As governor he got his state signed on to the national popular vote interstate compact

  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    131
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 month ago

    California gets 54 electoral votes; Wyoming gets 3.

    California has 38.94 million citizens; Wyoming has 0.575 million.

    California gets one electoral vote for every 721,110 people. Wyoming gets one for every 191,660. This means that per capita, Wyoming gets 3.76 times as much say in who gets to be the president as California.

      • Furball@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        32
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 month ago

        Don’t forget to implement proportional representation in the House, blow up the senate, and implement ranked choice voting or something similar in all elections

            • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              edit-2
              1 month ago

              That is it’s own different thing yes, but the house members were supposed to be proportional to the USA population, except they capped it and it’s out of whack now.

              Instead smaller states have out proportioned power.

              Made up numbers, but in some states it might be 100k people per house member, and another state it’s 300k people.

              • ltxrtquq@lemmy.ml
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                3
                ·
                1 month ago

                remove the arbitrary cap on House reps.

                proportional representation

                I thought you were conflating these two. If not, then I have no idea what you were talking about when you said

                I think thats what they meant?

              • Furball@sh.itjust.works
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                2
                ·
                1 month ago

                I’m talking about actual proportional representation, single member house districts are way too easy to gerrymander

    • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      8
      arrow-down
      12
      ·
      1 month ago

      This isn’t the electoral college causing the problem. It’s Congress capping the size of the house 100 years ago. It needs to be increased, but it won’t happen without force as it requires Congress to agree to reduce their individual power.

  • pachrist@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    53
    ·
    1 month ago

    As a pretty left person who lives in Tennessee, please get rid of it. Anytime I have this conversation with folks on the right, I always point out that there are more Republican voters in California than Texas. That usually gets them to concede.

    • SmoothLiquidation@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      21
      ·
      1 month ago

      As a Washingtonian I also dream of that. It is ridiculous that only people in states that are kinda purple have their opinions heard.

      • Wogi@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        1 month ago

        I’d prefer at least to maintain districts, 1 vote for 1 district, remove states and the extra two votes. Each district exactly the same number of people, give or take 1%. Give the low populated counties out in the boonies a chance to be heard.

        But failing that, straight popular vote is a better option than the current cluster fuck.

        • SmoothLiquidation@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          9
          ·
          1 month ago

          If it is equal representation, why does having districts make the rural vote heard? Whether it is one person one vote or 100,000 people one vote it won’t make a difference.

          Everyone will still have their representatives and senators to hear them. In fact I think we need to increase the number of representatives. It needs to be a number that a person can reasonably represent. Say 50 or 100 thousand people per representative. This would also help with gerrymandering as having a lot of small districts would make everyone’s voice louder.

          But for national positions like the president, we should have proportional votes, preferably with getting rid of first past the post that got us stuck with the two party system to start with.

  • cultsuperstar@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    24
    ·
    1 month ago

    Trump in 2012: The electoral college is garbage and needs to go. Trump in 2016: The electoral college is genius. What a great system. Trump in 2020: The electoral college is garbage and needs to go

    I remember his tweets each time.

  • rsuri@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    18
    ·
    1 month ago

    But without the electoral college, politicians would suddenly have to care about states with a lot of people living in them

  • Happywop@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    12
    ·
    1 month ago

    Yup, I understand it was meant to give smaller states an equal voice but he GOP weaponized it and now the minority is speaking for the majority. Tell me the system isn’t broken when ONE vote in shitty red state Wyoming is equal to TEN THOUSAN VOTES in Blue California?

  • Nuke_the_whales@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    1 month ago

    As a Canadian, can anyone ELi5 how the electoral college works? Is it like every state gets the same amount of votes regardless of population?

    • hydrospanner@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      edit-2
      1 month ago

      It’s really impossible to keep this brief, but I’ll try to keep it understandable:

      The EC is a body of “electors”, who serve as an intermediary body between the direct democracy of a popular national vote and the actual selection of a president. Their purpose is literally and intentionally to serve as a middleman, both to give a safety net to the ruling classes to make sure that whoever wins an election is someone they approve of, as well as to install a system that takes a national popular vote and basically applies an overlay to it…an overlay that leaves the process open to manipulation, stacking the odds, etc.

      I’m not just saying this as a criticism of the system (though it is), this is the explicit purpose of the existence of the system.

      Now to the nuts and bolts:

      The US has a federal government with three branches: the executive (headed up by the president and including all of the various “Departments” like the departments of State (handling all diplomatic affairs), Defense (the military), Justice Department (FBI), Interior (National Park Service), Education, Agriculture, Homeland Security, etc.

      Then there’s the Judicial Branch, which is the federal court system, spearheaded by the Supreme Court. In addition to criminal trials involving federal crimes, they also have the responsibility of deciding on whether laws or actions of other government bodies are constitutional. If not, they have the authority to strike them down.

      Last there’s the legislative branch, which is responsible for creating laws and deciding how to spend money. Within the legislative branch, there are two bodies: the Senate, and the House of Representatives. This is because when the government was being created, states were much more independent than they are now, and there was a serious disagreement over how not only the people, but also the states would be represented in federal government.

      So for the House, the number of Representatives each state sends is (roughly) proportional to that state’s population; ie. a state with more people living in it will have more representatives than a state with fewer people living in it. The specifics have changed over time, and the way this system works is another issue, but that discussion is for another time.

      However, smaller states, and (especially) states with slaves were concerned that even though they had a serious impact on the nation, they had a small voice in government. They wanted a system where their state was on equal footing with more populous states. Where just because they had less people (and by “people”, in that time, they of course meant “land owning white male people”), they wouldn’t have less power.

