The fairness of the Electoral College and other election processes

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Comments

  • Autenrieth RoadAutenrieth Road Shipmate
    edited October 2020
    If the electoral college were abolished, how do people think campaigning, and party platforms, [ETA: and vote suppression machinations / get out the vote campaigns] might change?
  • Lamb ChoppedLamb Chopped Shipmate
    edited October 2020
    I think "flyover" states would be wholly ignored.

    Now some would apparently consider that a feature, not a bug, but it's something to be aware of. Particularly when this area includes the breadbasket of the United States.

    Are you quite sure you want such a crucial area basically disenfranchised? Or do you count on coastal states and big cities to make informed, researched, sensible decisions about that sort of agriculture?
  • Dave WDave W Shipmate
    Well, we’d probably be better off if we were no longer subject to the ridiculous ethanol swindle.
  • Barnabas62Barnabas62 Purgatory Host, 8th Day Host, Epiphanies Host
    edited October 2020
    Lamb Chopped

    Isn’t that argument based on the assumption that the President will in practice govern only in the interests of the Americans who voted for him or her? Trump clearly does do that but a President of all the people isn’t compelled to do that.

    I thought that was one of the faults that separation of powers was designed to prevent. My argument is that the EC system is more likely to promote that kind of politicisation than guard against it.

    Let’s saw off the Eastern Seaboard. And California. Long live Middle America? Either way it’s not exactly an exercise in seeking a more perfect union.
  • I think "flyover" states would be wholly ignored.

    Now some would apparently consider that a feature, not a bug, but it's something to be aware of. Particularly when this area includes the breadbasket of the United States.

    Are you quite sure you want such a crucial area basically disenfranchised? Or do you count on coastal states and big cities to make informed, researched, sensible decisions about that sort of agriculture?

    You make it sound like the president is the only part of the government that makes laws. There's also this legislature thing.
  • Crœsos wrote: »
    I would disagree on one point; the electoral college was never intended nor structured to cope with a rigid party structure. I am quite certain that the framers assumed that political chicanery would manifest itself, but they likely envisaged gatherings in each state's capital of experienced public figures and local bigwigs who would send their votes off. This was quickly replaced in a few elections by the party slates and the 1796 and 1800 elections led to the tinkering of the 12th amendment (where separate votes would be held for the President and the Vice-President, previously the VP being the runner-up).

    I disagree here. The Twelfth Amendment (i.e. the electoral college as it currently exists) was written explicitly to handle the emergence of the First Party System. Whether or not this counts as "rigid" I'm not sure. You'd have to define that term. But in any case, the electoral college has been intended since 1804 onward to accommodate the existence political parties.

    Allow me to draw a parallel- Al Capone's 1928 Cadillac Town Sedan was designed to be an agreeable town car for a prosperous and respectable member of the community: it then became a murdering thug's transport from one crime to another. In this way, the College was designed to be a gathering of notables; after 17 years of elections, the needs of a developing party system changed that.
  • KwesiKwesi Shipmate
    LambChopped: I think "flyover" states would be wholly ignored.

    Not sure about that. An outcome determined by the popular vote totalled across all states increases the incentive to mobilise voters in states where currently the outcome is a foregone conclusion.
  • I think "flyover" states would be wholly ignored.

    Now some would apparently consider that a feature, not a bug, but it's something to be aware of. Particularly when this area includes the breadbasket of the United States.

    Are you quite sure you want such a crucial area basically disenfranchised? Or do you count on coastal states and big cities to make informed, researched, sensible decisions about that sort of agriculture?

    I'm not sure a state division on agriculture really makes sense. Is inland Washington notably different from Idaho in its agricultural concerns? My sense is that the divide is urban-rural more than it is coastal-inland.

    The maps here might give a more useful guide to how geography relates to voting:
    http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2016/
  • Gee DGee D Shipmate
    Those maps are very interesting. A very different picture emerges as you scroll through to the simplistic representation in the first.
  • orfeoorfeo Shipmate
    Dave W wrote: »
    A change of name made it no longer pointless? This thread is literally most of the comments from the previous thread cut and pasted into a thread with a different name.

