15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/us/electoral-college.html <comment><USER2> There are discussions about the electoral college favoring small states. Some people think that's bad, some people think it's good.

However, there's a more important issue: that's not really what the electoral college does. It gives a small edge to small states[0]. The much bigger effect is that in every given election, it favors a handful of battleground states over all the rest.

If you live in Wyoming, the electoral college does not help you, because your vote is secure. Ditto for Vermont. But if you live in Ohio or Florida, presidential candidates will spend all their time in your state, trying to get your vote.

While you can concoct a semi-coherent case for rural voters needing special protection, no one can explain why Ohio is more or less important than North Carolina, or Florida than Texas.

[0] Which, if you're paying attention, is at least correlated with being rural, but only partially--another lazy generalization that surrounds this subject.

<comment><USER3> I'm not in favor of the electoral college, but wouldn't its elimination merely shift this problem to politicians only visiting the most poulated states (e.g. California) anyway?

<comment><USER4> I think the whole "visiting" thing is overblown. We have TV and the Internet. This isn't the 19th century when the only way the average American might EVER see or hear a President would be a short speech off the back of a train car.

<comment><USER5> I totally underestimated the importance of visiting until I went to Iowa earlier this month. (My wife went to high school and college there and we went back for the state fair and some campaign events.) It shattered my East-coast preconceptions about how elections work. Because of the caucus system,[1] you actually have to meet people in person to encourage them to advocate for you at the caucus. My wife got selfies with nearly every democratic candidate. I met the mayor of New York at a Buffalo Wild Wings. (He was just there for a snack, as were we.) You go to a diner with like 20 people and a presidential candidate has to sit there and field rambling questions from 80 year old ladies. It's completely nuts, but the people who engage in the process (and they are completely ordinary people) are incredibly committed to their role.

The other thing I came away with from the whole process is a newfound appreciation for the "who would I like to have a beer with" factor. The issues and policy proposals you read on the Internet don't really matter—none of that stuff will ever get through Congress. Being able to look the person in the eye, and see how they carry themselves while shleping to half a dozen events every day—that really makes an impression.

[1] In the Iowa Democratic caucuses, registered party members in a precinct get together, discuss the candidates, take a first round vote where some candidates are cut, discuss the candidates some more, and then take a final vote.

<comment><USER6> "None of that stuff will get through Congress"

I have a different opinion. Sanders and to a lesser extent Warren have created massive volunteer networks that do have a pretty big impact, like everywhere. Obama had that too, but it was dismantled when he took office (insanity). There's a good argument to say Obama would have been far more impactful had he kept it going.

Sanders has no intention of shutting down his "revolution" (not my words) whether he does or doesn't get the nomination. There's going to be some serious pressure (like there already has) on congress in the years to come. I don't think the same ol' same ol' will continue much longer.

I don't mean to be a fan boy, but it's pretty phenomenal what he / they have done since 2016, and it resonates with a lot of people. CNN and MSNBC don't talk about it too often, but it's very real.

Don't take my word for it though. Easily researched.

<comment><USER7> It's a 50/50 country. It would be _alarming_ if, after one election, which will at best be decided 60/40 in their favor, a radically different (from their immediate predecessor) President was actually enable to enact their agenda. The system we have is literally designed to prevent that thing from happening. "Volunteer network" or not, Sanders isn't passing his agenda. If he was serious about doing that, he'd stay in the Senate.

<comment><USER6> Let's agree to disagree. I actually think big _alarming_ changes are coming (and have already happened). I'm just a Canuck though, and not out to convince anyone. I'm really fascinated with the political changes I see happening (or think I see happening at least).

<comment><USER8> After 10 years in DC working in political circles, I can tell you that very little is actually changing. The giant, faceless bureaucracy still runs most of the show.

If you look into many of the "unprecedented events" you'll see that most of them aren't new and some of them are decades old.

Though if the events really are bad and were ignored before, it's worth asking "why?"

<comment><USER9> > After 10 years in DC working in political circles, I can tell you that very > little is actually changing. The giant, faceless bureaucracy still runs most > of the show.

Maybe but aren't you in danger of missing the big changes coming precisely because you are inside the bubble?

A political equivalent to "let them eat cake".

As an outside observer to the US it does seem like the pressure has to give somewhere soon at some point (and in a few other western democracies including my own though I think the US is further down the pipe on this one).

<comment><USER8> Valid line of reasoning but I'm 10 years out from that world specifically because the bubble was/is ugly.

I think you're 100% right that there's building pressure and something will give but that's precisely because things haven't changed much. If the general populace decides "no matter how I vote, things don't change" some will lose hope and give up.. while others will look to other approaches.

(And those other approaches aren't usually good.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Debates over the electoral college tend to conflate two different things. The original purpose of the electoral college was a compromise between those who wanted the president directly elected, and those who wanted Congress to elect the president. While very small states have a modest edge as a result of using the number of members of Congress to decide the number of electors, the real purpose of the system is to add a layer of indirection to the election of the President, where the states have a say in their capacity as states.

That layer of indirection continues to exist today. Article II provides that "each state shall appoint" electors "in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct." So Minnesota could decide to have the state legislature appoint its electors, without a popular vote. (That would raise the importance of state government elections, which might be a good thing.)

At the same time, that layer of indirection could exist even in a purely proportional system. You could assign electoral votes based on population or number of house members.

So the debate over getting rid of the electoral college actually involves two different issues. Should the number of electors be proportional? And should we reduce the independent status of the states even more by taking away their intermediary role in electing the President?

<comment><USER10> Let the states that will never get their way in a "fixed" elector college, secede.

To mess with the electoral college in this point in time - when its basically 49% vs 51% - and at such a level of divide in the country is not exactly a testament to how empathetic the two sides are. It would be a disaster.

Everyone thinks Trump himself is the problem but this awful idea to change the goalposts literally to win elections would do way more damage than Trump could ever do but I guess it doesn't come in an 'easy to hate' package with agenda serving talking points, etc.

I don't know where these idiots think this whole "OK - we'll follow these laws, but not those" thing is going but it is incredibly damaging and at the moment only one side is picking and choosing which laws to obey and not obey (then writing publicly about it) but soon enough the other side will be picking and choosing which laws to ignore.

Get your helmets on once we are on _that_ slippery slope.

<comment><USER11> By your logic there can never be a suitable time for democratic reform. The current political situation can only get worse until the united states becomes more democratic or more authoritarian.

<comment><USER5> That doesn't follow. Even in recent history, most Presidents command large electoral vote majorities. In my life time, 7 of 10 elections ended in a more than 60-40 margin in the electoral college, including both Obama wins.

<comment><USER11> What difference does that make? It's either moving the goal posts so your team can win if they're out of power or it's entrenching your team's position if they have power. Either way is an outrage to someone, and so any reform comes at the wrong time.

I really don't see the point you're making.

<comment><USER5> I took the OP's argument to mean that, even if you can get a consensus that the electoral college should be changed, people should hesitate to do so where close races mean that the change will be outcome determinative for particular races. My point is that we still routinely have candidates winning massive electoral college majorities. If people otherwise were in agreement that a change was warranted (note that more than 50% of republicans supported abolishing the electoral college as recently as 2012), there are still opportunities to change the system where it won't change the result of the current election.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's not about division of power between rural/urban or big states/small states. The Electoral College is about buffering purely democratic power. The President doesn't represent "the people." He/she represents the interests of the states. The Legislative Branch represents the will of the people (most directly through the House of Representatives). One of the biggest problems is vesting too much power and importance in the Executive, which was never intended. Throw the balance of power out of whack, and we get these conversations (the President has to represent "the people" and therefore should be elected by popular vote)

<comment><USER13> I wish someone with $$ would start plastering this message everywhere the absurd "get rid of the elctoral college" debate comes up. We are not a democracy, seriously no one wants a democracy of 300 million plus. We are a federation of states that is supposed to have most of the control in their region and sacrifice a little bit of control to the federal government for purposes of defense and commerce. Your "democracy" should be your state legislature, but sadly authoritarians of the past have taken that away.

<comment><USER14> Your argument seems confused to me, but maybe I don't quite understand, can you elaborate? We do have state level democracy. The electoral college's purpose is solely for presidential elections, not for local elections. Why shouldn't we have a democracy for presidential elections? Your reasons given (local control) don't apply to federal elections. Even with the electoral college, we're pretty close to democratic representation for president anyway, and the discrepancy between what we have, a federal republic, and a pure democracy doesn't serve the same purpose that it used to. So why should we keep it? Why is the proposal to get rid of the electoral college "absurd"? What do you mean about authoritarians taking away state level democracy?

<comment><USER15> The structure of the Federal government is fundamentally geared towards mediating the relationships between the various states, as that was its original purpose. Actual governance of the populace was the purview of state government.

