[Politics] Attaboy, Senator.

[digitaldiscipline]

So, my senator, Bill Nelson, is making noise about doing away with the Electoral fucking College.

He just got a very, very supportive email from Yours Truly.

Comments

[sloot.livejournal.com]

what's his proposed alternative to the electoral college?
Aren't the number of electoral college votes per state enshrined in some very basic documents about the Uniting of the States?

[etcet.livejournal.com]

Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 - "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector."

Now that we're not, collectively, a bunch of backwater bumpkins, this is a hell of a lot less palatable to the majority of the citizens.

"One citizen, one vote" is how Nelson's trying to get things to happen. You know, like a REAL democracy. My biggest bitch about the EC is the unequal weight each individual's vote carries - Wyoming's citizens' votes count "more" than mine does, based on Electoral College votes divided by voting population.

Also, the all-or-nothing apportionment of EC votes in 48 of the 50 states is completely un-representative of how the public has actually voted, and skews the results. It also means that "unimportant" EC states get ignored.

[timswar.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, one-citizen-one-vote completely disenfranchises states like Wyoming or Montana, with small populations that won't get much of a voice in the overall election.

I know I'd hate to be living in those states and hear that California and New York have again dominated the political season due to their populations.

Tyranny of the majority and all that fun stuff.

For my money, I like how Oklahoma does it. Giving the district electoral vote to the district winner and the state electoral votes to the state winner. Unfortunately you'd still have a power imbalance in states like Wyoming and Montana where one district would effectively get 3 votes. 2 I could see justified, but 3 would be a bit much.

I'd rather like to see how a plan like that would have played out in the last election. Just to see if it would have resulted in any appreciable difference.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, one-citizen-one-vote completely disenfranchises states like Wyoming or Montana, with small populations that won't get much of a voice in the overall election.
I don't follow you at all here - the states of residence won't fucking matter anymore - some dude in wyoming = some dude in ny = some dude in west virgina = some dude in hawaii. all we'll have are the national aggregate totals for the popular vote.

The disproportionately large representation of the small states as currently implemented can be argued to disenfranchise voters in more populous ones. i think i ginned up a spreadsheet in 2004 to show the "citizens per electoral vote" distribution, and it's really, really skewed in favor of small states.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

maybe i do follow you - you're arguing that the states themselves will be fucked over, not their citizens?

[timswar.livejournal.com]

States are their citizens. But yes, I'm arguing that both would be screwed in this arrangement.

The system is designed to skew towards lower population states. If this were a MMO someone would just say that it's "Working as intended".

I live in California. I'm going to vote for a candidate who has New York issues at heart. The likelihood is that my neighbor will also vote for a candidate that has California issues at heart. We outnumber the state of Vermont by 60-1, what are the odds that a candidate will be elected who will consider the interests of Vermont?

As a Dem and feeling like we've been in the minority for a long time (how many non-conservative-democrat Presidents have we had since Kennedy?) I'm not terribly keep on the idea of doing away with small state protection against the majority just yet.

[drcuriosity]

Doing away with the electoral college for choosing your president doesn't mean that you'll be doing away with state-based representatives in Congress, though. In order to get things done, any president will have to take more than high population areas' desires into account.

When we in New Zealand changed our electoral system from a first-past-the-post (FPP) to a mixed-member proportional representation (MMP) system, we didn't do away with voting for electorate MPs. Sure, some cities are made up of several electorates where a larger rural area may be one, but that doesn't seem to have affected our priorities in terms of legislation. Agriculture and natural resource management are important to our economy, and it'd be cutting off our noses to spite our faces if we didn't take that into account. Big cities still need to be fed from somewhere.

If your politicians are trying to game the system for maximum popularity over putting the best interests of your country at heart, then something's drastically wrong anyway. They shouldn't be elected to be popular. That's not their job.

[sloot.livejournal.com]

I think he's trying to say that urban areas have different issues than rural areas, and because there are more americans in urban areas than in rural areas, that one elector one vote will mean that the rural americans become disenfranchised.

