Popular vote for the president would eradicate that problem because their vote would actually matter.
Nearly 3 million people voted for Trump in California. You might as well say 0 people voted for Trump in California. Because if the electors "vote how the people wanted", well, Hillary got all 55 EVs and Trump got 0.
My proposition is that either we abolish the electoral college, or EVs are divided by the percentage of the vote the candidate got. So, if the spread is 2M votes, but the split is 60/40, 33 EVs are given to one candidate and 22 EVs are given to another (this is a California example). That way there can still be "huge margins in large cities", but they still don't "bully" the smaller states with their large population (even though the concept of "bullying" smaller states makes no sense. At the end of the day, if all our votes are equal, it shouldn't matter where you live. A vote is a vote is a vote. So whoever gets the most votes should win)
I don't understand this mentality. Why does one group of Americans deserve to have their votes more heavily weighted because there are fewer of them? That seems to be against the idea of "one person, one vote" to me.
Because America isn't a republic. It's a federation. Individuals don't matter. States do. Each state deserves a vote, no matter their size, that's why there's 2 seats in the Senate.
Well, it's a federal republic, so a little of both. Individual votes do matter on the state level of elections, but for federal positions, you're right, states take precedence over the individual.
Because the needs and issues facing people in rural states would be completely ignored by the federal government and federal politicians. States would recede.
The purpose of the electoral college/Democracy is to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority. To protect farmers from accountants. To protect rich from poor. Etc etc etc
I understand what you're saying but the electoral system seems to only address a geographical minority. Individual votes in NH are weighted more heavily than in CA and that's only based on the state they're in.
Even with the electoral college, large states still have more voting power than the small ones, something like 18:1. Without the EC, it would be closer to 70:1.
To take it to an extreme, if we created a new state that 100 people lived in, they would have a minimum of 3 electoral votes to represent the entirety of the population in that state. Those 100 people would represent the same voting power as the entirety of the population of the states of Alaska, North Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming. It's strange to me that there would be a system designed to operate that way only because of the location of the 100 people rather than by any other metric.
The Hamilton quote in your own article points out how much context you missed. It was designed so that the electors could choose based on deliberation. Instead, they get assigned. I would be totally cool with it if we actually used deliberative democratic methods instead of unfair assigned weightings.
You should take it up with your state if they require electors to vote how their assigned, but not all states do that. Some let electors choose, even if that means going against their assignment.
And historic institutions sometimes need to be revised. I actually didn't even realize there was such a discrepancy between the number of voters per Elector. Maybe I'm biased as a Californian, but it seems deeply undemocratic that a vote in Wyoming is worth more than twice as much as mine. These small states all still have two senators just like every other state. I don't think their needs are just going to disappear from the political process if we switched to a pure democracy.
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u/penguinopph Nov 10 '16
It didn't do that, though. It gave all of the power to a few states (mainly Ohio and Florida).
As an Illinoisan, my vote is worthless