65% of U.S. adults say the way the president is elected should be changed so that the winner of the popular vote nationwide wins the presidency.
Ranked choice voting please.
My state Congress is getting ready to vote to outlaw Ranked Choice…
Probably because they know if it gets implemented they will get tossed out. What a shame.
What the point of that? Since you’d need the votes to make it a thing anyway you’d have the votes to change the law too, right?
They’re probably banning it in local elections.
Came here to say this.
Republicans would never win a nationwide election again. They’d actually have to come up with policies people want. Not gonna happen anytime soon.
I’ve had family that votes Republican say this, they will literally defend the minority vote winning. They see democracy as “mob rule.” Well, if a bunch of rich assholes getting to decide who’s president, and a system where the people with the least votes win, how is that not mob rule?
We have lots of minority protections in place to avoid mob rule and the tyranny of the majority. The Electoral College is the tyranny of the minority.
And yet, none of them will support using an Electoral College to elect the governor of their state. I guess mob rule is fine when it comes to governors, senators, mayors, and sheriffs, but not presidents.
“As long as the party I identify with is in charge then it’s fine.”
It’s really not surprising when they support going full dictator.
The cons really showed their hand more recently when arguing over things like suppressing the vote, and mail-in voting and telling everyone that “voting is not really a right enshrined in the Constitution”.
Well, tell us how you really feel.
Wait, are you implying that only crafting policy around what the elitist of the elite want and waging stupid performative culture wars for the clueless gop base is unpopular with most Americans?
They will never allow that because it’ll kill the entire republican party lol
Won’t be good for Democrats either. System is rigged for two parties and two parties only.
This would not really change the two party system. All it would mean is that you genuinely need a majority of votes and not the majority of a weird convoluted combo of states.
It would destroy the party system. Suddenly there’s a progressive democrat party and the freedumb caucus becomes it’s own thing.
I’m game for that.
First-past-the-post voting systems result in two conflicting parties. This would entrench the two party system. The current system is not good, but popular vote is only slightly better.
The difference is in what the voters want.
Both parties wouldn’t be for it, but liberal voters would be for it. Conservative voters would be against it.
You’ll have to pry it from their cold, dead hands.
You mean their hands the way they are now? Glitch McConnell had a death grip on that podium…
Right. Their cold dead hands.
You can’t convince me Joe Biden is actually alive. You can’t. He died on the campaign trail, and he’s being Weekend at Bernie’s-ed by his staff.
There’s not a substantive difference in his policies if he’s alive or dead…his whole platform is not Trump.
The whole thing is absurd and overly represents rural areas and Republicans. We already have a huge problem with the “2 senators per state” thing and the House representing Republicans far too much in relation to their numbers.
I’m 100% okay with the 2 senators per state thing. That’s a feature, not a bug. Even though cities are on the right side of history right now, I don’t want to completely silence the rural vote forever.
However, arbitrarily limiting the number of House reps is absolutely absurd and counter to the purpose of the House. That is a bug.
Well, then, maybe we should start considering splitting up some states and joining others together then. A place like California is more future-minded and it’s where a great deal of the people are, as well as much of our economy. Also, it’s where a lot of our food is grown. And it gets 2 Senators.
The 2 Dakotas have more than that, and what do they really represent for the future of America and the world? More fracking?
Maybe states with really large masses and hardly anyone in them are combined. Idaho, Montana and Wyoming - one state. North Dakota, South Dakota and Nebraska, another.
Again, you’re intentionally defeating the purpose of the Senate. The entire point is to give rural, less populous areas more of a voice.
Seems like giving one group more power than another group would be bad for equality.
That’s why we are supposed to have House members representative of pure population, and not land. Senate gives more power to rural areas, House gives more power to urban areas. It’s supposed to even out. Checks and balances.
It’s crazy how many people in this thread don’t seem to know the absolute basics of how their own government is structured and why.
