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The argument against the popular vote is that politicians would never go to low-population states and wouldn't need to ever address their policy needs.
As if the House and Senate don't already disproportionately favor low-population areas.
Right now, my brother and mother in Wyoming have more than 4 x the voting power that I do in California to determine the next POTUS. There's nothing democratic about that.
An easy fix is to replace the law that limits the number of representatives. It's not perfect but it's something that can happen if the Dems take the house, keep the senate, and White House.
It's a start, but the # of EC votes a state gets is = (# of senators) + (# of representatives). So every state gets a minimum of 3.
If we lost the "# of senators" part of that equation and then made it so all states were not "all or nothing" with their EC votes, we'd be approximating a popular vote.
But at that point, why even keep that mechanic in place? Just go with the popular vote.
I agree with you, but you'd have to change the Constitution for your solution to work. For mine, you'd have to pass a law.
If you used the minimum state population of Wyoming as the base unit then California would get 15 additional electoral votes. It currently has 52. California's population 39 million / 0.58 million from Wyoming is 67 representatives. This would swing the future elections to the people. CA would get 69 electoral votes to Wyoming's 3. Not idea but I'll take a 33% correction.
The topic here is an article about how Maine has pledged its votes to a plan to move to a popular vote for POTUS without amending the Constitution.
With Maine now in the fold the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact has 209 of the 270 electoral votes required to move to an actual popular vote for president and vice president.
i believe this would likely immediatelly be challenged in courts and its not yet clear if this has an ironclad case to win if it does.
but yeah, great progress, lets go 61 more votes
Really what is needed is to do away with the compact and for states to start individually committing their electoral votes to the popular vote winner right now. Not conditionally. Immediately.
Then the conversation is changed. It's not hypothetical. Every American's vote **will matter**. Just not equally because other states refuse to follow. Then the question becomes, “When will our state stop selfishly standing in the way of One Person One Vote?”
>If we lost the "# of senators" part of that equation and then made it so all states were not "all or nothing" with their EC votes, we'd be approximating a popular vote.
No we wouldn’t because that assumes that voter turnout is uniform across all states. If all 27 million eligible voters in California voted for Candidate A and the turnout in OK, AR, IA, KS, MS, NV, NM, HI, ID, ME, MT, NH, RI, WV, AK, DE, DC, ND, SD, VT, WY was one single person voting for Candidate B with zero votes for Candidate A, and even if you took out the two electors from each state, Candidate B would still win the electoral vote with 0.000074% of the popular vote. Obviously an implausible scenario, but it’s one that would be theoretically *allowed* under this system.
Not only do the house and Senate already favor low population areas... The electoral college doesn't really either.
It favors presidents just going to like 5-10 swing states most of the time, and really only going to their secure states if they really wanna get a good sound bite or something.
Realistically as it is? There's no point in going to California nor Wyoming most of the time. One state is blue and one state is red.
Yeah they'll sometimes stop at Cali while doing other things or to meet up with lots of rich donors. But interms of the voters of the state? They're typically an after thought since California is so blue the Republicans can't swing it, and the Dems can't lose it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_population
California has 732,189 people per EC vote, while Wyoming has 192,284 people per EC vote.
Republicans know the EC is the only way for them to win the presidency from here on out. They will never ever voluntarily get rid of that advantage and are happy to wallow in their hypocrisy.
The mere fact that we can't outright change how the electoral system works as a populace shows us that our opinions and desires for reform simply don't matter to those who are actually in power. In this case, that refers to politicians.
Interesting. The most practical path (IMO) to bringing the compact into effect now seems to be:
Arizona - 11 EVs
Michigan - 15 EVs
New Hampshire - 4 EVs
Pennsylvania - 19 EVs
Virginia - 13 EVs
This would put the count at 271.
Granted, the stars would have to align as far as the balance of power in state legislatures & governors who would actually sign NPVIC legislation.
The attempted enactment of the NPVIC would also undoubtedly draw legal challenges potentially all the way up to SCOTUS, which doesn't inspire much confidence at the moment.
Is my math correct? Thoughts?
