Since we’re having elections around here, I thought it would be a good time to remind everybody that the big election next year is unique among American elections—it’s the only one where it’s possible to lose and still win. It’s happened 3 times before. Depressing.
Anyway, here’s one of them cute little talky-fast infographic-style video dealies about it.
There is no “trouble” with the Electoral College. It’s doing exactly what it was designed to do.
The only problem with that video is when he talks about the size of American cities. He’s ignoring the metropolitan areas, which account for the bulk of Americans. Then again, those areas tend to vote differently than the urban cores. Still, I can’t imagine what that guy was thinking when he calculated city populations. Did he think rural America actually still holds a super-majority of the population?
@1 FTW
Maine and Nebraska split their electoral votes according to congressional district. Not that this substantially changes the point, just some of the math.
Worst possible system except for the one the likes of us morons would create in an effort to “improve” it. We’ve got it good compared to that nightmare clusterfuck.
No matter who “wins” next year, we’re gonna lose.
In a true Democracy you don’t vote for other people.
You directly participate in the decision making process…ala Occupy.
The point being we have social technology that now allows this to happen…the current system being obsolesced entirely.
The NPVIC has a good shot at making the electoral college irrelevant. It has already been adopted in WA.
The senate should be abolished for the same reason. If the NPVIC is successful, perhaps a similar mechanism could be tried to make the senate redundant. (i.e. states pass bills requiring their US senators to vote with the house once critical mass is achieved)
I agree with the film’s main point, that the electoral college is flawed, outdated, and needs to be dropped. But the narrator has a lot of faulty logic, starting right off with the assumption that we are or should be living in a democracy.
@3 is correct that @1 ftw.
The Senate is so that small elite states can have less than 10 percent of the population control the other 90 percent, btw.
Hold on, before you start criticizing the Electoral College — what do you propose to replace it with? Direct voting? A tournament system? Have you done the mathematical analysis? What does each individuals voting power come out to?
The Electoral College is a weighted voting system, meant to prevent dense metropolitan areas from having absolute control — it forces a potential candidates to essentially have to geographically popular. This is positive attribute to the system.
http://www.mth.msu.edu/~ywang/Course/201…
http://discovermagazine.com/2004/sep/mat…
That said, it’s not the best system, and it has its issues — especially since weighted voting power means that error get magnified:
http://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/news/prob…
Sigh, and let’s tinyurl those urls:
Math against tyranny: http://tinyurl.com/3m5zpw
One man, one vote, the Banzhaf power index: http://tinyurl.com/cu3fkhv
Error magnification in electoral college systems: http://tinyurl.com/c6pmcd6
What you fail to realize is that our system – a genius system – was built from a recognition of man’s long-term inclinations, and subsequently big government’s orientation.
Fortunately, our system is engineered so government has the effective ability to do what government should do (administer law, defense, establish currency), but limited ability to do the things that governments are inclined to do (nanny-ing legislation, prescribe social improvements), that it can’t do well, or that are ultimately ruinous. It’s system built on the principles of individual liberty, not of government doing things for you that your should do yourself, or getting government to work for you against someone else.
In short, our Founders were wicked smart and new that we’d eventually get to a condition where classes of people would leverage government to do more for them, by taking from others, and that corrupted government (as history has consistently shown) would spectacularly fuck it all up.
The right sees government as something that should be used to protect individuals from the masses. The left sees government as a means to insure people from themselves. The opposing views of government means government should remain relatively small, limited in scope, diluted in its structure, and out of our lives.
History suggests for good reason.
It’s happened three times in over 200 years? Oh the humanity!
The problem with the Electoral College isn’t the very slight risk of it overriding the popular vote. The problem with it is that it gives undue power to states that have nothing useful to offer the country as a whole. Think of any flyover state with its corn subsidies, soil erosion, and lagoons of pig shit. If those states didn’t have so much power in the Senate and over the presidency, we might have a chance of cleaning some of that (literal) shit up.
@1 The original idealistic intent of the electoral college was that (white, male, old, wealthy) voters would delegate electors based on their intelligence, and the electoral college would actually have genuine deliberation to choose the president. The framers of the constitution did not have enough foresight to predict political parties and pledged electors. Also, we can’t be too surprised that the 11 men tasked with designing the presidential electoral system didn’t come up with something proportional; after all, most of them owned slaves.
@11: Yes, the NPVIC will effectively replace the electoral college with a national direct plurality vote. One vote per person. We know from experience (and game theory) that it will still be an indefensibly bad voting system, but it will at least be more fair in some sense. Baby steps are better than no steps.
Every four years people whine about the electoral college. We elect a president and people promptly forget about it.
