Ranked choice.
Fix gerrymandering.
Popular vote.
If you don’t want this, you’re simply a sore loser. You dont want democracy, you want a boys club.
want a boys club.
*white, straight, christian, republican, cis, landowning boys club
See: Jackson Wyoming
Well, and I mean this in the nicest way, duh.
I don’t think there is anything obvious about this, but ok.
Shit. That’s why I can’t buy a home/land. Not a Repugnacan.
The issue with gerrymandering is that there is basically no way around it because all borders are arbitrary.
I get that the Electoral College was originally designed to give smaller states an equal say. But, when Los Angeles county has more population than like 10 states combined, things are getting ridiculous.
California has like 67 times the population of Wyoming… yet they each have two senators. And that keeps increasing.
Our government is not a good representation of the populace.
The number of people was a political compromise between individual rights and States rights, but so was a Senate and House.
The electoral college was primarily designed to enable states to vote despite a communication delay that could take months.
It did great at that, actually. How would California have up to date info on what’s going on in Washington when the fastest mode of travel was a horse? It wouldn’t.
Instead of voting based on information that’s outdated and potentially inaccurate, best to pick some people you trust to vote in your interests, and send them to Washington. Let them get caught up, and vote how they will as your representative.
Then States can sort out their own voting time and method, with no real concern for it being simultaneous or consistent because news travels so slow anyway. The important thing was authorized people would show up by the expected federal voting time, and if that happened, everyone did well enough.
Of course, now they can cast their vote without leaving the state, and coordination is possible, but here we are holding the bag on a lack of accounting for technological progress.
I agree with your ultimate premise, that technological advances have all but eliminated the need for the Ec. But, my man, the telegraph predates CA as a state.
The EC was also for many reasons, but pertaining to the point were talking about, it was because they were afraid people would just campaign in cities because that would be the most efficient. The EC forces a wider appeal.
But with the ability to reach everyone, everywhere, instantly, this fear that they only campaign in cities is gone.
Also, the electoral college only shifts the focus from cities to major swing states (and even then, cities within those states).
But more importantly, why the fuck should potential campaign strategies affect the strength of my vote?
It was originally designed to give slave owners a greater say than people in free states, since EC representation is mainly based on the number of representatives you have in the House, and the slave state representative count was inflated by the 3/5 compromise.
Instead of having a forever constitution that was great and new 200 years ago when the internet and modern transportation and communications didn’t exist … they should regularly overhaul the entire government every hundred years to keep up with the times.
I’m in Canada and they should do the same here.
We can’t possibly think that everything we see, think and believe today will be applicable to people living 100, 200 years from now.
We look at 200 year old laws about horses and we laugh at it. 200 years from now, our descendants will laugh at what we’re debating today.
The only reason to maintain the status quo is to protect the power and privilege of a few powerful and wealthy people. It never has anything to do with the goodwill of the people.
- Every fifty years. Jefferson for all his faults thought it should be that frequent.
Gotta refresh that tree of liberty from time to time.
California has like 67 times the population of Wyoming… yet they each have two senators. And that keeps increasing.
The worst part about the legislative branch is that Congress also acted to handicap the House of Representatives. It was supposed to be the body based on population. And you may say “Well California has 52 and Wyoming only 1 so that’s proportional.” But the original intent was no more than 30,000 constituents per representative. So based on a quick look at the 2020 population figures, Wyoming should have 19 while California should have ~1,317. (That would also be equivalent to California having 69 representatives to Wyoming’s current 1.)
“…designed to give smaller states an equal say…”
Not quite…
No it was designed by slave holding states to be sure that the free states up north didn’t have the power to end slavery.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/electoral-colleges-racist-origins
California has like 67 times the population of Wyoming… yet they each have two senators.
But they have way more representatives. That was the point of separation of power, to limit federal power, while California does have a state legislature that can do most of what it wants.
The issue is that congress can regulate anything as “interstate commerce”
This is exactly where we should be focusing when this pops up. If PA decided and the pending states go through, that’s all you need. Hell, with the pending states, you only need 11 more electoral votes for it to to be enacted.
and it would come into effect only when it would guarantee that outcome
And it will never budge above that line. They should have just done it anyways. Most of the votes to decide is better than all of them.
They should do it anyway, but limit it to the winner of the popular vote within the states that are part of the pact.
Then there’d be several states that would realize they’d have more influence by contributing their popular votes to the pact than by sending their electors to the College independently (and in any case a candidate would still have to virtually sweep all the non-pact states to win the College without winning the pact).
I think enacting it early would just make it look like a Democratic party alliance. That’s roughly who the enacted states are currently and it would dissuade other states who might benefit or believe in the popular vote from joining.
Right now, it’s in the abstract interest of Texas to join the Compact, because a popular vote would increase their influence, but if the Compact involved just being forced to vote blue indefinitely without gaining any influence, then it’s a bad deal. “Doing what the majority of the people” want is a lot easier a concept to sell than “doing what the majority of blue states want”.
Can we please just get ranked choice voting
Ah, but is a significant enough amount of that majority located in the lowest population states to make it matter?
From the article, maybe not:
Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are far more likely than Republicans and Republican leaners to support moving to a popular vote system for presidential elections (82% vs. 47%).
I think the issue is if we get close to enacting this, partisan politicians will flood the channel with anti-popular vote propaganda, because they know every step towards a fairer system harms their chances.