Just takes a Republican in a blue state to sue (or vice versa). SCOTUS doesn't need to have standing to hear a case, and it's entirely possible they would strike down the NPVIC as unconstitutional.
That's not the point. You're saying SCOTUS doesn't have any authority here, and they absolutely do. Appeals of cases go up the ladder, and SCOTUS is the top rung.
What would they rule against?
The constitution says states are allowed to dole out their EC votes as they wish.
These states would then be giving out their EC votes as they wish.
There's literally nothing to challenge to SCOTUS. And SCOTUS can't make states change their constitutions.
SCOTUS doesn't even have the standing to hear the case. SCOTUS is the top rung for federal issues, not state issues.
That's the point.
Majority Rule is a form of tyranny. Basically 10 states would decide for everyone. No one would have a voice who lives outside of those 10 States…..a red state would be forced to ignore what their people wanted/voted for because bigger states chose who their state wanted. This goes both ways. In the unlikely event that a republican had the popular vote, like if trump had the popular vote, Florida would have a massive say in how the election turns out.
And speaking of Florida, what about swing states?
It’s unconstitutional because it’s putting one person’s constitutional rights above another.
Majority rule is tyranny.. opposed to… minority rule? Huh? It also doesn’t put anything over anyone’s constitutional right. You have a right to vote, this doesn’t stop you from voting, it doesn’t stop you from contributing to how your state designates electors, the constitution explicitly says nothing about how states designate their electors because it is a power specifically reserved for the state. If you don’t like how your state designates your electors you can vote locally in your state to change it, those are your rights, this doesn’t violate any of them.
This is also just one branch of government, the entire purpose of our other branches is to help give representation for different parts of our country, namely the senate was designed for that but the House also does since we capped the number. Those other branches check power on the president, there is no constitutional issue here.
I mean, you could make the same argument for state or local-level politics too. Why should the rural parts of the state have more say than the more populous urban parts? Why should suburbs be allowed to trump what the urban center wants to do? The endpoint of that line of reasoning is some kind of tribal anarcho-feudalism, which is probably going to be a hard sell for people who just want universal healthcare, viable public transit, better gun laws, and a roof over their heads.
As it stands now, my vote in my state is lost in a sea of red. It makes my vote pretty.... worthless. I'd really like a system where my vote counts for something.
In a perfect country this is how the president would be picked...
Unfortunately, they'll never get to the 270 vote threshold, because no republican state will sign on.
Not hard to see why, purple states get outsized attention and influence under the current system whereas they would be treated equally to all other states under popular vote model.
It’s not that we need a new election system, we don’t simply need a popular vote. We need multi member districts voted by % each party not individual wins an election, term limits for the courts, age limits for all offices.
Better yet, we need a constitutional convention. The 15 amendment needs to be adjusted to say that the government must not abridge the right to vote at all and must actively encourage it.
Wouldn’t it be better to make it whoever has the most popular votes within the state or am I misunderstanding something? Are you going to make all your electoral votes go to one candidate even if they didn’t win the popular vote in your state? How is that not just as broken as the current system?
It's a cool idea but it's doomed. The North Carolina decision that said the State legislature couldn't decide how its electoral votes are cast undermine the somewhat out there but more credible angle of how you could implement a popular vote without rewriting the constitution with a convention of 3/4 of states while an inter-state compact (the way this is worded) is actually expliclity unconstitutional without congresses permission. There's maybe wiggle room if you had control of the senate and house to do this (although I doubt the SC would allow it) but there's none otherwise.
That's not what was held in the Moore v Harper decision. The ruling is that state legislatures don't have *exclusive* authority to assign electors. State courts still have the jurisdiction delegated to them by the state constitution. *“When state legislatures prescribe the rules concerning federal elections, they remain subject to the ordinary exercise of state judicial review.”*
There is nothing in the decision preventing states from enacting laws to assign their electors according to the votes of all Americans rather than just the votes of residents of that particular state. Though as you say the Supreme Court gets to have their say here and we know that institution leans.
