As governor he got his state signed on to the national popular vote interstate compact
Hey hey! Ho ho! The electoral college has got to go!
ONE PERSON
ONE VOTE
ONE CAGE
ONE BELT
ONE CHAMPION
SUNDAY
SUNDAY
SUNDAY
MONSTER TRUCK!
Yup, I understand it was meant to give smaller states an equal voice but he GOP weaponized it and now the minority is speaking for the majority. Tell me the system isn’t broken when ONE vote in shitty red state Wyoming is equal to TEN THOUSAN VOTES in Blue California?
Just to be clear: Also, “states” don’t have a voice, only the people in them. Giving a state a disproportionate voice is exactly as just as it is giving its people a disproportionate voice. When the right uses that argument, it’s injustice laundering, it’s not a valid concern.
As a pretty left person who lives in Tennessee, please get rid of it. Anytime I have this conversation with folks on the right, I always point out that there are more Republican voters in California than Texas. That usually gets them to concede.
It’s a great argument, and incredibly depressing that the only thing that will convince them is that it’s also their people are being hurt, not that it’s the most fair and just thing to do.
Brilliant.
Of course, there’s no guarantee republicans would understand the point.
I’m glad someone is saying it! Stupid ass lines on a map determines who becomes president
As a Canadian, can anyone ELi5 how the electoral college works? Is it like every state gets the same amount of votes regardless of population?
No, you get a number of votes equal to your total representatives in Congress, so it’s a compromise between population size and statehood, as the House is based on population and every state gets two votes in the Senate.
The problem is that the votes are really electors. The specifics of that get beyond ELI5 because it’s largely up to the states individually but in general whoever wins the popular vote of a state is supposed to get all of their votes.
It’s really impossible to keep this brief, but I’ll try to keep it understandable:
The EC is a body of “electors”, who serve as an intermediary body between the direct democracy of a popular national vote and the actual selection of a president. Their purpose is literally and intentionally to serve as a middleman, both to give a safety net to the ruling classes to make sure that whoever wins an election is someone they approve of, as well as to install a system that takes a national popular vote and basically applies an overlay to it…an overlay that leaves the process open to manipulation, stacking the odds, etc.
I’m not just saying this as a criticism of the system (though it is), this is the explicit purpose of the existence of the system.
Now to the nuts and bolts:
The US has a federal government with three branches: the executive (headed up by the president and including all of the various “Departments” like the departments of State (handling all diplomatic affairs), Defense (the military), Justice Department (FBI), Interior (National Park Service), Education, Agriculture, Homeland Security, etc.
Then there’s the Judicial Branch, which is the federal court system, spearheaded by the Supreme Court. In addition to criminal trials involving federal crimes, they also have the responsibility of deciding on whether laws or actions of other government bodies are constitutional. If not, they have the authority to strike them down.
Last there’s the legislative branch, which is responsible for creating laws and deciding how to spend money. Within the legislative branch, there are two bodies: the Senate, and the House of Representatives. This is because when the government was being created, states were much more independent than they are now, and there was a serious disagreement over how not only the people, but also the states would be represented in federal government.
So for the House, the number of Representatives each state sends is (roughly) proportional to that state’s population; ie. a state with more people living in it will have more representatives than a state with fewer people living in it. The specifics have changed over time, and the way this system works is another issue, but that discussion is for another time.
However, smaller states, and (especially) states with slaves were concerned that even though they had a serious impact on the nation, they had a small voice in government. They wanted a system where their state was on equal footing with more populous states. Where just because they had less people (and by “people”, in that time, they of course meant “land owning white male people”), they wouldn’t have less power.
Thus there were two concessions given to these states to get them to join the union:
First, the three-fifths compromise: when determining population (to see how many representatives each state could send to the House), states were allowed to count each slave living in that state as three-fifths (0.6) of a person. Yes, these slaves, who their states regarded as property any other time, and who sure as hell weren’t allowed to vote…were nonetheless to be allowed to count toward how much voting power their owners would have.
And second…the Senate. The Senate is the other house of Congress, where instead of determining members by population, it’s much simpler: every state gets two. Regardless of population. This puts the smallest state on equal footing with the largest in the Senate.
And since both chambers of Congress (the Senate and the House) must pass a bill in order for it to become law, this is why it’s so hard to get anything done for Congress.
SO!
Now that we know about the house and Senate and why and how they are the way they are… what’s that have to do with the electoral college?
