That is actually a very interesting and appealing suggestion. The problem is, how would we manage a legislature that consisted of several thousand people? I don't think there are a lot of historical precedents for legislatures that size elsewhere in the world, at least not successful ones.Lord Insanity wrote:Regarding the electoral college, the real problem here is Public Law 62-5 that went into effect in 1913. It fixes the maximum number of representatives in the House at 435.
In Article 1 Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution we find, "...The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct. The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative..."
Realistically speaking the House of Representatives should be at least an order of magnitude larger than it is with a proportional increase in electoral votes across the board. This more than anything else is what is "rigging the system."
It would reduce the political significance of any given representative to near-zero, unless they happened to be one of the handful of specific individuals picked to run a committee or serve some other major function.
That's obviously not true.Alyrium Denryle wrote:How is going with the will of the people in an election a tyranny of the majority? Protections against that come from things like the Bill of Rights, and the court system. Why should we instead have a tyranny of a minority?All of this ties together really.Simon_Jester wrote:May I simply ask, why should the opinions of people in three tiny states count for more than the opinions of people in two huge ones?
Similarly, why should a state where 60% of the population votes Yellow or whatever automatically result in the Yellow candidate getting all of that state's support?
Do you actually have answers for those specific questions?
First off when I use the term state or states (lowercase) I am refering to the people in those States. (Capitalized)
For illustrative purposes lets use hypothetical states A, B, C, D, and E.
A and B have a population of 5 million. 2 Senate seats plus 5 House seats give each 7 electoral votes.
C, D, and E have a population of 3 million. 2 Senate seats plus 3 House seats gives each 5 electoral votes.
A = 5mpv (5 million popular vote) 7 ev (7 electoral votes)
C = 3mpv (3 million popular vote) 5 ev (5 electoral votes)
...
Of the 10 possible combinations of 2 vs 3 states only one leads to a lower popular vote total having a higher electoral vote total.
The reason for this is it forces candidates to actually care about the smaller states. If a candidate could win the election just on A + B they would never bother with C, D, and E. The ability to win despite losing the popular vote is what gives the smaller states a chance to not be dominated by the larger ones. It is still only a 10% chance in this perfect idealized hypothetical.
If the presidential election were based on a direct popular vote, all voters would be equally valuable. One million rural farmer votes are just as valuable as one million city slicker votes. One million Texas Democrats are just as valuable as one million California Democrats. One million black people are just as valuable as one million white people. And half a million people in Wyoming are just as valuable as half a million people in Texas.
But not MORE valuable, in any of those cases. Right now, the opinion of 250,000 people in Wyoming (roughly the entire population of the state that bothers to vote) is worth three electoral votes.
The opinion of the same 250,000 people, if they all spontaneously moved to the neighboring state of Colorado, become far less meaningful... because nearly three million people voted in Colorado's election! The only way the former Wyoming residents could have an impact is if they voted nearly unanimously. They become worth zero electoral votes, with a relatively slim chance of being worth nine if they are lucky and vote more or less unanimously.
How is that being fair to "small states?" Especially since Colorado is not an especially large state- it's simply that Wyoming is a relatively small one.
The simplest way to fix this is with a national majority vote to pick the president. Suddenly, addressing the concerns of every state helps in a material way, and even small gains in any given state will be valuable because they can offset small lossesIn real life the nubers are messier but the concept is still the same. Ideally all states would be battleground states. That many states are considered a "lock" for one party and only a few states are actually "in the game" is entirely the fault of the parties themselves. Any state that is a "lock" for one party is because the other party is utterly failing at addressing the concerns of that state. Its not the systems fault that is happening. There is a suggested tweak that would significanly help this propblem.
Suddenly, gaining the approval of 200,000 independent voters in Texas becomes worth losing the approval of a 100,000 independent voters in Ohio. Right now, that is a stupid decision for a presidential candidate to make- because of how perverse our system is.
It sounds delightful, but it's significantly more complicated than "just go with a national popular vote." Among other things, because you'd have to calculate the number of electors a state gets after the fact.I fully agree with this change and it address most of the concerns people have with the system in its current form.Natapoff's suggested tweak: keep the state-based determination of electoral votes, but change the way they're apportioned. Give the winner in each state the total number of popular votes actually cast in the state that day, plus one-quarter of the number of votes cast in the average state, to replace the two senatorial electoral votes per state awarded under our present system.
In Natapoff's proposed system, a voter also could choose to cast a blank ballot, which would not be counted for the winner. "This would let the supporters of the underdog punish a leading candidate who is hostile to them," he said.
A registered voter casting a blank ballot in an election is analagous to a poker player with weak cards folding in a game, according to Natapoff's scheme. He believes that just as a poker player may choose to fold rather than enrich the winner's pot, a voter should be able to cast a blank ballot rather than enrich (i.e., help elect) a candidate she dislikes.
Natapoff also insisted that determining a state's electoral votes by the number of votes actually cast would encourage eligible voters to come out on election day, because every vote cast would make a difference in the national count. Under the current system, states are assigned electoral votes based on population, not by the number of actual voters. And voters can't change that on election day.
Also, it might require federal monitoring of state-level elections, to prevent fraudulent overreporting of the number of voters who showed up and cast blank ballots. But that's a side issue.
I'll admit I like the incentive structure it creates- because both parties have an incentive to raise voter turnout as long as they can get even slightly more than a 1:1 ratio in their favor, and voter suppression punishes both parties, on the local level as well as the national.
That said, it represents just about as drastic a change as anything the rest of us are suggesting, including the much simpler 'nationwide popular vote' approach.