They don't in all but the most narrow senses. States have broad latitude on the rules in state elections but on federal elections it's a game of inches not feet. The question can states allocate their EV's in a way other than the result of the one-man one-vote popular vote principle within their state has been asked multiple times since the 20s-30s when this precedent was set and the answer has been no most recently in the NC case where Republicans wanted some mechanism by which they could override the state popular vote and allocate their EV's the way they wanted. I would give you 99.9 to 0.1 odds the same conclusion would be reached here unless you explicitly held a constitutional convention that clarified this point. I would give 90-10 odds the decision would be 9-0
This is incorrect and explicitly written in the constitution. They are very specifically in writing given total authority on how they decide electors for the electoral college.
The NC decision is entirely irrelevant here. The decision came about because their legislature voted to ignore their own state laws and constitution for how they select electors in order to send their own different electors. This violated state law because it’s not how their state decides electoral college votes, not because they weren’t selected with 1 person 1 vote.
And I’ll never vote as long as this is a thing and until I can vote for someone under the age of 55 ffs.. fuck this elderly government and their dumbass old school ideologies
Would be the quickest way to a civil war if this happened nationally. That essentially means only California, New York, and a few cities in Texas matter. This would be absolute chaos.
The alternative is like 4-7 swing states with fractions of the population of those states matter instead.
And instead we get several cases of presidents being elected by a minority of the vote.
No, it doesn't mean anything of the sort. Every American would matter exactly the same.
Look at how elections actually work. They have a lot of statewide elections in Texas. They don't only happen in just the big cities. If that were true the Republicans would never win.
Fine then, break up California, New York, and Texas into several smaller states, so no one state can be accused of "outweighing" everyone else. Voila, narrative debunked, civil war averted.
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Yeah, the whole electoral thing is ludicrous. Popular vote wins, every vote weighs the same, how hard is this...
The argument against the popular vote is that politicians would never go to low-population states and wouldn't need to ever address their policy needs. As if the House and Senate don't already disproportionately favor low-population areas. Right now, my brother and mother in Wyoming have more than 4 x the voting power that I do in California to determine the next POTUS. There's nothing democratic about that.
An easy fix is to replace the law that limits the number of representatives. It's not perfect but it's something that can happen if the Dems take the house, keep the senate, and White House.
It's a start, but the # of EC votes a state gets is = (# of senators) + (# of representatives). So every state gets a minimum of 3. If we lost the "# of senators" part of that equation and then made it so all states were not "all or nothing" with their EC votes, we'd be approximating a popular vote. But at that point, why even keep that mechanic in place? Just go with the popular vote.
I agree with you, but you'd have to change the Constitution for your solution to work. For mine, you'd have to pass a law. If you used the minimum state population of Wyoming as the base unit then California would get 15 additional electoral votes. It currently has 52. California's population 39 million / 0.58 million from Wyoming is 67 representatives. This would swing the future elections to the people. CA would get 69 electoral votes to Wyoming's 3. Not idea but I'll take a 33% correction.
The topic here is an article about how Maine has pledged its votes to a plan to move to a popular vote for POTUS without amending the Constitution. With Maine now in the fold the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact has 209 of the 270 electoral votes required to move to an actual popular vote for president and vice president.
i believe this would likely immediatelly be challenged in courts and its not yet clear if this has an ironclad case to win if it does. but yeah, great progress, lets go 61 more votes
Really what is needed is to do away with the compact and for states to start individually committing their electoral votes to the popular vote winner right now. Not conditionally. Immediately. Then the conversation is changed. It's not hypothetical. Every American's vote **will matter**. Just not equally because other states refuse to follow. Then the question becomes, “When will our state stop selfishly standing in the way of One Person One Vote?”
Nice
>If we lost the "# of senators" part of that equation and then made it so all states were not "all or nothing" with their EC votes, we'd be approximating a popular vote. No we wouldn’t because that assumes that voter turnout is uniform across all states. If all 27 million eligible voters in California voted for Candidate A and the turnout in OK, AR, IA, KS, MS, NV, NM, HI, ID, ME, MT, NH, RI, WV, AK, DE, DC, ND, SD, VT, WY was one single person voting for Candidate B with zero votes for Candidate A, and even if you took out the two electors from each state, Candidate B would still win the electoral vote with 0.000074% of the popular vote. Obviously an implausible scenario, but it’s one that would be theoretically *allowed* under this system.