Well…the number of electors from each state are determined by adding up the number of Representatives and Senators that the state sends to Congress. So a small population state like say, Wyoming has one representative because very few people live there…and they get two senators because they are a state and all states get two. 2 + 1 = 3. So in a presidential election, Wyoming gets 3 electoral votes. For a more populous state, like my home state of Pennsylvania, we’ve got 17 representatives. Adding our two senators to that means that Pennsylvania gets 19 electoral votes for president.
Adding up all these electoral votes, it works out such that whichever candidate gets 270 electoral votes wins the presidency.
So you might be thinking, “Hmm… sounds like proportional voting and democracy with extra steps… what’s the big deal?”
Well… there’s two issues going on:
First: It’s only proportional in allocation, but not so much in casting those votes. Of all 50 states, all but two (Maine and Nebraska) are set up such that whoever wins the state wins all of that state’s electoral votes. So take my Pennsylvania for example: we’ve got about 13 million people living here. Obviously not everyone can vote, and not everyone that can vote will vote, but if next month, let’s say all 13 million of us vote…if 12,999,999 people vote for Trump and 1 person votes for Harris, Trump wins all 19 votes. That makes sense. However, if Trump gets 6,500,001 votes and Harris gets 5,999,999 votes, that two vote difference means that Trump still gets all 19 votes. We don’t split them so that he gets 10 and she gets 9. Winner take all.
Not only does this distort the popular vote, but it also has the effect of making a narrow victory in one area the same as a landslide in another.
Second: With the way votes are allocated, the fewest that any state can have is three (one representative and two senators). Even if ten people lived in that state, they still get three votes in the electoral college. Meanwhile, with the way congressional laws work, states with bigger populations do get more representatives…but as a state’s population gets bigger and bigger, even though they get more electoral votes, each of those votes encompasses more and more people.
So looking (approximately) at Wyoming and California: Wyoming has a population of 582,000 and gets 3 votes, California has a population of 39,000,000 and gets 54 votes. That means that every vote in Wyoming represents about 194,000 residents, while every vote in California represents about 723,000 residents.
Doing the math, this means that every vote in Wyoming carries about 3.73x more power than a vote in California.
So in summary: the biggest criticisms of the electoral college are:
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The lopsided way votes are allocated in the first place.
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The winner-take-all system awarding the same number of votes for a landslide and a narrow victory distorting the actual voting numbers.
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The lopsided allocation resulting in a situation where some Americans living in low population states having dramatically more power than others, based simply on where they live.
Of course these issues lead to lots of other weirdness and wrongness…for example: with the winner take all system, candidates don’t even try to win states that are projected to safely go to one candidate or the other…they focus all attention on “battleground” states where the election is set to be close, ignoring millions of people nationwide because they happen to live in a state that’s not competitive. A national popular vote would eliminate state political boundaries and make everyone’s vote matter equally.
Likewise, this is how you end up with a case like 2016: more people voted for Hillary Clinton than Donald Trump…but those people lived in the wrong states, so basically she won by bigger margins but the margins meant nothing because he won narrow victories in more areas…so even though more people wanted her to be president, because of the electoral college, he got enough votes in the right geographical areas to win the presidency with fewer votes.
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Can we get rid of the senate too?
But without the electoral college, politicians would suddenly have to care about states with a lot of people living in them
100% correct.
I’m not sure I agree the EC has to go; it definitely has to change, but it also does provide protections — just ones that aren’t currently at issue with the present political climate.
Combined with the PV compact and a ranked vote system, it could actually become a more relevant part of the process.
What kind of protections?
To be honest, I’m not sure it applies.
The electoral college is an institution where electors cast votes to elect the President. In theory, it allows electors to choose a different president if the population chooses someone terrible.
It’s not /supposed/ to favor red states. However the formula for counting number of electors relies on the number of representatives in the house. That is fixed at 435 by law. To fix the electoral college, we’d have to remove that cap and it would work the way the founders intended.
But then, you’d need a helluva lot of dissenters to change. Is it possible? Sure. Is this system built for current day population and densities? Arguably not
I did some math assuming lowest population is 1 seat and rounding to the nearest whole number based on 2020 census using that factor.
We should have 574 seats with 676 electors. I didn’t include Puerto Rico or overseas who didn’t claim a state.
Except the scotus recently ruled that electors have to abide by the laws of the state that require them to vote a certain way, so the idea that they are free to vote as they wish is gone.