Over time, however, decisions about domestic law have increasingly been made at the Federal level. At this point, the interstate commerce clause in the Constitution is used to justify almost any regulation that the Federal government wants to pass. When that doesn't work, availability of Federal tax money is made contingent on states aligning their laws with whatever national policy is.

Also, the legislature has been ceding its rule-making authority to the executive by passing broadly-worded legislation and leaving the details to administrative rules committees that work for the executive.

I suspect that 'vturner is suggesting the correct fix is to shift the overall balance of power back towards the more democratic parts of government instead of reforming the election process of the government's chief clerk.

<comment><USER14> Thank you for the very reasonable and rational explanation! That does broaden my interpretation of vturner's comment.

Your comment seems broadly true and open minded as well. I have a couple of questions, possibly from a devil's advocate perspective, purely for the sake of discussion because I'm curious:

When you say the government was originally geared to mediate the states and that real governance was supposed to be states, what does the Supremacy Clause in the constitution mean to you? It was there originally from the start, and it declares the federal government the winner of conflicting state and federal laws.

Second, while I am personally a fan of states' rights in a bunch of specific scenarios, it makes little sense to me to talk vaguely about who should be in control of most laws without a specific list of regulations in mind. Where can I find a list of federal laws that are broadly viewed to be overreach by most people, that most people agree should be in state control?

Acknowledging that there is politics here, that it's a fight over control, and your point that the Federal government is leveraging tax money, is it possible that the natural order of things is for laws to drift in the federal direction anyway - as travel across state boundaries has become faster and faster, as the internet blurs the lines, as state laws individually become closer together, as we see more needs for consistent standards nationally, etc.? When the constitution was written it took a minimum of _days_ to even communicate with another state, let alone spend money, purchase goods, or visit. The geographic, financial, and communication boundaries between states has literally almost disappeared compared to what it used to be.

<comment><USER15> Unfortunately, Aside from identifying general trends, I haven't looked into the issues enough to hold any strong opinions, nor am I in a position to cite any specifics without significant research. I think you may be right about increased interconnectedness naturally leading to a larger federal role in everyday governance.

As far as the supremacy clause goes, it's necessary for the treaty to work. The states are agreeing to give up some of their sovereign rights to be executed by the federal government instead, in the interests of the union. The bulk of the Constitution describes exactly those rights that the states are giving up, and this clause confirms that they can't pass legislation to opt out of individual federal decisions they don't like that fall within those bounds. Without it, the federal government would in practice only be able to make suggestions— a situation that led to bankruptcy under the Articles of Confederation.

I'm actually more concerned about the shift in power from the legislature to the executive. As the role of the federal government has grown, it feels like every executive agency has grown its own miniature legislature and judiciary that are primarily beholden to the executive. Agency regulations are law, so why aren't they drafted and approved by an arm of the relevant congressional committee?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Firstly, I'm an independent - I actually have a great deal of issues with both major parties. My concern with abandoning the college starts with this observation:

Swing states are the states most likely to have divided government. And if divided government is good for anything, it is accountability. So with the Electoral College system, when we do wind up with a razor-thin margin in an election, it is likely to happen in a state where both parties hold some power, rather than in a state controlled by one party. The Electoral college system focuses a great deal of energy on states in this condition when an election is close.

National Popular Vote (NPV) rewards states with high population - the higher the turnout, the more power for that state. Additionally, under NPV, each state would certify its own "national" vote total. What would happen when there are charges of skullduggery? Would states really trust, with no power to verify, other state's returns?

I have other concerns as well but feel the EC system is superior. Just as an observation, the parliamentary systems of the UK, Canada, Israel, (& others) have the parliament elect the Prime Minister and likewise don't elect their leaders by popular vote.

[edited: removing poor wording about 'lax laws', seems I implied things in a FUD way that I didn't mean to]

<comment><USER17> Nothing you said provides an argument against equally weighting each citizen's vote at the federal level.

States have select powers over the federal government that are specifically provided by our Constitution: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/States%27_rights](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/States%27_rights). When you vote in local elections, you are in effect in control of certain outcomes within your state, as accorded by our Constitution.

The federal election determines representation for every single person in the United States and, in part, how federal governmental power is exercised on their behalf. There is no conceivable logical reason why citizens in any particular state should have more or less say in such matters than those in any other. The electoral college system is an absolute sham that deprives a significant number of people of their Constitutionally-guaranteed right to fair representation at the federal level.

I'd welcome any well-formed argument to the contrary. I've yet to ever hear one.

<comment><USER18> > There is no conceivable logical reason why citizens in any particular state > should have more or less say in such matters than those in any other.

So should we abolish the senate too? Not being snarky just wondering what those who support NPV think.

<comment><USER19> Mitch McConnell represents 6.8M people in TN and he is the most powerful man in the Senate, and one of the most powerful people in the country.

How difficult is it to corrupt a man like Mitch McConnell? How robust is our system of representation when one senator holds so much power?

<comment><USER20> McConnell is from Kentucky

<comment><USER19> Thanks. Doesn't change the substance of my comment except that Kentucky has even less people in it than TN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I want to point out this article was written in May, and is a bit out of date. For example, Nevada (heavily mentioned in the article) never adopted the National Popular Vote compact because the governor vetoed the bill after the legislature passed it.

FiveThirtyEight published an article last week on the current state of the compact: [https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-movement-to-skip- th...](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-movement-to-skip-the- electoral-college-may-take-its-first-step-back/)

<comment><USER22> > Unsurprisingly, given that almost every state government to pass the > National Popular Vote compact was completely controlled by Democrats,

It kinda feels like this part keeps getting glossed over when people talk about this. I don't think those signing on have really thought it through, and are just reacting to the 2016 election results. Of course the party that lost wants to change the system in a way that, that time, they may have ended up winning - especially with all the open hate for Trump.

<comment><USER23> It's worth noting that the same thing happened to the Democrats in 2000, and hadn't happened in the US at that point for over 100 years. Looked at from the perspective of the Democratic party: they have won the popular vote 4 out of the last 5 elections, but only won the presidency twice. It's not surprising the party's frustration with the Electoral College would continue to grow.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_elections_in_which_the_winner_lost_the_popular_vote)

<comment><USER24> Interestingly in 2008 Hillary Clinton won the popular vote to be the Democratic Nominee but did not become the Nominee. The Democrats criticize the EC, but also don't mind using a form of it internally.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Democratic_Party_presiden...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries)

<comment><USER25> Both of those are untrue.

Super delegates have never decided a Democratic primary, and Obama got more votes in 2008 (the official tally excludes Washington, Michigan, and Florida, who went for Obama but didnt publish vote tallies)

The delegate system is proportional, not winner-take-all, it is utterly unlike the electoral college.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> An argument I heard recently against this is, if abolished, politicians won't have incentives to campaign in rural territories, and they won't be accountable to rural territories. That basically makes sense. The EC is the only thing that really gives rural territories any stake, as the majority population has shifted to larger urban centers.

People who want to get away from the big cities and live a different kind of life with different priorities (and different legislative interests), shouldn't be totally shut out, should they? Even though I live in a giant urban area, I wouldn't want to feel pressured to due so due to lack of political stake if I move elsewhere.

<comment><USER27> The counterpoint to that is that the Electoral College has transferred so much power to rural areas that we are no longer an actual representative democracy.

For example, a vote in Wyoming counts 3.6 times more than a vote in California.[1] The people in California are not represented in the Presidential election; it would be more accurate to say that one-quarter of the people in California are represented.

"Rural issues" do not deserve special protection if that protection results in a tyranny of the minority. People are choosing to actively leave rural communities and congregate in urban areas; this does not on its face mean that their concerns have become less important.

Moreover, people congregating in urban areas tend to be center- and left- leaning, so skewing the Presidential vote towards urban areas also results in US politics _as a whole_ shifting to the right. It also results in a judiciary that is more conservative than the population as a whole.

There are only eight _states_ in America that have more people than Los Angeles _county_.[2] Why are the concerns of the people living in LAC less important than the concerns of the people in Nevada or Arkansas? What is it about their geography that makes their issues unimportant?

[1] [http://theconversation.com/whose-votes-count-the-least-in- th...](http://theconversation.com/whose-votes-count-the-least-in-the- electoral-college-74280)

[2] [http://www.laalmanac.com/population/po04a.php](http://www.laalmanac.com/population/po04a.php)

<comment><USER28> This is somewhat balanced by representation in the other house of Congress.

It's not only the US which has to balance rural vs urban electorates. Some are even further down the spectrum like Japan where rural areas have even larger influence than cities compared to other democracies.