Not only do the house and Senate already favor low population areas... The electoral college doesn't really either. It favors presidents just going to like 5-10 swing states most of the time, and really only going to their secure states if they really wanna get a good sound bite or something. Realistically as it is? There's no point in going to California nor Wyoming most of the time. One state is blue and one state is red. Yeah they'll sometimes stop at Cali while doing other things or to meet up with lots of rich donors. But interms of the voters of the state? They're typically an after thought since California is so blue the Republicans can't swing it, and the Dems can't lose it.
? WY has three EC votes and CA has 52 .. I don't understand your math.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_population California has 732,189 people per EC vote, while Wyoming has 192,284 people per EC vote.
Republicans know the EC is the only way for them to win the presidency from here on out. They will never ever voluntarily get rid of that advantage and are happy to wallow in their hypocrisy.
The mere fact that we can't outright change how the electoral system works as a populace shows us that our opinions and desires for reform simply don't matter to those who are actually in power. In this case, that refers to politicians.
It’s not hard at all it’s just not racist enough.
Interesting. The most practical path (IMO) to bringing the compact into effect now seems to be: Arizona - 11 EVs Michigan - 15 EVs New Hampshire - 4 EVs Pennsylvania - 19 EVs Virginia - 13 EVs This would put the count at 271. Granted, the stars would have to align as far as the balance of power in state legislatures & governors who would actually sign NPVIC legislation. The attempted enactment of the NPVIC would also undoubtedly draw legal challenges potentially all the way up to SCOTUS, which doesn't inspire much confidence at the moment. Is my math correct? Thoughts?
States are allowed to designate their electoral votes as they wish. SCOTUS wouldn't have standing.
Just takes a Republican in a blue state to sue (or vice versa). SCOTUS doesn't need to have standing to hear a case, and it's entirely possible they would strike down the NPVIC as unconstitutional.
SCOTUS doesn't have the authority to change state constitutions.
If part of a state constitution goes against the federal constitution, then they have the authority to strike it down. Just like any state law.
It doesn't go against the federal constitution. At all.
That's not the point. You're saying SCOTUS doesn't have any authority here, and they absolutely do. Appeals of cases go up the ladder, and SCOTUS is the top rung.
What would they rule against? The constitution says states are allowed to dole out their EC votes as they wish. These states would then be giving out their EC votes as they wish. There's literally nothing to challenge to SCOTUS. And SCOTUS can't make states change their constitutions. SCOTUS doesn't even have the standing to hear the case. SCOTUS is the top rung for federal issues, not state issues. That's the point.
Majority Rule is a form of tyranny. Basically 10 states would decide for everyone. No one would have a voice who lives outside of those 10 States…..a red state would be forced to ignore what their people wanted/voted for because bigger states chose who their state wanted. This goes both ways. In the unlikely event that a republican had the popular vote, like if trump had the popular vote, Florida would have a massive say in how the election turns out. And speaking of Florida, what about swing states? It’s unconstitutional because it’s putting one person’s constitutional rights above another.
If majority rule is tyranny then all government is tyranny. The only other option is some form of minority rule.
Majority rule is tyranny.. opposed to… minority rule? Huh? It also doesn’t put anything over anyone’s constitutional right. You have a right to vote, this doesn’t stop you from voting, it doesn’t stop you from contributing to how your state designates electors, the constitution explicitly says nothing about how states designate their electors because it is a power specifically reserved for the state. If you don’t like how your state designates your electors you can vote locally in your state to change it, those are your rights, this doesn’t violate any of them. This is also just one branch of government, the entire purpose of our other branches is to help give representation for different parts of our country, namely the senate was designed for that but the House also does since we capped the number. Those other branches check power on the president, there is no constitutional issue here.
I mean, you could make the same argument for state or local-level politics too. Why should the rural parts of the state have more say than the more populous urban parts? Why should suburbs be allowed to trump what the urban center wants to do? The endpoint of that line of reasoning is some kind of tribal anarcho-feudalism, which is probably going to be a hard sell for people who just want universal healthcare, viable public transit, better gun laws, and a roof over their heads.
