Jophiel wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Yeah. That's yet another feature that favors the EC. It's far less likely to result in a tie.
A popular vote is FAR FAR less likely to end in a tie.
Sorry. I meant our current (mostly) winner takes all EC methodology as opposed to the proportional allocation method that I was responding to (and which resulted in a tie in this case).
Jophiel wrote:
gbaji wrote:
No. You described what you'd like your better voting system to do, not how it would actually do it. That's like saying "I'd like a flying car", complete with all the arguments about how a flying car would be better than one that doesn't fly, but without bothering with details like how you actually build a flying car.
What details? It's pretty self-evident. You have a couple main options:
(1) Award EC delegates like Maine & Nebraska do. One for each CD won and two on top for the popular vote winner
(2) Award EC delegates proportionally by popular vote. No extras for the popular vote and a heavy vote in one CD over another doesn't sway things
(3) Eliminate EC entirely, award presidency based entirely on popular vote.
Yup. Both 1 and 2 increase the odds of a tie (but admittedly do make every state and/or district more likely to garner attention).
Number three (I'm answering both you and TLW here), introduces several problems. It makes any close election a nightmare in terms of potential recounts. It also focuses media campaign buys in the most heavily populated areas. It also more or less tosses out the idea of a national Republic as our system of government (which I suppose is more of an extension of the previous problem, but it's not something you just change lightly because you think it'll benefit your party or something).
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(1) & (2) would be easiest to implement since the structure is already in place, it's just a question of allocation. They are less democratic than a popular vote since they still rely on the weighted EC system but more accurately reflect the will of the voters in the end than the current Winner Takes All system.
Also presents yet another problem. One of the points of the EC in the first place is to allow for the possibility (likelihood even) of the president being of a different party than that which controls congress. If you think about the state representation in the EC, it's identical to that in congress. We could just as easily have had the already elected members of congress vote for who gets to be president. But that would make our system more or less identical to those which elect a prime minister. We can debate why we decided to do things differently, but we did. Summarily tossing that out might not be a great idea.
And yes, it's not the same exact thing, but likely to produce the same results most of the time. Oh. Just in case it's not clear, I'm speaking of what things would look like if we went to either a proportional or district by district allocation of EC votes nationwide.
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(2) is more accurately reflective than (1) and is immune to the issue of CD gerrymandering since there is no partisan lumping of votes within the state.
You're basically choosing (most of the time anyway) between whether the EC votes match the Senate, or match the House (with some modification via the Senate). And we're also glossing over the fact that the states are empowered to make that decision, not the federal government. You'd have to also radically change our system to a top down process before you could even begin this. Because otherwise, you could see large states like California and Texas sit still on their current allocation methodology, while diluting the relative power of other states. There's just very little incentive for states to do this (or something like this), which is why only two have to this date. So to actually do this, you'd either have to somehow convince every state to do it voluntarily at the same time, or create some new federal law that mandated how states allocate their electoral votes (which would take a pretty massive step from states rights to federalism).
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(3) would be the most purely democratic but also require the biggest change. None of these require in depth proposals for Gbaji to pour over in order to be valid suggestions.
And also would require the most radical change to our system. Again, at this point you have to toss out the idea that we're in a Republic. I guess maybe I'm asking the wrong question here (I'm sure of it actually). It's not just "how would you do it?", since the easy answer most toss out is "use a straight popular vote". Um... duh. I'm asking people to analyze the effect of making such a change beyond just "Clinton would have won!". How does this change how politicians run for president? How does it change the relative representation of each voter in the process. Not just the good "one person one vote", but also the bad "more dollars per vote gained here versus there". Also, how may this change trickle down into other related systems (like how we do primaries?). Does a change like this act as a precedent for other changes that we may not necessarily want today. Like say, changing other aspects of our federal process to be more like a direct democracy. We could, theoretically open up federal legislation to ballot initiative processes voted on directly by the people rather than our representatives. I mean, if the issue is to make sure "one person, one vote", should that not also apply to our legislation? The same skew that exists in the EC also exists in congress (well, similar anyway). Do we use this same movement to change that down the line as well? Is that really what we want?
I just think that this is one of those issues that comes up every election cycle (and even moreso when we have an outcome like this), and people jump on the bandwagon, but most of them without really having thought through the process. The system we use wasn't just made up on the fly arbitrarily. It was designed to balance a number of factors in the selection of our president. You're free to call this moving the goalposts if you want, but I think it's important to argue, not just what change you are proposing, but why that proposed change is a good idea.
Oh. It also goes without saying that all of these solutions (except I suppose the states voluntarily changing to a proportional system) would require a constitutional amendment be passed. Which is almost certainly not going to succeed, given that the very issue you're trying to change is the influence states have as a balance against pure popular vote, and once again, since we live in a Republic and not a Democracy, popular votes aren't counted for constitutional amendments either. States vote (and congress, which is yet another of those darn Republican processes).
So. Um... Good luck with that!
Edited, Dec 6th 2016 4:51pm by gbaji