But in a way it makes sense. Without people in the countryside the people in the cities would have little to eat. Most countries go to some lengths to ensure some modicum of food security/self-sufficiency.

<comment><USER29> It would be somewhat balanced if there wasn't a cap on the number of representatives and there was 1 rep per N population. But that's not the case. So even in the House there is an imbalance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> >On Tuesday, Nevada became the latest state to pass a bill that would grant its electoral votes to whoever wins the popular vote across the country, not just in Nevada. The movement is the brainchild of John Koza, a co-founder of National Popular Vote, an organization that is working to eliminate the influence of the Electoral College.

I don't think this will survive constitutional challenge, because it is not the voters of the state who are deciding how the state's electors are decided. For example, would it be allowed for a swing state such as Florida which now has a Republican governor and state legislature, to pass a law stating that their state's electors would be allocated based on how Alabama votes? That way, even if the Democratic candidate won a majority of votes in Florida, the electors would still go to the Republican candidate if the Republican candidate wins in Alabama.

<comment><USER31> It's a shame most of these comments are debating the merits of the Electoral College, skipping right past the much more interesting & relevant argument of whether the NPV compact is constitutional.

I agree with you that it's not. States can indeed choose electors with any constitutional method they wish, but if they hold a statewide election, it has to be a fair election or it will run afoul of the 14th Amendment.

<comment><USER25> How is NPV "unfair"? It is more in the spirit of the 14th than the winner- take-all system, where your vote means more or less depending on where you live (which was a core part of the 14th amendment logic of Gore v Bush)

<comment><USER31> States don't get to hold elections for statewide officials (e.g. electors) where some votes are effectively discarded because of some fact external to that state election. Adding up votes from other states isn't materially different in that regard than performing an augury.

For the same reason, the Western states couldn't engage in a pact to elect their governors by party slate (especially without triggering the interstate compacts clause).

<comment><USER25> And why not? The constitution says that the states can choose their electors for President any way they see fit. They can be named directly in the law if the legislature wanted them to: "Our Electors are Joe Bloggs, James Jameson, and Person McPersonface". There is no constitutional limit on how a state can choose its electors.

When states started switching from the original plan of "electoral districts" to "winner-take-all", Hamilton and Madison decried it as contrary to the spirit of the Constitution, but recognized that they couldn't do anything about it because the text of the constitution says "in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct", and Hamilton's amendment to strike that clause and replace it with an explicit by-district electoral process failed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The Electoral college exists because of slavery.

The original idea going into the Constitutional Convention was to have Congress pick the president. A majority of delegates going into the Convention supported this, but discarded it after debates established it would violate the separation of powers.

The popular vote wasn't an option, however, because it would mean the southern states with their large, non-voting slave populations would have vastly reduced influence. The southern delegates would have never supported a popular vote. Thus, the electoral college.

Madison wrote about it here: [http://memory.loc.gov/ll/llfr/002/0000/00610057.tif](http://memory.loc.gov/ll/llfr/002/0000/00610057.tif)

<comment><USER33> That page you linked ([http://memory.loc.gov/ll/llfr/002/0000/00610057.tif](http://memory.loc.gov/ll/llfr/002/0000/00610057.tif)) contains that argument from Madison followed by a non-slavery based argument made by someone else.

To say that the electoral college exists "because of slavery" is an oversimplification. It ignores the misgivings about a popular vote that are mentioned in the page you linked, and it also ignores the desire of the state governments to exert control over their representation in the Federal government -- senators were not directly elected for the same reason.

If you want to point to part of the Constitution that exists purely because of slavery, the 3/5 compromise is a better example. The decision to adopt an electoral college was certainly influenced by complications introduced by slavery, but there were a lot of other arguments in favor of an electoral college that were persuasive at the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'm really confused about this because I don't understand the incentives politicians have to adopt this in their own state. It clearly undermines their state's power in national elections.

My (cynical) assumption is that this will be obeyed insofar as it helps bring about the desired outcome by those in power. It will be disregarded if it would shift the outcome in the other direction.

<comment><USER35> Does it? What if there state votes for the popular winner and that popular winner is not the winner?

Remember, this will work both ways - eventually we will have a democrat that doesn't win the popular vote as well in the current system.

<comment><USER36> It will only ever tip that way for a Democrat when Democrats become the party of rural voters.

<comment><USER35> Why? There are plenty of small democratic states too - Rhode Island, Hawaii, etc. etc.

<comment><USER37> They are vastly outnumbered by rural republican states.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> The electoral college achieves one very useful function thats ignored by everyone calling for its abolition in favour of the popular vote: it produces a clear winner and contains the contagion of litigating and delegitimizing the outcome of an election.

Think about this: there are a number of elections that have a very small popular vote margin. What if this gets less than, say, 20,000? That's entirely possible. In a strictly popular vote election, what's to stop each side from scrounging up votes or invalidating votes in every county in the country?

The most contentious and litigated election is probably the 2000 election. The electoral college contained those shenanigans to Florida alone (and largely to Miami-Dade and Broward countries, specifically).

There are four main problems with the US election system as I see it:

1\. Voting needs to be mandatory. Americans who love "freedom" chafe against this but optional voting undermines democracy. You can see this in the organized efforts to suppress voting and disqualify voters by US political parties.

2\. The US needs preferential voting. Third-party votes are otherwise largely a waste.

3\. Paper ballots with optical recognition only. No punch cards, certainly no electronic voting. You need the paper trail of actual ballots. This could be filling in a ballot and validating it with a machine or using a machine to print out a ballot. These have an exceptionally low error rate.

4\. Stop politicizing the election process. Like, why is the supervisor for elections an elected political position? This is the case in Florida, for example. Likewise, you have the Senate majority holding up election reform because of there is suspicion this will help the Democrats in the House who passed it. Seriously, Mitch McConnell needs to go to jail.

5\. I'm fine with states being represented in the US system. The problem is that this system was designed at a time when populations were rural and cities were small. I don't think anyone predicted the disparity between ~40M people in California and ~150k people in Vermont having 2 Senators each.

You'll note that none of these are having the popular vote. IMHO that's fixing the wrong problem.

<comment><USER39> > Stop politicizing the election process. Like, why is the supervisor for > elections an elected political position?

The alternative is that it's an appointed position. That won't be less political.

<comment><USER38> Patenntly false. Chairman of the Federal Reserve is largely apolitical. Judges have philosophies that tend to reflect the wishes of the President who nominated them but other than that are largely independent.

Look at how other countries handle election. In Australia the Australian Electoral Commission ("AEC") is responsible for running elections and I can tell you that none of the problems with politicized elections that exist in the US exist in Australia.

<comment><USER39> Very well. Appointed people are not _always_ political. I bet that an appointed election supervisor would be political at least some of the time, though. (Source: human nature.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I always hear people complain about the electoral college, but I've never once heard a detailed, objective argument as to why they think a popular vote would be a better system.

Friends I've talked to about just seem to default to a majority system because it seems more 'fair', or its easier to understand? I dont know.

In the USA, I think we are conditioned to belive in the democratic process, so I guess it feels 'natural' to just tally up the votes, & majority wins.

We've done it countless times in our personal lives. Anytime there's a disagreement, or a group decision to be made, "Ok, lets vote on it". Majority wins. Simple.

This is a fine & easy way to decide things in small groups, but is it really the best way to decide something among 300 million?

I'm not convinced. I'm not saying the EC is perfect, I just suspect a simple majority wins vote could cause other serious problems that are not immediately obvious.

<comment><USER41> There's a lot of reasons for it on the movements official site:

[https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/written- explanation](https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/written-explanation)

<comment><USER40> So after looking it over, the idea is to eliminate get rid of the 'winner take all' system in the participating states. Seems fine to me. It's definitely hard to argue for winner takes all electoral votes.

I'm not really a history guy, but I wonder why states decided to move in that direction to begin with? Guess I'll have to look into it.

What I don't get is if there are this many states trying to push this idea, why do they need a bill like this to do it. Why don't those states just take it upon themselves to change their laws individually. What's stopping them right now?

Moreover, it seems one of the main points is that the current system causes candidates to only focus their campaign in a few battleground states. I'm struggling to see how the National Popular Vote system would change this. Maybe it would break up the current pattern, if so, I have a feeling another similar pattern would emerge.

The battlegrounds would just shift. For example, it might just redistribute the candidates focus to the greater metro areas where 2/3 of the population lives, and republican/ democrat distributions are more even (according to the site). If the city centers are strongly democrats, and rural strongly republican, the I imagine the same problem emerging since those areas are a 'done deal'. Why would the candidates spend any resources there is there is no chance of swaying them?

