Land doesn’t vote. People do. End the Electoral College now.
Or, hear me out, we make the federal government less important so having fair representation doesn’t matter quite as much. Focus more on state and local government, which solves the problem across multiple fronts. Also solves the problem of greedy wannabe royalty since the position no longer has power and therefore doesn’t attract power hungry individuals.
Not everything is the same everywhere. Having a huge unified govt is… Kinda silly?
This is what the founders of America wanted by the way.
TIL pizza is a where.
We need the electoral college because without it the ignorant masses might elect an dangerously unqualified reactionary demagogue they saw on a reality TV show.
if the baseline for district size was the population of the least populated state (wyoming), and the house of representatives and electoral college were increased in size as needed to accommodate…
the outcome of every presidential election since the house was capped at 435 would remain unchanged, with the possible and singular exception of 2000–but there were other ‘circumstances’ involved then that gave that election away.
Yet if we didn’t just tweak a terrible voting system and got rid of the EC, 5 elections would have had different outcomes - as in the will of the majority of voters would have choose a different president a whole five times.
Let’s let the class decide what type of pizza to get.
Counting the votes, pepperoni wins.
Counting the votes at each table, then each counting the winner per table, pepperoni wins.
Arbitrarily dividing each table into “groups” of students, then adding those groups up to determine which choice won the table, then counting the tables… anchovies wins!
A better analogy
Counting the votes- pepperoni wins.
There’s a lot of vegetarians but they don’t make up an absolute majority so their needs are ignored.Counting the votes at each table- cheese wins, because even the two huge tables want pepperoni, many of the smaller tables are mostly vegetarians who don’t eat pepperoni.
This is why the electoral college is still relevant- to ensure that urban voters don’t bowl over suburban or rural voters who deserve to have a say in government too.Dividing each table into groups then adding them together- that’s a scam by a pepperoni fan because they will ensure every group has 5 known pepperoni lovers and 2 others.
Isn’t the House and the Senate already skewed in rural areas favor? Do urban voters really need to be kneecapped all across government?
It would have been nice if work from home inspired a blue wave to move to red states and flipped the electoral maps during COVID.
Where
pizza
shoe
Me, off-camera: these people are idiots
This has been the electoral college
I bet Liz from Wyoming votes to eat the shoe at like 90% of meals, but argues that she’s totally different from all the other shoe eaters.
Hold on now, Liz only wants everyone else to eat shoes - she still wants pizza for herself! That’s what she’s gonna get, right? …Right?
She already has pizza before they even asked the question.
Now do the US Senate.
Ed: Where should we eat? I say pizza.
Ann: Pizza!
Ty: Pizza!
Liz: Pizza!
Ed: Alright, pizza it is! Oh, right, I forgot we have to figure out what the voters will eat. I guess they can have this old shoe. Now, back to pizza!
The Senate was never designed to be proportionate to a state’s population. The House was.
It’s fine to be against the idea of the Senate, but you should at least make sure you understand why it was created in the first place. That is, to create a union of states where each one has a certain level of autonomy.
The Senate is meant to represent each state’s individual interests in a national legislature.
Sometimes the interests of a local municipality don’t perfectly align with the interests of a state writ large. Which is why we have two houses: one to represent each state, and one that’s proportionate to population and represents the districts within a state.
The real issue, in my opinion, is the Reapportionment Act of 1929 that put a hard cap on the number of members of the House of Representatives at 435 seats.
It was created because the founders didn’t trust democracy. Shay’s Rebellion had them nervous about too much democracy taking wealth from the ruling class.
Thanks for saving me the trouble of bringing this up.
The Senate made more sense when the US was less centralized and different states were like different countries and there weren’t a bunch of states populated by 100 cows for every person.
In the modern era, it’s a simple tyranny of the minority. Wyoming has like 500,000 people, but those 500,000 have the exact same power in the more important chamber of Congress than do the 40,000,000 of California or the 30,000,000 of Texas.
If we take it to an extreme, imagine if there were only two states in the Union. Hawaii and the entire Continental US. Would we share equal power with Hawaii? Of course not.
If we’re really married to the idea, there should be a requirement for roughly equal population by state, and let’s be honest, we have that with House districts and they gerrymander it. (We should also move to proportional representation to fix that.)
We should also move to proportional representation to fix that.
