Majority of Americans continue to favor moving away from Electoral College

Comments

• ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  65% of U.S. adults say the way the president is elected should be changed

  Hmm this seems unfair. How about we redo the survey but this time break it down state-by-state where the majority option in each state will be considered the “winner” of the entire state (except for in Maine and Nebraska, in which the minority option is still given some points) and then these states will appoint a certain number of people (the number of people each state can appoint is equal to how many representatives they have plus two for their senators, except in DC where its capped at the state with the least amount of apointed people) where they will redo the survey again but now they have the opportunity to change the results if they feel like it (but don’t worry that basically has never happened so it’s all good) and after that each state will count the actual votes and then mail them to DC where Congress will count the votes from each state and the members of Congress get a chance to vote to ignore a state if enough of them feel like it (but again don’t worry this has never happened! It’s all good!) and after that hopefully one of the options has a majority because if not then the house gets to choose and if they can’t decide then the senate gets to pick and if nobody can make up their minds then the Speaker gets temporarily decide until everyone figures their stuff out.

  I think that’s how Americans should answer all their surveys since it’s more fair.

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  • gibmiser@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Had me in the first half, ngl

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  • cheese_greater@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    You don’t happen to have ADHD do you? Dont read to much into this, that wall of text tho

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    • ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I copy and pasted how the electoral college works from Wikipedia and made it a run-on sentence to emphasize how nonsensical it is.

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• kirklennon@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  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.

  Why? You're accepting the premise but then stopping short. Yes, a candidate's final outcome in the election should be proportional to the number of votes they received. You want to make it less unfair, but we can just as easily make it completely fair by making the outcome exactly proportional to the vote.

  not completely disenfranchise rural voters

  According to the US Census, roughly 20% of Americans live in rural areas. Under the Electoral College, most of these people get effectively no say in who is the president. Nobody cares what rural voters in Texas or California or Wyoming or Oklahoma think because they're not swing states. In a popular election, these 20% of Americans would get 20% of the say, and their individual vote would carry the same weight as everyone else. That's the only fair system. Making it less rigged is still rigged.

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  • Patches@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Bro what? You might need to do a bit more research.

    The Electoral College ensures rural votes have an outsized say compared to their population.

    See almost every GOP state with maps redrawn in the last 4 years.

    www.clarionledger.com/story/…/6428483002/

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    • kirklennon@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      On the whole, yes, the Electoral College gives a larger weight to rural voters by stealing it from urban voters. I was merely highlighting that it also effectively disenfranchises a lot of rural voters by consolidating all electoral power in roughly a dozen swing states. I think the argument that we need to give special privilege to rural voters is bogus, but even accepting the premise, the EC still sucks at that. The specious arguments made in its favor don’t hold up.

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• Rapidcreek@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  What does the Electoral College breakdown look like on that poll?

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  • PizzaMan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Why does that matter? The people want a better electoral system, one that treats all votes equally.

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    • Rapidcreek@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      It matters which people want it. Certainly, if the sample was all in Kansas it would be different than if they were in New York.

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    • elscallr@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      “Powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution are reserved to the States, or to the People.” -10th Amendment to the United States Constitution

      Restrict the federal government’s power to only those powers explicitly delegated to them by the Constitution and I’d be ok with eliminating the Electoral College.

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    • wintermute_oregon@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      It was designed to be unequal on purpose. The electoral is what keeps us from being ruled by the masses. It should not change.

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• Tsavo43@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  So leaving our elections up to L.A. and NYC. All Democrats from now on. Hard pass. The founding fathers got it right.

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  • gibmiser@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    So some Americans are more important than others?

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  • kirklennon@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    So leaving our elections up to L.A. and NYC.

    Combined those might round up to 4% of the population of the United States. Explain again how they'll control the outcome of a popular election?

    Implicit in your argument is the self-evidently fair notion that the country should not be controlled by a minority ... except that is precisely what the Electoral College allows and what the popular vote makes impossible. Under the EC, the president is effectively decided only by voters in a dozen or so swing states (which exact states are in play varies by year but the number is pretty consistent). Candidates literally don't even campaign for votes in the other ~38 states, just sometimes making brief fundraising stops.

    The founding fathers cobbled together a stop-gap system that placated the oh-so-varied interests of different groups of privileged white men. It wasn't fair then and it has no moral justification in the present day. It's an affront to the basic principles of self-government now that we've expanded "self" to finally mean all Americans.

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  • blazera@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Why should your vote be worth more than someone else's?

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  • PizzaMan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    So then you agree that it is a terrible idea for our votes to be weighted based on where people live, so that we can avoid things like individual cities swaying the vote?

    I think so too. Everybody’s vote should be equal, which is why we should have a popular vote instead of the electoral collage.

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  • Primarily0617@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    So Republican policy represents the population so badly that they'd never win another election if the country switched to a more democratic system?

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  • gullible@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Land shouldn’t get a vote, much less land controlled by ineffectual leaders.

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  • FurtiveFugitive@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Should senators not be elected by the popular vote of each state? Should states develop their own state electoral colleges that give votes based on the proportional population of each county?

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  • uis@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Let’s explore limits. Given 50 states, two of which have population of 165,999,976 people each, and rest 48 states have population of 1, such country with Electoral College will be dictatorship of 26 people.

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  • 8bitguy@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    The population of Los Angeles is about 4M. NYC is 19M. 23M combined. US is 340M. Those two cities account for 6.8% of the US population. One person, one vote seems like the fairest approach to a democracy.

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  • random65837@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    100% correct. The system isnt perfect, but the way it is for a reason. Anybody that wants it popular is just voting for a system that’s easier to overthrow.

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    • PizzaMan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      How is it any easier to overthrow a popular vote?

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• sj_zero ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  If two or three states end up picking the president, you're going to have a problem where some geographical regions have disproportionate choice over who runs the country.

  A lot of the systems in the USA are set up to help prevent a national divorce caused by disproportionate power accumulating in a few states. The more you eliminate those systems the faster you expedite a national divorce.

  • PizzaMan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    If two or three states end up picking the president, you’re going to have a problem where some geographical regions have disproportionate choice over who runs the country.

    Moving away from the electoral college to something like STAR/approval voting would move us away from geographically weighted votes, which means that no such thing would happen. All voters would have equal representation.

    Instead we currently have a system where a disproportionate amount of power is given to a select few states with fewer people. Tyranny of the minority is not acceptable. All votes should be equal.

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    • sj_zero ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      So would you abolish the senate as well, with its 2 seats per state to ensure that each state is represented equally?

      If you're going to have a few regions basically having total dominion over who controls the country, why would the other state want to remain in such a union? The reason for the way things are set up is that different regions in the US had to be convinced to join the union in the first place. The farmers were concerned that the cities would have all the power. Start stripping away stuff intended to prevent a couple geographical areas from totally dominating the discussion and you will end up getting a couple geographical areas from totally dominating the discussion. That might work for a bit, but you could very well see it eventually causes a revolt and the end of the union since there's no point being involved with a thing like that.

      The President is not the representative of the 10 largest cities in America, they're a representative of all of America. With the current system, a presidential candidate needs to convince people from all around the country that they're the person to be president. With a pure equal voting system, presidential candidates would never spend any time at all in most states, and wouldn't have anything in their campaign to help most states.

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• itsonlygeorge@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  30 percent of voters are idiots and blue how they are told. Leaving it to a party vote is also not a great idea.

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  • PizzaMan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    So therefore we should stick with a system that treats votes unequally? Fuck that. All votes should be equal.

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