</comment></comment></comment><comment> munk-a The Connecticut Compromise is good and all, but I think it's about time we discard it as an artifact of the days when communication was difficult and states had expectations around operating as semi-autonomous bodies. States used to be a strong identity tie than the nation but our general mindset has shifted toward identifying as Americans before Delawareans.

<comment><USER42> In a related anachronism...

> In [Republican CO State Senator Sonnenberg's] view, the Electoral College > was created so that "people in rural areas did not get overrun by the > masses."

This can't be true since in 1790 (roughly the same time period the EC was created), "the masses" were rural; at that point only about 5% of the population was urban[0].

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_States)

<comment><USER43> In the US they were rural. The founders and early lawmakers took much inspiration from the histories and travails of other governments around the world.

<comment><USER25> Which were also predominantly rural. There was no country on earth with a majority urban population until well into the 20th century.

<comment><USER43> Nobody said cities needed a majority to inspire fear of the way they concentrated political power.

The founders' concerns about that are well-documented. A cursory search yielded a decent starting point: [https://www.planetizen.com/node/18841](https://www.planetizen.com/node/18841)

<comment><USER25> And nowhere did the founders say that the electoral college was intended to counteract it.

Unlike most people today trying to come up with justifications for an obviously broken system, the founders knew that minority rule is worse than majority rule.

In every document where the framers discuss "tyranny of the majority", it is clear that their solution is not minority rule, it is _CONSENSUS_. That is why the most important functions of government: constitutional changes, impeachments, censorship, rule changes, and veto overrides, require supermajorities.

You don't overcome tyranny of the majority by letting minorities win. That's just regular tyranny.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> It's in the Constitution. If you don't like the Constitution: \--amend it. \--call for a Constitutional Convention. These are the agreed methods to change the document. "End runs," state compacts and attempts to game the system are unconstitutional and doomed.

<comment><USER25> Winner take all is not in the constitution. When states started arranging their elections this way in the early 1800s, the chief creators of the Electoral College Madison and Hamilton, called it an abomination and sued, and when that failed, tried to amend the constitution to get rid of winner-take- all.

The constitution says that states can apportion their votes however they want. If they want to give them to the national popular winner, that's their prerogative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> The electoral college was just a kludge to allow elections before modern instant long distance communication became a thing. The gold standard for democracy was always "one person, one vote", but nowadays there's a lot of people that consider their personal gain more important than being democratic and those people (the Republican party mostly) will try to hang on to the electoral college, no matter the cost apparently.

<comment><USER46> "The gold standard for democracy has always been one person one vote": it's much more complicated than that. At least for US legal history, the idea of "who has the right to vote" has changed significantly, from land owning white males to citizens who haven't committed felonies (and a few other exceptions like residents of Puerto Rico or citizens who live abroad and a few more). If you look even further back, Athens, the creator of democracy, would generally view our government as oligarchy (rule by the few) as popular vote elections were viewed as possible to be games/bought by the wealthy or connected. You can see echoes of that in today's politics with dynastic families (Clintons, Bushes). To solve the problem, the Athenians employed the concept of "sortion" or essentially a civil service lottery where the ruling council of the city was chosen at random from all eligible citizens. A modern example of something close to sortition today is Jury Duty.

<comment><USER47> If the House was chosen randomly from the population, it would be a big improvement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I have often thought that part of the rationale for the electoral college was that in the 18th century they did not have the internet, TV, Radio, even newspapers were pretty scarce. So it just wasn't all that practical for a candidate to ride a horse around all 13 colonies to meet each voter. The logical solution would have been to have a parliamentary system whereby the congress would select the president for you. The problem there was that the president would be beholden to the congress and you would lose some of the checks and balance features because he would be less likely to veto something. So they developed a "shadow congress" that did not have law making responsibilities but sole purpose was to travel to Philadelphia or DC and hear the speeches and so forth and select the president for you as your representative.

Looking at it from this 18th century perspective highlights why it is completely unnecessary today. Obviously the voter has many ways of getting to know the positions of the candidates themselves and hence able to elect the president directly. There is no need for it today.

<comment><USER49> On the other hand, the electoral college, like congress, gives actual weight to the idea that a state is more than just the sum of its population, by automatically getting two votes for being a state.

Whether or not _that_ is necessary is a different conversation from the information dissemination purpose of the EC.

<comment><USER50> That isn't a reason for a single state to be able to hold the entire progress of the majority back.

<comment><USER49> How can a single state hold back progress in this case?

Individual states can apportion their EC votes however they want. 48/50 states are all-or-nothing states (arguably the actual problem), which is decided at the state level.

<comment><USER50> Mitch McConnell

<comment><USER49> Not sure I follow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> If people are up in arms about the electoral college giving small states outsized influence, wait until they hear about the senate.

<comment><USER12> That's the literal point of the Senate, though, to be fair.

<comment><USER51> Yes, and it's part of the point of the electoral college. It's a weighted average of the number of congress members from your state*

*and also includes Washington D.C.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Why cant states just give out percents of electoral votes based on who voted?

Example: Lets say CA has 10 Electoral Votes (for easy math) 60% vote Dem, 40% vote Republican. California then Gives 6 Electoral Votes to the Democrat and 4 to the Republican instead of all 10 to the Democrat.

Feels like that would more fairly represent the voters of each state no?

<comment><USER53> Yes, I also think this is the simplest way to make it more fair. States can do this unilaterally without pact. That's why I feel the pact is not about fairness.

<comment><USER25> The pact is necessary because whoever changes the system first loses out on influence. You never hear of presidential candidates appealing to Maine or Nebraska. It only works if everyone does it together.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Most modern countries have similar systems, where smaller areas are disproportionally represented in the legislative power. Its only when you loose that is a problem?

<comment><USER25> The President is not a legislative body.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> When looking at political methods I like to look a first principals from all points of view.

Here is a conservative or traditionalist political point of view in favor of the Electoral College

[https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/danger-attacks-electoral- coll...](https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/danger-attacks-electoral-college/)

Here is a liberal or progressive point of view against the Electoral College

[https://harvardpolitics.com/united-states/the-case- against-t...](https://harvardpolitics.com/united-states/the-case-against-the- electoral-college/)

These are but two opinions. Politics is ultimately creating policy on opinions from a large community.

</comment><comment><USER56> "Legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests." \- Justice Earl Warren

There's a long history of the US electoral system favoring rural areas over urban areas. Typically, the courts had to intervene in order to remedy an issue where clearly the legislature has a conflict of interest. The most famous is Reynolds v Sims (1964), which stated that electoral districts of state legislative chambers must be roughly equal in population [1].

Hopefully, we can see similar change happen in the Electoral College.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynolds_v._Sims](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynolds_v._Sims)

</comment><comment><USER57> Isn't it interesting that minority opinions matter and must be treated equally, until your state has the minority of the population...

</comment><comment><USER58> Up next: Abolishing the World Series. Make it one big, long game and count only the total number of runs.

<comment><USER59> this is the cricket approach. baseball typically plays multi-game series instead.

i agree in spirit though. i have long thought it would make sense to abolish the playoffs. give the pennants to the teams with the best records. then, have them play a 21-game World Series in the fall.

<comment><USER60> That's closer to how baseball used to be, but there were also less teams at that time.

<comment><USER61> yeah, they never had 21 games, but the winningest team from each league played in the World Series until 1969. They did have a few 9 game World Series, but most were 7.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> If this happens, Democrats will be very unhappy with how many Republicans there are in Upstate New York, Southern Illinois and Rural California who's vote now counts for something.

<comment><USER63> It'll mostly balance out I think, and even if it doesn't, that's hardly the point

<comment><USER39> No, it kind of is the point. Democrats aren't doing this because it's more _fair_ , they're doing it because they think they'll win more elections.

<comment><USER63> But regardless of what forces are actually pushing for it, it is more fair.

<comment><USER39> Perhaps. But when I know that there are people with a partisan axe to grind pushing for it, I think arguments for "fair" should be regarded with a certain amount of skepticism...

<comment><USER41> The NPVIC board actually has more Republicans than Democrats on it.

[https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/about](https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/about)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> The electoral college also serves as a "firewall" of sorts to contain any local election fraud to that state (such that the will of the voters in that state is compromised, but the compromise doesn't extend beyond that).

For all I care, CA could pick their votes out of a lotto machine and it wouldn't affect the power of my vote (as a non-CA resident). The fact that my vote is meaningless (deep blue state) is a collateral issue, perhaps.

<comment><USER65> This is an interesting point. The EC provides a kind of process isolation, in theory.

Election fraudsters and hackers hoping to control the outcome of an election have to make big splashes in small ponds, so to speak. It seems intuitive then, that their shenanigans are more likely to be noticed - and are at least somewhat contained if they aren't.