Nailed it. Gerrymandering is impossible to fix so long as we rely on geographical districts. In a state with 20 districts, 40% voting Democrat, 40% voting Republican, 10% voting Pirate, and 10% voting Ninja, we should have a congressional delegation of 1 Ninja, 1 Pirate, 9 Democrats, and 9 Republicans. Instead, we get 12 Republicans, 8 Democrats, no ninjas, and no pirates.
you should at least make sure you understand why it was created in the first place. That is, to create a union of states where each one has a certain level of autonomy.
The Senate is meant to represent each state’s individual interests in a national legislature.
…
The real issue, in my opinion, is the Reapportionment Act of 1929 that put a hard cap on the number of members of the House of Representatives at 435 seats.
IMO the real reason the Senate is broken is the 17th Amendment (having Senators be directly elected by popular vote instead of chosen by state legislatures). That’s the point when it ceased to be fit for its original purpose (representing the State as its own entity in a way materially different from the House, maximising separation of powers) and should’ve just been abolished entirely instead.
I agree with you that the House is broken by the Reapportionment Act because there are just too damn many constituents per legislator, but that issue is separate from what’s wrong with the Senate.
but that issue is separate from what’s wrong with the Senate.
I’m not sure that it is. We have a bicameral legislature, you can’t really separate them completely. Together they are “Congress”.
I think the Senate would be fine as it is if we actually had a proportionate House of Reps.
And maybe the Senate shouldn’t be the “upper house” as I think “The People’s House” (in this scenario, actually proportionate) should be considered more important.
But I think calling for the abolishment of the Senate entirely is misguided. I like the idea of a federation of states, each with a degree of autonomy. And given the nature of the US being a nation of immigrants (and it’s sheer size), I think it fits our culture very well.
The senate has too much veto power, see the entire Biden presidency
Nah, the senate represents the state. That’s the problem, always has been.
The senate was designed to represent capital over people.
If you want to see the US without the Senate, watch The Hunger Games. It’s called “Panem”.
12 numbered districts whose collective population is a minority of the total, controlled from afar by a single district comprising the majority. Whatever that distant, popular majority wants, it commands the minority districts to provide.
The solution to the inequities in Panem is a Senate with the power to veto the whims of the Capitol district.
Instead you let a minority control the majority
Veto powers should be limited to that which directly impacts each state materially, not simply everything including things happening afar
Instead you let a minority control the majority
Myth. The House vetos the minority from controlling the majority. That’s the purpose of the House.
Veto powers should be limited to that which directly impacts each state materially, not simply everything including things happening afar
If the majority wants to enact something without the consent of the Senate, they are free to enact it at the state level: For themselves, rather than imposed against a minority populace that would reject it for themselves.
If that is not a viable option, then the federal government has too much power and needs to be reined in.
The purpose is not what it is doing anymore.
if the majority wants to enact something without the consent of the Senate, they are free to enact it at the state level
Then the veto should not apply to (more than a representative percent of) federal budgets. A shared project which states want to coordinate should not be vetoable by non-participants.
If that can still be vetoed then the vetoing states have too much power and must be reined in
A shared project which states want to coordinate should not be vetoable by non-participants.
Rejected. Individual states are free to establish contractual arrangements with eachother. They can create and fund joint commissions for such shared projects.
Where these “shared projects” are conducted and controlled by the federal government, there are no “non-participant” states. As participants in the federal government, these states have an interest in the budget of that government.
Lmao you do know there are many other forms of democratic government in the world that aren’t the USA right? You don’t have to resort to ham-fisted YA fantasy.
Also I need to confirm with you: you know the hunger games is fiction and not real life, right?
Fiction widens the contrast, bringing the problem into stark relief. It makes the pattern easily recognizable, so more subtle intrusions don’t go overlooked.
There are, indeed, many other forms of democratic government in the world that aren’t the USA. Some better. Many far, far worse. The best have strong factors differentiating them from simplistic, populist governance.
The United States is and always has been a federal hybrid not a true direct democracy. I don’t like it any more than you do but the president is elected by the states and not by the people and this was intentional in the design of the government. The “grand experiment” is the compromise between federal and democratic systems. Unfortunately the democratic side has lost ground like with the capping of the House. If we want to turn our government into a direct democracy then we need to do more than do away with the electoral college.
The United States is and always has been a federal hybrid not a true direct democracy
Technically, it was briefly a confederation between 1781 and 1789, but that just supports your real point even more.