The only reason the Senate is such a problem right now, is because the House of Representatives needs to be properly reapportioned so it’s actually representative.
On this, we definitely agree. The House is being held down to an arbitrary number and it is patently absurd.
It feels like a compromise from a period of time that is no longer relevant to these times when we are trying to push this country into the future. I don’t want rural regions to have more of a voice, FFS. Look at what it is doing to this country. Having fewer people have an equal say with the majority of the people is also not great, the majority should win out. Why the fuck should tracts of land be voting?
We should never completely silence the voice of a group of people for all time, even if right now they’re pushing some heinous shit.
Part of the reason for the phenomenon of Trump was the failure of politicians to care about the legitimate problems that rural voters have.
In any case, if the House and Electoral College functioned like they should, the majority would win a lot more often. Don’t focus on the Senate, focus on the two institutions that weren’t designed to give rural people an outsized choice but have been manipulated to do so.
completely silence the voice of a group of people for all time
I don’t think anything proposed here by anyone would do that? What is being proposed is to stop prioritizing the votes of people occupying vast tracts of land over the majority. To have a vote cast by someone in the hinterlands equal someone’s vote in more populous parts of the country is putting them on par with everyone else. I’m not so sure what is so magical about someone living in a remote area that their interests should not align with everyone else’s.
It’s nothing magical. They will inherently have different priorities, and they deserve a voice in the political process.
How is it no longer relevant? Do you know where your food comes from?
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of how the legislative branch of the US government is structured, and why.
Your concerns are valid, but you’re not aiming them at the correct House.
I’m not understanding the food part here.
I understand the history of compromising with states that had less (free) people because of slave states; I’m saying it’s no longer relevant in modern society. It turns out rural areas are usually better represented by Democratic policies in any case. Ironically.
That’d be an easier sell if the rural areas less consistently used their voice to shit up the world.
True, but it’s not always guaranteed to be that way. We should never give one group absolute power.
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The Republicans are the main reason we still have it … they know they’d never win if they had to play fair.
But but but why should cities get to determine everything? Don’t you know that not only does land vote, everyone in a patch of land votes the same? So, why bother giving everyone in a city a vote, you know?
Also, be sure to let the vice president cancel the whole thing if they don’t like the results.
(Please tell me my sarcasm is obvious.)
We should just abolish the Senate. With the current formulation of the US government there’s no reason why a State should have extra power like that. Let the people make the rules. Expand the House, abolish the Senate, and remove the electoral college. And since we’re wishing for things that will never happen anyway, go ahead and use some kind of proportional vote (ranked choice, star, whatever, just literally anything but FPTP).
Americans, lobby your state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
The better plan would be institute the Wyoming Rule or something similar to it. The HoR is simply too damned small which not only limits the number of EC votes it also has the representative to citizen ratio fucked up 90 way to Sunday.
We broke the EC in 1929 by capping the size of the HoR and it’s well past time to fix it.
Instead of tilting at the windmill that is removing the EC how about we do something much easier and simpler and simply expand the House of Representatives? Not only would this add votes to the EC and make the Presidential Elections more representative it would also, you know, make the HoR more Representative! For extra fun it would also diminish the returns of gerrymandering since there would be so many more districts.
All we need is a change to the Re-Apportionment Act of 1929. There is no good reason that the size of the HoR is fixed at 435. None.
For extra fun it would also diminish the returns of gerrymandering since there would be so many more districts.
you should lead with this
In 1929, each representative represented about 283k Americans. Now each representative represent about 762k Americans. That’s almost a 300% increase. This means each American’s voice is only about 1/3rd as powerful as it was in 1929. To have as much political power as they did in 1929, we’d need about 1200 Representatives.
To have as much political power as they did in 1929, we’d need about 1200 Representatives.
I don’t see a problem with that.
And yet, having more representatives fundamentally reduces the power of each as well. Your vote is fundamentally worth less as the population increases. Something you’re just gonna have to come to terms with.