      Thus there were two concessions given to these states to get them to join the union:

      First, the three-fifths compromise: when determining population (to see how many representatives each state could send to the House), states were allowed to count each slave living in that state as three-fifths (0.6) of a person. Yes, these slaves, who their states regarded as property any other time, and who sure as hell weren’t allowed to vote…were nonetheless to be allowed to count toward how much voting power their owners would have.

      And second…the Senate. The Senate is the other house of Congress, where instead of determining members by population, it’s much simpler: every state gets two. Regardless of population. This puts the smallest state on equal footing with the largest in the Senate.

      And since both chambers of Congress (the Senate and the House) must pass a bill in order for it to become law, this is why it’s so hard to get anything done for Congress.

      SO!

      Now that we know about the house and Senate and why and how they are the way they are… what’s that have to do with the electoral college?

      Well…the number of electors from each state are determined by adding up the number of Representatives and Senators that the state sends to Congress. So a small population state like say, Wyoming has one representative because very few people live there…and they get two senators because they are a state and all states get two. 2 + 1 = 3. So in a presidential election, Wyoming gets 3 electoral votes. For a more populous state, like my home state of Pennsylvania, we’ve got 17 representatives. Adding our two senators to that means that Pennsylvania gets 19 electoral votes for president.

      Adding up all these electoral votes, it works out such that whichever candidate gets 270 electoral votes wins the presidency.

      So you might be thinking, “Hmm… sounds like proportional voting and democracy with extra steps… what’s the big deal?”

      Well… there’s two issues going on:

      First: It’s only proportional in allocation, but not so much in casting those votes. Of all 50 states, all but two (Maine and Nebraska) are set up such that whoever wins the state wins all of that state’s electoral votes. So take my Pennsylvania for example: we’ve got about 13 million people living here. Obviously not everyone can vote, and not everyone that can vote will vote, but if next month, let’s say all 13 million of us vote…if 12,999,999 people vote for Trump and 1 person votes for Harris, Trump wins all 19 votes. That makes sense. However, if Trump gets 6,500,001 votes and Harris gets 5,999,999 votes, that two vote difference means that Trump still gets all 19 votes. We don’t split them so that he gets 10 and she gets 9. Winner take all.

      Not only does this distort the popular vote, but it also has the effect of making a narrow victory in one area the same as a landslide in another.

      Second: With the way votes are allocated, the fewest that any state can have is three (one representative and two senators). Even if ten people lived in that state, they still get three votes in the electoral college. Meanwhile, with the way congressional laws work, states with bigger populations do get more representatives…but as a state’s population gets bigger and bigger, even though they get more electoral votes, each of those votes encompasses more and more people.

      So looking (approximately) at Wyoming and California: Wyoming has a population of 582,000 and gets 3 votes, California has a population of 39,000,000 and gets 54 votes. That means that every vote in Wyoming represents about 194,000 residents, while every vote in California represents about 723,000 residents.

      Doing the math, this means that every vote in Wyoming carries about 3.73x more power than a vote in California.

      So in summary: the biggest criticisms of the electoral college are:

      1. The lopsided way votes are allocated in the first place.

      2. The winner-take-all system awarding the same number of votes for a landslide and a narrow victory distorting the actual voting numbers.

      3. The lopsided allocation resulting in a situation where some Americans living in low population states having dramatically more power than others, based simply on where they live.

      Of course these issues lead to lots of other weirdness and wrongness…for example: with the winner take all system, candidates don’t even try to win states that are projected to safely go to one candidate or the other…they focus all attention on “battleground” states where the election is set to be close, ignoring millions of people nationwide because they happen to live in a state that’s not competitive. A national popular vote would eliminate state political boundaries and make everyone’s vote matter equally.

      Likewise, this is how you end up with a case like 2016: more people voted for Hillary Clinton than Donald Trump…but those people lived in the wrong states, so basically she won by bigger margins but the margins meant nothing because he won narrow victories in more areas…so even though more people wanted her to be president, because of the electoral college, he got enough votes in the right geographical areas to win the presidency with fewer votes.

  • Homescool@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    arrow-down
    10
    ·
    1 month ago

    Why do we keep having this discussion when IT WONT ever happen? It’s a grift at this point. A boogie man to raise funds against, like Trump.

    Abolishing the Electoral College would require the approval of some of the states that would lose power.

    The only way it happens is if we pay them off for their vote.

    • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.mlOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      14
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      1 month ago

      He got his state on the national popular vote interstate compact as govenor. He’s talked about it before and done more than most to make the popular vote a reality

          • anticolonialist@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            arrow-down
            4
            ·
            edit-2
            1 month ago

            There’s still the electoral college which needs to go, creating a half-assed workaround which could easily be dissolved is not a fix. It’s nothing other than a spit and a handshake

            • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.mlOP
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              4
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              1 month ago

              It’s more than a “handshake”. States are actually passing laws for this. Plus there’s nothing stopping you from going above 270 electoral votes

              Once it’s been in effect for a while, it would make a formal constitutional ammendment to fully remove it a lot easier to get though

  • Crismus@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    4
    arrow-down
    22
    ·
    1 month ago

    Guess you all are fine with having everything decided by a few states. I for one am not willing to end up with rle by the Mob.

    Without the E.C., no presidential candidate will go to any Midwest state, southeast or the southwest. Politics will not matter in DC for any state past the coasts.

    The system we have was designed so that instead of one group taking over we have to find common ground. Checks and Balances are important for keeping it in the middle ground. Just because it may help in one way, doesn’t mean it can be used against the Democrats in the future.

    I’m as far left as they come, but I don’t think gutting the system for short term gains will help. We should increase the House due to thensize, but I think we should go back to a senate chosen by the state and not having senate elections. It has so far turned the senate into another popularity body instead of people being able to pass laws without regard of electioneering.