[lil-m-moses.livejournal.com]

I dunno. I live in a giant state (Texas), and I'm completely disenfranchised if I want to vote for a Democrat for President. My vote simply doesn't count, since the majority of the state votes Republican. I think individually-worthwhile votes is also the only way to have a hope of ever moving beyond a two-party system, too. I believe that many more people would vote for third parties if they didn't know their votes would be worthless when the other 95% of the state votes for one of the two biggies.

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

Fuck democracy. Right in the ear. We're supposed to be a republican union of individual states. If you want your vote to count more, feel free to move to Wyoming. If you want to dilute your vote into the larger pool of a more heavily populated state, that's your choice.

The EC is designed to balance electoral influence at the state level. What you're proposing will utterly disenfranchise smaller states. And since the states that have the biggest populations also tend to be the biggest statist fucktards, whose own governments are doing such an excellent job of running their own affairs that they're begging for a trillion dollars from the fedgov, you're looking to help re-create the power imbalance that led to the Civil War.

On second thought, carry on.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

I contend that there are large numbers (proportionally) of fucktards in every state, whether they live on a farm or in a condo.

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

Yet somehow MA and NY are hundreds of billions of dollars in the hole, and MT is not. And what you're proposing will tend to favor MA and NY controlling politics over MT, even more so than they already do.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

Fiscal responsibility is seldom a popular platform; I'm old-fashioned enough to think that this is a lousy goddamned way to run a government (if your budget doesn't balance, you aren't permitted to run for re-election).

In the run-up to the election, there was a lot of discussion on which states received the largest amount of federal money relative to how much taxes were paid by their constituents, and it wasn't the big Democratic states that were on the take, it was the rural ones. I wish I had the link handy. This table (http://www.cagw.org/site/PageServer?pagename=reports_pigbook2008porkpercap) on per-capita "pork" spending (which, I will fully admit, is probably not a remotely objective source) gives some sense of the point I'm trying to illustrate (ie: just because states are populous and lean sharply towards democratic candidates, they're not getting a disproportionate amount of federal monies).

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

Yes, but much of that goes directly to FedGov projects that don't actually do the surrounding state much good. And for that matter, that they'd never get away with plunking elsewhere.

Just as a couple quick examples, I'd be deliriously happy to move the nuclear weapon manufacturing plants out of my state and into, say , Boston. And I bet there's a lot of Nevadans who wouldn't mind storing all that nuclear waste in NY, instead.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

Hmmm.. three-mile island might work!

[sloot.livejournal.com]

the all or nothing EC vote thinger is definately a mess.

If you were to go to a proportional EC vote system[1], you would have a similar problem that we have up here, where PEI is guaranteed 4/308 MP seats (1.3%) while they have a population of 139,818/33,212,696 (all of canada) 0.5%.

This means that their votes actually count more than someone in Ontario (106/308 [34%] & 11,410,046/33,212,696 [33%])

There is talk of getting us to a more proportional representative system rather than 'first past the post' in each electoral district, but I don't see it happening for quite a while (unless the coalition actually tosses Harper out on Jan 27th).


[1] I know that you said true proportional representation, I'm just discussing this because it's a more likely interim step

[etcet.livejournal.com]

Proportional apportionment is a good first step, yeah.

[argylerockstar.livejournal.com]

The electoral college made sense when we were a country of farm hands, spread across the plains, with no technology connecting us. We no longer need representatives to speak for everyone.

[y2kdragon.livejournal.com]

Great plan. I hope there is a next step of finding a way to allow people to vote from their home computers without having to wait hours in line at a polling place. The EC had its place, but we are now a country of electronic voting machines and instant vote tabulation. Time for changes.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

I think in-person polling is still useful. Vote-at-home stuff still leaves things too open to abuse, I think.

However, MAKE IT A GODDAMNED HOLIDAY SO THAT EVERYONE CAN VOTE. The huge early turn-out this year shows that people want to.