Yes the Electoral college sucks but popular vote isn’t a utopia either without some adjustments.
CGP Grey’s “The Voting System That’s Actually Too Good for Politicians to Allow” -
I feel like rank choice is the way
Ranked choice. Rank choice would just smell bad.
There’s a part of that I don’t quite understand. So it said white tiger got 65% of the vote. It doesn’t need 65 it only needs 33 so anything over 33 was taken off and their second choice got picked instead. But how is that done exactly? I mean did all 65% that voted for white tiger have the exact same ballot? Every last one of them picked the other tiger second? What if some of them hadn’t? What if some of them picked the Silverback Gorilla second? How do we choose which of those 65% go to another person? That’s the part I don’t understand.
Every round, you count one new step of rankings, and eliminate the lowest candidate.
Round one starts with simply counting all 1st rank votes first.
Everybody’s vote counts once, to one person. It goes to that voter’s highest still-in-the-running candidate.
In the first round, if some candidate already gets 50%, they win directly. If not, you eliminate the person with the lowest votes.
(some variants pre-filter all candidates with too few total votes to have a chance, especially people who didn’t even get ranked by most, or only low ranks)What happens now is that people whose 1st vote was for the eliminated person gets redirected to their next highest person still in the running for the next round on the ballot which they cast. So in round 2 that’s your rank 2 on your ballot. Each remaining candidate now has their 1st rank votes from round 1 plus also their 2nd rank votes from all ballots which had been cast to the now-eliminated candidate.
Note that in each consecutive round, all votes which was already counted to a person who still in the running in that round remains untouched. So all who picked a 1st which is still in are still getting counted to that person. You don’t look at your 2nd rank yet if your 1st is still active.
So now in round 2, after the redirection to second choices, if that puts somebody over 50% they win. If not you eliminate yet another person, the lowest one every time. Every vote counted to that eliminated person, either 1st’s or 2nd’s, now gets redistributed again to that voter’s next highest person still in the running on their cast ballot - if your 1st is eliminated now, it goes to the 2nd if that person still is in, if not it goes to your 3rd. If you were already on your 2nd and that person is eliminated, it also goes to your 3rd. If somebody’s 1st and 2nd are eliminated AND they don’t have a 3rd, their vote gets ignored in the rest of the tallying process.
In round 3 and on you just keep going, until somebody gets 50% or all but one is eliminated. You may force a revote in many places if that person is beneath some threshold.
If I understand correctly, after each round, at least one name will be removed from everyone’s ballot. If anyone meets the threshold, their name will be removed (and they win a seat). If nobody reaches the threshold, the lowest name will be removed. Either way, after the name is removed, every ballot will be counted again in the next round.
That voting system is indeed too idealistic. The ideal is that if 65% of a voting population votes for the more popular candidate of Party A, everything above the cut off would go to the next highest candidate that belongs to Party. That way 65% of the voting population is ideally represented by the same political Party.
There are a bunch of problems with this of course. What if the 2nd candidate is under investigation for eating babies? Or who is to guarantee Candidate 2 will make the same policy decisions? No one would ever vote opposite of their party’s position! \s
I believe Australia had an incident were almost no one voted for a politician but they still won. Vaguely remember that was ~20 years ago and a lot of people were not happy with that.
That was possibly Ricky Muir in 2013 from the Australian Motor Enthusiasts Party. He was running in Victoria for the nathional Senate. He got 0.5% of the primary vote in but because of a feature called Group Voting Ticket a lot of minor parties sharing preferences so he kept getting preferences until he reach quota. GVT is no longer used in the national Senate
This is a problem with all party-based systems. Political party should not be part of election logic it’s objectively awful every single time it’s done.
So if I understand you what you’re saying is they don’t actually look at those ballots. They just assume anyone who voted for the white tiger in this scenario would automatically have picked the other tiger second? So they just ignore the rankings on the ballots entirely?
Yeah that sounds nuts. What would even be the point of having ranked choices then?
i went back and rewatched the video. It sounds like Grey implied everyone voted White tiger as 1st pick and the other tiger as 2nd. No explanation of how that would work tho.
“Indeed, let’s throw weighted votes out! All votes shall be equal!”
European elections is now a simple game. Hundreds of millions are voting for a day and at the end, the Germans always win.
