Jophiel wrote:
gbaji wrote:
I think someone else (in the other thread I think?) mentioned the idea that liberals who are right now shouting about how the EC is broken should stop and examine whether they'd be saying that if the results were reversed. If Trump had won the majority of the popular vote and Clinton had won the EC vote, would they be arguing that the EC was broken? I'd wager none of them would.
No, but plenty of Republicans would instead.
I'm sure many would. But I would disagree with them. I'm not talking about random folks "out there", but responding to posters on this forum who are, right now, arguing that point.
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Witness now where you have Republicans already arguing that the Senate needs to abolish the filibuster. Saying "These guys only care at this time" doesn't really reflect the value of their arguments even if they're being opportunistic for presenting them now.
Sure. But I disagree with them. You're free to search my posts from the period 2001 through 2006 and find all the times I argued that the filibuster should be abolished (hint: you wont find any). Same deal. Again, I'm mainly responding to posters in this forum, not addressing what is going to statistically happen at a given rate in the population as a whole no matter what we might do or say. I'm trying to get the people I'm directly speaking to to realize that their own positions seem to shift based on which "side" it benefits.
For the record, I happen to think that the filibuster requirement should be
increased to 2/3rds of the Senate. I believe that if you make a filibuster impossible to overcome with just one party's members, it will force legislators to write bills that they can at least get a decent chunk of the other party's members to agree to. Which would decrease the amount of blatantly partisan legislation.
And yes, I'm arguing for that, right now, when my own party has a pretty narrow majority in the Senate. So yes, I'm just that much more enlightened than the rest of you
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Events like this are when people actually give a shit about the EC so now is the time to talk about it.
Ok. That's a completely fair point. Again though, if you actually want to accomplish something more than just whining and winding up young folks who don't actually know any better so we can, I guess, gin up our media advertising value by covering riots, it might be a good idea to make this an actual agenda item and pursue it. Other than the occasional fringe professor or think tank somewhere mentioning it, this topic tends to die out pretty quickly after it's raised. Maybe this time will be different, but I'm not holding my breath.
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There's valid reasons for thinking that the Electoral College is a poor system that remain valid whether or not any select individual is even in their criticism regardless of who wins. "My vote should count as a single vote and the person with the most votes should win" is a simple and compelling argument. It is, after all, how most of us were initially taught that the system works and, in fact, how it works in almost every election excepting the presidency. You don't, after all, have a system that weights a vote for senator in Los Angeles different from a vote in rural California although the same arguments for preserving the EC apply ("But then senatorial candidates only really need to win the big urban areas and the rural voter is forgotten!").
Sure. But that Senator only represents the state that sent him to congress, and he only has one vote in that congress, just like a senator from NH does. This is actually a pretty bad example, because it supports the same kind of system as the EC, since the ratio of senate representation in a large versus small state is seriously different.
You'd have a better argument using house representatives, but again each representative is based solely on the voters in his district, and not some accumulation of the entire US population. To make an equivalent argument, you'd have to say that each and every voter in the US gets to vote on each and every member of congress in the US. Which is not how we do things.
The EC is weighted in the exact same way we weight representation in congress. So yeah, it is how we do things in other federal elections. The best argument you could make is voting for governors, which is by pure popular vote in the state. So there's that, at least. But again, the state is itself a single legal entity. The US is a collection of states. We have always elected presidents based on the will of the states, not the will of the population of the US as a whole. We can debate if that's a good or bad thing, but simply saying "that's not how we do other elections" isn't really a great argument IMO. Yes, we elect presidents of the US differently than we elect governors of states (or mayors of cities). But is that "bad", or "wrong"? And why?
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This goes back to the "Founding Fathers assumed we're too dumb to make these decisions on our own" reasoning since the election of senators used to be out of the public's hands entirely and were selected by the state legislatures. But now we vote for them directly and the republic hasn't collapsed as a result.
I think it goes back to the idea that the US government was supposed to be a collection of the States (hence, the name "United States"). So the idea was that each state needed to have a say in the government that they were granting authority over them. The concept that a majority of people in one part of the country should not hold easy sway over the entire country seems to have been very firmly entrenched in the thinking of the founding fathers from day one. And all one needs to do is look at the county by county election maps to see that the current scenario is that very thing, in spades. We've got a nation that is massively divided between high population urban areas, and lower population cities and towns. I believe that kind of thing was *exactly* why the EC was created the way it was.
Which brings me back to my original point that this is the EC working as intended.
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I personally don't care a ton either way. It would certainly be to my advantage politically if the EC were abolished but I accept the fact that everyone's known the rules for a couple hundred years now and should be acting accordingly. On the other hand, if the EC were abolished either through Constitutional change or a 'soft' change like state pacts to award their EC votes to the national popular vote winner, I wouldn't have any particular quarrel with it.
Yeah. I heard about that idea. I think it's monumentally foolish especially if just taken on a state by state basis. It's a way to effectively make your own state irrelevant to the process. I've heard a few other suggestions for solutions, and they're also fraught with as many problems as they solve (and in some cases create many more).
I guess my issue with this is that we go through it every election cycle. Someone trots out the "EC process is broken!" argument. Tons of people who don't really understand the process, why it exists, and how it affects representation, jump up and down and agree. Then the arguments die down as people get distracted by whatever shiny whirly thing comes along and nothing happens. Again, maybe this time someone actually does something. But probably not. There are actually a number of very good reasons for using the Electoral College system, and only one, mostly emotional and overly simplistic, reason for using a straight popular vote. I'll stick with the EC system.