I’m ok with my vote meaning more or less as long as it’s the same vote everyone else gets…that’s not the case with the current system.
Would there be any way to have everyone keep the same voting power while the population tripled?
Sure, you just define the problem differently. Instead of saying that there are X representatives in total, you just say there should be 1 representative for every 283K citizens. In this way the number of representatives naturally scales with the population.
This is basically what the Wyoming Rule does. It sets the ratio in the lowest population State, currently Wyoming, as the ratio for everywhere. Wyoming currently has 500,000 people and 1 Representative. That means the HoR would expand to something like 580 Seats.
We could change the math, and the name, to the “1929 Rule” and set the ratio 280,000 to 1. I’m actually fine with an HoR that has 1,200 people in it but either way the Re-Apportionment Act of 1929 needs changed and the HoR needs expanded.
Good point - it’s not about power because everyone else also gets that extra power up. It’s about equity.
And we can achieve now that through fairness in redistricting.
That’s a long way around to get to fair representation. It amounts to a distraction from the real issue.
We can achieve that now through fairness in redistricting.
We can achieve that now through fairness in redistricting.
No you can’t.
Your way doesn’t return the ratio of EC votes between the HoR and the Senate to what it should be. It keeps it stuck in 1929 and every year that goes by makes it worse.
Your way doesn’t scale the number of total EC votes as our population grows.
Your way ALSO doesn’t return the ratio of Citizens to Representatives to anything resembling sanity. Ratios of nearly 800,000 to 1, and growing, are irrational and break Democracy.
You could redistrict the ever loving hell out of the other 49 States but Wyoming would keep it’s 3 EC votes and its outsized vote for President. It would keep it’s outsized influence in the HoR and it would keep it’s ranking as #1 in the Citizen to Representative Ratio.
So much of what everyone hates about our Federal Government today is DIRECTLY tied to a vastly undersized HoR. The body is simply too small to adequately represent a population of over 300,000,000 people.
There are only so many ways to divide 435 seats while still guaranteeing at least 1 seat per state.
Unfortunately the elected representatives don’t care what the majority of citizens want.
Hell, a good chunk of the citizens vote for people that don’t support their lives or values. It’s fucked top to bottom.
That good chunk would be democrats and republicans
I don’t disagree. The only real power us peons have is voting, and we are really, really shitty at voting.
We are not shitty at voting, we are shitty to keep supporting the right wing duopoly. Not voting is a choice, and voting 3rd party is a choice. If the 76% of democrats that do not want Biden to run voted 3rd party they would win. People choosing to vote their fears instead of their conscience is whats holding us back
People choosing to vote their fears instead of their conscience is whats holding us back
Otherwise described as: being shitty at voting.
I propose the National Popular Vote Interstate compact. Cgp grey has an amazing video on it. It’s a “petition” of sorts that basically says that states that sign it will have its elective representatives vote with the majority vote of their said state.
Here’s the video if anyone wants to watch it: https://youtu.be/tUX-frlNBJY
The “founding fathers” would be against the electoral college today too. The electoral college was an idea to try to get the people to directly vote for the president.
The electoral college was necessary because it would have been logistically impossible for people living in 18th and 19th century America to be able to participate in a single-day one person one vote election, given their level of technology at the time.
We live in the 21st century. We have instantaneous means of communication via the internet making designating an elector to travel to Washington unnecessary, a greatly expanded infrastructure via roads and mass transit for people to travel to polling places in a reasonable amount of time in a day, computers that can tally the ballots many hundreds of times faster than a human being can, and vastly expanded capacity for handling the logistics of running a nationwide election including a complex bureaucracy dedicated to oversight and enforcement of voting laws and regulations.
The electoral college is an archaic system whose only purpose has been completely supplanted by modern technology. Any notion of rogue electors defending the republic from authoritarians and populists is not only historically false, but given the fact that they failed to prevent exactly that situation from happening once already, laughably ineffective.