If we're going down the "1 person, 1 vote" road, that isolation vanishes. No more big splashes needed - only very small droplets in a vast, vast ocean.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> It's like we've been trying to destroy the electoral college almost since it's inception. And every step makes it worse.

The electoral college was supposed to be a sort of bulwark between the public and the highest office in the nation.

State governments choose their electors. Those electors are _supposed_ to be tasked with choosing the best among the candidates for president and vice- president.

But instead, state governments threw that decision to the public. Effectively making the electoral college a proxy popularity vote for a state. And that's a big fucking ask of any person. Choose the person who is capable of running the country and making all these decisions, whose policies will guide your nation to prosperity, etc.

Hell man, I'm just trying to get _my_ budget straight. Do I look like I have time in between everything else I do to also seriously investigate every single candidate? And I'm not a complete moron either. And I know I cannot actually make a completely informed decision here. But I know complete morons. And they get a vote just like me.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The National Popular Vote (NPV) initiatives website has a lot of good info and background on the issue, and takes on the myths around it.

\- [https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/](https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/)

Explanation - [https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/written- explanation](https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/written-explanation)

Myths - [https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/answering- myths](https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/answering-myths)

As for the compact being a partisan issue, losing the presidency despite winning the popular vote can happen in either direction:

 _A shift of 59,393 votes in Ohio in 2004 would have elected John Kerry despite President Bush's nationwide lead of over 3,000,000 votes._

Edit: C-SPAN interview with NPV co-founder John Koza from March 2019:

[https://www.c-span.org/video/?458502-6/washington-journal- jo...](https://www.c-span.org/video/?458502-6/washington-journal-john-koza- discusses-popular-vote-movement)

</comment><comment><USER67> No he isn't and he won't.

But, it's a good social engineering mechanism to discuss these issues so the next gen and others who don't understand the US thanks to pop culture can learn why the EC is important.

Repeal the 17th Amendment while you're at it and then increase the house reps to 5000 and triple the senators.

Then we'll see how effective or profitable lobbying, campaign finance or gerrymandering is.

</comment><comment><USER68> For 32+ years, the fact is that the Democratic candidate has won the popular vote 7 times in the last 8 elections.

I am not saying whether this is good or bad.

But, I think the two party system would crumble very quickly if the Electoral College were removed, and something else would come into place instead.

Disclaimer: I do not vote despite being an American citizen. I am also an anarchist.

<comment><USER69> If this means viable 3rd parties, am all for it.

<comment><USER68> Personally I think it does, and I also think it means that there would be a spectrum shift among the candidates to more "left of center" positions.

For example I think you would still have a broad selection of candidates who differ greatly on economic ideas. But, I think that social ideas that currently are still being debated (abortion, church and state, drugs) would be resolved. I am willing to estimate that maybe 70% of Americans agree on these social issues, compared to economic issues being more 50/50.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> I could not be more opposed to the abolishment of the Electoral College. The founders had a very good rationale for putting it in.

That said... I think there's a solution for this. Hard term limits for everyone, in all the branches.

It already exists for the Executive branch. I think it should be instituted for both Legislative and Judicial as well.

<comment><USER71> The rationale for the EC and every other compromise in the Constitution was simple: it's what was required to get the states to actually sign up.

There was the very real possibility that the individual states would go their own way if they didn't like the proposed Constitution. Larger states could have easily decided that they didn't need to be part of a larger country. Smaller states could have easily decided that they would be ruled by the larger states and that they'd be better off independent.

The electoral college was needed to convince everyone to stick together. Same with the different structures of the House and the Senate, the 3/5ths compromise, and more.

Things are completely different now. There's no realistic possibility that any state will exit the union. The major purpose of so many elements of our federal system is completely gone.

<comment><USER39> That's fair. We have a set of rules, and the rationale for many of them is gone. Therefore... what?

Throw them all out? If so, replace them with what? Worse: How do you get everyone to _agree_ on what to replace them with?

As it turns out, there's a mechanism for getting everyone to agree, and to prevent changes that everyone does not agree with (for certain values of "everyone"): Amend the Constitution.

<comment><USER71> It turns out that there's another mechanism to accomplish this: a collection of states adding up to a majority of electoral votes can agree to cast all of their votes to the winner of the national popular vote. Hence the subject of the article.

<comment><USER39> I don't think it will "accomplish this", because it's too low a threshold. This mechanism doesn't add up to "getting everyone to agree". It adds up to "getting 50% + 1 of the electoral votes", which is not the same thing. It's going to leave far too many people feeling bypassed and marginalized. In today's political environment, those people might become problematic.

<comment><USER71> Oh, I thought you were saying this was the mechanism for deciding how to change the rules.

At any rate, people may well feel bypassed and marginalized, but hopefully the ones outside of swing states will come around once they realize that their vote actually matters for once. And if they don't, well, lots more people feel bypassed and marginalized _now_.

If it's a bad idea, what do you propose to do about it? The Constitution allows states to cast their votes as they see fit.

<comment><USER39> > Oh, I thought you were saying this was the mechanism for deciding how to > change the rules.

That too. This "compact" approach bugs me partly because it's a hack to get around the appropriate way of doing this, which they know they can't get enough support to do.

> The Constitution allows states to cast their votes as they see fit.

That may be correct. But the Wikipedia article on this ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact)) indicates that the constitutionality is at least in question. I'd really like to see the Supreme Court decide on the constitutionality of this approach _before_ the first election where it would be in force.

<comment><USER71> What makes it a hack, but amending the Constitution isn't? I agree it feels like one, but it is entirely above board. I'm sure the authors of the Constitution didn't anticipate states choosing to allocate their votes this way, but they didn't bother to specify how they could or couldn't do it.

From the Wikipedia article, the only question I see is whether the agreement requires Congress to approve it or not. There seems to be no question that the agreement is allowed and would work.

<comment><USER39> And, under current circumstances, do you see congressional approval to be forthcoming? For myself, I rather doubt it.

[Edit: Why isn't amending the Constitution a hack? Because it's the recognized mechanism for changing the rules.

What makes the compact a hack? I guess it _feels_ like a hack because the expectation is that, if you're going to change the way the president gets elected, you have to change the Constitution - and therefore having to withstand the full level of scrutiny that such a change would involve. Changing it within the parameters allowed - just barely - by the Constitution is not technically a hack, legally. But it's still _feels like_ a hack to make the change without as much scrutiny, and without the need for the massive majority. At least, so it seems to me.]

<comment><USER71> Right now, no. Next time the Democrats have control of both chambers, though, it seems possible.

In any case, my point is just that a constitutional amendment isn't required and this is totally above-board. The odds of an amendment being ratified are far lower.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> The electoral college was created to strike a balance between valuing a diversity of perspectives and popularity of perspectives. The probability that a geographically restricted monoculture gets it right is very close to zero.

<comment><USER25> That's not what the electoral college does. It's a post-hoc justification your high school teacher probably came up with on the fly, and you clearly haven't thought about it critically since.

The only thing the electoral college does is give the voting power of local minorities to local majorities.

3 million people in the state vote for A

4 million people in the state vote for B

B gets 7 million people's worth of electoral votes, A gets nothing. Repeat 47 times.

There is no explanation for this that makes sense. It wasn't designed this way, it happened by accident. The framers tried to stop it in the 1790s and 1800s, but there was no political will: everybody wanted to exploit the antidemocratic loophole in the constitution instead of fixing it.

<comment><USER72> Woo there buddy, slow down there a gorsh durned second.

The nature of our republic and bicameral system is a recognition that both the elites (in the form of states, in this case) and the population have important things to contribute. If your fundamental theory of politics is that the elite don't have anything extraordinary to contribute, then how about you start by cleaning your own house and getting rid of superdelegates before you go on trying to change the entire country to match your pet political power distribution

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> Use a condorcet method [0] to elect a US president that represents common ground.

Needs of specific groups of people can be taken into account as transparent supplementary conditions. Sparsely populated areas constitute one potential parameter. Maybe the opinions of poor and ill people can also be taken into account for while respecting their privacy.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method)

</comment><comment><USER74> I turned 30 this year,and the Republican candidate has won the popular vote once in my life,and he was an incumbent. There has been a Republican president 14 of the 30 years of my life. Now,the first president of my life ( Bush 1) won the popular vote before I was born, but if we don't count him, no Republican has entered office with the popular vote in my life. Regardless of political beliefs does this seem right to everyone?

<comment><USER75> If you removed only California from the popular vote then Hillary lost. The share number of people there still cause Hillary to get the popular vote. Is it fair that 1 state has a controlling share over every other state?

<comment><USER25> And if you remove Texas, Hillary would have won by an even larger margin.

What is your point?

<comment><USER75> EC works as intended.

