15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete

There are discussions about the electoral college favoring small states. Some people think that&#x27;s bad, some people think it&#x27;s good.<p>However, there&#x27;s a more important issue: that&#x27;s not really what the electoral college does. It gives a small edge to small states[0]. The much bigger effect is that in every given election, it favors a handful of battleground states over all the rest.<p>If you live in Wyoming, the electoral college does not help you, because your vote is secure. Ditto for Vermont. But if you live in Ohio or Florida, presidential candidates will spend all their time in your state, trying to get your vote.<p>While you can concoct a semi-coherent case for rural voters needing special protection, no one can explain why Ohio is more or less important than North Carolina, or Florida than Texas.<p>[0] Which, if you&#x27;re paying attention, is at least correlated with being rural, but only partially--another lazy generalization that surrounds this subject.

Debates over the electoral college tend to conflate two different things. The original purpose of the electoral college was a compromise between those who wanted the president directly elected, and those who wanted Congress to elect the president. While very small states have a modest edge as a result of using the number of members of Congress to decide the number of electors, the real purpose of the system is to add a layer of indirection to the election of the President, where the states have a say in their capacity as states.<p>That layer of indirection continues to exist today. Article II provides that “each state shall appoint” electors “in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” So Minnesota could decide to have the state legislature appoint its electors, without a popular vote. (That would raise the importance of state government elections, which might be a good thing.)<p>At the same time, that layer of indirection could exist even in a purely proportional system. You could assign electoral votes based on population or number of house members.<p>So the debate over getting rid of the electoral college actually involves two different issues. Should the number of electors be proportional? And should we reduce the independent status of the states even more by taking away their intermediary role in electing the President?

It&#x27;s not about division of power between rural&#x2F;urban or big states&#x2F;small states. The Electoral College is about buffering purely democratic power. The President doesn&#x27;t represent &quot;the people.&quot; He&#x2F;she represents the interests of the states. The Legislative Branch represents the will of the people (most directly through the House of Representatives). One of the biggest problems is vesting too much power and importance in the Executive, which was never intended. Throw the balance of power out of whack, and we get these conversations (the President has to represent &quot;the people&quot; and therefore should be elected by popular vote)

Firstly, I&#x27;m an independent - I actually have a great deal of issues with both major parties. My concern with abandoning the college starts with this observation:<p>Swing states are the states most likely to have divided government. And if divided government is good for anything, it is accountability. So with the Electoral College system, when we do wind up with a razor-thin margin in an election, it is likely to happen in a state where both parties hold some power, rather than in a state controlled by one party. The Electoral college system focuses a great deal of energy on states in this condition when an election is close.<p>National Popular Vote (NPV) rewards states with high population - the higher the turnout, the more power for that state. Additionally, under NPV, each state would certify its own &quot;national&quot; vote total. What would happen when there are charges of skullduggery? Would states really trust, with no power to verify, other state’s returns?<p>I have other concerns as well but feel the EC system is superior. Just as an observation, the parliamentary systems of the UK, Canada, Israel, (&amp; others) have the parliament elect the Prime Minister and likewise don&#x27;t elect their leaders by popular vote.<p>[edited: removing poor wording about &#x27;lax laws&#x27;, seems I implied things in a FUD way that I didn&#x27;t mean to]

I want to point out this article was written in May, and is a bit out of date. For example, Nevada (heavily mentioned in the article) never adopted the National Popular Vote compact because the governor vetoed the bill after the legislature passed it.<p>FiveThirtyEight published an article last week on the current state of the compact: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fivethirtyeight.com&#x2F;features&#x2F;the-movement-to-skip-the-electoral-college-may-take-its-first-step-back&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fivethirtyeight.com&#x2F;features&#x2F;the-movement-to-skip-th...</a>

An argument I heard recently against this is, if abolished, politicians won&#x27;t have incentives to campaign in rural territories, and they won&#x27;t be accountable to rural territories. That basically makes sense. The EC is the only thing that really gives rural territories any stake, as the majority population has shifted to larger urban centers.<p>People who want to get away from the big cities and live a different kind of life with different priorities (and different legislative interests), shouldn&#x27;t be totally shut out, should they? Even though I live in a giant urban area, I wouldn&#x27;t want to feel pressured to due so due to lack of political stake if I move elsewhere.