The electoral college was necessary because it would have been logistically impossible for people living in 18th and 19th century America to be able to participate in a single-day one person one vote election, given their level of technology at the time.
That had nothing to do with it. It would have been extremely easy for people in each state to count the votes for that state, then bring those vote totals to the capital where those state-totals are added together to get the final country-wide count. The problem is that that kind of simple, one-person one-vote system means that each vote would be weighted equally, and in some states there was a large portion of the population that couldn’t vote but the state’s decision-makers still wanted that portion to affect how much say that state had in choosing the President.
So basically, the Electoral College is there because of slavery.
You are correct, of course. Based on the writings of the founders at the time they established the system, it was clear that the system was never intended to be a democratic one in the first place. They didn’t trust each other and they certainly didn’t trust uneducated rural Americans with the power to select the chief executive.
The fact that they couldn’t agree on whether or not to count a slave as a full person for the purposes of counting population is all the more reason the system should have been swept away ages ago.
They could, however, agree that a tax on tea-smugglers was worth starting a war and killing thousands over.
Also, there have been times where electors got the names wrong lol. Imagine losing because somebody put your name wrong. I mean I guess there’s precedent for the supreme Court picking a winner already. God I hate this country.
The election is not and has never been a single day affair. People like Trump are just trying to make it into one because it gives them a better chance at winning.
I didn’t mean to imply it was. Just that before America was well developed with sophisticated infrastructure, it would have been a tall ask to have voters in rural areas show up at a specific location at a specific time to vote. It would have taken counties several days to collect all of the ballots, tally them, and hand them off to someone who then had to report those results to the state, and then after all the counties reported in the state would appointed an elector to go to Washington on horseback to deliver the results in person. Electors made sense at the time - it funneled the communications down to a single official entity, rather than trying to organize the election centrally and delivering ballots from the far corners of the United States delivered to Washington DC to be counted and certified.
We could cut out the electoral college and very little about our voting process would change, it would just eliminate an archaic and historically anti-democratic system that works behind the scenes to contribute nothing of value in our current society, aside from being a very tantalizing point of failure that has already been targeted by election fraudsters.
The electoral college exists because the founding fathers didn’t want normal people voting for president. The whole point is to isolate people from directly choosing a president.
There was also the little problem of logistics back then.
Which is why there’s still a ton of delay in the process. There’s about a month between voting for electors and them voting, and several months before the president was inaugurated.
And it worked better before information was so easy to obtain.
I don’t think this is true. The commonly cited reference is James Madison’s Federalist Paper No. 10, I’ll provide the relevant excerpt and a Wikipedia link, though I’ll urge caution as they aren’t authoritative sources by any means. Bolding is mine.
Preamble
Federalist No. 10 continues a theme begun in Federalist No. 9 and is titled “The Utility of the Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection”. The whole series is cited by scholars and jurists as an authoritative interpretation and explication of the meaning of the Constitution. Historians such as Charles A. Beard argue that No. 10 shows an explicit rejection by the Founding Fathers of the principles of direct democracy and factionalism, and argue that Madison suggests that a representative republic is more effective against partisanship and factionalism.
Cherry-picked quote cited by Garry Wills
Garry Wills is a noted critic of Madison’s argument in Federalist No. 10. In his book Explaining America, he adopts the position of Robert Dahl in arguing that Madison’s framework does not necessarily enhance the protections of minorities or ensure the common good. Instead, Wills claims: “Minorities can make use of dispersed and staggered governmental machinery to clog, delay, slow down, hamper, and obstruct the majority. But these weapons for delay are given to the minority irrespective of its factious or nonfactious character; and they can be used against the majority irrespective of its factious or nonfactious character. What Madison prevents is not faction, but action. What he protects is not the common good but delay as such”.
EDIT: Here’s where I first heard of the argument that the US is not a democracy (in the sense it’s thought of by everyday use, as opposed to the Greek which involves the concept of demos. He’s a Marxist, thought it might be relevant and wouldn’t want to waste your time only to figure it out later.
