65% of U.S. adults say the way the president is elected should be changed so that the winner of the popular vote nationwide wins the presidency.
BREAKING: group of people whose only chance of getting elected is relying on the Electoral College not thrilled about the idea of abandoning the Electoral College
It’s a great idea until it affects them lol
If the president was chosen by popular vote, I think you could make a reasonable case that the last Republican president would have been George H.W. Bush in 1988. George W. Bush did win the popular vote against John Kerry in 2004, but he lost it to Al Gore in 2000 so it’s debatable whether or not he would have beaten an incumbent Gore in 2004 I think.
And now you see why the Republicans are so against it. They can’t win in a straight vote.
The electoral college was created at a time when faster-than-horse communication didn’t exist. It made sense then, but has not grown with the times.
National Popular Vote Interstate Compact
Introduced in 2006, as of August 2023 it has been adopted by sixteen states and the District of Columbia. These jurisdictions have 205 electoral votes, which is 38% of the Electoral College and 76% of the 270 votes needed to give the compact legal force.
Napavointerco
Two things I’d love to see. Eliminating the electoral college and then getting rid of superdelegates. Two fundamentally anti-democratic concepts.
Well superdelegates aren’t exactly something the government can legislate away because they’re just an internal thing of the DNC.
Abolish parties.
Abolish parties.
Ranked-choice voting.
Under the 2018 rules, in the Democratic National Convention superdelegates can’t participate in the first vote and can participate only in a contested convention. Seems reasonable to me.
Wikipedia also reminded me about this little bit of Bernie hypocrisy that I’d forgotten about: “Sanders initially said that the candidate with the majority of pledged delegates should be the nominee; in May 2016, after falling behind in the elected delegate count, he shifted, pushed for a contested convention and arguing that, ‘The responsibility that superdelegates have is to decide what is best for this country and what is best for the Democratic Party.’” Talk about unprincipled political opportunist.
I can disagree with something Bernie said, but still be a huge supporter of his for his many other things I fully agree with. I maintain that superdelegates being in place to deal with a contested convention is still a bad thing and undemocratic. The real unhelpful part was when the DNC chair stated that it can also quell unintended grassroots efforts. I thought grassroots efforts were an example of a good thing about democracy, not a bad one.
Two things I’d love to see.
Don’t forget “ranked-choice voting”.
We could start by reconsidering the Reapportionment Act of 1929…
Instead of tilting at the windmill that is removing the EC how about we do something much easier and simpler and simply expand the House of Representatives? Not only would this add votes to the EC and make the Presidential Elections more representative it would also, you know, make the HoR more Representative! For extra fun it would also diminish the returns of gerrymandering since there would be so many more districts.
All we need is a change to the Re-Apportionment Act of 1929. There is no good reason that the size of the HoR is fixed at 435. None.
For extra fun it would also diminish the returns of gerrymandering since there would be so many more districts.
you should lead with this
That’s a long way around to get to fair representation. It amounts to a distraction from the real issue.
We can achieve that now through fairness in redistricting.
We can achieve that now through fairness in redistricting.
No you can’t.
Your way doesn’t return the ratio of EC votes between the HoR and the Senate to what it should be. It keeps it stuck in 1929 and every year that goes by makes it worse.
Your way doesn’t scale the number of total EC votes as our population grows.
Your way ALSO doesn’t return the ratio of Citizens to Representatives to anything resembling sanity. Ratios of nearly 800,000 to 1, and growing, are irrational and break Democracy.
You could redistrict the ever loving hell out of the other 49 States but Wyoming would keep it’s 3 EC votes and its outsized vote for President. It would keep it’s outsized influence in the HoR and it would keep it’s ranking as #1 in the Citizen to Representative Ratio.
So much of what everyone hates about our Federal Government today is DIRECTLY tied to a vastly undersized HoR. The body is simply too small to adequately represent a population of over 300,000,000 people.
In 1929, each representative represented about 283k Americans. Now each representative represent about 762k Americans. That’s almost a 300% increase. This means each American’s voice is only about 1/3rd as powerful as it was in 1929. To have as much political power as they did in 1929, we’d need about 1200 Representatives.
And yet, having more representatives fundamentally reduces the power of each as well. Your vote is fundamentally worth less as the population increases. Something you’re just gonna have to come to terms with.
I’m ok with my vote meaning more or less as long as it’s the same vote everyone else gets…that’s not the case with the current system.
They told me in high school that the electoral college was still necessary because counting the popular vote was too hard…
No. It’s because states that have huge populations would choose the president with basically zero say from most others. Technically a non representative government.
Except using the popular vote means that States wouldn’t decide who was president like they do now, the people would.
