by politicians in Oregon that doesn't really care what's going on in a set of islands hundreds of miles away because they massively outnumber them don't need their votes anyways? You think the people in Montana and Idaho are gonna be happy being controlled by the busybody Mormons in Utah? And Shiprock is probably going to have an actual shooting war when Lubbock and Abilene figure out that Austin is going to dominate them electorally.
Then why is the USA the only country using indirect elections? Every other modern country that used it at some point has switched to direct elections.
Then why is it that you can't even do a basic wikipedia search for indirect elections to realize that you don't know what you're talking about?
Germany, Italy, Estonia, Latvia and Hungary all use indirect elections...
There are currently 33 countries, including the UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland and India that all use the Westminster system, which is considered to be an indirect election because you vote for a party and if it's that party gets the majority, or the leader of one party has the support of more than 51% of the Members of Parliament (MPs), that leader becomes the head of government.
You don't vote directly for the head of government in those systems and, unless you're lucky, you generally have to vote for an MP that you would rather not vote for to see your party have the majority. Sometimes, it's the opposite and you have to vote for a party you don't want to see the leader as head of government just so you can have the local MP you want to see in parliament elected.
So, which modern countries were you talking about that have all switched to direct elections at some point for their head of government?
(Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indirect_election / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_election / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westminster_system)
This speaks to doing away with winner-take-all rules that many states have. I can pretty much guarantee that people living in central California have little in common with people living in downtown San Francisco, ideologically speaking. So why should the latter get to speak for the former? Yet in California, all electoral votes have been magically switched leading people to think the whole of California is liberal. I've been saying this for the past 20 years that the political divide in this country is not about Republican vs. Democrat. It's much more about ruralite vs. urbanite. When you look at election results broken down by county instead of by state, you see a much different picture. Urban districts generally vote liberal Democrat while rural districts vote conservative Republican. Party ideology aside, people in rural areas have vastly different priorities than those who live in cities. People who live in cities often are so full of themselves that they think only they know what's good for city dwellers as well as those who live in the country and they tend to impose legislation without having the slightest bit of experience living in the country.
That's incorrect. The president of Germany is elected by the Federal Convention, which is made up of all members of the German Federal Diet (Deutscher Bundestag, elected by proportional representation every four years) plus the same number of representatives elected by the states' parliaments. Therefore, half of the result is determined by indirect vote, and the other half by double indirect votes (populace votes for representatives in the state parliament, those vote for representatives in the Federal Convention, and that in turn votes for the president). There is however, no popular vote at all for the president, the elections for the president don't coincide with any federal or state elections. Few people really care, because the president usually has a much lower profile than the chancellor..
Of course they do. See Wyoming- a single person's vote in Wyoming is worth 3/563000 =5.32e-6 of an electoral vote (based on 2012 census data). A vote in California is worth 55/37200000= 1.47e-6 votes. A person in Wyoming is worth 4 times as much. That's completely unfair.
Now historically it makes sense- it dates back to right post revolution where we were really 13 nations who decided to band together into 1, and it was a compromise to get the small states to go along with it. It stopped making sense when we became a real nation beyond point of breakup- basically after the civil war it was outdated. Now, due to geography its a system that's totally unfair.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Rural areas don't have undue weight - how many rural states does it take to equal one OH, NY, FL, TX or CA? Electorally those states are monsters that decide who will be President - the rural areas do not have undue weight.
Those states have far more electoral votes because they have far higher populations. Votes in less-populated states have slightly greater weight than votes in states with higher populations. A state with a population of two million that has two representatives (numbers rounded to make the math easier) gets four electoral votes, or one per 500,000 people. A state with a population of 20 million and 20 representatives gets 22 electoral votes, or one per 900,000 people.
The whole indirect voting systems like the US Electoral College were created to deal with the logistical problems of giving every citizen the vote.
Uh, no.
We have the electoral college because we live in a federated representational republic, not a democracy. The individual citizens of the United States don't get a vote for president. Our states do. We only get a vote to tell our state government who we would prefer they vote for. And, they don't even need to listen to us (and have in the past chosen to vote against the will of the people)!
In this day and age, the only purpose of indirect elections is to give undue weight to rural areas.
In this day and age, we forget that Massachusetts and New York and Virginia, etc, saw themselves basically as sovereign nations, only joining together in that pesky federal government business to give them a united front in dealing with the old European powers. We forget, in this era of "excuse anything with the Commerce Clause", that the vast majority of the constitution took great pains to refer to the states as such, rather than as mere political subdivisions of the whole.
You also forget that before that whole "one man, one vote", having a voice in government depended solely on how much land you owned. Urbanites didn't give farmers more of a voice out of charity, but rather, the large landowners graciously allowed the unlanded to have a voice at all.
Has the time come when we should realign our political system with modern perceptions? Or should we respect that we have such an archaic system for damned good historical reasons?
Personally, I think the recent gun ownership debate has brought exactly this issue to the center of attention - We have urban yuppies who've created their own violent crimes hell, trying to take guns away from rural areas with almost no violent crime. Perhaps the Founding Fathers understood something about us that we have forgotten.
Slavery and the balance between slave and free states. The author of the article has no sense of US history, which is sad and scary. Logically it makes no sense to lump Hawaii with a west coast area due to isolation and different climate. Lumping Alaska with Rainer makes no sense either for the same reason. There is more to geography than human population. Remember, the "Geo" in geography means "Earth". The physical features of the planet, politics, and limitations of technology often trump an idealization of reality. So over all I give the article a big "meh". It's too simplistic to be interesting.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Have you any idea how many US cities and counties, let alone states, have Native American names already? Alaska (through Russian), Arizona (through Spanish), Hawaii, Idaho (disputed), Illinois (through French), Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan (through French), Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, Wisconsin, and Wyoming are all derived from Native American words in some form or another. That's almost 40% of the states.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
OK, I'll bit. %0 states and shades of gray. You know where I going with this, right?
Seriously, this is the main problem, I think. There are only two parties and they are almost identical. The discussions can be compared to talking if Pepsi or Coke is better, but leaving out all the other drinks.
This isn't a republic democracy. It is a farce that holds up an image as if you have anything to say.
In the past there were people who were not happy with the way their government was running things, so they threw them out and made a new one according to the best ability and the situation they had at that moment.
here is no reason not to do that again. Saying "But they did a great job 200+ years ago." is like saying "But we are a kingdom and that went great fr more then 200 years."
In many parts of the world you have different shades of grey and even though this will cause different issues, it is great to have a voice.
In Belgium somebody said, when we were having problems getting together a government for more then a year, "It would be easier if we had only two parties like in the US." My answer was that it would be easier, but it should just be easy. It should be just.
How do you vote if you are pro gun and pro gay rights? Are you sure that the person you vote for will vote for a president who has the same ideas? Does the party you vote for give you that option? Does that party have any chance of ever being part of a government?
In Europe there are people from the Pirate Party who have a seat in governments. There are people from all over the place representing the people.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The purpose of the electoral college was to avoid having the most important office in the federal gov't be victim to popular fervor. In a direct election, radicals can be too easily elected (see tea party). This system prevents that in theory (along with the voting system of the electors: in seperate areas. This prevented one guy from giving a moving speech and changing the minds of everyone.)
The Electoral College was the result of a political compromise at the 1787 Constitutional Convention because the participants couldn't make up their minds how the President should be selected. Just about every possible method was suggested by one participant or another, and the Electoral College was just the one that happened to pass.
We can respect the work of the Founding Fathers without treating them as infallible gods. In fact, refusing to think for ourselves and instead treating their work as a kind of Holy Scripture is completely against the Enlightenment values that they stood for.
There's the British system: The people vote, someone emerges on top, and none of us can figure out exactly what goes on in between.
Do you even know why there is a Senate? The Senate's obstruction is deliberate. The Senate is the chamber where bad bills which would become bad laws are supposed to die. It may seem like it "prevent things from getting done" but that's why it's there, because it is far better than the knee-jerk nonsense of two-year term political hacks who would enact virtually any law just so something "can be seen to be done" before their next election season.
There is a reason that our Republic has 'undemocratic' elements. Pure democracy fails, fails quickly, and terrifyingly transitions through ochlocracy to some form of autocracy. This has been understood and demonstrated since antiquity (see Polybius et al), and it is why our founders were wise enough to establish a more complex, resilient, synthetic system of government.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Then why is the USA the only country using indirect elections?
While I think the electoral college is pretty nutty, in defense of the USA, they're not alone in their use of indirect elections.
Virtually every jurisdiction using the Westminster Parliamentary System (mostly Commonwealth countries like the Canada, Australia, the UK etc.) use indirect elections.
A riding ('district') elects a Member of Parliament (MP) who heads off to the legislature. The party with the most number of MPs form government, and the leader of that party becomes Prime Minister. So in that sense, the PM is 'indirectly elected.'
The opposite of "tyranny of the majority" is not "tyranny of the minority". The problem you complain about does not result from a failure of democratic process, it is due to the monopoly enjoyed jointly by the two-party system. The electoral college does not contribute to that, it is victimized by it.
DC should never have been given EC votes; it should have (mostly) been given back to Maryland. The people mostly don't live in the key Federal building areas, and so the idiotic idea of DC statehood wouldn't matter - they'd be citizens of Maryland.
To the founders, the "Senate problem" was a solution, not a problem. Proportional representation was not the ultimate goal; it was a goal that needed to be tempered. The Senate does that.
"The Founders" weren't one unified body. The bicameral system was a compromise between large-state representatives who wanted proportional representation by population, and small-state representatives who wanted all states to have an equal vote.
The people we usually think of as "Founding Fathers" – most notably James Madison and Alexander Hamilton – wanted proportional representation and weren't too thrilled about the Senate, though they were willing to accept it to avoid scuttling the whole enterprise. According to Wikipedia, "Madison argued that a conspiracy of large states against the small states was unrealistic as the large states were so different from each other. Hamilton argued that the states were artificial entities made up of individuals, and accused small state representatives of wanting power, not liberty." The people who were gung-ho for an equal representation Senate were much more marginal figures, such as Gunning Bedford, Jr.
The key insight of the US federal structure as originally embodied in the Constitution was that every constituency deserves a hearing - the people are represented in the House, the states are represented in the Senate, and the President is elected by whatever means the States appoint - they can be more or less democratic in the selection of electors. A necessary consequence of the first-past-the-post system with specific electoral districts used in the US is that it is designed to produce a two-party state. Third parties have to influence one of them. Yes, third parties matter less here. On the other hand, it relentlessly forces both parties' platforms to the center of the electorate, strongly curbing radical influence.
I agree with some posters that this lacks a sense of history and an appreciation of geography.
It also deeply lacks a sense of culture. There are combined areas with no common culture and indeed cultural opposition across geography. This re-Balkanization, so to speak, might as well offer the opportunity to dismantle the United States -- which is, in all ways except language, as culturally distinct as most of Europe.
It's true that the Electoral College somewhat overrepresents small rural states. This is because each state's electoral votes is equal to the size of its Congressional delegation, and all states have 2 Senators regardless of size. (Also, the smallest states still have 1 Representative, no matter how minuscule their population.)
But that problem really doesn't come up too often. It did in 2000, to be sure, but in every other instance in the past century, the Electoral College results had the same winner as the popular vote results. A much more serious issue is that the Electoral College gives rise to the phenomenon of "swing states."
Defenders of the Electoral College often claim that if it was abolished, then Presidential candidates would only bother campaigning in the big states and ignore everyone else. But under the current situation, we have an even worse situation: the campaigns are largely restricted to a handful of states that happen to be almost evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. That means that if you live in New York or California or Texas, you'll be essentially ignored through the whole Presidential campaign. On the other hand, if you live in Ohio, there is no end to the amount of pandering the parties will do to get your vote. The current situation results in a vast majority of the American people being written off as irrelevant to a Presidential campaign! This is one way we wind up with crappy policy like ethanol subsidies: they play really well in Midwestern swing states, so no one with Presidential aspirations will dare to challenge them.
It makes it hard for my voter apathy party to get a place at the table.
Idaho? Youdaho!
There are only two parties and they are almost identical
Which is to say: the American Constitution is structured in such a way that the only way to increase your party's strength is to drive relentlessly to the center of the electorate. It is not without its problems, but it also curbs radical notions - the US has had Progressives and Know-Nothings, but very few Communists or Brownshirts.
I think it's possible to accept that 1) there are damned good historical reasons and 2) that those historical reasons no longer apply and the system should change. Your post has brings some interesting historical facts, but history only explain problems; it doesn't justify them.
Wyoming has a population of 576 thousand. California has a population of 38 million.
It should take 65 wyomings to out vote one California. Instead, it takes nineteen.
Germany, Italy, Estonia, Latvia and Hungary all use indirect elections...
However, what "indirect" means in the elections of these countries is quite different from what it means in the US electoral system...
You should really get a basic clue about electoral systems first before even starting to compare apples with bananas.
The GP is wrong though. Of all the offices that we have, it's just the President where we don't directly vote. Ever since the early 20th century when the constitution was changed to require the direct election of Senators we've been more democracy than republic.
If you want to be technical about it, we're a democratic-republic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_republic
So you're saying that he should either love it or leave it? That's kind of a false dichotomy. Maybe he thinks that California is the best state there is, but despite this it still has some massive problems. That's pretty much how I feel about California.
Do you always get offended when people try to improve their governments?
Many countries, not just the U.S.A., have provisions that legislation must be passed by both a majority of population and a majority of geography. Hence congress allocated by population, but each state has two senators, whether it's Wyoming or California.
Canada doesn't. Our Senate is appointed by population (by regions on paper, but by population in practice), so Ontario has the most MPs and the most senators. Here in B.C. we have similar issues: the vast majority of the population live in the southwestern corner of the province, but the happening industry is in the northeast, which feels more kinship with neighbouring Alberta. Including using the same time zone.
We've also looked at proportional representation in B.C., but that didn't get off the ground. I would have welcomed it.
...laura
We have the electoral college because we live in a federated representational republic, not a democracy
You seem to think that this is a good thing.
I certainly do.
It bothers the crap out of me to see uninformed people voting for their representatives. To see them voting on actual decisions? No quicker way of destroying the country that I can think of.
Before I'm accused of defining "uninformed" as "believes differently than I do," I'll just point out that I follow my own guidelines, and unless I've taken the time to research the issues and all of the candidates running for a particular office meticulously, I don't cast a vote. Which generally means that I rarely vote, and when I do I leave most of the ballot empty, voting only for those offices for which I've taken the time to study every candidate and the relevant issues. I refuse to potentially cancel out the vote of a more informed citizen.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
The antebellum South called, it wants you back. Seriously, this issue was settled at Appomatox Court House in 1865.
Seriously, has it? Tell that to the ten times since 1872 (I won't count 1872 since Greely died between voting day and the meeting of the electoral college) we have seen "faithless" electors. Great effort goes into choosing people extremely unlikely to vote against the will of the people of their state, but it still happens.
And what does Appomattox have to do with this? Not talking about secession, but the way the electoral college works today. In the present, modern United States of 2013. You and I don't get a vote. We get to voice an opinion, that our state's electors may accept or may disregard as they see fit. Simple as that.
The president of Germany is elected by the Federal Convention, which is made up of
The president of germany has almost no power at all. He acts as a representative and while theoretically a law has to be signed by him to be valid - the most he can do is refuse to sign a law for some time, but even that is questionable.
The position was completely guttet after Hitler missused the power it held (starting wars, ordering people killed, enemies of the state,... sounding familiar?).
So comparing the election of a public figure head with literally and intentionally no power to the most powerfull american is quite a bit of a stretch.
I haven't run the numbers, but the electoral college favors less populous states by guaranteeing a minimum of 3 electoral votes. California has 66 times the population of Wyoming but only 18 times the number of electoral votes. My initial guess would be that the voters in rural Western states (Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas, Idaho, etc) would lose clout in this scheme, and those are all Republican strongholds.
However, the 10 least populous states (+DC) are Wyoming (R), Vermont (D), DC (D), North Dakota (R), Alaska (R),
South Dakota (R), Delaware (D), Montana (R), Rhode Island (D), and New Hampshire (swing)
So that's a 50-50 split pretty much: both parties benefit from the electoral college.
The top 10 states are California (D), Texas (R), New York (D), Florida (swing), Illinois (D), Pennsylvania (swing), Ohio (swing), Georgia (R), Michigan (D?), and North Carolina (swing?). So 4 D, 2 R, and 4 swing states (depending on how you define them): so maybe the Dems suffer a bit from the electoral college at this end of the spectrum.
The hard question is what happens when you split these states up: Atlanta freed from the rest of Georgia goes blue, but the middle of Pennsylvania goes red without Philly and Pittsburgh, etc. So maybe the article is right that when you run the numbers it disadvantages Democrats, but I'd be interested to see the analysis because I don't understand how you come to the conclusion that this favors Republicans without it.
(I know this isn't a serious proposal so apologies for geeking out over it. :)
Just because many people use it incorrectly does not make that usage correct.
http://astutehosting.com/
Yeah lol, if we redraw the statelines after each presidential election like the article suggests, then the gerrymandering will get out of control. We'll have the ugliest states you've ever seen in your life.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I take it you don't understand what a democratic republic is. Those people you're referring to aren't politicians, they're appointed to carry out the policies that we voted for when we voted for the President and the congress. Apart from the secretaries, most of them work through multiple administrations and carry out the priorities of the President of the time.
It was not designed to produce a two-party state. There's a great deal of evidence (for example, Federalist Paper #10) that many of the designers of the Constitution were, in fact, trying to create a non-partisan system. Unfortunately, with few real-world examples to take lessons from, they did not see how the system they were designing would inevitably lead to a two-party state.
It's no accident that most democracies to be founded after the United States have chosen not to directly copy its system of government.
It will be a win-win for everybody: socialists, which tend to mooch off more densely populated areas, will get to play socialism, and the rest of us will be free from their control.
Absolutely false. Urban centers tend to support people in rural areas, and this is certainly true in New York where the city pays out more in taxes than it gets back in services. This also occurs at the national level. So you, libman, are a direct beneficiary of my tax dollars. Now I don't mind supporting your welfare benefits, but please don't pretend you aren't leeching off me while you're sponging off me.
Even in the mid 19th century Walter Bagehot in his great defence of the Westminster system; The English Constitution, saw the US electoral college as a failed institution that had never really fulfilled its intended function.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
A man arrives at Passport Control at Athens airport.
"Nationality?" asks the immigration officer.
"German," he replies.
"Occupation?"
"No, just here for a few days."
No, a better idea is to follow the 38 States proposal made in the 70s (but with a little updating since there's been some big demographic changes since then). The NYC metro area should indeed be a separate state, but this holds for every metro area. Basically, no metro area should ever cross a state line, whether it's NYC, Chicago/Milwaukee, Portland, or Louisville. After this, the state boundaries should be drawn to keep local cultures together and minimize political infighting.
In the US, tt's completely fair and working as designed.
Jefferson and Madison and a few of the others were smart men with uncommonly noble intentions, however it is naive to forget that they were dealing with the reality of politics of their day, and that the politics they had to deal with were often as bad or worse than the politics we have to deal with today.
Might I remind you that the Three-Fifths Compromise was also part of the "completely fair and working as designed" system put in place in the Constitution. Slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person when counting up population for the House of Representatives. It was working as designed, right up until two-percent of the entire US population had to be killed in the Civil War to get it repealed.
Both the Three-Fifths Compromise and the Electoral College are the result of SLAVERY-POLITICS. They were not some noble and perfect system for better government, they were designed and selected for the purpose of balancing the political power of Slave-States vs Free-States.
The Constitution had to be ratified by the petty politicians of the various states, politicians who first and foremost were concerned with their own political power and their own political agendas. The Three-Fifths Compromise and the Electoral College are nothing more than arbitrary bullshit political compromises catering to Slave-politics, designed to give pro-slavery and anti-slavery political forces equal political power, so that neither side would reject and kill off the Constitution.
As for Federalist 10, it has no relevance to the existing Electoral College. Federalist 10 would only be relevant if you were to propose electing unpledged electors. (The positive or negative value of electing unpledged electors to the Electoral College may be an interesting theoretical exorcise, however I'm sure you'll agree that modern Elector-elections would immediately devolve into partisan politics.)
However that still fails to address the central criticism being leveled at the existing Electoral College. There is absolutely nothing in Federalist 10 to justify wildly disproportionate representation of voters. A Wyoming voter gets more than four times the representation as a California voter, and a Vermont voter gets more than three times the representation as a Texas voter. That does nothing to combat factors or any "tyranny of the majority". That merely gives arbitrary factions disproportionate power and replaces any possible "tyranny of the majority" with a "tyranny of an arbitrarily overrepresented minority".
It's to prevent one group of "interests" or "factions" as Madison put it, from squashing the liberties of others.
With pledged Electors, the Electoral College has zero connection to Federalist 10 and does exactly zero to counter "interests" or "factions" from squashing the liberties of others. And with the grossly disproportionate representation in the Electoral College it greatly magnifies that problem. Our Electoral College now empowers arbitrary minority "interests" or "factions" to squash the liberties of the majority. Our Electoral College completely subverts the point of Federalist 10.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
And a person in a swing state is worth exponentially more so than either Californians or Wyomingites. So what?
Uhhhh.... yeah..... there's two main parts to the argument why the Electoral College is crap. Are you attempting to refute the "unequal representation" flaw in the Electoral College by citing that the Electoral College is ALSO flawed for lumping votes into state-wide blocks?
Citing the second flaw in the system in no way refutes the first flaw. And arguing that there's two problems rather than one is hardly an argument in defense of the Electoral College.
Our system is designed to protect minority interests against mob mentality. I'd say that's a virtue.
Parts of our system were designed for that purpose. However the Three Fifths Compromise and the Electoral College were designed to balance the political influence of pro-slavery politics against anti-slavery politics. The Constitution required ratification from the various politicians of the various states, and one of the prime political calculations they were doing was the math on how many votes pro-slavery and anti-slavery interests were going to get in electing the president.
There is absolutely nothing in our Electoral College system that does anything to "protect minority interests against mob mentality". What our electoral College system does is (1) arbitrarily give some people more than four times as much vote as others which merely empowering an arbitrary minority-mob to trample legitimate majority interests, and (2) wildly empower fringe interests in randomly-selected "swing states" to dominate, distort, and hold hostage national politics.
Life isn't fair. It never will be
Agreed. However when you find a lump of shit in your soup, it's still a good idea to throw it out and make new soup. The new soup won't be perfect... it will still have specks of dust and dirt.... possibly even microscopic specs of feces.... but that is hardly an argument sit there and keep eating soup with a big fat turd in it.
The Electoral College is a turd with no redeeming qualities. (Unless you happen to live in Wyoming or Vermont, and you selfishly consider it a "redeeming quality" the Electoral College gives you more than three times the representation as a Californian or a Texan.)
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
The problem with the premise (and I recognize it's not serious) is that it utterly ignores the entire basis of the foundation of the United States.
It's understandable when people from other countries don't "get it". It's sad/pathetic (and I'm really talking about the comments here) when people ostensibly FROM this country don't understand the basic premises of their own history.
"The electoral system overrepresents the least-populated states". Yes, that is PRECISELY the point.
The United States is not a country like most others, in which case the subdivisions are relatively-arbitrary political/administrative districts, counties, oblasts, whatever.
The separate states are (or were) SOVEREIGN states, with a constitutionally-enforced protection of that sovereignty. The US Federal government is only allowed to act in very narrowly-defined areas that were mutually agreed by the original colonies to be of jurisdictional benefit - defense, foreign policy, etc.*
It's worth saying again: the States are NOT 'districts' of the US in the familiar sense that most countries have. For example, the US Federal government passes few laws that directly impact citizens. By far, the majority of laws applicable to people directly in the US are state laws and local (city) ordinances. The US Fed doesn't set national speed limits, for example; they set a limit and tell the states to comply or they won't get their Federal highway maintenance dollars.
The union of the Colonies was specifically predicated on a level of balance that allows them a voice disproportional to population.
One might further point out that Congress ITSELF has worked to make it less representative. Note that in the first Congress, the House was approximately 62 members for a colonial population in 1790 of 3.8 million. Proportionally, this would mean the House today would be over 5000 members. Remember, that this likewise would impact the number of electoral votes in play, and pretty much eliminate the 'senator' anti-populist bias.
*Granted, the Constitution is pretty nearly in tatters, the remaining shreds filthy with the wipings of modern administrations and congresses who have actively colluded to evade and sap both the letter and spirit of the original framers.
-Styopa
That's because you're trying to boil everything down to only 2 "sides", as if there's only two kinds of people in this country, "liberals" and "conservatives", which is total bullshit. These two "sides" are really just shaky alliances based on a bunch of different issues that frequently don't have that much to do with each other. For instance, Democrat voters in the Northeast are nothing like Democrat voters in San Francisco. The SF voters probably care about issues like gay marriage, gay rights, maybe environmentalism, etc. The voters in the Northeast care about issues relating to unions. The Democrats usually carry the northeast and other rust belt states because they're aligned with unions. There are no unions in California, and voters there don't care about that. Similarly, Republican voters in Alabama are not the same as Republican voters in Arizona or Montana. The voters in the Bible belt states care about religion, and the Republican party panders to that vote. The voters in Western states don't care that much about religion (at least not from their legislators or government), they tend to be of a libertarian bent and want smaller government, and the Republicans pander to that as well. If, for instance, we were to break the country up into 10 new, smaller countries, you'd quickly find the political landscape changing, as different issues become important in different regions (and other issues become totally settled). A country that encompassed only the Bible Belt states wouldn't have abortion as an issue any more, because they'd probably just ban it and be done with it, so they'd move on to other issues for political parties to distinguish themselves on.
The number of states that's optimal is highly debateable. Obviously, 1 is too few, and 1,000,000 is too many. I disagree that we need more states; more states equals more administrative overhead. Of course, you don't want too few states, because, as you point out, the larger your administrative region becomes, the more internal division there is, and that means more infighting (like people in Illinois fighting over whether there should be strict gun-control laws or not--the city dwellers typically want guns banned or otherwise strict measures, while rural dwellers usually want the opposite, so a state that groups together two disparate groups of people will have infighting over issues like this). But if you make states too small, then you end up with more government overall (more spending on government necessary per capita), plus you get lower efficiency because now you have to deal with all kinds of cross-state issues for all kinds of things like roadbuilding and trade and other issues. Look at all the problems we have now with metro areas that span state lines: you get people living on one side because income taxes are lower there, and then buying stuff on the other side because sales taxes are lower or nonexistent there. Can you imagine the mess if everyone lived near 3 other states? All the states would be fighting each other about how "unfair" it is that people can take advantage of different tax rates in different states. While it's certainly valid to pack up and move to a different state because you don't like the taxation in your own state, just having people drive to a neighboring state to take advantage of lower taxes there doesn't actually solve any problems (actually, it screws over the people who can't afford cars and are stuck staying there and paying the higher taxes at local stores, and because of their lower socioeconomic status don't have a way of getting legislators to fix things for them).