<comment><USER25> Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, the people who designed it, called it their greatest mistake, an abomination, and presented constitutional amendments to abolish it in the 1800s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> I'm interested in hearing arguments from anyone who genuinely believes that California and New York are over all politically underprivileged.

<comment><USER41> Every non-swing state (including Texas and Wyoming) is when it comes to electing the president.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> [https://i.imgur.com/wpOIGxq.png](https://i.imgur.com/wpOIGxq.png)

That's a nice number of comments.

</comment><comment><USER77> Right or wrong, the only thing that matters is the constitution.

It is easy to imagine that a purely democratic system would be better, but I find it easy to imagine that it would be substantially worse.

The founding fathers rightly believed that most people were ignorant and relatively stupid so the people vote for the house, but senators and electors were appointed.

The agreement to get small states to join was that they would have an equal number of senators. If you want a different system change the constitution. Im skeptical that a democratic system would be better.

They setup the system to be a collection of states with a weak federal govt with limited power. The federal govt over time has taken more and more power from the states.

When california joined the union it had 33X less population than the most populous state (new york). Californians were happy to have the overrepresentation when it benefitted them.

Overall a strongly federal system is worse than a system where 50 states each try something different. In a 50 state system we get many chances to find the best policies. For example when marijuana is illegal at the federal level the antis predicted wholesale mayhem. There was no way to test to see what would happen until some states defied federal law. Once one state showed that it was fine others could come on board.

The same goes for open carry. Antis claimed there would massive increases in crime and shootings. It turns out not to be the case.

<comment><USER78> My problem with the electoral college is that it doesn't seem to matter who I vote for or which way my state goes.

The election comes down to some key battleground states, which is where the candidates spend the vast majority of their time campaigning.

The constitution shouldn't be put on a pedestal. The men who wrote that document were flawed just like any other human. Many of them owner slaves. I'm not saying we should disregard our laws but I am saying we should keep an open mind to amending the constitution as needed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> > "Sanford Levinson, a constitutional law scholar at the University of Texas > at Austin, is sharply critical of the Electoral College system, but does not > believe the interstate pact would solve all of the problems inherent to > America's election design."

Same argument as we can't try any gun restrictions because none of them will stop all shootings.

</comment><comment><USER80> What if Congress revoked all (or nearly all) implicitly and explicitly delegated powers to the Executive? The jockeying over who runs for President and how we elect them always seems to miss the point that the modern Executive is much too powerful.

Make the Presidency weaker, and then let's have this discussion about how we elect them.

</comment><comment><USER81> In much more recent news:

[https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/faithless- elector-a-...](https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/faithless-elector-a- court-ruling-just-changed-how-we-pick-our-president/)

</comment><comment><USER82> About the same number of people live in public housing in NYC as Wyoming.

Either land area matters or people matter.

Choose.

</comment><comment><USER83> Questions like this push me more and more to the idea that places like China have got governance nailed. Why bother about all this? It's disorder for little gain.

</comment><comment><USER84> Every time this debate comes up I can't help but wonder if we are letting the office of the president have too much power. To over-simplify a bit: the president should be executing the will of Congress, right?

</comment><comment><USER36> This article is from May. Oregon has since joined, becoming the 16th state to do so.

<comment><USER85> The current number is 15. Nevada didn't join. Although passed by the Assembly and the Senate, the Governor vetoed it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> The electoral college is a fault domain for voter fraud, and scaler to mitigate differences in voter accessibility, which cannot otherwise be fully mitigated given differences in geography.

</comment><comment><USER87> I'd be curious how this holds up to court challenges because it seems like a deliberate circumvention of the constitution.

Not that the current system is completely equitable.

</comment><comment><USER88> Democratic candidates have won the popular vote 4/5 times in the most re ent elections, but only won the Presidency 2/5\. That's an issue.

<comment><USER39> Teams with the most yards lose some football games, too. Is that an issue?

Run to win the election under the rules that are in force.

<comment><USER89> This does not make any sense to me. Elections is not a game, it is people's inalienable right to have equal representation compared to others. If politicians decide that State X doesn't matter since it's not powerful with respect to EC, this is blatantly undemocratic and needs to be fixed asap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> ur-whale The real core issue is the president and the federal govt has way too much power. There is no reason why a centralized authority should decide on policy for both rural and urban communities and for states as deeply different as Louisiana and Washington state.

If political power was surrendered back down to where it naturally belongs, i.e. to the state, or even better to the city level, and the fed was stripped and left with little to no political power, this whole electoral college charade would become entirely moot.

</comment><comment><USER90> Obviously only the "blue" states want this change. Fortunately there are more "red" states than blue states, so the original purpose of the electoral collage, as created by the founding fathers, will be preserved. Otherwise we would be in "tyranny of the majority" mode, which we are anyway, but at least not with regard to presidential elections.

<comment><USER41> It's really not a blue state vs red state thing as much as a swing state vs non-swing state thing. Right now it's more blue because trump is in power, but if democrats take the White House (and especially if it's without winning the popular vote), red states will be jumping on the bandwagon. Before 2016 red states were terrified of the electoral college "blue wall" and many were very close to joining the compact before the 2016 election made it politically infeasible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> Another thing to abolish - winner-takes-all system, which prevents wider parties variety.

<comment><USER92> Would you have multiple presidents? How would you break their roles up? Which one gets the nuclear code or do they all?

<comment><USER93> Winner takes all refers to the fact that in most states, the winning candidate gets 100% of the electoral college votes. Even though the candidate may have gotten just 50% plus 1 of the votes.

This is the main reason a popular vote winner can still lose.

You could be the 51% winner in most states but lose by nearly 100% in the more populous states and still win. Which is why this keeps happening to Democrats. They win by landslides in NY and CA but then eek out a loss in some of the swing States.

<comment><USER92> I don't understand how you can have all electors voting for the national popular winner, and also somehow not have first-past-the-post?

<comment><USER91> "Winner takes all" problem refers to the Congress, not presidential elections.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER94> 1\. Even if NPV is a good idea, this is the wrong way to do it. Doing it the wrong way means legal chaos. Doing it the wrong way means it can probably be undone or made worse the wrong way.

2\. George Mason vs. Elisabeth Warren. James Madison vs. Jay Inslee. These match-ups aren't even close.

3\. I don't think the results will match the intentions.

For point 1 this seems like parts of Obamacare. Whether you support it or not, enforcing/creating parts of it via executive order means it can be unenforced/dismantled via executive order. This isn't a direct comparison, my point, if you base something on legally weak and questionable methods you will end up with weak and questionable outcomes.

Another way I look at point 2, can Justin Beiber rewrite Mozart and improve upon it? There are very few political intellectuals I would put on par with the founding fathers, and sadly most of those are not politicians. The founders' system has worked very well for centuries, the USofA has faults sure, but from ragtag rebel colonies to world super-power, this part is working fine. We have many problems, isolate the variables, I don't think the EC is the cause.

Point 3, this is mostly a party issue, Democrats support it, Republicans do not. Of the 16 states to pass it through legislature 15 had Democrat governors, the single Republican governor vetoed. I think it is safe to say the elections of Bush and Trump, without winning the popular vote, are the big driving factors for the NPV. I don't think NPV will have the intended effect. I think people are wrongly taking new rules and applying old stats but if you change the rules of the game you can't expect players (candidates and voters) to play with old strategies. A lot more Republicans will show up to vote in solidly blue states where currently voting for an R is a waste of time.

</comment><comment><USER95> The United States bases way too much of its identity on who is its president.

<comment><USER25> Because the United States invests way too much power in who is President.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> > Jerry Sonnenberg, a Republican state senator in Colorado who opposed the > bill, said he believed the change would weaken the electoral power of > sparsely populated rural states like Wyoming and Utah, while strengthening > states like California and New York.

States. Are. Not. People.

<comment><USER39> No. But states' representatives will often work together across party lines to try to do something that benefits the state. "Political power of a state" is not a totally idiotic concept.

</comment></comment><comment><USER96> the electoral college system has become a scam to give the presidential election to the wealthy. they can, during the election year establish residency in the swing states and in affect have more of a say as to who becomes president. people here claiming that it gives the rural population more of a say, that's a lot of bs. with national popular vote the urban and rural states will have just as much of a say as each vote will count for one vote. none of this crap of increasing the representative count and taking advantage of the numbers being rounded in favor of one party vs the other. now if a party wants to rig the election, they will have a much harder time.

</comment><comment><USER97> Wake me up when it's 35 states. Before that, it's just a political stunt - blue states promise to vote for popular vote winner, thinking it would be a Democrat, which they'd be voting for anyway.

</comment><comment><USER98> It's quite likely that without the electoral college, Donald Trump would have won the popular vote. Republican turnout in NY is terrible for presidential elections, because they all know there vote won't matter. Registered Democrats out number Republicans in NY by more than 2 to 1, and yet there are more Republicans in NY that there are people in New Mexico and Vermont combined.

It's definitely not a given, but predicting what would happen is not a clear exercise. You can't change the rules without changing peoples behavior.

</comment><comment><USER99> You misspelled obsolete :)

</comment><comment><USER100> How is this tech related?

</comment><comment><USER101> Most of these comments are about the structural issues with the electoral college.

I'm not really concerned about that. What concerns me is this insistence that a popular vote for President in a country of 350M people is a good idea. Does anyone actually believe this? The executive branch these days has essentially become a proxy for what laws one wants passed, and you end up voting accordingly. This might be fine, if the results were restricted to being local - and by the way, the original design of this country accented on exactly that point. But we don't live in that country anymore, I guess. Now we want more democracy, all the time.

So I find it really hard to believe that introducing _more_ "democracy" in a nation as divided and diverse as this one is a good idea. This, I thought, was supposed to be one of the reasons that people wanted to move here ... the whole Federalism thing. Taxes can be different between states. So can Social policy. The extension of this is of course the Electoral College.

Spare me the criticism of "slippery slope" but getting rid of the Electoral College seems like we'd be on the road to a government "of the majority, by the majority, and for the majority". That is categorically absurd, at least in my view.

The cynic in me says that the only reason we're even talking about this is because Trump won in 2016 via the EC. Sure. He did. And Clinton won the "popular vote" because of LA, SF, and NYC.

For those in SF (or whatever proxy): do you want folks in Sioux Falls or Fargo making your economic and social policy? No? I didn't think so. So why is it okay to institute the reverse?

The point I'm trying to make here is this country, as diverse as it is, is best run as a distributed network. And centralizing the election of the Executive into a singular popular vote will help destroy what's left of that network.

</comment><comment><USER102> News flash: Trump would still have won, just with a different campaign strategy and a different platform. Promise a little more of what CA and NY want, and a little less of what everybody else wants, and he'd get the popular vote, too.

In fact I think this would make it _easier_ for a populist to win, not harder, because all they'd have to worry about is crafting a campaign message that resonates with the majority and portrays their opponent as Satan in the flesh.

<comment><USER35> I mean, if he had won the popular vote, then fine, he is the winner.

All this is asking is 1 person 1 vote.

<comment><USER102> This would lead to e.g. Wyoming being run by California though. I'm sure Wyomingites would totally love that.

<comment><USER35> Wyoming would still have a state legislature - I am not sure I see your point.

If you are saying that each person in Wyoming would have 1 vote towards the presidency and each person in California would have 1 vote towards the presidency, then I agree.

<comment><USER103> >>Wyoming would still have a state legislature - I am not sure I see your point.

It means that California would have more influence at the federal level than it does now. And since federal laws apply to all states it means that indirectly California would have more influence on Wyoming.

<comment><USER104> so? California has more people - it should have influence proportional to it's population - remember that in most states (except for Wyoming) electoral college votes are dominated by house seats (which are proportional to population).

<comment><USER102> If you want the US to stay whole, that's a big problem. Technically states can secede, or form a separate union if they so desire. That's also why Senate representation is _NOT_ proportional to population. I suspect that'd be the next thing to be dismantled if whoever is pushing this actually succeeds.

<comment><USER105> > Technically states can secede, mlor form a separate union if they so desire.

 _Technically_ , they can't. There is no provision for secession in the US Constitution.

 _Practically_ , well, the one notable attempt didn't work out, so not that, either.

> That's also why Senate representation is _NOT_ proportional to population. I > suspect that'd be the next thing to be dismantled if whoever is pushing this > actually succeeds.

Well, you can't do that through coordinated state action.

Or even a Constitutional amendment. Maybe two amendments, because the provision prohibiting amendments which alter the equal representation in the Senate isn't itself explicitly protected the same way. Of course, small states can easily block a Constitutional amendment, so that's not going to happen unless they are on board.

<comment><USER102> >> There is no provision for secession in the US Constitution.

There's no provision forbidding secession either, so they technically very much can. All that's not forbidden is allowed.

<comment><USER105> > There's no provision forbidding secession either

The Article IV Sec. 4 guarantee cannot be interpret as even coherent if a state can secede; once a state is admitted to the union, he federal government is irrevocably obligated to preserve it as a subject and republican government; if a state government could escape this oversight by secession, the guarantee would be empty.

Further, there is ample historical evidence that the idea of reserving the right to secede when ratifying was raised by New York, and rejected because it was understood that it would be viewed by the Congress as an inconsistent condition attached to ratification and thereby nullify the ratificstion.

The Supreme Court has also ruled on the issue, in _Texas v. White_. So your concept of a right to secession is inconsistent with the text, historical evidence of intent and case law of the Constitution.

<comment><USER102> >> Article IV Sec. 4

Says literally nothing about secession.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER106> The democrats crucified Trump in 2016 for not accepting the outcome of the election. Today they want to amend the constitution to abolish the electoral college. Maybe it's a good thing that we can't change these things on a whim.

<comment><USER107> This campaign doesn't require changing the constitution. States can decide how to divide their electors, which is exactly what is going on here. See [https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/written- explanation](https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/written-explanation).

</comment></comment><comment><USER108> re: California

It's also worth considering the distortions that illegal aliens put on electoral college numbers.

<comment><USER25> If there was any evidence at all, the administration would have presented it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER109> Wouldn't that push housing up in big cities?

</comment><comment><USER110> This is absurd populism. IMHO electoral college votes should come from US House district winners instead of winner takes all.

<comment><USER60> Probably a move in the right direction, but then the issues of gerrymandering come into play.

</comment></comment><comment><USER111> My issue with the electoral college is that winner take all - rather than each electoral vote being counted and rolled up, only the winner is. There are a couple states that do this, I'd like to see the others adopt this.

</comment><comment><USER112> Anyone proposing this is doing so in the blind. Nobody knows how this would change the complex executive and legislative systems we have. Nobody could know, for decades. So why the confidence that this is the right thing to do?

</comment><comment><USER113> 1) the presidency has grown too powerful and imperial with a bureaucracy so massive the Qing emperor would be jealous.

2) 15 States can do what they want, but unless they meet the provisions in Article 5, the college is here to stay.

Thank goodness the Framers had the foresight to include the process for amending the Constitution in the document.

<comment><USER25> The states have the absolute right to assign their electors as they see fit.

The framers intended for them to be locally elected or proportional, like Maine and Nebraska today.

<comment><USER113> Oh I know. There is no Federal notion of a popular vote for the presidency. It's entirely up to each state how they wish to nominate their Electors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Let's imagine a state signs this and is a tipping point state for the presidential election. If this compact has any effect, it will be for the state's electors to vote against the popular vote in that state, resulting in the election of the undesired president according to the state's voters.

Nothing wrong with that constitutionally, but I suspect the politicians will feel differently after the voters express their opinion of the matter.

<comment><USER114> If this actually does pass the tipping point, nobody will even be counting electors any more, they will only be counting the popular vote. The electors will be considered just a formality.

<comment><USER115> Vote counts will still be reported at every level, but electors will all cast their votes for the national popular vote winner.

It will be easy enough to note which states' vote counts favor candidate B, despite the national popular vote favoring candidate A.

As parent says, that's the design, but I'm sure there will be upset people in those states.

<comment><USER105> > As parent says, that's the design, but I'm sure there will be upset people > in those states.

There are people upset with the plurality winner getting all the states votes, too.

<comment><USER116> Not to mention a plurality of voters in _the entire country_ in 2000 and 2016.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER117> This is stupid. The entire point of the electoral college is to ensure small states have a say and the country isn't ruled by the majority mob. Small states would have to be pretty ignorant to make themselves irrelevant like that.

<comment><USER118> Are you thinking of the US Senate? The electoral college is not meant to give a proportionally larger weight to small states.

<comment><USER60> Except it does. Smaller states do get more votes per capita than larger states.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_Colleg...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_College#Advantage_based_on_state_population)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER119> If trump is re-elected it may be the last time a republican wins a presidential election in the current system, due to demographic changes in key states (FL, TX, NC, etc.)

If the electoral college is abolished, it could actually end up getting another few republicans elected, since it would incentivize republican turnout in solidly democratic states like California.

<comment><USER39> I doubt it. The Republicans will just have to move their platform just enough to the left to appeal to whichever state has the 270th vote.

<comment><USER120> The left has gone so authoritarian they may not have to. Left and right are illusion. Freedom and despotism are what you experince as a citizen.

<comment><USER39> All right, the Republicans have to move their position just enough to appeal to the median electoral vote _just a bit more_ than the Democrats do. If the Democrats go full off-the-deep-end leftist (as seen by the bulk of the voters), then the Republicans may not have to move at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER121> The states agreed to the Constitution with the Electoral College provision. If there's national will to change it, it should be through the amendment process described in the Constitution.

Having some states band together to subvert the intention of the EC fundamentally breaks the compact of the Constitution. What is the authority of a President chosen through subversion of the Constitution?

<comment><USER53> Constitution does not specify how states should implement EC. In fact, Maine and Nebraska do not use winner-take-all used by other states.

</comment></comment><comment><USER122> Great. With no electoral college, Wyoming would have 1.44% of the weight California would have towards who was elected. The only thing keeping Wyoming in the Union would be their two senators. Maybe then Wyoming folks should have to pay 1.44% of the Federal Income Tax that Californians pay.

Campaigning for President? Just go to New York, LA, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, and maybe a few other cities.

Maybe city folks can start making their own food while they're at it.

<comment><USER123> Guess what? Wyoming pays less than 1.07% <1> of the federal income tax that California does so you have gotten your wish.

Also California grows about 100x <2> the food of Wyoming so yeah we can eat our own food, thank you.

The most important reason the electoral college was invented was so that states with large slave populations could count 60% of them for representation without actually giving them the vote. You don't hear about it that much anymore for obvious reasons.

<1> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_tax_revenue_by_state](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_tax_revenue_by_state)

<2> [https://www.farmprogress.com/management/what-us-states- produ...](https://www.farmprogress.com/management/what-us-states-produce-most- food-ranking-1-50)

<comment><USER122> Nice response. With actual data. Of course I am not sure the folks in the San Jaoquin Valley (who produce all that food) would be colored blue if they were an independent state.

I don't buy the slave argument -- I think the electoral college was created for the same reason we have two senators per state. Of course those states with large slave populations would have been colored blue, but that is another history folks ignore.

<comment><USER123> And if the San Jaoquin Valley became its own state conservative votes in San Jaoquin valley and San Fransico would count more if they were seperate states. Which is the whole point. It's telling that my point about economics and representation got turned into a blue / red thing.

>> I don't buy that slave arguement.. And you are a historian? The slave states that were large like Virginia wanted the electoral college, contradicting your argument.

[https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/electoral-college- slav...](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/electoral-college-slavery- constitution) [https://time.com/4558510/electoral-college-history- slavery](https://time.com/4558510/electoral-college-history-slavery) [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/opinion/electoral- college...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/opinion/electoral-college- slavery.html)

<comment><USER122> It seems the electoral college was exploited by slave owners, but what I challenge is that is was created for that purpose. It articles see the electoral college was a vestige of slavery, but that does not seem like a reasonable conclusion. The sources you give all have a serious bias and a vested interest in seeing the electoral college disbanded.

<comment><USER123> It was supported by the largest state at the time, so the idea that it was created to "help small states" makes no sense. It served that purpose but that is not why it was made.

You provide no evidence and when I site sources you say they are biased. If you believe the sources are biased please note that they site books, experts etc. If you just reject every piece of evidence you will always be right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER124> I wonder how many people arguing for the abolishment of the EC would like it if India and China automatically had the most votes in whatever supranational government arises in the future and got to decide everything that happened across the world. The US is still supposed to be a federation. The EC was part of the deal the US made with smaller states to become part of the Union precisely because they were afraid of being drowned out by the big states. Don't like it? Convince the smaller states. Might not be that hard. There are plenty of dumb people in the smaller states willing to permanently consign their land to irrelevance because they don't like a President who's going to be gone in a handful of years.

<comment><USER125> That only matters if our international government gets an elected god emperor.

The president is one of three branches of government. Congress/Senate balances the power across states.

</comment></comment><comment><USER126> I think this is both a dumb move and unconstitutional.

Present day politics aside, allowing for pure demographic voting in this day and age is even more dangerous than it was in the early days of the republic.

States and regions have different needs that need to be considered in the governance of the nation. You can already see warning signs, the Democratic Party platform has been so brain dead, they even managed to marginalize union voters. Kansas and Wisconsin were progressive strongholds.

Changing the way we count isn't a fix for that issue — fixing how candidates and parties approach the people is. A more productive approach would be to reduce the carnival nature of the election process... candidates shouldn't be picked based on their ability to shuck and jive in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Direct popular vote is basically a beacon for reactionary politics. It's easy to churn out old people to vote.

<comment><USER127> What is unconstitutional about a state using its constitutional authority to cast its votes for President?

Why should fictional state borders take precedence over actual humans when allocating voting blocs? If different states have difference needs, then those states residents will vote for leaders who serve them.

Your problem seems to be that that giving supreme power to an arbitrary majority is flawed. And it surely is. But giving supreme power to an arbitrary _minority_ is surely as bad or worse.

Old people live in every state.

If you have a problem with old people exercising their sacred voting right too much, surely the solution is to enable young people to vote, not give rural state citizens extra vote weight?

<comment><USER126> Don't put words in my mouth.

My problem is that this is a solution looking for a problem. In fact, it's a solution that will make the problem that some people want to solve far worse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER128> I think before we change the system we might want to get politicians to actually do their job and represent the people in their district. With all these people voting by mail and all these government provided or subsidized phones and internet connections it's not only trivial but should be mandatory to quantify and qualify what each person who votes wants as a matter of a public record of accountability rather than having some party line being towed. If the politicians were doing their job and not serving some party or political agenda, the electoral college I think would work just fine. Popular vote/mob rules? I don't think so. The majority should never rule over the minority, and the only good government is a democracy where the majority vote in the best interest of all citizens and compromise in order to do so. Or as I like to sum it up, don't confuse a coop game with a competitive game.

</comment><comment><USER129> A hypothetical situation;

An amendment is proposed on the floor of the House to change the formula in a bill for how funding is allocated.

The amendment presents a pro-urban allocation which provides a greater share of funding for larger cities compared to a baseline per-capita allocation.

Urban center representatives stand up and argue how their cities need a higher reimbursement rate because the issue at hand is costlier to fix or more prevalent in their environment.

Rural representatives stand up and argue they need the baseline funding to run an effective program.

A vote is taken, and 54% of votes approve the amendment, urban center reps effectively pooling their votes to enact the funding paradigm that most benefited their constituents.

——

The moral of the story is that it's a lot more complicated than 1 person 1 vote.

Often times policies may benefit a rural area over and urban environment or vice versa. One type of community benefiting and the expense of another. Cities already carry a massive voting advantage, because, that's where most people live!

When bills pass on a majority vote, urban already wins over rural every time. The rural areas maybe can form blocks to help push otherwise divided city reps one way or another, but policy debate is already dominated by urban voters, despite the claim of urban votes "counting less". The simple math belies the reality that urban center reps vote for pro-urban national policies and the rural states with 1 rep sit on the sidelines.

The last place these votes matter, even in the slightest, is in the EC in a closely contested election, and in the Senate. Frankly I'm not convinced more populism is any benefit, or that cities are particularly hurting from a lack of representation.

<comment><USER130> The thing I've never understood about this argument is why the urban/rural divide is so special that it needs special rules? There are a bajillion other types of ways to categorize people that there is a majority and a minority besides the population density of their state.

<comment><USER129> It's a hypothetical, of course it's contrived. Thankfully things break down much more chaotically than just an urban/rural split! That's not to say there is not a general effect present.

Here's another way to think of it. How many congressional votes does Los Angeles get before it's people are adequately represented? Right now I believe it's 18.

Even at that level their vote per capita is technically 3:1 less powerful than a person in WY. But whose interests are being served better in Congress?

Is the population of LA really disenfranchised in Congress due to WY getting a representative, or because LA didn't get 30?

There's a power effect which is very much non-linear due to the individual votes in Congress being decided on a win/loss by majority or super-majority and this effect already greatly benefits these so-called "disenfranchised" voters.</comment></comment></comment>


An open source OS for cars - <AUTHOR> https://www.automotivelinux.org <comment><USER2> _Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) is a Linux Foundation Workgroup dedicated to creating open source software solutions for automotive applications. Although the initial target for AGL is In-Vehicle-Infotainment (IVI) systems, additional use cases such as instrument clusters and telematics systems will eventually be supported. AGL has participants from the Automotive, Communications, and Semiconductor Industries and welcomes contributions from individual developers._</comment>


Why do we keep pretending that children are wiser than adults? - <AUTHOR> https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/10/will-greta-win-the-nobel-peace-prize-tomorrow-i-really-hope-not/ <comment><USER2> Having seen plenty of adults as they attempt to adult I'm no longer sure most adults are actually adults. A lot are just children that aged. That and a lot of adults are afraid of their children or have decided to be "friends" instead of parents.</comment>