    It is all the comments that were a tangent from the original topic of the other thread. If you can't understand that my decision re the other thread was to a large extent based on the fact that the discussion I was part of was a tangent, then that, Sir, is entirely your problem.

  • orfeoorfeo Shipmate
    Barnabas62 wrote: »
    orfeo

    Do you see anything wrong with the first principles argument that the President is President of all the people and therefore each person’s vote should count equally.
    No. I don't really see anything wrong with that argument per se if we were starting from first principles.

    Most federal nations do at least some things to recognise their federal nature. I can't remember who put this forward, but someone did suggest that you can have House of Reps by district, the Senate by state, and the President nationally, and I do think there is a reasonable argument for that. You've still got the Senate, and constitutional amendments, having a federal aspect.

    My problem is more the tone of claiming that it is utterly self-evident that this is the right approach and a state-by-state system is a wrong approach, and the fact that this frequently seems to be driven not by first principles but by a dislike of election results.

    I dislike the last US Presidential election result as much as anyone, believe me, but I simply don't reason from that that the solution is to ensure that the party favoured in big cities gets to win from now on.
    The EC system produces battleground states which I think distorts both debates and policy arguments. No previous President has been as unashamedly partisan and base-conscious as Trump and maybe the EC system has contributed to that more than an all-votes-equal-value system would?

    Any system that subdivides in any way inevitably creates battlegrounds. The UK, Australia etc have safe seats that see little campaigning and marginal seats that get all the attention. I live in Canberra, and in the federal elections we are almost always safe. Meanwhile, 15 minutes drive from me across the NSW border is Queanbeyan, which is the largest town in the seat of Eden-Monaro, and for an entire generation whoever won Eden-Monaro won the election. So I've become extremely used to witnessing party leaders making announcements in Queanbeyan during election campaigns, rather than in the national capital!

    But I suspect that even if you had a single national vote for President, you would in practice have some battlegrounds. They'd simply be the biggest population areas. Maybe there'd be some assessment of which cities offer the most capacity to swing, but in general I suspect that there would be a concentration of campaigning wherever there would be lots of votes to be won, and people in smaller population centres would be ignored.

    Is that less distorting? Maybe.

  • orfeoorfeo Shipmate
    Crœsos wrote: »
    Barnabas62 wrote: »
    On a first principles basis I think constituency boundaries should include relatively similar size populations but I much prefer the idea of representative democracies with one representative per constituency. It is the party system with its controls which has probably damaged that notion beyond repair. I can accept the inequities of the system from the perspective of minor parties if representatives are prepared to put constituency needs ahead of party needs. That’s not the present system in practice. So, reluctantly, I have moved to prefer PR on the grounds that it leads to coalitions, thereby diluting the power of the larger parties. That leads to larger constituency boundaries and multiple constituency representation. Not ideal but it curbs the power of the party machine.

    Political parties, or "the party machine" if you prefer, are shaped by the type of electoral system in which they have to function. A single ballot, winner take all plurality system tends to favor the existence of exactly two political parties. The penalty for vote splitting tends to force non-antagonistic interest groups to consolidate their votes in order to achieve at least a plurality. A proportional representation or ranked choice or multi-representative district system would allow the practical existence of more political parties, but I'm not sure that's necessarily beneficial. It might lead to political gridlock.

    One of the things that's not very well understood is that, like a parliamentary system, American politics is about forming a coalition government. The difference is that the coalition is made before the election, in the form of political parties. For example, the Democratic Party as it's currently constituted isn't an ideologically unified entity like many parties in other countries, it's a coalition of factions. Presently the major ones are African Americans, Hispanic Americans, women's rights groups, labor unions, and liberals/progressives. There is obviously some overlap between these groups. The key to building a successful party/coalition is getting enough factions to constitute a majority (or at least a plurality) without recruiting factions that have competing agendas. (e.g. there's no obvious reason why an anti-abortion faction can't ally with either labor or big business, but there's a pretty obvious reason they can't ally with pro-choice activists.)
    orfeo wrote: »
    It's not self-evident though. Why are children excluded?