EDIT EDIT: I didn’t even make my point, whoops. I think the founding fathers were not unaware of the current state of affairs of the electoral college being probsble, rather it was included by design.
First we need a federal initiative/ referendum system. Because the existing politicians will never vote to limit their own power.
After we have this, we can start with initiatives that set maximum ages, fix the voting systems. Fix Roe. Dismantle the terrible stranglehold the two party system has on getting anything done.
Do all the things that are popular but politicians will never do.
Direct democracy has shown to be a pretty bad idea. It’s useful here and there for certain things like referenda, but to use it for everything? Fuck that, no way. People are fucking dumb and are already constantly voting against their interests.
I mean just look at Brexit. And that would be just the tip of the iceberg if we ran our entire country that way.
A two party system where each side does whatever it takes to stay in positions of power has shown to be a pretty bad idea as well.
What else do we have to work with?
The two party system is a direct result of first past the post voting system. Ranked choice would go a long way toward fixing things.
Parliamentary system would work too. They often have 5+ viable parties.
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This would help so much. Not only would greatly increasing the number of representatives lead to fairer representation - it would decrease lobbyist power in the House (harder to buy a critical number of members when there are so many representatives).
there is absolutely no valid argument to do anything that isn’t simply tallying all the votes. because of course that’s how it should work
It makes sense from the perspective of early America, which initially wanted a confederate system.
It doesn’t make sense now that most people consider themselves American first and their state is just the place they currently live.
The EC can work but make it a contest for each electoral vote, and remove the states from the equation entirely. California being safe blue and Texas being safe red don’t matter, each district is counted for one electoral vote, and the states don’t get extra votes anymore.
That just seems like popular vote with extra steps. I’m not sure, but I feel like mathematically there would be no way in which the result of the EC would differ from the popular vote under such a system. I suppose it might still be possible to skew it far enough to shift the outcome using some extreme gerrymandering.
It is a popular vote with extra steps. That’s literally what it is.
The extra steps mean that politicians can’t purely focus on population centers, rural communities would count for the same vote. each district should be of similar population size, and every district counts for one.
This:
each district should be of similar population size, and every district counts for one.
seems to run counter to this:
The extra steps mean that politicians can’t purely focus on population centers, rural communities would count for the same vote.
As an example, lets say you have a rural area with 1000 people in it, and you decide that each district should contain 1000 people, so that entire area is one gigantic district. Nearby you have a city with 10,000 people, so you split the city into 10 districts. That city still counts 10 times what that one giant rural area does. The only way I can see where you could make the rural area count for more is with extreme gerrymandering where you snake little bits of every rural area in to include a chunk of the city population thereby diluting the strength of the cities vote by smearing part of it over the rural areas.
I see absolutely no reason why we should adopt a system that exists solely for the purpose of making gerrymandering possible, and I see no reason why doing things this way would make any difference over just using the popular vote if you aren’t gerrymandering.
Apparently you are unaware of ranked choice voting systems, because there are certainly reasons that electing by popular vote is a bad system.
Not a fan of the EC, but this is a bad take imo.
Many democracies don’t have the people directly vote on their leader. Parliamentary systems typically have the people voting for a representative who will then vote for the Prime Minister on their behalf.
Representative Democracy exists for a reason.
I would modify the electoral college rather than get rid of it. Make it so that states are obligated to assign their electoral votes to candidates in proportion to the number of votes received. For example, Maryland might go 60% blue and 40% red, so they would give 6 of their 10 votes to blue and 4 to red.
This would de-emphasize the importance of swing states, not completely disenfranchise rural voters, and would return a result that more closely mirrored the popular vote. It might also pave the way for a 3rd party to be relevant if the stars aligned elsewhere.
Might work for MD size states, but most smaller even EV states would split their EVs evenly, even if the state voted 60/40 one way or the other – while odd EV states would always cast a net vote for the winner.
