An amendment to the Constitution of the USA to abolish the electoral college

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-joint-resolution/14/text

by grawprog • 6 years ago

48 98 6 years ago

What are the pros and cons to moving to a purely populous voting system? Have other countries made this move and how did it play out? I bet someone here is an expert on this topic.

buffaloo• 6 years ago

Aristotle and others gave some thought to the polity vs. democracy. The electoral college is one of the checks on the possibility of the tyranny of the masses, polity perverted to democratic demagoguery. The crude version is: The red states feed the blue states, so better keep them happy - electoral college is one of the checks that performs that function.

perardi5• 6 years ago

The red states feed the blue states, so better keep them happy - electoral college is one of the checks that performs that function.

You’d think the giant bribes—oops, I mean, farm subsidies would help with that.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/12/us/politics/trump-farmers...

nradov• 6 years ago

That depends which blue states you mean. California and some others are net agricultural exporters.

geofft4• 6 years ago

Wait, do the red states actually feed the blue states?

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/state-export-data/ann... says the top exporters are California (blue), