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Slashdot Asks: Should The US Abolish The Electoral College?
Last night as votes were still being counted, statistician and editor-in-chief for FiveThirtyEight Nate Silver pointed out that while Donald Trump has been elected president of the United States, "it's possible, perhaps even likely, that [Hillary Clinton] will eventually win the popular vote as more votes come in from California." We now know that she has indeed won the popular vote by a slim margin. American journalist Carl Bialik adds via Silver's blog: Hillary Clinton could still conceivably win the election -- or she could lose the national popular vote. But since both outcomes look unlikely, we should start preparing ourselves for the possibility of the second split between the national popular vote and the electoral vote in the last five presidential elections. A coalition of 11 sates with 165 electoral votes between them has agreed to an interstate compact that, once signed by states with a combined 270 or more electoral votes, would bind their electors to vote for the winner of the national popular vote -- in effect ending the Electoral College. New York just joined this week. It wasn't enough to affect this election, but maybe today's result will spur more states to join. The results of this election echo the 2000 results, where Democrat Al Gore narrowly won the popular vote, but George W. Bush won the White House. It brings into question whether or not the Electoral College should be abolished in favor of the popular vote. As a refresher, the Electoral College is comprised of electors that cast their votes for president. Each state has a set number of electors that is based on the state's population -- the candidate who wins the state's popular vote gets those electors. Technically, on Election Day, the American people are electing the electors who elect the president. The New York Times has a lengthy article describing how the Electoral College works, which you can view here.
The operators of /. are unhappy about the results of the election, so the system is broken.
New York and California do not get to dictate who is president of the entire country.
We are the United States.
A republic. And as such, the votes need to be weighted to protect the rights of the states and the people in them.
Mob rule is the worst form of government.
Work Safe Porn
If State A has the worst voter fraud in the country, then the effects of said fraud are limited within their borders. If there is no electoral college, then the effects of fraudulent votes in State A for Candidate X is that they will now start cancelling out votes for Candidate Y in other states. LBJ would have loved nothing more than to get rid of the electoral college. Look at Virginia allowing felons to vote. Getting rid of the electoral college is a fool's errand.
The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy
The operators of /. are unhappy about the results of the election, so the system is broken.
Indeed.
The Democrats moved $60 mil from down-ballot elections to Hillary to torpedo Bernie(*), gave the media questions to grill trump, got debate questions ahead of time, got to vet media articles before they were published, hired protestors to shut down a rally and start fights, colluded with PACs, published oversampled and biased polls, tried to frame Julian Assange.
The electoral college is unfair!!
(*) Are the democrats bemoaning that R's control both houses? Now we know why!
The electoral college ensures that politicians ignore 90% of the country and focus on only the few swing states.
Rather than NY being dominated by a coalition of smaller states with less total population? That protects individual and minority rights?
By all means look at a map of red vs. blue. But don't look at a regular map; look at a cartogram where the size of a state is scaled by population rather than physical area. Then let's talk about small dominating big; it's not the square footage you live in that matters, it's the say you have in your own government.
And getting rid of the electoral college doesn't mean we're not a Republic any more. Even if your defintion of "Republic" is "small states have disproportionate power". Small states have that in the Senate.
Anyhow, I've read Federalist no 10, and it sound convincing but it's basically hooey. The idea is that the complicated way the Constitution set things up would prevent the emergence of political parties. That didn't work as planned. Although really the plan was to preserve slavery by giving slaveholding interests more political power. Remember there used to be property requirements for voting. So this really wasn't about protecting minorities at all; Federalist no 10 was just a smokescreen for a compromise that divided power between wealthy people in the North and wealthy people in the South. To sweeten the deal further for Southerners slaves counted as 3/5 of a person.
So it's not really about protecting the little guy; it's about letting the powerful prey upon the less powerful.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Why do we level the playing field between rural and urban, but not along any other axes? There are plenty of demographics that are disenfranchised by their relative size, and they would gain important safeguards against oppression by having a louder voice. But we don't, for example, count black people's votes eight times to put them on a level playing field with whites. The electoral college doesn't make the whole system more fair, it just tips the scale in one particular direction.
Also, the idea that if you don't like a state you can just move is meaningless in this case -- we're talking about the results of a federal election. You can't move anywhere to escape those, so that suggestion doesn't weigh on electoral college considerations.
We live in a Republic, not a democracy. The Electoral College does serve a purpose, one that you disagree with, but it still serves a purpose. The GP outlines it very nicely and in unbiased terms.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Every state (except Maine and Nebraska) wants to give the majority of its population the largest voice possible. That's great. This is why the plurality popular vote in a state gets all the electoral college votes.
But wait... what about the voice of the people who are not part of each state's plurality? They are effectively silenced. No good. And these silenced votes represent different proportions in different states; they range from low in deep-red/deep-blue states to high (perhaps even a majority) in swing states.
Another problem with the EC is that swing states effectively decide each election. The candidates don't visit the vast majority of the states because they have practically guaranteed outcomes. The candidates don't get the opportunity to listen to those citizens. Promises are made to the citizens of swing states, but rarely in deep red/blue states.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Could it be tweaked? Sure, I would like to see all the states' electoral votes be proportioned to the candidates by the popular vote within each state.
I think this would undermine the remaining purpose of the electoral system. In this fashion you will essentially have a popular vote, quantized in a funny way. Giving these small states 3 electoral votes and winner-take-all gives them more power than they would have had otherwise. It creates for some inversions, but because the states are low population, it's not so significant that an overwhelming majority is defeated by a powerful minority, it has always been near split.
But really it is there for a REASON. You are a citizen of your state first, and then a citizen of the United States.
Very few people identify this way in the modern age. I've been a citizen of over half a dozen states. I don't even consider it anymore, I move where the jobs are, wherever the jobs are. I am an American first. The one thing I've noticed about state & local governments is that they're the most corrupt, backwards institutions in America, highly subject to cliques and backroom dealing, mostly for sale to the local businessman. Honestly I think our Federation outlived its usefulness long ago. Most of the problems and bullshit fights we see are about state politicians losing some power for corruption and graft based on federal policies. Some states are better than others, but Texas is pretty shitty.
The states are the unit of power in the US. A citizen in Maine has vastly different needs often, than someone in Wyoming, than in Louisiana, than northern NY.
This we can agree on, it is the best reason for states to exist and to retain some autonomy at their level. Which is not to say that I agree that they should continue to function wholly outside of federal control and influence as they often do now, but there is a purpose to their existence.
I don't like that potentially voters in the Electoral College could vote how they want instead of how their state laws say
This is dangerous and scary but doesn't happen much. The original purpose was that this group of intelligentsia would decide that the rubes didn't know what they were doing, that they very blatantly WOULD go against the popular vote. In this case, almost certainly they wouldn't have chosen Trump... he is almost the definition of what the EC was designed to prevent. It seems inconceivable in this day that they'd go against the grain, I would feel better if it were the actual law that they had to (in all states), but I suspect there will be no change until the day it happens.
There was a reason we had it. Several actually.
1 travel time of a day or more to the polls for a significant chunk of eligible voters (and outside information getting to the voters was also greatly slowed)
2 extremely limited current information on political issues and events for the average citizens (not a lot in the way of "informed voters")
3 because of (2), many of the politicians and people running the government were sincerely worried about what would happen if the election became a popularity contest among the dumb citizens and a truly bad person was elected president of the country (some would argue we had that happen last night, others would argue it was inevitable given the available options...)
4 the college gave the final say to a smaller handful of more politically-informed people (the electorate) that could, in the event of insanity by the "dumb public", choose the sane option, overruling the popular vote.
The reasons for the college have long since disappeared. The best reason we have at this point to continue using the college is that we've been using it since forever and we're not comfortable with change, even when it's for the better.