&gt;On Tuesday, Nevada became the latest state to pass a bill that would grant its electoral votes to whoever wins the popular vote across the country, not just in Nevada. The movement is the brainchild of John Koza, a co-founder of National Popular Vote, an organization that is working to eliminate the influence of the Electoral College.<p>I don&#x27;t think this will survive constitutional challenge, because it is not the voters of the state who are deciding how the state&#x27;s electors are decided. For example, would it be allowed for a swing state such as Florida which now has a Republican governor and state legislature, to pass a law stating that their state&#x27;s electors would be allocated based on how Alabama votes? That way, even if the Democratic candidate won a majority of votes in Florida, the electors would still go to the Republican candidate if the Republican candidate wins in Alabama.

The Electoral college exists because of slavery.<p>The original idea going into the Constitutional Convention was to have Congress pick the president. A majority of delegates going into the Convention supported this, but discarded it after debates established it would violate the separation of powers.<p>The popular vote wasn&#x27;t an option, however, because it would mean the southern states with their large, non-voting slave populations would have vastly reduced influence. The southern delegates would have never supported a popular vote. Thus, the electoral college.<p>Madison wrote about it here: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;memory.loc.gov&#x2F;ll&#x2F;llfr&#x2F;002&#x2F;0000&#x2F;00610057.tif" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;memory.loc.gov&#x2F;ll&#x2F;llfr&#x2F;002&#x2F;0000&#x2F;00610057.tif</a>

I&#x27;m really confused about this because I don&#x27;t understand the incentives politicians have to adopt this in their own state. It clearly undermines their state&#x27;s power in national elections.<p>My (cynical) assumption is that this will be obeyed insofar as it helps bring about the desired outcome by those in power. It will be disregarded if it would shift the outcome in the other direction.

The electoral college achieves one very useful function thats ignored by everyone calling for its abolition in favour of the popular vote: it produces a clear winner and contains the contagion of litigating and delegitimizing the outcome of an election.<p>Think about this: there are a number of elections that have a very small popular vote margin. What if this gets less than, say, 20,000? That&#x27;s entirely possible. In a strictly popular vote election, what&#x27;s to stop each side from scrounging up votes or invalidating votes in every county in the country?<p>The most contentious and litigated election is probably the 2000 election. The electoral college contained those shenanigans to Florida alone (and largely to Miami-Dade and Broward countries, specifically).<p>There are four main problems with the US election system as I see it:<p>1. Voting needs to be mandatory. Americans who love &quot;freedom&quot; chafe against this but optional voting undermines democracy. You can see this in the organized efforts to suppress voting and disqualify voters by US political parties.<p>2. The US needs preferential voting. Third-party votes are otherwise largely a waste.<p>3. Paper ballots with optical recognition only. No punch cards, certainly no electronic voting. You need the paper trail of actual ballots. This could be filling in a ballot and validating it with a machine or using a machine to print out a ballot. These have an exceptionally low error rate.<p>4. Stop politicizing the election process. Like, why is the supervisor for elections an elected political position? This is the case in Florida, for example. Likewise, you have the Senate majority holding up election reform because of there is suspicion this will help the Democrats in the House who passed it. Seriously, Mitch McConnell needs to go to jail.<p>5. I&#x27;m fine with states being represented in the US system. The problem is that this system was designed at a time when populations were rural and cities were small. I don&#x27;t think anyone predicted the disparity between ~40M people in California and ~150k people in Vermont having 2 Senators each.<p>You&#x27;ll note that none of these are having the popular vote. IMHO that&#x27;s fixing the wrong problem.