    The basic premise underlying most civil law is that children lack mental capacity. It's why they're not able to legally consent to sex, why they can't enlist in the military, why they can't sign legally binding contracts, and why they can't vote. It's very consistent.
    orfeo wrote: »
    Why are resident non-citizens?

    The premise is that Americans should elect American elected officials. Allowing citizens of foreign governments is problematic not only for the obvious reasons but because it allows the current government to game the system by setting immigration policy. This was not always the case. Some American jurisdictions, mostly in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, allow foreigners to vote. Most of them didn't make a distinction between resident and non-resident foreigners largely because such a distinction didn't exist in American law at the time.
    orfeo wrote: »
    What about people who never enrolled, or just didn't vote?

    People who, of their own volition, chose not to register or chose not to vote are excluded at their own insistence. Those who have had their otherwise valid registration or vote invalidated by an outside party have been cheated.
    orfeo wrote: »
    And why is federalism completely irrelevant for the head of the federal government?

    Because the federal government represents the people. It says so right there at the beginning of the U.S. Constitution in really big letters so you can't have missed it: "We the People of the United States . . . " There is an American constitution that starts off "We, the people of the Confederate States, each State acting in its sovereign and independent character, . . . ", but it's not the Constitution of the United States of America.

    I'm getting very tired of folks trying to read a neo-Confederate understanding of American federalism into the U.S. Constitution.
    orfeo wrote: »
    I mean, I'm sure there are plenty of American Presidential elections where no-one actually got the majority of the population to vote for them.

    There are four American presidential elections where the winner of the electoral college receive did not receive even a plurality of the votes (i.e. they got fewer votes than one of their opponents): 1876 (Rutherford B. Hayes), 1884 (Benjamin Harrison), 2000 (George W. Bush), and 2016 (Donald Trump). I'm eager to hear your reasoning why Samuel Tilden, Grover Cleveland, Al Gore, and Hillary Clinton would have been such disasters for the American Republic, relative to their opponents.
    orfeo wrote: »
    But for Presidential elections, what you're complaining about is the Republicans understanding the rules of the game, set LONG before the current demographic map existed, and then winning the game with rules as set. That's not gaming the system, that's playing the game within the system. It's not a Republican plot, it's the same basic rules that existed when the South was pretty well ruled by Democrats.

    I'm unconvinced by your advocacy that Jim Crow-style voter disenfranchisement is perfectly consistent with democracy. Can you flesh this out a bit? I'll grant it's very consistent with your stated belief that some votes should count for more than others, but a little more detail would be nice.
    Kwesi wrote: »
    I thoroughly agree with Orfeo. It may be that the EC is currently working in a manner that many might consider perverse, but that is not to say the result in 2016 was gerrymandered by Trump and the Republicans.

    For my part I'm perplexed as to why a discussion primarily about the electoral college was given the title "Gerrymandering" when split off from the previous thread. Seems inapt.

    Honestly, I'm not going to bother with this. There are at least 3 times where you simply show you don't understand what I was saying.
  • RuthRuth Shipmate
    orfeo wrote: »
    But I suspect that even if you had a single national vote for President, you would in practice have some battlegrounds. They'd simply be the biggest population areas. Maybe there'd be some assessment of which cities offer the most capacity to swing, but in general I suspect that there would be a concentration of campaigning wherever there would be lots of votes to be won, and people in smaller population centres would be ignored.

    This makes sense to me. Flyover country would not be ignored; candidates would campaign in Chicago, Minneapolis, St. Louis, etc. But the smaller the city, the less likely people would be to see the candidate. As it is, flyover country cities that are much smaller than the SoCal city I live in get far more attention. I grew up in a city of 35,000. If it had been in Iowa, we'd have seen any number of presidential candidates over the years, if not right in town, certainly within driving distance. But it was in California, and not close to a large population center. Nobody in Washington outside of the House Rep has ever had to give a shit about ranchers in San Luis Obispo County, but farmers in Iowa get plenty of attention.