And part of the reason why it was implemented is that the population in the north was way bigger than the south, and so they were trying to make it more even where southern States would have more representation, so in a way it was meant to “protect red states.”
It’s important to note that the human populations of northern and southern states were fairly close to even, but the south decided that anyone with a bit too much melanin was property, not a human with rights and a vote…and they were very reluctant to give up that system.
True. I should have been more clear and said voting population. I think the population in the south exceeded the north if you count slaves, which is why they only counted 3/5ths.
Today each state decides how to assign their electors. In my uneducated opinion for the system to be fixed, rather than states being “winner take all”, it would make more sense for each state to allocate electors in proportion to the popular vote within their state.
Would be easier to just get rid of the damn thing
It makes sure white people never lose political control of the country.
It absolutely must go - fuck the EC with a rusty fucking spork.
I’m curious too. The EC has a troubling history - it was invented because of slavery, https://time.com/4558510/electoral-college-history-slavery/
Another strike against the EC - no other country uses one. If it really provided protections, surely another country would have adopted it by now? It’s hardly a secret formula or anything.
What it was designed for, to protect the slave states and provide another barrier to populist movements.
Also the EC will never be abolished, despite whatever candidates promise every 4 years. It’s too useful.
While there’s plenty of criticism of the constitution along slavery lines, this isn’t one of them. Sorting the 1790 census by total population and then comparing the percentage of slave population, you’ll see that it’s very mixed. If the EC were to protect slavery, we would expect states with a high slave population to have a lower population overall, but that isn’t the case.
Also of note is that only two states (Maine and Massachusetts) had zero slaves. There were a handful of house slaves in almost every state at the time. Those states didn’t have a heavy economic dependence on slavery, though. It’s the southern states, with their whole economy built around plantation slavery, that are the real problem. But again, they don’t line up in ways that would give them an EC edge.
No, its a pretty well documented critique. The EC increased the South’s delegates by a huge margin.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/electoral-colleges-racist-origins
Except it doesn’t check out when you break down the numbers.
Right from the get-go, the Electoral College has produced no shortage of lessons about the impact of racial entitlement in selecting the president. History buffs and Hamilton fans are aware that in its first major failure, the Electoral College produced a tie between Thomas Jefferson and his putative running mate, Aaron Burr.
The EC in the 1800 election was 73/65 in favor of Jefferson. The popular vote was 60% in Jefferson’s favor, but he got 53% of the EC. If anything, the EC put him at a disadvantage.
The tie spoken of above was a technical issue between Jefferson and his intended Vice President, Aaron Burr. It doesn’t have much to do with slavery at all. They were trying to hack around the system of setting the second place winner as Vice President, and it blew up in their face. Burr was always intended by the Democratic-Republicans to be Vice President.
The 12th amendment was passed before the next election to do away with that means of selecting the Vice President. It was ratified by both slave and free states. It was rejected by Delaware and Connecticut, both of which had <10% of their population as slaves in the 1800 Census (only three states had zero slaves by then).
Adams was by far more consistently against slavery compared to Jefferson. You can find writings where Jefferson was against it, but his actions plainly speak otherwise. Adams never owned a slave and even avoided employing them secondhand. Which is about as difficult as avoiding products from tobacco industry subsidiaries today.
Adams lost, but he would have lost with or without the EC.
Anything that happens later (which is where the article goes after the above) isn’t particularly relevant to how the EC was intended to work. The population dynamics and entry of new states couldn’t have been predicted at the time.
The three-fifths compromise, though? Absolute fucking evil. Adams maybe wins the EC in 1800 without that, and (more importantly) Congress would certainly look very different. The EC was, if anything, a counterbalance to the three-fifths compromise, though not a very strong one.
The EC should go away because it’s antidemocratic. The argument that it was for slavery, though, just doesn’t add up.
Consider the possiblity that the president will be elected by the popular vote. That might be dangerous
The leader might be elected DEMOCRATICALLY? The horror
And, when the president is elected against the popular vote? Like in 2016?
2000 too. Not to mention that in 1980 the electoral college did not protect us from a populist fascist. So I’m not really sure what good Electoral College is. If it doesn’t do the thing the people say it’s supposed to do. Even though all it was ever supposed to do was to protect slave states and conservative power. Which is all it’s ever done.
I thought the issue with the 2000 election was because of SCOTUS. Not a yank, and wasn’t amping for the 1980s, but I appreciate your insights!
2000 was only close due to the electoral college. The supreme court fuck up didn’t help of course. Without the Electoral College Reagan or bush senior would have been the last Republican presidents we had. Because I think they were the last two to win the popular vote.