I always hear people complain about the electoral college, but I&#x27;ve never once heard a detailed, objective argument as to why they think a popular vote would be a better system.<p>Friends I&#x27;ve talked to about just seem to default to a majority system because it seems more &#x27;fair&#x27;, or its easier to understand? I dont know.<p>In the USA, I think we are conditioned to belive in the democratic process, so I guess it feels &#x27;natural&#x27; to just tally up the votes, &amp; majority wins.<p>We&#x27;ve done it countless times in our personal lives. Anytime there&#x27;s a disagreement, or a group decision to be made, &quot;Ok, lets vote on it&quot;. Majority wins. Simple.<p>This is a fine &amp; easy way to decide things in small groups, but is it really the best way to decide something among 300 million?<p>I&#x27;m not convinced. I&#x27;m not saying the EC is perfect, I just suspect a simple majority wins vote could cause other serious problems that are not immediately obvious.

The Connecticut Compromise is good and all, but I think it&#x27;s about time we discard it as an artifact of the days when communication was difficult and states had expectations around operating as semi-autonomous bodies. States used to be a strong identity tie than the nation but our general mindset has shifted toward identifying as Americans before Delawareans.

It&#x27;s in the Constitution. If you don&#x27;t like the Constitution: --amend it. --call for a Constitutional Convention. These are the agreed methods to change the document. &quot;End runs,&quot; state compacts and attempts to game the system are unconstitutional and doomed.

The electoral college was just a kludge to allow elections before modern instant long distance communication became a thing. The gold standard for democracy was always &quot;one person, one vote&quot;, but nowadays there&#x27;s a lot of people that consider their personal gain more important than being democratic and those people (the Republican party mostly) will try to hang on to the electoral college, no matter the cost apparently.

I have often thought that part of the rationale for the electoral college was that in the 18th century they did not have the internet, TV, Radio, even newspapers were pretty scarce. So it just wasn&#x27;t all that practical for a candidate to ride a horse around all 13 colonies to meet each voter. The logical solution would have been to have a parliamentary system whereby the congress would select the president for you. The problem there was that the president would be beholden to the congress and you would lose some of the checks and balance features because he would be less likely to veto something. So they developed a &quot;shadow congress&quot; that did not have law making responsibilities but sole purpose was to travel to Philadelphia or DC and hear the speeches and so forth and select the president for you as your representative.<p>Looking at it from this 18th century perspective highlights why it is completely unnecessary today. Obviously the voter has many ways of getting to know the positions of the candidates themselves and hence able to elect the president directly. There is no need for it today.

If people are up in arms about the electoral college giving small states outsized influence, wait until they hear about the senate.

Why cant states just give out percents of electoral votes based on who voted?<p>Example: Lets say CA has 10 Electoral Votes (for easy math) 60% vote Dem, 40% vote Republican. California then Gives 6 Electoral Votes to the Democrat and 4 to the Republican instead of all 10 to the Democrat.<p>Feels like that would more fairly represent the voters of each state no?

Most modern countries have similar systems, where smaller areas are disproportionally represented in the legislative power. Its only when you loose that is a problem?

&quot;Legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests.&quot; - Justice Earl Warren<p>There&#x27;s a long history of the US electoral system favoring rural areas over urban areas. Typically, the courts had to intervene in order to remedy an issue where clearly the legislature has a conflict of interest. The most famous is Reynolds v Sims (1964), which stated that electoral districts of state legislative chambers must be roughly equal in population [1].<p>Hopefully, we can see similar change happen in the Electoral College.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Reynolds_v._Sims" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Reynolds_v._Sims</a>

When looking at political methods I like to look a first principals from all points of view.<p>Here is a conservative or traditionalist political point of view in favor of the Electoral College<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imprimis.hillsdale.edu&#x2F;danger-attacks-electoral-college&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imprimis.hillsdale.edu&#x2F;danger-attacks-electoral-coll...</a><p>Here is a liberal or progressive point of view against the Electoral College<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;harvardpolitics.com&#x2F;united-states&#x2F;the-case-against-the-electoral-college&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;harvardpolitics.com&#x2F;united-states&#x2F;the-case-against-t...</a><p>These are but two opinions. Politics is ultimately creating policy on opinions from a large community.

