Wouldn't this lead to a TON of games? Now if you're a Democrat in Nebraska, or a Republican in California, it's in your best interest NOT to vote. That way the winner-takes-all majority in your state would get less of an impact. On the other hand, all of the Democrats in California and Republicans in Nebraska would definitely want to show up to the polls.<p>Basically if you think your party will win, you want to show up. If your party will lose, you want to skip. There are basically 3 equilibria: 100% of either party votes and 0% of the other one, or exactly 50/50 with the outcome unknown to anyone.
Meh, why is turnout something one should encourage? Put another way, why should the voices of those who could barely be bothered to show up be amplified over those of those who really care?<p>I don't <i>want</i> 100% turnout; I <i>do</i> want the people who don't care to stay home. I'd also like to only allow people who can pass the citizenship test given to prospective naturalised citizens to be able to vote, but that's an entirely different discussion…
<i>Green states received a larger proportion of Electoral votes compared to their actual turnout. Red states received less.</i><p>Wish I could read these maps, but I'm red-green color blind (like 8% of men). Please consider using different colors or some additional indicator to show this information.
Some reasons we have the Electoral College:
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_%28United_States%29#Support" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_%28United_St...</a>
I'm surprised voter turnout isn't lower. Unless you live in a swing state, or Maine or Nebraska, voting for president is a waste of time. If you are in a swing state, it still might not matter unless you are in a swing district. It's a terribly broken voting system.
Will never happen. The Republican Party has almost made it its official platform to make it very hard for voters to vote. They are opposed to a holiday for elections; they come up with all sorts of excuses to take people off electoral rolls; they raise the bogey of "voter fraud" each and every election, when there's not much evidence of any.
This a fun little data project. No one is passing a constitutional amendment to change the EC to seats based on turnout. Even the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which does not require a constitutional amendment unfortunately seems to be stalled indefinitely.
And if we also split those electoral votes as close as possible to the way the people of the state voted we can get even closer to a direct election. And that's what the author seems to want - he's still got butt-hurt that Al Gore lost even with the popular vote. Why not just say what you want instead of proposing something that sounds kinda interesting but will never happen?
Wouldn't this just be a general election with sort of weird rounding rules?<p>edit: no, because of winner-takes-all nonsense. seems like a bad idea.
>Wyoming voters made up 0.193% of the total popular vote in 2012. That would earn them a total of one electoral vote. In reality Wyoming gets 3.<p>and they get the same amount of senators as California or NY. This is why US politics will always lean conservative. There are just too many "fly over states" with tiny conservative populations that have an undue influence on national elections.<p>All too often "money in politics" are blamed for the lack of liberal or progressive changes in the nation. That's a red herring for the most part, or at least, problem #2. With a system like this its very difficult to put in liberal reforms. Hell, Obamacare, which is pretty much a Reagan-era proposal, barely got passed with a Democratic majority in almost all branches of government. Even after passing, its been endlessly disputed with at least two major losses to the law via SCOTUS. Those courts? Packed with conservative leaning judges by POTUS, who has a major advantage to winning if he's a conservative. This stuff comes full circle and starts with the over-representation of lowly populated conservative areas.