Beer Baron wrote: I think Electoral College does a huge disservice to people in large states that skew heavily in one direction or the other, e.g. CA and TX. If your state is certain to go to one party, there is less incentive for *anyone* in that state to vote.
Exactly. In certain states it's a certainty which way things will go so why bother showing up?
GameboyRMH wrote: Understood, and here is where the inherently political power-rebalancing comes in: Someone has to choose how much more rural votes should be worth than urban votes or vice-versa when assigning a number of electoral votes to a state. Some group is going to get hosed to some degree by this system - the myopic needs of the farmer or rancher also don't serve the urbanite very well at all. If the system is particularly unbalanced some group will get hosed particularly badly. I for one am not sure the potential for hosing is worth it - many other countries with a mix of rural and urban populations seem to do OK without such a system.
The less populous states have the advantage in electoral college (executive branch) which at most will be envoked every 4 years. But the more populous states have the advantage in the House of Representatives (Legislative branch) where the amount of representatives is proportional to population and they are elected every 2 years. This means states with large populations can have a larger effect on policy and more frequently than those in less populous states. This aligns nicely with the other checks and balances the founders instituted.
This election was fun. Michigan was so close that, no matter which way it went in the end, my vote felt important. Yay!
Arguing about the Electoral College vs Popular Vote is like arguing about PAX times vs raw times.
"It's not fair he beat me, I was faster than him. It really shouldn't matter that I'm driving a 700 hp Corvette, and he's driving a stock Camry. Everyone knows I was faster".
Well, those are the rules. Some folks would rather make up rules than play by them.
It is a system that was designed to introduce fairness and balance in an inherently unbalanced system (just like the PAX rules). It is sometimes flawed (just like the PAX rules). It doesn't have anything to do with acreage of land, it has to do with differing needs. If urban people made the decisions for the entire country, we would be trying to figure out how to have mass transit systems, high rise fire management systems, and Starbucks coffee shops on every rural-bump-in-the-dirt-road in the entire country.
If you really want equality of acreage, I would suggest that the urban areas receive vastly larger quantities of government services per acre than the rural dwellers will ever get. Probably in the 100X or more neighborhood.
Don't forget, urban dwellers need the support system provided by rural areas too. Just because your work may be possible with nothing more than a chair and a laptop computer, doesn't mean your footprint doesn't also include massive quantities of farmland- assuming, of course, that you eat food.
STM317 wrote: In reply to nderwater: "We are marching against violence and hatred! In order to make our point, we will violently vandalize things that don't belong to us and write/say hateful things about others!" I should add that my intent is not to flounder, I just don't understand this methodology and find some funny hypocrisy in those photos.
YAY TOLERANCE!
failboat wrote: Thanks for the discussion guys. But I am torn on where I stand about the Electoral College. I do think its a problem when states decide to award ALL their electoral votes to whoever leads the popular vote. We cant split up the electoral votes proportionally? Or does that further cause an issue when you take into account densely populated areas vs rural?
That is probably the most viable and practical step to take at this point. It's up to the states themselves how they award their electoral college votes, so it's not something that would take a (national) constitutional amendment to implement. It would to a good extent eliminate or heavily change the 'swing state' map and mean that candidates would have to spend more time appealing to voters EVERYWHERE instead of just 'swing states'.
The same would be true (in terms of being doable at a state level I believe, less certain here) of Ranked-Choice/Instant-Runoff Voting, which Maine just voted to implement as law for pretty much everything except voting for President. There's some speculation that this would have changed the results of this election if this were in place- voters could vote their conscience and vote for third-party candidates without the concern of being 'spoilers' because if no candidate received a majority the candidates on the bottom end would be eliminated and their voters' 2nd-choice votes added in until one candidate had a majority.
And yes, no matter whether you live in a state where your vote doesn't count because it's heavily for your own party of choice or heavily against (and I've lived and voted in both situations since I've been old enough to vote), it's occasionally difficult to muster the enthusiasm to go and vote when you know that, ultimately, it's not going to matter.