Isn&#x27;t it interesting that minority opinions matter and must be treated equally, until your state has the minority of the population...

Up next: Abolishing the World Series. Make it one big, long game and count only the total number of runs.

If this happens, Democrats will be very unhappy with how many Republicans there are in Upstate New York, Southern Illinois and Rural California who&#x27;s vote now counts for something.

There are 2 major data points that are forgotten in this discussion<p>#1 The founding fathers responsible for the american revolution risked everything by creating the constitution and the electoral college. They literally went against the most powerful empire in the world. They determined that the electoral college was the best system to defend the freedom of the naescent Republic.<p>Then on the other side, you have a bunch of armchair bureaucrats and talking heads trying to change the system they inherited thanks to the blood of others. They want the benefits from the change (&quot;more votes&quot;) but should the system implode, they will surely socialize losses among USA (they wont even join the army , let alone fight for what they believe in ).<p>Then you have switzerland. The longest continuous government in the world operates as an extreme version of Republic, giving ample powers to small groups, where they can undo anything enacted by the majority. Nothing gets done as people bicker about small things. Majority does not get its sat. Yet the country is the most stable in the world.<p>Maybe its time to consider what is the price for changing something that was forged with the blood of tears of more brave men, and has proven to stand the test of time.

The electoral college also serves as a “firewall” of sorts to contain any local election fraud to that state (such that the will of the voters in that state is compromised, but the compromise doesn’t extend beyond that).<p>For all I care, CA could pick their votes out of a lotto machine and it wouldn’t affect the power of my vote (as a non-CA resident). The fact that my vote is meaningless (deep blue state) is a collateral issue, perhaps.

The National Popular Vote (NPV) initiatives website has a lot of good info and background on the issue, and takes on the myths around it.<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nationalpopularvote.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nationalpopularvote.com&#x2F;</a><p>Explanation - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nationalpopularvote.com&#x2F;written-explanation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nationalpopularvote.com&#x2F;written-explanation</a><p>Myths - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nationalpopularvote.com&#x2F;answering-myths" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nationalpopularvote.com&#x2F;answering-myths</a><p>As for the compact being a partisan issue, losing the presidency despite winning the popular vote can happen in either direction:<p><i>A shift of 59,393 votes in Ohio in 2004 would have elected John Kerry despite President Bush’s nationwide lead of over 3,000,000 votes.</i><p>Edit: C-SPAN interview with NPV co-founder John Koza from March 2019:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.c-span.org&#x2F;video&#x2F;?458502-6&#x2F;washington-journal-john-koza-discusses-popular-vote-movement" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.c-span.org&#x2F;video&#x2F;?458502-6&#x2F;washington-journal-jo...</a>

It&#x27;s like we&#x27;ve been trying to destroy the electoral college almost since it&#x27;s inception. And every step makes it worse.<p>The electoral college was supposed to be a sort of bulwark between the public and the highest office in the nation.<p>State governments choose their electors. Those electors are <i>supposed</i> to be tasked with choosing the best among the candidates for president and vice-president.<p>But instead, state governments threw that decision to the public. Effectively making the electoral college a proxy popularity vote for a state. And that&#x27;s a big fucking ask of any person. Choose the person who is capable of running the country and making all these decisions, whose policies will guide your nation to prosperity, etc.<p>Hell man, I&#x27;m just trying to get <i>my</i> budget straight. Do I look like I have time in between everything else I do to also seriously investigate every single candidate? And I&#x27;m not a complete moron either. And I know I cannot actually make a completely informed decision here. But I know complete morons. And they get a vote just like me.

No he isn&#x27;t and he won&#x27;t.<p>But, it&#x27;s a good social engineering mechanism to discuss these issues so the next gen and others who don&#x27;t understand the US thanks to pop culture can learn why the EC is important.<p>Repeal the 17th Amendment while you&#x27;re at it and then increase the house reps to 5000 and triple the senators.<p>Then we&#x27;ll see how effective or profitable lobbying, campaign finance or gerrymandering is.