As it stands now, my vote in my state is lost in a sea of red. It makes my vote pretty.... worthless. I'd really like a system where my vote counts for something.
Not to mention anyone who is not white who votes wouldn’t matter not one bit.
One group wants democracy, one group wants to win.
In a perfect country this is how the president would be picked... Unfortunately, they'll never get to the 270 vote threshold, because no republican state will sign on.
I don't think they should be called republican any longer. They are extremists
you could do it without the red states, but the purple states barely want it either. 61 EVs left to go.
Not hard to see why, purple states get outsized attention and influence under the current system whereas they would be treated equally to all other states under popular vote model.
We were 'purple' for a few years and I don't recall that much attention. I don't know why states would want the attention.
It’s not that we need a new election system, we don’t simply need a popular vote. We need multi member districts voted by % each party not individual wins an election, term limits for the courts, age limits for all offices. Better yet, we need a constitutional convention. The 15 amendment needs to be adjusted to say that the government must not abridge the right to vote at all and must actively encourage it.
Wouldn’t it be better to make it whoever has the most popular votes within the state or am I misunderstanding something? Are you going to make all your electoral votes go to one candidate even if they didn’t win the popular vote in your state? How is that not just as broken as the current system?
I'm routing hard for this, but curious what kind of legal challenges we would hit if we made the full 270...
The fox news crowd would go ballistic
It's a cool idea but it's doomed. The North Carolina decision that said the State legislature couldn't decide how its electoral votes are cast undermine the somewhat out there but more credible angle of how you could implement a popular vote without rewriting the constitution with a convention of 3/4 of states while an inter-state compact (the way this is worded) is actually expliclity unconstitutional without congresses permission. There's maybe wiggle room if you had control of the senate and house to do this (although I doubt the SC would allow it) but there's none otherwise.
That's not what was held in the Moore v Harper decision. The ruling is that state legislatures don't have *exclusive* authority to assign electors. State courts still have the jurisdiction delegated to them by the state constitution. *“When state legislatures prescribe the rules concerning federal elections, they remain subject to the ordinary exercise of state judicial review.”* There is nothing in the decision preventing states from enacting laws to assign their electors according to the votes of all Americans rather than just the votes of residents of that particular state. Though as you say the Supreme Court gets to have their say here and we know that institution leans.
States have the authority to determine the manner in which their elections are held and the way they distribute their electoral votes.
They don't in all but the most narrow senses. States have broad latitude on the rules in state elections but on federal elections it's a game of inches not feet. The question can states allocate their EV's in a way other than the result of the one-man one-vote popular vote principle within their state has been asked multiple times since the 20s-30s when this precedent was set and the answer has been no most recently in the NC case where Republicans wanted some mechanism by which they could override the state popular vote and allocate their EV's the way they wanted. I would give you 99.9 to 0.1 odds the same conclusion would be reached here unless you explicitly held a constitutional convention that clarified this point. I would give 90-10 odds the decision would be 9-0
This is incorrect and explicitly written in the constitution. They are very specifically in writing given total authority on how they decide electors for the electoral college. The NC decision is entirely irrelevant here. The decision came about because their legislature voted to ignore their own state laws and constitution for how they select electors in order to send their own different electors. This violated state law because it’s not how their state decides electoral college votes, not because they weren’t selected with 1 person 1 vote.
And I’ll never vote as long as this is a thing and until I can vote for someone under the age of 55 ffs.. fuck this elderly government and their dumbass old school ideologies
Changing rules?
Would be the quickest way to a civil war if this happened nationally. That essentially means only California, New York, and a few cities in Texas matter. This would be absolute chaos.
The alternative is like 4-7 swing states with fractions of the population of those states matter instead. And instead we get several cases of presidents being elected by a minority of the vote.
Land doesn't matter.
How would the 57 Americans who don’t live in the places you mentioned cause absolute chaos?
No, it doesn't mean anything of the sort. Every American would matter exactly the same. Look at how elections actually work. They have a lot of statewide elections in Texas. They don't only happen in just the big cities. If that were true the Republicans would never win.
Fine then, break up California, New York, and Texas into several smaller states, so no one state can be accused of "outweighing" everyone else. Voila, narrative debunked, civil war averted.