That's not an argument against the Electoral College per se, but rather an argument against letting states allocate all of their Electoral College votes to the winner of the popular vote. This particular problem could be solved by forcing all states to apportion their Electoral College votes based on the distribution of the popular vote.
I've never found this to be a convincing argument in favor of the electoral college as implemented. Why favor a system which constantly cedes power to the same small arbitrary electorate (swing states), year after year?
States should allocate electors in proportion to their own popular votes. The +2 electors for each state is already a good mechanism for combatting pure majority rule. At this point, swing state influence is arguably worse for this country than majority rule.
What frustrates me about this constant argument is that there's a way to retain the electoral college, which serves to at least somewhat fairly designate votes by state populations, and still make every vote count: Make states assign electors proportionally. A couple states already do it, and if all fifty did, we'd have a much fairer system that is still somewhat insulated from differences in how states manage voting.
That's not what the electoral college does. It's a post-hoc justification your high school teacher probably came up with on the fly, and you clearly haven't thought about it critically since.
The only thing the electoral college does is give the voting power of local minorities to local majorities.
3 million people in the state vote for A
4 million people in the state vote for B
B gets 7 million people's worth of electoral votes, A gets nothing. Repeat 47 times.
There is no explanation for this that makes sense. It wasn't designed this way, it happened by accident. The framers tried to stop it in the 1790s and 1800s, but there was no political will: everybody wanted to exploit the antidemocratic loophole in the constitution instead of fixing it.
You're not wrong, which is part of the issue with the electoral college. If it's a 60/40 state, each candidate should simply receive that share of the popular vote.
I do not understand your comment. I am arguing that the electoral college is less representative in a presidential election than popular vote. Which seems obvious to me, assuming you want everyone to have equal voting power for the president.
The electoral college is designed to protect the country from manifestly unqualified presidents.
Furthermore, the electoral college is all that stands between us and Florida 2000 on a national scale. Recounting one state was painful enough. Recounting all 50? Nightmare.
The electoral college needs to go. It's broken and this just cements it in my mind. Why have a popular vote if the majority winner doesn't determine the outcome? Why have the electoral college if they can't vote their conscience?
I know the reasons the electoral college was chosen. I still don't think it's necessarily a good idea, especially given the modern role of the President.
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.
The problem with the electoral college is not one with the constitution. The house of representatives could easily reapportion seats and expand it's size to be more in line with the populations of the states, and these readjust the electoral votes to be closer to the popular vote. But they don't. Why? Perhaps they give up more as individuals than they gain in doing so?
The electoral college was not originally winners take all.
The problem is that going proportional only works out for the states if everyone is doing it, otherwise a massive winner takes all state is that much more important to swing.
There's pros and cons to the electoral college. At the moment the states can award electors however they want, including deciding on their own to commit them to the winner of the popular vote, as some have done. The states legislatures can also choose electors - there's nothing in the 12th amendment saying it's a people's vote.
I think the bigger point that should be talked about is why everyone has invested so much power in the presidency, and argues that their candidate should have won by a 1% majority and is now entitled to implement their national agenda. That is not the way this country was meant to work. You eventually end up with a dictator.
My best guess at the reason why we do this: tribalism and mass media. Human nature. Gotta have a chief, one person to look to for answers.
I believe it would be a violation of current electoral law for electors to fail to cast votes as apportioned by the results of their state's general election.
In my view, being detached from the outcome of the general election in a state isn't the problem with the electoral college currently (though maybe it was in the past).
Rather, the problem is that the all-or-nothing apportionment of electoral college votes within most states often creates outcomes that wildly diverge from the national popular vote. But I think the idea of splitting up the general election vote tallying by state is a good one, because I think running one giant national vote would be more of a contentious logistical nightmare than it already is.
But if it were up to me, all states would apportion their electoral votes proportionally, and each state would get a lot more votes. That is, say California is allotted 10,000 "electors" and 57.25% of their votes go to one candiate, 39.67% goes to another, and 3.08% to a third, then the electoral college votes would be 5,725, 3,967, and 308, respectively. This would reach outcomes extremely close to a national popular vote, while still using the electoral college in a way that is no less ceremonial than it is today.
The problem with allocating the state's electoral college votes proportionally is that there's no advantage in doing so on a state-by-state level. For each individual state, the result is having a much smaller influence on the election overall. There's a first-mover problem, where it would result in a better end state, but any state that makes this allocation is shooting themselves in the foot.
Instead, there's a better solution in the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact[0]. All states in the compact give the entirety of their votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote on the national level, but only once the NPVIC has sufficient electoral votes to be the deciding factor. This way, the electoral college still exists, doesn't require a constitutional amendment to change, but effectively becomes a rubber stamp. Because it only takes effect once the NPVIC controls the majority of electoral college votes, it avoids the first-mover effect.
you could make a strong argument that the 'winner-takes-all' electoral votes in states that have winner-takes-all systems is essentially already doing what the proposal to effectively eliminate the electoral college is doing -- it's saying that individual votes dont count, only the collective whole.
There are many strong criticisms of the electoral college. It being "a separate body chosen by the 2 dominant political parties for electing the president" is not one of them, because everyone chosen by the parties is almost guaranteed to vote as they are supposed to. The outcome is known and isn't pulled out of thin air, and has a direct relation to how people voted.
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