For 32+ years, the fact is that the Democratic candidate has won the popular vote 7 times in the last 8 elections.<p>I am not saying whether this is good or bad.<p>But, I think the two party system would crumble very quickly if the Electoral College were removed, and something else would come into place instead.<p>Disclaimer: I do not vote despite being an American citizen. I am also an anarchist.

I could not be more opposed to the abolishment of the Electoral College. The founders had a very good rationale for putting it in.<p>That said... I think there&#x27;s a solution for this. Hard term limits for everyone, in all the branches.<p>It already exists for the Executive branch. I think it should be instituted for both Legislative and Judicial as well.

The electoral college was created to strike a balance between valuing a diversity of perspectives and popularity of perspectives. The probability that a geographically restricted monoculture gets it right is very close to zero.

Use a condorcet method [0] to elect a US president that represents common ground.<p>Needs of specific groups of people can be taken into account as transparent supplementary conditions. Sparsely populated areas constitute one potential parameter. Maybe the opinions of poor and ill people can also be taken into account for while respecting their privacy.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Condorcet_method" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Condorcet_method</a>

I turned 30 this year,and the Republican candidate has won the popular vote once in my life,and he was an incumbent. There has been a Republican president 14 of the 30 years of my life. Now,the first president of my life ( Bush 1) won the popular vote before I was born, but if we don&#x27;t count him, no Republican has entered office with the popular vote in my life. Regardless of political beliefs does this seem right to everyone?

I&#x27;m interested in hearing arguments from anyone who genuinely believes that California and New York are over all politically underprivileged.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;wpOIGxq.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;wpOIGxq.png</a><p>That&#x27;s a nice number of comments.

Right or wrong, the only thing that matters is the constitution.<p>It is easy to imagine that a purely democratic system would be better, but I find it easy to imagine that it would be substantially worse.<p>The founding fathers rightly believed that most people were ignorant and relatively stupid so the people vote for the house, but senators and electors were appointed.<p>The agreement to get small states to join was that they would have an equal number of senators. If you want a different system change the constitution. Im skeptical that a democratic system would be better.<p>They setup the system to be a collection of states with a weak federal govt with limited power. The federal govt over time has taken more and more power from the states.<p>When california joined the union it had 33X less population than the most populous state (new york). Californians were happy to have the overrepresentation when it benefitted them.<p>Overall a strongly federal system is worse than a system where 50 states each try something different. In a 50 state system we get many chances to find the best policies. For example when marijuana is illegal at the federal level the antis predicted wholesale mayhem. There was no way to test to see what would happen until some states defied federal law. Once one state showed that it was fine others could come on board.<p>The same goes for open carry. Antis claimed there would massive increases in crime and shootings. It turns out not to be the case.

&gt; &quot;Sanford Levinson, a constitutional law scholar at the University of Texas at Austin, is sharply critical of the Electoral College system, but does not believe the interstate pact would solve all of the problems inherent to America’s election design.&quot;<p>Same argument as we can&#x27;t try any gun restrictions because none of them will stop all shootings.

What if Congress revoked all (or nearly all) implicitly and explicitly delegated powers to the Executive? The jockeying over who runs for President and how we elect them always seems to miss the point that the modern Executive is much too powerful.<p>Make the Presidency weaker, and then let&#x27;s have this discussion about how we elect them.

In much more recent news:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.msn.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;news&#x2F;politics&#x2F;faithless-elector-a-court-ruling-just-changed-how-we-pick-our-president&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.msn.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;news&#x2F;politics&#x2F;faithless-elector-a-...</a>

About the same number of people live in public housing in NYC as Wyoming.<p>Either land area matters or people matter.<p>Choose.

This article is from May. Oregon has since joined, becoming the 16th state to do so.

Every time this debate comes up I can&#x27;t help but wonder if we are letting the office of the president have too much power. To over-simplify a bit: the president should be executing the will of Congress, right?

The electoral college is a fault domain for voter fraud, and scaler to mitigate differences in voter accessibility, which cannot otherwise be fully mitigated given differences in geography.