The whole "first past the post" scheme itself has problems also, and IMHO should be ditched while we're at it. CGPgrey has a great explanation of this issue and how to fix it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... It doesn't completely fix all the issues, fixes several problems, improves some of the remaining issues, and doesn't cause any new problems. Please watch this before responding, I promise you'll enjoy it if you're even remotely interested in the voting process, even if you don't end up agreeing with it by the end,
There is one thing I'd like to clear up that I think a lot of people miss when this discussion comes up. It's actually a point toward KEEPING the college. Just because I have an opinion doesn't mean I'm going to blindly ignore opposing reasons, and here's a good one anyone thinking about this needs to consider. Everyone games the college. In a political race, they'll do anything they can (legally, or that they can get away with) to help their candidate win. I'm OK with them doing everything they can within the rules to win. States with lower electoral votes get mostly ignored in races like this. States that have a history of voting very strongly in one direction also get ignored by both candidates. (one says "I have it in the bag, why waste my time here?", the other says "I'll never win these, why waste my time here?") So this WILL tend to create a lopsided popular vote vs electoral vote. Campaigning would be done VERY differently if we went strictly by popular country vote. It's difficult to look back at an election and say with any confidence "would it really make a difference?" States that got lots of ground pounding due to their high electoral count and "batleground state" status would see a lot less traffic, and other more moderately populated areas would see more campaigning. Surely this would change the numbers quite a bit. In what direction is very hard to say. Some years, maybe no noticeable difference. Other years, maybe a huge difference. So what I'm saying is that we can't just look at an election where the popular vote and electoral vote disagree (even somewhat strongly) and say with any great confidence "it would have made a difference if we did it the other way this election". Because we can't. But that being said, I still believe a popular vote using proportional representation would produce results that more closely aligned with who the public would rather see in office. (a lot moreso for congress than president, actually)
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Actually, in a popular vote, the 1 million people living in the city have the exact same voice as the 1 million people living in the country.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
You must live in one of the more populous states. We who live in smaller states would never have a say in who becomes President if it were based only on popular vote.
While we're at it, let's go back to letting the state legislatures choose their Senators so that states would be represented in Washington. That was the way it was for much of our country's history and we need to have it again.
But that happens anyways. Generally, "safe states" don't get nearly the attention from candidates as the battleground states.
Mind you, I think one of the things that is going to come out in the wash from this election is that the idea of "firewall states" is a phantom, a miasma built out of pseudo-scientific demographic bafflegab. Clinton didn't lose because Trump stormed the gates so much as she lost because the firewall that Obama had built didn't really exist, or at the very least, it only existed so long as the candidate in question was Barack Obama. I read a report this morning that Bill Clinton had been worried in the lead up to the vote that she hadn't done nearly enough campaigning, that she had put all her effort into battleground states.
In fact, people like myself were actually criticizing Trump for spending so much time in states where his vote was safe, but I think, whatever you think of Trump, his pollsters and campaign team recognized that relying on the notion of safe states is pure hubris. Trump may have built the new engine of presidential elections, and he did it with less money and less resources than Clinton. By every rule in the presidential campaign book, Clinton checked all the boxes, and yet a portion of the supposed safe demographic walked away from her and voted for Trump.
The question that the Dems and Republicans will spend the next three or so years trying to answer is "Is Trump's victory a bizarre one-off, a sort of American Brexit, and will never happen again, or is there a new paradigm taking form?" I'd say as interesting as the 2016 election was, I'm wagering the 2020 is going to be the real product of this disruption. I'd also say guys like Nate Silver and Sam Wang may want to find something else to do, because this, even though I didn't believe, did end up being a Brexit-style vote, where traditional demographic models failed utterly and the pollsters and aggregators by and large got it wrong.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
California gave all 55 votes to Clinton while 31% of the population voted for Trump. I'd say the large states have far more effect on elections than say New Hampshire with 4 whole votes. CA also called it for Clinton before a single vote was counted. Does the EC only prove to be a problem when it's not to your advantage?
And while we are at it, there is a massive voter depression in CA because people see their votes do no good. If it was popular vote, CA could have added a few million more to Trump as easily as not.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.