KyAllroad wrote:Beer Baron wrote: I think Electoral College does a huge disservice to people in large states that skew heavily in one direction or the other, e.g. CA and TX. If your state is certain to go to one party, there is less incentive for *anyone* in that state to vote.Exactly. In certain states it's a certainty which way things will go so why bother showing up?
Yeah, state elections, state questions, etc.
All completely unimportant.
I too dislike the electoral college voting. If I lived in Texas but wanted a democrat as POTUS, why would I even bother voting? Same with living in California if I wanted a republican. If you are voting opposite of what the majority in your state is voting for, Your. Vote. Does. Not. Count.
GameboyRMH wrote:T.J. wrote: It perhaps has failed the will of people who live in isolated pockets of dense population (cities), but followed the will of a huge majority of the country in terms of area. It is what it is. Focusing on the irrelevant popular vote is a bit silly since that's not how the whole thing works.Still it's a bit messed up that votes per sq. ft. of land seems to override votes per person...maybe a remnant of the 1700s law that voters had to own land?
I'm quoting this because it's short, not to single it out, as an example for what I'm about to ask.
Why are all these post referencing land area?
Congressional apportionment is based roughly on a states share of the total population, not area.
So each state gets 2 senators, and then a number of representatives based on population, with a minimum of 1 representative.
Alaska has the largest land area, but only 1 representative and 2 senators so they get 3 votes in the electoral college. That the same as Delaware, which has significantly less area.
I'd be curious to know how the results would turn out if all states followed the example of Maine, and got rid of the all or none approach for electoral votes.
I believe Maine give 2 votes to the winner of the popular vote, and then the balance are awarded based on the winner of each congressional district.
z31maniac wrote:KyAllroad wrote:Yeah, state elections, state questions, etc. All completely unimportant.Beer Baron wrote: I think Electoral College does a huge disservice to people in large states that skew heavily in one direction or the other, e.g. CA and TX. If your state is certain to go to one party, there is less incentive for *anyone* in that state to vote.Exactly. In certain states it's a certainty which way things will go so why bother showing up?
Depending on where you live, it certainly can seem that way. Still, I have voted every time since I turned 18 and SWMBO for the first time in her life (not quite as bad as it seems, as she's 8 years my junior) voted in this election. Regardless of whether it truly matters or not, I will always take trying and not having it matter over not trying and wondering if it would have.
In reply to jstand:
I may have started us down the land area path. It was not intended to have anything to do with how the electoral college works, just noting that the vast majority of the country in terms of land area voted one way and the cities voted the other way.
All I was thinking about is if you look at a red state/blue state map of this election there is a lot more of one color than the other, but yet in the popular vote it looks like the less represented color won. If you look at red/blue at the county level it is even more interesting and you will see that this election essentially came down to city dwellers voting one way and the rest of the country voting the other way. As an example, look at Virginia. It is blue on the national maps, but if you look at it at the precinct level, the blue areas are concentrated around DC and the larger cities of Virginia. The map is essentially red with some blue dots here and there.
Here is a map of VA and NC together:
People keep trying to frame this election based on race or education or sex or whatever, but looking at maps like this it seems clear to me that it was an election of rural vs urban.
In reply to T.J.:
Or, those wanting to be left alone and responsible for themselves, vs those who appreciate and want more government services and safety nets.
T.J. wrote: People keep trying to frame this election based on race or education or sex or whatever, but looking at maps like this it seems clear to me that it was an election of rural vs urban.
There was a surprisingly prescient article in Cracked a couple of months ago that outlined that same argument: http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about/. (it's Cracked, so there's NSFW language)
T.J. wrote: People keep trying to frame this election based on race or education or sex or whatever, but looking at maps like this it seems clear to me that it was an election of rural vs urban.
This is a fundamental thing here. THose in the city can't understand why people live in rural areas and people in rural areas can't understand why people live in cities. IT's like fire and water. Then you've got the coasts, which seem to emit the idea that they are more educated and informed than those "rural hicks". Sadly, some of hte smartest, most informed people I've known in my life have been rural hicks and some of the most closed minded uninformed people have been city dwellers.
YMMV, but this is election has shown that the cities aren't the only places with a voice and an opinion. Those that live the rural life are tired of the big city lies, the professional politicians and the obvious underhanded dealings that go on in washington that are considered to be "OK".