Questions like this push me more and more to the idea that places like China have got governance nailed. Why bother about all this? It&#x27;s disorder for little gain.

I&#x27;d be curious how this holds up to court challenges because it seems like a deliberate circumvention of the constitution.<p>Not that the current system is completely equitable.

Democratic candidates have won the popular vote 4&#x2F;5 times in the most re ent elections, but only won the Presidency 2&#x2F;5. That’s an issue.

The real core issue is the president and the federal govt has way too much power. There is no reason why a centralized authority should decide on policy for both rural and urban communities and for states as deeply different as Louisiana and Washington state.<p>If political power was surrendered back down to where it naturally belongs, i.e. to the state, or even better to the city level, and the fed was stripped and left with little to no political power, this whole electoral college charade would become entirely moot.

Obviously only the &quot;blue&quot; states want this change. Fortunately there are more &quot;red&quot; states than blue states, so the original purpose of the electoral collage, as created by the founding fathers, will be preserved. Otherwise we would be in &quot;tyranny of the majority&quot; mode, which we are anyway, but at least not with regard to presidential elections.

Another thing to abolish - winner-takes-all system, which prevents wider parties variety.

1. Even if NPV is a good idea, this is the wrong way to do it. Doing it the wrong way means legal chaos. Doing it the wrong way means it can probably be undone or made worse the wrong way.<p>2. George Mason vs. Elisabeth Warren. James Madison vs. Jay Inslee. These match-ups aren&#x27;t even close.<p>3. I don&#x27;t think the results will match the intentions.<p>For point 1 this seems like parts of Obamacare. Whether you support it or not, enforcing&#x2F;creating parts of it via executive order means it can be unenforced&#x2F;dismantled via executive order. This isn&#x27;t a direct comparison, my point, if you base something on legally weak and questionable methods you will end up with weak and questionable outcomes.<p>Another way I look at point 2, can Justin Beiber rewrite Mozart and improve upon it? There are very few political intellectuals I would put on par with the founding fathers, and sadly most of those are not politicians. The founders&#x27; system has worked very well for centuries, the USofA has faults sure, but from ragtag rebel colonies to world super-power, this part is working fine. We have many problems, isolate the variables, I don&#x27;t think the EC is the cause.<p>Point 3, this is mostly a party issue, Democrats support it, Republicans do not. Of the 16 states to pass it through legislature 15 had Democrat governors, the single Republican governor vetoed. I think it is safe to say the elections of Bush and Trump, without winning the popular vote, are the big driving factors for the NPV. I don&#x27;t think NPV will have the intended effect. I think people are wrongly taking new rules and applying old stats but if you change the rules of the game you can&#x27;t expect players (candidates and voters) to play with old strategies. A lot more Republicans will show up to vote in solidly blue states where currently voting for an R is a waste of time.

The United States bases way too much of its identity on who is its president.

&gt; Jerry Sonnenberg, a Republican state senator in Colorado who opposed the bill, said he believed the change would weaken the electoral power of sparsely populated rural states like Wyoming and Utah, while strengthening states like California and New York.<p>States. Are. Not. People.

the electoral college system has become a scam to give the presidential election to the wealthy. they can, during the election year establish residency in the swing states and in affect have more of a say as to who becomes president. people here claiming that it gives the rural population more of a say, that&#x27;s a lot of bs. with national popular vote the urban and rural states will have just as much of a say as each vote will count for one vote. none of this crap of increasing the representative count and taking advantage of the numbers being rounded in favor of one party vs the other. now if a party wants to rig the election, they will have a much harder time.

Wake me up when it&#x27;s 35 states. Before that, it&#x27;s just a political stunt - blue states promise to vote for popular vote winner, thinking it would be a Democrat, which they&#x27;d be voting for anyway.