A lot went on in 2000. One was the electoral vote didn’t match the popular. Another was that the automatic counting machines rejected good ballots due to error in Florida. The spread was close enough to trigger a recount. After the first machine recount gore requested a hand recount. The Republicans running Florida threw up every barrier they could. I belive gore was up in the hand recount and likely to win it, but they moved the date up and stated they would reject recounts not finished. The Supreme Court upheld the date, which had been chosen to be impossible to meet.
It protected a business-friendly candidate from one that was supported by women and minorities. The system worked perfectly.
Is that you, Alito?
If the majority of Americans vote for Trump then America is a failed state.
Everyone’s vote having the same weight, and our elections not being a competition to win a handful of battleground states while ignoring the rest of the country? Don’t threaten me with a good time.
It feels like the only protections the EC provides is to the GOPs ability to win the presidency. I agree with Walz, the EC needs to go, it’s too easy to game by focusing on swing states.
The ec Is so anti democratic. It does need to go
Let’s see what the founders had in mind:
The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States. It will not be too strong to say, that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue. And this will be thought no inconsiderable recommendation of the Constitution, by those who are able to estimate the share which the executive in every government must necessarily have in its good or ill administration. Though we cannot acquiesce in the political heresy of the poet who says: "For forms of government let fools contest That which is best administered is best,‘’ yet we may safely pronounce, that the true test of a good government is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.
In other words, it’s supposed to stop someone like Trump from ever being President. Since that clearly failed, maybe we should junk the whole thing.
Even this is generous. The Federalist Papers, IMO, should be taken as a way to sell the new constitution to the populace. They make it sound like the whole thing was more well thought out than it really was. The constitution that came out is just the compromise everyone could live with after debating it for hours. Politicians back then aren’t that different from today; they have their own agendas, their own ambitions, and their own squabbles. They also get tired after long debates and will vote for anything as long as it gets them out of there.
On top of that, a good chunk of what they were thinking at the time–which you can see echos of in the quote above–was deflecting criticism that democracy couldn’t work. The US was the first modern democracy, and there were plenty of aristocrats in Europe (and even some useful idiots domestically) who laughed off the idea of a government run by peasants. The result is a system that doesn’t go all in on democracy, and has all these little exceptions. “No, no, see, the electoral college will stop a populist idiot from taking executive power”.
We’ve changed a lot of those over the years, such as electing senators rather than having them appointed by state governors. In hindsight, these were not necessary at all. It’s time for the electoral college to go.
The EC is undemocratic, but the Republican Party would never be able to win the presidency if it was decided by pure popular vote. So, it will never go or even change.
Then, one would argue that the republican party should not government if they are unable to garner the requisit amount of votes!
But they are currently in enough of government to block any move that removes their advantage.
Yup
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.
And the corrollary, those who ignore peaceful protest signal that only violence will be recognized.
This was the video that made me passionate that the electoral college needs to go. It is a dumb system that seemed good at the time, but makes literally no sense today.
Sending one person to Washington to speak on behalf of a arbitrarily chosen group (and not even have to respect their choices) is an antiquated system from the days we sent representative by horseback…
You haven’t even given a reason you think it shouldn’t go away. The only reason to keep it would be to exploit it… it’s a ridiculous system.
Historically, the EC protected the women’s suffrage movement. In a straight NPV, you couldn’t allow progressive states like Wyoming to just double their electoral influence by letting women vote until conservative states like Massachusetts are ready to do the same.
Maybe the modern equivalent is ranked choice voting reforms. Under EC, it’s no problem for Maine to choose electors by IRV, and if other states see it working, they might follow. Under a NPV, or even the NPVIC, they’d be forced to revert to a plurality system so their votes could be added to the national total.
Why do we keep having this discussion when IT WONT ever happen? It’s a grift at this point. A boogie man to raise funds against, like Trump.
Abolishing the Electoral College would require the approval of some of the states that would lose power.
The only way it happens is if we pay them off for their vote.
The Electoral College is allowing more an more manipulation from these small states. It is time for that to end. They are holding this country back much too much.
The Hill - News Source Context (Click to view Full Report)
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https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4923526-minnesota-gov-walz-electoral-college/
Trump in 2012: The electoral college is garbage and needs to go. Trump in 2016: The electoral college is genius. What a great system. Trump in 2020: The electoral college is garbage and needs to go
I remember his tweets each time.