    The larger issue in American politics is that because of the Electoral College and the Senate, we effectively have minority rule. It's not just that the guy in the Oval Office was not supported by more than half the population. The problem is also that policies a majority of the American public supports are not being implemented.
  • People have been calling for the dismantling of the Electoral College long, long before Bush v Gore. @orfeo I think you have a bit of tunnel vision here.
  • KwesiKwesi Shipmate
    Ruth: The problem is also that policies a majority of the American public supports are not being implemented.

    There is so much to be said about this, isn't there? How democratic is the United States, not compared with some ideal but in comparison to other democratic states? To my mind the absence of a comprehensive healthcare system, however structured, says it all, unless for some quite peculiar reasons Americans choose insecurity and the threat of penury should they fall ill.

    From a black perspective, of course, it is moot as to whether, or at least for how long, has the US been a democracy.
  • Look, the agriculture example was just that--an example. We could as easily choose flood control down the Mississippi. If you throw the election into major population centers (which is primarily coastal areas, with a few exceptions), you are going to elect candidates whose plans revolve primarily around things that those population centers think of as important.

    If you think the large cities and coasts are going to do a fine job choosing candidates (and subsequent legislation, promotion, etc.) for the whole country, take another look at Puerto Rico. How are they doing, with no voice?
  • But right now millions of Americans are without adequate healthcare because the minority empowered by the senate and electoral college don't want it.
  • Look, the agriculture example was just that--an example. We could as easily choose flood control down the Mississippi. If you throw the election into major population centers (which is primarily coastal areas, with a few exceptions), you are going to elect candidates whose plans revolve primarily around things that those population centers think of as important.

    If you think the large cities and coasts are going to do a fine job choosing candidates (and subsequent legislation, promotion, etc.) for the whole country, take another look at Puerto Rico. How are they doing, with no voice?

    Concerning natural disasters, blue states tend to vote FOR support for red states, and red states vote AGAINST support for blue states. For what that's worth.
  • Ugh. This is not an attempt to lay blame or play "Who's the biggest asshole." (Thanks for that!) It's an attempt to point out that de facto placing all the power in the hands of the most heavily populated areas is not necessarily going to produce helpful results for all.

    Why is this so difficult?
  • Ugh. This is not an attempt to lay blame or play "Who's the biggest asshole." (Thanks for that!) It's an attempt to point out that de facto placing all the power in the hands of the most heavily populated areas is not necessarily going to produce helpful results for all.

    Why is this so difficult?

    Because everyone can see the effect of putting power in the hands of the less populated areas right now.
  • Lamb ChoppedLamb Chopped Shipmate
    edited October 2020
    WTF???? So everybody is suddenly going to turn into little angels because we transfer all power to large populations?

    This is just "I hate you and I'm taking my ball and going home."

    I am trying (emphasis on the trying, since I'm apparently failing) to point out WHY it would not be a wonderful day in the neighborhood the minute we took away the electoral college. Apparently you are convinced that it would.

    Enjoy that dream, because it's just going to be another nightmare. (Or try to come up with something more equitable rather than equally INequitable, if you want to.)
  • RuthRuth Shipmate
    A majority of Americans support access to abortion.
    2/3 of Americans favor a national Medicare-type health insurance plan.
    Almost 2/3 of Americans think government should act more aggressively on climate change.
    72% of Americans think physician-assisted suicide should be legal.

    The national government's policies should reflect what the majority of Americans want. Instead a minority inflicts their views on the rest of us.