Under the current system if I vote Red in Chicago I just completely wasted my time. Cook County is so blue that I don’t have a voice. Get rid of the Electoral College, however, and now my vote worth just as much as everyone elses.
People seem to think that if we moved away from the College that the population of a blue state will 100% vote blue or a red state will only have red votes. It’s just not true. The northern half of California or the southern half Illinois votes way different than their counterparts.
The Electoral College is an outdated system designed for a time when the US had relatively low Literacy and the public couldn’t be reliably counted on to be informed. There is no excuse for it nowadays.
You solve the ‘problem’ of ‘tyranny of the majority’ by having a strong constitution and good rights and protections for minorities, not by switching to the indisputably worse option of ‘tyranny of the minority’. Because that causes the exact same problem, but for even more people instead.
The version of the tyranny of the majority that he’s warning against is already solved in the American system. The ward against it is the Senate. Every state has exactly 2 votes in the Senate and no legislation can be passed and enacted into law without passing a vote in the Senate.
So instead, states with populations smaller than some cities get to completely override the will of the majority of the country.
Americans, lobby your state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
Direct voting should be the end-goal of a democracy.
Why?
Unfortunately the elected representatives don’t care what the majority of citizens want.
Hell, a good chunk of the citizens vote for people that don’t support their lives or values. It’s fucked top to bottom.
Republicans would never win a nationwide election again. They’d actually have to come up with policies people want. Not gonna happen anytime soon.
By “the electoral college” most people seem to mean that each state has influence disproportionate to its population, because every state gets two electors regardless of size. Ignoring that that is independent of the electoral college, disproportionate power isn’t where most of problem arises. The problem is that most states do not allocate their electors proportionally to how their citizens voted. Almost all states give all electors to the majority winner in the state. It’s not required to do it that way, and Maine and Nebraska allocate at least some of their electors based on the proportion of the vote.
If states allocated their electors solely based on the proportion of votes in the state, that would achieve what a national popular vote would achieve and more. For example, when Trump won despite losing the poplar vote, but if states had instead allocated their electors proportionally to voters within the state, Trump would have lost.
Why do this instead of a national popular vote? First-past-the-post voting systems result in two party systems with a lot of conflict. Ranked choice systems elect representatives that are more agreeable to everyone. A national popular vote entrenches a bad system, making it harder to ever get a rank choice system.
More importantly from a pragmatic standpoint, it’s much harder to get a national popular vote implemented. To work, almost all of the states would need to get on board, but there’s no individual-level incentive for citizens of a state to agree to it. Why would the majority of citizens of Montana agree to send their electors to the national popular vote winner when it’s likely not the person they voted for? How are you going to convince them to join? The majority of people there won’t want that, so they won’t pass the law.
If states allocate based on proportion, individuals won’t be concerned that their votes will ever support a candidate they don’t like. It also doesn’t matter whether other states hop on board. Maine and Nebraska are proof of this. They changed their allocation schemes without regard for any other state. At the individual level, the choice is easy; no one wants their vote to go toward a candidate they don’t like, and the current system AND the national popular vote system both do that. If you think about your own views, are you in a state that the majority of the time the majority of people vote for a candidate you don’t like? Wouldn’t you rather have your state allocate proportionally? Are you in a place where the majority of the time your state goes the way you do? Are you happy that your neighbors’ opinions are suppressed? It’s pretty easy to get on board at an individual level, so that makes it easy to pass within a state.
People should give up on national popular vote and focus on getting their state to switch to proportional allocation. If you really want progress, target some key states: Florida, Ohio, Texas, Arizona, Georgia, California, New York, Illinois.
I feel like while the electoral college is an issue, it’s the gerrymandering that is ultimately the biggest issue.
And in fact probably also contributes to the electoral college issue.
The senate is pretty bad too.
In theory we could expand the number of house seats so that more populous states get more reps and everyone has a more equal number of voters per congressperson. I think that would not only help make the house more fair but would also make the electoral college more fair (since the # of electors increases with the number of house members). Not as good as the popular vote, but it’s an improvement that doesn’t require a conditional amendment.
Gerrymandering only directly impacts the House, while the EC biases the presidential vote, and state sizes bias the senate. All three elected branches are badly selected and all three are biased towards the Republicans. Hard to say the House is more important than the presidency though.
They will never allow that because it’ll kill the entire republican party lol
You’ll have to pry it from their cold, dead hands.
Won’t be good for Democrats either. System is rigged for two parties and two parties only.
This would not really change the two party system. All it would mean is that you genuinely need a majority of votes and not the majority of a weird convoluted combo of states.
It would destroy the party system. Suddenly there’s a progressive democrat party and the freedumb caucus becomes it’s own thing.
I’m game for that.