@11, now that you fixed your link, I spent an hour or so reading about Natapoff’s work. It’s very interesting, but I disagree with his metric on the quality of a voting system. Here’s my understanding:
(All of the following assumes a two-way race)
Natapoff defines “voting power” as the probably that a particular voter’s vote sways an election. (Put another way, this is the probability that everyone else’s votes deadlock). He then studies the effect of districting and the size of the electorate on voting power, and shows that under reasonable assumptions, districting tends to increase voting power.
I however, do not see any reason to care about my voting power (provided it’s about the same as everyone else’s). I find the minimization of Bayesian Regret far more compelling. (As an aside, this is the model used to motivate range voting, but I want to stay on the topic of whether or not to abolish the electoral college). Anyone know if districting helps or hurts average Bayesian Regret? I would be very surprised if it helps.
At any rate, thanks for the link Zap; it gave me something to think about!
The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC), without needing to amend the Constitution.
Under National Popular Vote, every vote, everywhere, would be politically relevant and equal in every presidential election. Every vote would be included in the national count. The candidate with the most popular votes in all 50 states and DC would get the 270+ electoral votes from the enacting states. That majority of electoral votes guarantees the candidate with the most popular votes in all 50 states and DC wins the presidency.
National Popular Vote would give a voice to the minority party voters in each state. Now their votes are counted only for the candidate they did not vote for. Now they don’t matter to their candidate.
With National Popular Vote, every vote, everywhere would be counted equally for, and directly assist, the candidate for whom it was cast.
Candidates would need to care about voters across the nation, not just undecided voters in the current handful of swing states. The political reality would be that when every vote is equal, the campaign must be run in every part of the country. States and voters in more than 2/3rds of the country, including Washington, would no longer be ignored. When and where voters are ignored, then so are the issues they care about most.
The bill uses the power given to each state by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution to change how they award their electoral votes for president. Historically, virtually all of the major changes in the method of electing the President, including ending the requirement that only men who owned substantial property could vote and 48 current state-by-state winner-take-all laws, have come about by state legislative action.
In Gallup polls since 1944, only about 20% of the public has supported the current system of awarding all of a state’s electoral votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most votes in each separate state (with about 70% opposed and about 10% undecided). Support for a national popular vote is strong among Republicans, Democrats, and Independent voters, as well as every demographic group in virtually every state surveyed in recent polls in closely divided Battleground states: CO – 68%, FL – 78%, IA 75%, MI – 73%, MO – 70%, NH – 69%, NV – 72%, NM– 76%, NC – 74%, OH – 70%, PA – 78%, VA – 74%, and WI – 71%; in Small states (3 to 5 electoral votes): AK – 70%, DC – 76%, DE – 75%, ID – 77%, ME – 77%, MT – 72%, NE 74%, NH – 69%, NV – 72%, NM – 76%, OK – 81%, RI – 74%, SD – 71%, UT – 70%, VT – 75%, WV – 81%, and WY – 69%; in Southern and Border states: AR – 80%,, KY- 80%, MS – 77%, MO – 70%, NC – 74%, OK – 81%, SC – 71%, TN – 83%, VA – 74%, and WV – 81%; and in other states polled: CA – 70%, CT – 74%, MA – 73%, MN – 75%, NY – 79%, OR – 76%, and WA – 77%. Americans believe that the candidate who receives the most votes should win.
The bill has passed 31 state legislative chambers in 21 small, medium-small, medium, and large states.The bill has been enacted by 9 jurisdictions, including Washington, that possess 132 electoral votes- 49% of the 270 necessary to bring the law into effect.
NationalPopularVote
Your assuming that we’re interested in the centralization of powers in the federal government, when many (most?) Americans we prefer to de-power federal authority, and leave the governance to state and local governments, more attuned to their needs and accountable for their choices. A National Popular Vote is important — if you really like emperors. For the everyday person, local representation in local affairs is swelldandy.
With the Electoral College, and federalism, the Founding Fathers meant to empower the states to pursue their own interest within the confines of the Constitution. The National Popular Vote is an exercise of that power, not an attack upon it.
More than 2/3rds of the states and people have been just spectators to the presidential elections. That’s more than 85 million voters.
Policies important to the citizens of ‘flyover’ states are not as highly prioritized as policies important to ‘battleground’ states when it comes to governing.
States have the responsibility and power to make all of their voters relevant in every presidential election and beyond.
Unable to agree on any particular method, the Founding Fathers left the choice of method for selecting presidential electors exclusively to the states by adopting the language contained in section 1 of Article II of the U.S. Constitution– “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors . . .” The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly characterized the authority of the state legislatures over the manner of awarding their electoral votes as “plenary” and “exclusive.”
Federalism concerns the allocation of power between state governments and the national government. The National Popular Vote bill concerns how votes are tallied, not how much power state governments possess relative to the national government. The powers of state governments are neither increased nor decreased based on whether presidential electors are selected along the state boundary lines, or national lines (as with the National Popular Vote).