T.J. wrote: People keep trying to frame this election based on race or education or sex or whatever, but looking at maps like this it seems clear to me that it was an election of rural vs urban.
Exactly what the 'experts' on CNN concluded while scratching their heads as to just what the berkeley happened last night.
The New York Times had some really great interactive election tools as the election results were coming in (see http://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/president) including this map, which illustrates up the nation-wide city-vs-rural results pretty succinctly:
The Electoral College may have been needed 230 years ago but sorely out of date in todays world.
That has been my opinion for over 60 years, so I'll stick with it.
I don't understand the reason for PAX either.
Honestly the one thing this election has driven home in my view is the idea that the US (along with most other "countries") is too big for its political system. It was so close to 50/50 in the popular vote that forcing either "side" to live under the other's ideology seems completely wrong. There's no legal structure at all for it to happen, but the best result that could come out of this mess is some sort of power-sharing agreement. Let Hillary govern the cities and the coasts and Trump the industrial heartlands (at least until he runs them into the ground even further and everyone boots him out of office.) Give federal jurisdiction over very narrow framework of issues that affect everyone and are decided by science & fact instead of ideology (e.g. climate change.)
I agree with roughly 0% of what Trump wants but I will fully admit some of his platform are extraordinarily complex issues with no "right" or "wrong" answers, and there's lots of room for consensus & compromise. Unfortunately he does not seem like the kind of person to ever admit he was wrong or let new information change his mind.
If your country ever gets to the point where there are three viable parties the imbalance between electoral college votes and the popular vote will be way out of whack.To an outsider it looks like the whole system was designed for two parties right from the get-go.
What are the standards by which the Electoral College measures the President-Elect anyway? Is there a Tech Inspection of sorts, like checking a birth certificate or tax return? 
(3% battery left on phone, need to make dinner & then drink myself into stupor while watching beloved Browns be blasted by Baltimore & figure someone here knows.)
In reply to Jay: Is your proposed solution temporary for this election only? What happens in future elections that may not be so close? Why stop at having Clinton lead the cities and Trump lead the other areas? Surely there are small pockets of support for either candidate within those boundaries that would be lead by individuals that they weren't happy with. Why not take it down to the county level, and just let the candidate that wins each county govern the people that wanted them. But if you go that far, you might as well go on a house by house basis since my street was split pretty much 50/50. That way, everybody gets the leader they wanted, and nobody has to feel bad ever again. We could even hand out victory trophies to the winners, which would be everybody, and who doesn't like trophies?! I'm sure it would be a utopia where things worked seamlessly.
I hope you picked up on my light-hearted sarcasm here. I'm not trying to be too fecetious, but we've been playing by the same rules for a couple hundred years now. Everyone knows them. They're designed to handle situations like this, and in this case they worked as intended. There are always winners and losers in elections. You'll never make everyone happy.
It seems to me that your concern about half of the populace being forced to live under the other half's philosophies could be easily averted in the future by simply having a legitimate third party which would eliminate the possibility of a 50/50 split
DeadSkunk wrote: If your country ever gets to the point where there are three viable parties the imbalance between electoral college votes and the popular vote will be way out of whack.To an outsider it looks like the whole system was designed for two parties right from the get-go.
I had to look it up. Assigning electoral votes would be the same as it is now. However, in the likely event that no candidate reaches the required 270 electoral votes to win, then the House of Representatives gets to vote for the candidate of their choice. So the party in control of the House would basically promote "their" candidate, regardless of that candidate's performance in the popular vote or electoral college. Things would get interesting.
In reply to STM317:
That's correct.
Note, that it would be the INCOMING House of Representatives, not the ones who had been in power.
Additionally, the Senate would vote for the VP.
So, you could theoretically have Donald Trump voted President by a bunch of Freshman Congressmen, with Tim Kaine voted as his VP (depending on the political makeup of the House and Senate).
Yup. That's our system. You can't make this stuff up.
I don't understand why we can't get a None Of The Above option on the ballot. Get a None vote majority and they have to scrap all the current candidates and start over.
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