    The 10 states touched by the Mississippi River would do better under majority rule because what is needed there is a real plan to address the causes and effects of climate change, which is why there have been four huge floods on the Mississippi in the last 10 years. Moreover, people in population centers aren't complete fools; we know that our food isn't grown here in the city and that goods travel on infrastructure, including the Mississippi River, that traverses the entire country.
  • Dave WDave W Shipmate
    WTF???? So everybody is suddenly going to turn into little angels because we transfer all power to large populations?

    This is just "I hate you and I'm taking my ball and going home."

    I am trying (emphasis on the trying, since I'm apparently failing) to point out WHY it would not be a wonderful day in the neighborhood the minute we took away the electoral college. Apparently you are convinced that it would.

    Enjoy that dream, because it's just going to be another nightmare. (Or try to come up with something more equitable rather than equally INequitable, if you want to.)
    WTF yourself. Majority rule is more equitable than minority rule.

    And please stop with the bullshit strawmen ("little angels", "wonderful day").
  • If you think the large cities and coasts are going to do a fine job choosing candidates (and subsequent legislation, promotion, etc.) for the whole country, take another look at Puerto Rico. How are they doing, with no voice?

    The smaller population centers would not have 'no voice' they would have a voice commensurate with the number of people they contain, rather than a voice incommensurate with the number of people they contain.

    Yes, no one is going to turn into 'little angels' (and I can't see who is claiming they would be), I'm just wondering how you figure it works elsewhere?
  • RuthRuth Shipmate
    The minority who are governing us aren't angels themselves.
  • I remember my high school civics teacher referring to the electoral college by saying the Presidential Election is not a popularity contest.
  • CrœsosCrœsos Shipmate
    edited October 2020
    If the electoral college were abolished, how do people think campaigning, and party platforms, [ETA: and vote suppression machinations / get out the vote campaigns] might change?

    One big change is that voter suppression would automatically reduce the suppressing state's influence over the selection of the U.S. president. At present a state's "weight" in the presidential election is the same whether it has 10% turnout or 90%. Given that most voter suppression efforts include some "friendly fire" disenfranchisement of those who would support the vote suppressors if they were allowed to cast a ballot, having a direct election would probably mitigate all but the most blatantly lopsided vote suppression efforts.
    I think "flyover" states would be wholly ignored.

    I'm pretty sure that's the case now. How many campaign stops have been made in North Dakota, Kansas, or Vermont this year? Okay, 2020 is a weird year with large rallies being somewhat damped down by COVID-19. What was it like in 2016? Pretty much a few big states receive attention and other small and big states were ignored. Under the electoral college system marginal, competitive states receive attention, whereas ones with lopsidedly partisan electorates are ignored. Under the current system, anything that boosts your turnout above 50% + 1 vote represents wasted campaign resources.

    I suppose one could argue that it's important for populous states like Ohio and Florida to dominate American elections while populous states like California and Texas are ignored (and low population states like New Hampshire are important while low population states like Vermont receive no attention), but it doesn't seem immediately obvious why this is an optimal system.
    Gee D wrote: »
    Those maps are very interesting. A very different picture emerges as you scroll through to the simplistic representation in the first.

    xkcd has an interesting 2016 map.
    orfeo wrote: »
    No. I don't really see anything wrong with that argument per se if we were starting from first principles.

    Most federal nations do at least some things to recognise their federal nature. I can't remember who put this forward, but someone did suggest that you can have House of Reps by district, the Senate by state, and the President nationally, and I do think there is a reasonable argument for that. You've still got the Senate, and constitutional amendments, having a federal aspect.

    My problem is more the tone of claiming that it is utterly self-evident that this is the right approach and a state-by-state system is a wrong approach, and the fact that this frequently seems to be driven not by first principles but by a dislike of election results.

    The first principle involved is that whoever gets the most votes should win the election. That's pretty basic democratic theory. Minority rule is classified as an oligarchy.
    Ugh. This is not an attempt to lay blame or play "Who's the biggest asshole." (Thanks for that!) It's an attempt to point out that de facto placing all the power in the hands of the most heavily populated areas is not necessarily going to produce helpful results for all.

