They aren't disenfranchised. Everyone knows which way California will go so they don't spend a lot of time campaigning there. Candidates have a limited amount of time and money. So they focus on the swing states. My state also votes pretty consistently and therefore doesn't get much campaigning. I don't feel like I am disenfranchised for it.
And for everyone who is crying about the popular vote, there is a very good reason we don't do that. It was recognized from the start that if you do a strict popular vote. the more populous and wealthy areas would always call the shots and would dictate politics to the rest of the nation. At the time that meant Virginia. But it doesn't really matter who, the principle still holds. This was a compromise between populous areas and rural areas in order to get the union formed.
If you switch to a pure popular vote then the nation would be run by a handful of mega cities like NYC, LA etc. That's not democracy. The system we have prevents that while still allowing for populous areas to matter. Getting rid of the electoral college would remove one of the main compromises our federal system is built on and in my opinion would be fair grounds for any state to secede. It would be comparable to throwing away parts of the Bill of Rights.
> And for everyone who is crying about the popular vote, there is a very good reason we don't do that. It was recognized from the start that if you do a strict popular vote. the more populous and wealthy areas would always call the shots and would dictate politics to the rest of the nation. At the time that meant Virginia. But it doesn't really matter who, the principle still holds. This was a compromise between populous areas and rural areas in order to get the union formed.
The original intention was not this bloc-voting crap. The idea was that a state would select some trusted, wise, and ideally educated, locals to go get a look at the candidates and vote on their behalf, since expecting everyone in a whole country the size of the US to get any meaningful sense of the candidates, or to understand many of the relevant issues in order to make an informed choice, was obviously crazy in a time before broadcast (and still is, actually; broadcast barely even helped with the core problem of most folks—justifiably!—knowing almost nothing about the things a head of state deals with).
This broke down instantly, as electors began pre-declaring for candidates. But we kept the system, which, while a half-decent (if hopelessly poorly-implemented) idea originally, is now simply very bad—we get all the noisy, absurd national campaigning but most of us don't get a meaningful say in the election, anyway.
I’ve heard this take before and it makes no sense to me. Areas don’t dictate anything. It’s people. Why should it matter where the people live? As it stands, people who live in smaller states have more say in national politics than people who live in bigger states.
> As it stands, people who live in smaller states have more say in national politics than people who live in bigger states.
Not for presidential elections, nobody cares about Delaware or Wyoming's 3 electors. Small-population states matter for the Senate where they're way over-represented.
Not that they're not over-represented for the EC mind, but e.g. for their 0.2% of the national population Wyoming has 0.55% of the Electoral College, versus 2% of the Senate. By comparison California's 11.75% of the national population gives them 10% of the EC and... 2% of the Senate.
States which have a say (or are heard really) during presidential elections are states with large enough populations (and thus EC) that it's worth spending time and dumping money there for campaigns, yet purple enough that there's a chance to swing them.
As things stand, where every state votes as a block, the ones where the whole population lands within the 50/50 range is heavily contested. If North Dakota were 50/50 the Bismark media market would be flooded by advertising. Every electoral college vote matters.
The actual number of potentially contested states is quite low; states not in contention aren't contested.
There are many "within the constitution" ways of adjusting this -- states chose electoral college reps as chosen by nation wide popular vote, as chosen by state election ratio, etc. But as things stand, no individual state would do this by itself because an inconsistent implementation would (IE if california or texas stop sending all or nothing electoral college reps) tip the balance to one or the other party for forever.
There's some indications that the republicans won the house in this current election cycle because new york didn't aggressively gerrymander, allowing several republicans to be elected when the absolute math would have made it trivial to exclude them.
Politics is hard. It's better than mass murder, though, which is the typical alternative.
> As things stand, where every state votes as a block
Not every state. Two states (Maine and Nevada) have district voting, so they allocate one elector per congressional district (based on that district’s vote), plus two statewide. Tough they only account for 9 electors combined. And it’s still far from proportional representation.
>> Politics is hard. It's better than mass murder, though, which is the typical alternative.
Weird thing that politics does is convince you that it’s not in control of the mass murder. I promise you we have hundreds of thousands of state sanctioned or willfully negligent deaths annually in <country name of your choice>.
Modern politics isn’t about stopping the deaths, it’s just better at hiding how the sausage is made.
The easiest way to fix this without an amendment would be to greatly increase the number of representatives and use the Maine/Nebraska method to split the electors. It's not perfect, but it would be close enough, depending on how large you make the House of Representative.
It’s not the easiest way to fix this because it makes states which adopt this lose out in the meantime:
- let say you’re a “solid” state (whether red or blue), odds are that’s on both presidential and state (governor, possibly to likely assembly), if you adopt district voting you parcel out EVs to “the other party” without that favour coming back the other way
- if you’re a purple state, then you lose out on campaign presence, money, and publicity, because instead of shifting, say, 10+ EVs getting that extra % popular votes shifts 2 EVs if they’re not in a purple district, 3 if they are
That’s why the NPVIC was designed with a threshold: when the NPVIC covers 270EVs it comes into force and everybody gets the same thing at the same time.
>>I’ve heard this take before and it makes no sense to me.
I’m assuming that’s because you’re not trying to vote in candidates who consistently support a small group of loudly aggrieved people to inflict their will on the vast majority of the country.
The electoral college wasn't created to restrict the power of large states like Virginia.
The electoral college was created because it was expected that state governments would elect the president, not citizens. In the presence of direct election of the president, it's an anachronism at best. It was never about "tyranny of the majority", and in a two-party system, trying to prevent the tyranny of the majority is just a tyranny of the minority.
If you want, weight the votes so votes in small states count more, or votes in rural areas count more. It'll still be a much more fair and equitable system than the electoral college, which effectively means that anyone outside a swing state has no representation.
Of course, doing it that way would make it much more obvious that there's no credible reason we should give 1,000 suburbanites Wyoming more voting power than 1,000 farmers in rural California, or 1,000 voters in Columbus more power than 1,000 voters in Brooklyn.
Even though that gets brought up as a reason very often it is not true. Firstly the US (like many other democracies) has a two house system. The senate is designed to counter balance the power of high population states. Even if the US went to a popular vote system now it would not be governed by california and NY, because the senate gives disproportionate power to smaller states.
If you read historians opinions there are several reasons, the "big States get all the power" is typically not cited [1], however one important reason which does get cited is slavery. The southern states wanted a way to count slaves as population without actually letting them vote. The three fifth rule was the compromise [2 - 4]
Yeah, I guess it's as black and white as you state. There's no in-between like keeping the per state allotments while still having that allotment be chosen by the people instead of adding another layer in between that is "voting for the people", which I provide in quotes because who actually believes that is happening? "voting on behalf of their supporters", at best.
And for everyone who is crying about the popular vote, there is a very good reason we don't do that. It was recognized from the start that if you do a strict popular vote. the more populous and wealthy areas would always call the shots and would dictate politics to the rest of the nation. At the time that meant Virginia. But it doesn't really matter who, the principle still holds. This was a compromise between populous areas and rural areas in order to get the union formed.
If you switch to a pure popular vote then the nation would be run by a handful of mega cities like NYC, LA etc. That's not democracy. The system we have prevents that while still allowing for populous areas to matter. Getting rid of the electoral college would remove one of the main compromises our federal system is built on and in my opinion would be fair grounds for any state to secede. It would be comparable to throwing away parts of the Bill of Rights.