Is that a threat? Do we need to have government sponsored people movement into less populated states from left voting cities? Because I’ll fucking vote for that.
You can bus all the immigrants you want to cities in blue states, and in equal exchange, we will bus lefty to sparsely populated states to render your votes blue.
Carpetbaggers of America, do your civic duty!
It’s wild that if multiple things we implemented republicans would never win the presidency again.
Any anti voter suppression method, like universal mail in voting Ranked choice voting Removal of the electoral college
I am sure there are even more.
Remember that republicans are the minority, they just show up to vote more often (and aren’t actively suppressed)
Man what I’d give for ranked choice voting, it seems like a no-brainer
I’ve been working with local groups trying to get it passed. It may be worth investigating if there are some near you. Donate money or time or support.
That’s awesome! I’ll have to look into it
The electrical collage is way overdue to be retired. I wonder if we will have the means to actually do it.
The way elections are run Is mostly up to the states. The electoral college, though, is stipulated in the Constitution.
So is a method to change the Constitution.
Are you suggesting with say…an amendment?
Or we could ratio it out of existence. If we had 10,000 representatives then the EC would match the popular vote results.
That really is the only way to get rid of the electoral college.
That’s not exactly true. Each state could choose to give their votes to the candidate that wins the national vote. Then the electoral college system would still exist on paper but in reality wouldn’t be relevant to the outcome.
I think it would be better to amend the Constitution. But it’s not the only way to make popular vote reality.
The states changing their electors outside their popular vote is exactly what Trump was trying to do.
I think it’s important to point out that strategies would change if the system changed so we can’t predict what the results would be.
They would still win, but they would have to shift their platform to capture the true political center rather than the center right.
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So how do we get a constitutional amendment passed to do this?
Especially with the republicans only able to win the presidency through the electoral college. They’re gonna cling to that shit with their dying breath.
We actually don’t need a constitutional amendment to do it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
How we did this
In 2000 and 2016, the winners of the popular vote lost their bids for U.S. president after receiving fewer Electoral College votes than their opponents. To continue tracking how the public views the U.S. system for presidential elections, we surveyed 8,480 U.S. adults from July 10 to 16, 2023.
Everyone who took part in the current survey is a member of Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology.
Here are the questions used for this analysis, along with responses, and its methodology.
I can already hear it…
wEr,E a REpUbLiC nOt A dEMoCrOcy111
Alternatively, with a simple bill we can establish an EC so large or doesn’t effectively matter. We would just repeal the inter-war bill freezing the size of the House of Representatives and set the ratio to something that means even Montana gets 20 EC votes.
Alternatively, with a simple bill we can establish an EC so large or doesn’t effectively matter.
Well it’s still up to the states to determine how electors are determined. That’s because the president was intentionally designed to not be a prime minister (speaker of the house) because they are intentionally not elected in the same way as the house
this poll may show that Americans want electoral college gone, but if you look at where they answered, you can instead count the answers given by state delegates and then it turns out Americans love the electoral college!
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Factual Reporting: Very High
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Beep boop. This action was performed automatically. If you dont like me then please block me.💔
If you have any questions or comments about me, you can make a post to LW Support lemmy community.I get it, but then only like 4 counties in the whole country decide an election.
Oh no! The majority of the people get to decide an election in a democracy! The horror!
You just described the system we have now.
Not true, heres the county map from 2016. https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2016_Presidential_Election_by_County.svg
My vote has no practical effect since I’m not in a swing state.
Get rid of the EC and my vote suddenly matters just as much as a vote from PA.
Land can’t vote, people can. Your argument sucks.
So only people that live in large dense cities voice’s count. Got it.
If presidents were elected via popular vote, that would be the literal definition of “we the people”. One person, one vote.
As opposed to now where only like 4 empty plots of dirt decide elections…?
Which 4 counties contain even close to a majority of the population between them?
Not only that, but if the election is close, the entire country gets re-counted.
The quickest way to fix the electoral college is not to fix it at all, but to increase the size of Congress. Congress used to increase in size every year, until the 1920s, when they couldn’t decide on how many seats to add. In 1920, there were about 250k people in an average district. Now there are over 750k, which is larger than some of the smallest states.
Congress sets its own size, and this fix can be done without any amendment.
This doesn’t really fix anything other than the small state counting bias. You still have states that are entirely ignored because they’re reliably >50% red/blue and you still have a small number of close states that are the only ones who matter. There’s still a high likelihood that you’ll have presidents elected who lost the popular vote merely because of inefficient arrangements of voters.
that doesn’t solve the issue with the senate; where every state regardless of size has two.
No, that won’t be solved without a constitutional amendment, though. Increasing the size of Congress can help mitigate the issue, and just takes an act of Congress .
That’s the entire purpose of the Senate. It is functioning as designed and that is not an issue.
Congress is supposed to be two halves, one where every State is on equal footing (Senate), and one half where a larger population gets a larger voice (House).
Just because it’s designed that way doesn’t make it a non-issue. It was designed to be shitty and I’d really like a not-shitty government, thank you.
…if you batched the popular vote into counties and made each county winner-take-all.
Which is not what anyone is suggesting.
Counties dont vote. Individuals vote. Even if you’re in LA youre still one person that gets one vote regardless of how those around you vote.