    Why is this so difficult?

    Again, this is basic democratic theory. Governing agendas set by majorities (or at least pluralities). Objecting to the unwashed masses setting the agenda instead of good, decent people is not new in American politics, only the definition of who is in the "unwashed masses" and who qualifies as "good, decent people" changes. Conservative icon William F. Buckley wrote what is probably the touchstone of this argument in his 1957 column "Why the South Must Prevail".
    The central question that emerges - and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalogue of the rights of American citizens, born Equal - is whether the Whit community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes - the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. . . . The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage.

    Again, the question of who is "civilized" and who is "atavistic" (a term Buckley uses elsewhere to describe black Southerners) may change over time, but the basic argument for minority rule is pretty much the same.
  • Gee DGee D Shipmate
    Crœsos wrote: »
    Gee D wrote: »
    Those maps are very interesting. A very different picture emerges as you scroll through to the simplistic representation in the first.

    xkcd has an interesting 2016 map.
    suffrage.

    Thank you - that shows support for Trump spread much more widely than that for Clinton. It's too hard to tell from that map, but I wonder what would have happened had all those supporting other candidates have given their vote to Clinton. My suspicion is that it would have made little difference to the Electoral College.
  • Ugh. This is not an attempt to lay blame or play "Who's the biggest asshole." (Thanks for that!) It's an attempt to point out that de facto placing all the power in the hands of the most heavily populated areas is not necessarily going to produce helpful results for all.

    Why is this so difficult?

    I'm saying it will, because those people are more likely to help the other people than the other way around. It's not any more difficult than you're making it.
  • CrœsosCrœsos Shipmate
    edited October 2020
    Gee D wrote: »
    Crœsos wrote: »

    Thank you - that shows support for Trump spread much more widely than that for Clinton. It's too hard to tell from that map, but I wonder what would have happened had all those supporting other candidates have given their vote to Clinton. My suspicion is that it would have made little difference to the Electoral College.

    Your suspicion would be wrong.

    Wisconsin 2016
    Clinton margin: -22,748 votes
    Third party vote: 188,330 votes

    Pennsylvania 2016
    Clinton margin: -44,292 votes
    Third party vote: 268,304 votes

    Michigan 2016
    Clinton margin: -10,704 votes
    Third party vote: 250,902 votes

    That would have put the final electoral vote count at Clinton 278, Trump 260. For some reason a lot of people don't realize how razor-thin Trump's margin of victory was in these three key states.
  • Gee DGee D Shipmate
    Third party spoilers then - and thanks for the detail. The advantages of a preferential voting system.....
  • Crœsos wrote: »
    Again, this is basic democratic theory. Governing agendas set by majorities (or at least pluralities).

    Not entirely. There is also a need to protect minority interests, and any measure you put in place to protect minority interests is at least potentially in conflict with the principle of plurality rule.

    I'll agree that, from outside, the US Electoral College doesn't look like the best way of managing this. But other solutions also have the result of diluting plurality rule.

    A runoff system like in France can deliver a result where the candidate whose agenda has plurality support nevertheless does not win the election.

    In other systems there is considered to be a need to balance the needs of diverse groups regardless of which group holds the plurality. The Northern Ireland executive has to contain both unionist and republican elements, regardless of how votes are cast. The EU Council and Commission are weighted so that every member state gets an equal vote regardless of population size.
  • DafydDafyd Shipmate
    Any system of voting by ranked candidates has flaws compared to an ideal democratic system.

    Suppose candidate A is loved by 51% of the population and hated by the other 49%, while candidate B is loved by the 49% and respected by the 51%. Is it really the case that candidate A is the choice of the people?

    That's before we get onto Arrow's theorem, which proves that the only non-random voting system that fulfils certain intuitive criteria for a democratic voting system is a dictatorship (the Vetinari principle: he is the one man and he has the one vote).