It&#x27;s quite likely that without the electoral college, Donald Trump would have won the popular vote. Republican turnout in NY is terrible for presidential elections, because they all know there vote won&#x27;t matter. Registered Democrats out number Republicans in NY by more than 2 to 1, and yet there are more Republicans in NY that there are people in New Mexico and Vermont combined.<p>It&#x27;s definitely not a given, but predicting what would happen is not a clear exercise. You can&#x27;t change the rules without changing peoples behavior.

You misspelled obsolete :)

How is this tech related?

Most of these comments are about the structural issues with the electoral college.<p>I’m not really concerned about that. What concerns me is this insistence that a popular vote for President in a country of 350M people is a good idea. Does anyone actually believe this? The executive branch these days has essentially become a proxy for what laws one wants passed, and you end up voting accordingly. This might be fine, if the results were restricted to being local - and by the way, the original design of this country accented on exactly that point. But we don’t live in that country anymore, I guess. Now we want more democracy, all the time.<p>So I find it really hard to believe that introducing <i>more</i> “democracy” in a nation as divided and diverse as this one is a good idea. This, I thought, was supposed to be one of the reasons that people wanted to move here ... the whole Federalism thing. Taxes can be different between states. So can Social policy. The extension of this is of course the Electoral College.<p>Spare me the criticism of “slippery slope” but getting rid of the Electoral College seems like we’d be on the road to a government “of the majority, by the majority, and for the majority”. That is categorically absurd, at least in my view.<p>The cynic in me says that the only reason we’re even talking about this is because Trump won in 2016 via the EC. Sure. He did. And Clinton won the “popular vote” because of LA, SF, and NYC.<p>For those in SF (or whatever proxy): do you want folks in Sioux Falls or Fargo making your economic and social policy? No? I didn’t think so. So why is it okay to institute the reverse?<p>The point I’m trying to make here is this country, as diverse as it is, is best run as a distributed network. And centralizing the election of the Executive into a singular popular vote will help destroy what’s left of that network.

News flash: Trump would still have won, just with a different campaign strategy and a different platform. Promise a little more of what CA and NY want, and a little less of what everybody else wants, and he&#x27;d get the popular vote, too.<p>In fact I think this would make it _easier_ for a populist to win, not harder, because all they&#x27;d have to worry about is crafting a campaign message that resonates with the majority and portrays their opponent as Satan in the flesh.

I wonder how many people arguing for the abolishment of the EC would like it if India and China automatically had the most votes in whatever supranational government arises in the future and got to decide everything that happened across the world. The US is still supposed to be a federation. The EC was part of the deal the US made with smaller states to become part of the Union precisely because they were afraid of being drowned out by the big states. Don&#x27;t like it? Convince the smaller states. Might not be that hard. There are plenty of dumb people in the smaller states willing to permanently consign their land to irrelevance because they don&#x27;t like a President who&#x27;s going to be gone in a handful of years.

The democrats crucified Trump in 2016 for not accepting the outcome of the election. Today they want to amend the constitution to abolish the electoral college. Maybe it&#x27;s a good thing that we can&#x27;t change these things on a whim.

re: California<p>It&#x27;s also worth considering the distortions that illegal aliens put on electoral college numbers.

Wouldn&#x27;t that push housing up in big cities?

My issue with the electoral college is that winner take all - rather than each electoral vote being counted and rolled up, only the winner is. There are a couple states that do this, I’d like to see the others adopt this.

This is absurd populism. IMHO electoral college votes should come from US House district winners instead of winner takes all.

Anyone proposing this is doing so in the blind. Nobody knows how this would change the complex executive and legislative systems we have. Nobody could know, for decades. So why the confidence that this is the right thing to do?

1) the presidency has grown too powerful and imperial with a bureaucracy so massive the Qing emperor would be jealous.<p>2) 15 States can do what they want, but unless they meet the provisions in Article 5, the college is here to stay.<p>Thank goodness the Framers had the foresight to include the process for amending the Constitution in the document.

Let&#x27;s imagine a state signs this and is a tipping point state for the presidential election. If this compact has any effect, it will be for the state&#x27;s electors to vote against the popular vote in that state, resulting in the election of the undesired president according to the state&#x27;s voters.<p>Nothing wrong with that constitutionally, but I suspect the politicians will feel differently after the voters express their opinion of the matter.