For example, using the 2020 election numbers Trump would win if the election included only the following states:
- AK (R+10) Trump 2-1 Biden
- GA (D+0) Trump 8-8 Biden
- WI (D+1) Trump 5-5 Biden
- PA (D+1) Trump 10-10 Biden
- NV (D+2) Trump 3-3 Biden
- NH (D+7) Trump 2-2 Biden
- ME (D+9) Trump 2-2 Biden
- RI (D+20) Trump 2-2 Biden
I don’t know that it’s any nobler to for electoral influence to discriminate on the basis of even states and odd states than swing states vs safe states. Unless you’re also one of the group wanting to expand the legislature until there are no 4 and 6 EV states …
If the president was chosen by popular vote, I think you could make a reasonable case that the last Republican president would have been George H.W. Bush in 1988. George W. Bush did win the popular vote against John Kerry in 2004, but he lost it to Al Gore in 2000 so it’s debatable whether or not he would have beaten an incumbent Gore in 2004 I think.
And now you see why the Republicans are so against it. They can’t win in a straight vote.
By “the electoral college” most people seem to mean that each state has influence disproportionate to its population, because every state gets two electors regardless of size. Ignoring that that is independent of the electoral college, disproportionate power isn’t where most of the problem arises. The problem is that most states do not allocate their electors proportionally to how their citizens voted. Almost all states give all electors to the majority winner in the state. It’s not required to do it that way, and Maine and Nebraska allocate at least some of their electors based on the proportion of the vote.
If states allocated their electors solely based on the proportion of votes in the state, that would achieve what a national popular vote would achieve and more. For example, Trump won despite losing the poplar vote, but if states had instead allocated their electors proportionally to voters within the state, Trump would have lost.
Why do this instead of a national popular vote? First-past-the-post voting systems result in two party systems with a lot of conflict. Ranked choice systems elect representatives that are more agreeable to everyone. A national popular vote entrenches a bad system, making it harder to ever get a rank choice system.
More importantly from a pragmatic standpoint, it’s much harder to get a national popular vote implemented. To work, almost all of the states would need to get on board, but there’s no individual-level incentive for citizens of a state to agree to it. Why would the majority of citizens of Montana agree to send their electors to the national popular vote winner when it’s likely not the person they voted for? How are you going to convince them to join? The majority of people there won’t want that, so they won’t pass the law.
If states allocate based on proportion, individuals won’t be concerned that their votes will ever support a candidate they don’t like. It also doesn’t matter whether other states hop on board. Maine and Nebraska are proof of this. They changed their allocation schemes without regard for any other state. At the individual level, the choice is easy; no one wants their vote to go toward a candidate they don’t like, and the current system AND the national popular vote system both do that. If you think about your own views, are you in a state that the majority of the time the majority of people vote for a candidate you don’t like? Wouldn’t you rather have your state allocate proportionally? Are you in a place where the majority of the time your state goes the way you do? Are you happy that your neighbors’ opinions are suppressed? It’s pretty easy to get on board at an individual level, so that makes it easy to pass within a state.
People should give up on national popular vote and focus on getting their state to switch to proportional allocation. If you really want progress, target some key states: Florida, Ohio, Texas, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia, California, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois.
National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is a viable path to getting a national popular vote. Essentially if enough states agree to send all of their electoral votes to the popular candidate then the popular vote winning candidate will win the election. The compact will only go into effect once enough states agree that would make a majority. Right now there are states with 206 electoral votes that have agreed and only 65 more electoral votes would be needed.
I do feel like your proposition is harder to convince people to enact. Right now my state has finally changed to be for a party I support I don’t want to support legislation that will mean some of those electoral college votes will go to the other party, it would be more fair on the state level but not nationally. Sure I’d be okay with it if other states that vote for the other party did the same thing. It becomes this standoff where people want the other side to move first. That’s my favorite part about NPVIC is that it does away with the messy middle ground.