    In the abstract it seems to me that if you see the Presidency as having little jurisdiction intra-state and that its role is solely to manage interstate matters or to conduct foreign policy on behalf of all the states then there's a case for an electoral college. In so far as it can directly determine people's lives it should be directly voted for.
  • KarlLBKarlLB Shipmate
    Is it possible to have a middle way, where the numbers of electors per state are as they currently are, but all states must appoint electors where their pledges match the proportions of the vote for each candidate - as I understand is already the case in some states? That way the amplified voice of smaller states remains but it becomes much harder to win on a minority of the popular vote as those marginal states will not count as strongly as those with a big majority.
  • My guess is that each State could determine how it wants to distribute the electoral college votes that it is assigned. That could be in a "winner takes all" as seems to be the case now, it could be by PR of the whole state, it could be dividing the state into a number of districts equal to the number of EC voters and each district elect a voter ... or whatever. But, the decision of each State.
  • orfeoorfeo Shipmate
    mousethief wrote: »
    People have been calling for the dismantling of the Electoral College long, long before Bush v Gore. @orfeo I think you have a bit of tunnel vision here.

    I'm sure they were. But the popularity of that call increased markedly after 2016.
  • DafydDafyd Shipmate
    edited October 2020
    If a state splits its electoral votes that obviously gives whichever party is dominant there a disadvantage nationally unless states where the party is not dominant agree to do the same.
    It also means that if the state is marginal candidates will probably be competing over only one national vote rather than all, which means the state loses its influence. That might be a good thing nationally, but not from the view of the state concerned.
  • orfeoorfeo Shipmate
    edited October 2020
    Crœsos wrote: »
    The first principle involved is that whoever gets the most votes should win the election. That's pretty basic democratic theory.

    No matter how many times you say this, you still show no sign of recognising that the phrase "the most votes" tells you precisely nothing about which votes you are counting.

    Not only does it tell you nothing about whether you decided to group votes into, say, congressional districts. It also doesn't tell you anything about whether you are using a first past the post voting system or a preferential system of some kind.

    I live in a country that uses preferential systems such that it's quite common for the person who got the most first-preference votes to not win. And a heck of a lot people who look at these things think that this is way, way more equitable than a first-past-the-post system. We do away with so much of the tactical voting nonsense of having to vote for someone you don't particular like to prevent someone even worse winning. We do away with all the fears of the left-wing or the right-wing vote being split: if there are 2 fairly similar candidates, the one with the lower vote is eliminated but then most of their bloc will be diverted to the better supported of the 2, rather than leading to the election of someone that supporters of both of those candidates didn't want.

    We do away with the whole notion of "third party spoilers" that you show enabled Trump's election. And you're trying to tell me that doing away with "third party spoilers" actually breaks the principles of democratic theory?

    Your basic democratic theory is so basic it hurts.

  • KwesiKwesi Shipmate
    Once one starts to advocate the proportional distribution of a state's college vote then why not just have a direct election of the president because it gives each popular vote the same weight?
  • DafydDafyd Shipmate
    The main problem with most systems of democracy is that having 51% of the voters means you win 100% of the votes, and the 49% don't ever win.
    Elections in multiple candidate constituencies sometimes mitigate that by having a system whereby voters who have elected one candidate have a reduced voice in electing subsequent candidates.
  • orfeoorfeo Shipmate
    Dafyd wrote: »
    The main problem with most systems of democracy is that having 51% of the voters means you win 100% of the votes, and the 49% don't ever win.

    Problem? What problem? 51 is greater than 49. We've been told that 51 is supposed to win.