This is stupid. The entire point of the electoral college is to ensure small states have a say and the country isn’t ruled by the majority mob. Small states would have to be pretty ignorant to make themselves irrelevant like that.

If trump is re-elected it may be the last time a republican wins a presidential election in the current system, due to demographic changes in key states (FL, TX, NC, etc.)<p>If the electoral college is abolished, it could actually end up getting another few republicans elected, since it would incentivize republican turnout in solidly democratic states like California.

The states agreed to the Constitution with the Electoral College provision. If there&#x27;s national will to change it, it should be through the amendment process described in the Constitution.<p>Having some states band together to subvert the intention of the EC fundamentally breaks the compact of the Constitution. What is the authority of a President chosen through subversion of the Constitution?

Great. With no electoral college, Wyoming would have 1.44% of the weight California would have towards who was elected. The only thing keeping Wyoming in the Union would be their two senators. Maybe then Wyoming folks should have to pay 1.44% of the Federal Income Tax that Californians pay.<p>Campaigning for President? Just go to New York, LA, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, and maybe a few other cities.<p>Maybe city folks can start making their own food while they&#x27;re at it.

I think this is both a dumb move and unconstitutional.<p>Present day politics aside, allowing for pure demographic voting in this day and age is even more dangerous than it was in the early days of the republic.<p>States and regions have different needs that need to be considered in the governance of the nation. You can already see warning signs, the Democratic Party platform has been so brain dead, they even managed to marginalize union voters. Kansas and Wisconsin were progressive strongholds.<p>Changing the way we count isn’t a fix for that issue — fixing how candidates and parties approach the people is. A more productive approach would be to reduce the carnival nature of the election process... candidates shouldn’t be picked based on their ability to shuck and jive in Iowa and New Hampshire.<p>Direct popular vote is basically a beacon for reactionary politics. It’s easy to churn out old people to vote.

I think before we change the system we might want to get politicians to actually do their job and represent the people in their district. With all these people voting by mail and all these government provided or subsidized phones and internet connections it&#x27;s not only trivial but should be mandatory to quantify and qualify what each person who votes wants as a matter of a public record of accountability rather than having some party line being towed. If the politicians were doing their job and not serving some party or political agenda, the electoral college I think would work just fine. Popular vote&#x2F;mob rules? I don&#x27;t think so. The majority should never rule over the minority, and the only good government is a democracy where the majority vote in the best interest of all citizens and compromise in order to do so. Or as I like to sum it up, don&#x27;t confuse a coop game with a competitive game.

A hypothetical situation;<p>An amendment is proposed on the floor of the House to change the formula in a bill for how funding is allocated.<p>The amendment presents a pro-urban allocation which provides a greater share of funding for larger cities compared to a baseline per-capita allocation.<p>Urban center representatives stand up and argue how their cities need a higher reimbursement rate because the issue at hand is costlier to fix or more prevalent in their environment.<p>Rural representatives stand up and argue they need the baseline funding to run an effective program.<p>A vote is taken, and 54% of votes approve the amendment, urban center reps effectively pooling their votes to enact the funding paradigm that most benefited their constituents.<p>——<p>The moral of the story is that it’s a lot more complicated than 1 person 1 vote.<p>Often times policies may benefit a rural area over and urban environment or vice versa. One type of community benefiting and the expense of another. Cities already carry a massive voting advantage, because, that’s where most people live!<p>When bills pass on a majority vote, urban already wins over rural every time. The rural areas maybe can form blocks to help push otherwise divided city reps one way or another, but policy debate is already dominated by urban voters, despite the claim of urban votes “counting less”. The simple math belies the reality that urban center reps vote for pro-urban national policies and the rural states with 1 rep sit on the sidelines.<p>The last place these votes matter, even in the slightest, is in the EC in a closely contested election, and in the Senate. Frankly I’m not convinced more populism is any benefit, or that cities are particularly hurting from a lack of representation.