  • KwesiKwesi Shipmate
    Do we need to remind ourselves that the election on 8th November is to choose electors to select a president? I don't know whether it is still the case, but in some states the name of the party presidential nominees did not appear on the ballot. As late as 1960 fewer than half the Democrat nominees for the college were pledged to support JFK in one southern state, (name currently escapes me). To criticise the College system on the grounds it fails to meet the criteria of another system seems odd. Incidentally, it is necessary to get an overall majority of votes in the college to win, otherwise the congress get involved.
  • Though, technically, the election elects EC voters, as those people have only one job to do (elect the President, unless they also elect the VP as well?) the effect is to be voting for who you want the EC members for your State to vote for. You could have a system where those already elected for something else (Senate, Congress, Governors ...) also have the job every four years of electing a President and VP - which is the system in, say, Germany. But, you don't.
  • DafydDafyd Shipmate
    edited October 2020
    I suppose one could argue that giving smaller states more representation in the electoral college might compensate for greater soft influence exerted by larger states elsewhere in the process. For example, if larger states are disproportionately more wealthy or have a higher number of very wealthy individuals or so on.
    However, in practice it does not seem that any financial bias operates in favour of the voting preferences of the larger states.
  • Dave WDave W Shipmate
    Kwesi wrote: »
    To criticise the College system on the grounds it fails to meet the criteria of another system seems odd.
    Really? That view drastically limits the scope of allowable criticisms of any system. E.g, you couldn't criticize apartheid for failing to uphold a "one person, one vote" principle, but I guess you could if you thought it didn't do a good enough job of entrenching the power of a racial minority.
  • KarlLBKarlLB Shipmate
    Kwesi wrote: »
    Once one starts to advocate the proportional distribution of a state's college vote then why not just have a direct election of the president because it gives each popular vote the same weight?

    No it doesn't, because the ratio of voters to electors is not constant.
  • orfeoorfeo Shipmate
    edited October 2020
    KarlLB wrote: »
    Kwesi wrote: »
    Once one starts to advocate the proportional distribution of a state's college vote then why not just have a direct election of the president because it gives each popular vote the same weight?

    No it doesn't, because the ratio of voters to electors is not constant.

    This is true. Although it doesn't vary all that much in the scheme of things, given that the number of electors is linked to the number of representatives in Congress, which in turn is largely linked to population, in the House of Reps.

    But the 2 extra for Senators does have a much greater impact for smaller States. The States that only have a single congressional district get their electors tripled.

  • KwesiKwesi Shipmate
    KarlLB No it doesn't, because the ratio of voters to electors is not constant.

    .........I was unaware I mentioned electors. I was envisaging a totalisation of the popular vote across the United States. Would it not mean that each vote contributes 1 vote/n votes to the outcome?
  • KarlLB wrote: »
    Is it possible to have a middle way, where the numbers of electors per state are as they currently are, but all states must appoint electors where their pledges match the proportions of the vote for each candidate - as I understand is already the case in some states? That way the amplified voice of smaller states remains but it becomes much harder to win on a minority of the popular vote as those marginal states will not count as strongly as those with a big majority.

    The states have the power to determine how electors are chosen. In the early years of the US, electors were chosen by state assemblies and, I think in two instances, were named by the governor. 48 of the 50 states do a winner-take-all choice of party lists of electors, while Maine and Nebraska elect them in each congressional district, with a party list of two electors going to the majority candidate. As students of this arcane topic are aware, several states have signed on to a compact to award all their electors to the winner of the national popular vote once a certain number of states agree.

    The Nebraska/Maine approach would address the real problem of majority states being totally ignored by presidential campaigns (e.g., why would a Republican candidate ever bother with California aside from fundraising and, conversely, Democratic candidates need never spend a half-hour thinking about the Pacific NW). This might be the easiest change. The College is an odd mechanism addressing a problem which never really emerged, and forests have died in the interim as writers try to figure out a currently-valid rationale for it. And now we drive hordes of innocent pixels to their end in the same pursuit.

    I have long thought that PR by STV is the best system for selecting bodies of representatives but its application would have to wait channelling in from a parallel universe.
  • RuthRuth Shipmate
    orfeo wrote: »
    mousethief wrote: »
    People have been calling for the dismantling of the Electoral College long, long before Bush v Gore. @orfeo I think you have a bit of tunnel vision here.

    I'm sure they were. But the popularity of that call increased markedly after 2016.

    Please offer some support for this claim.
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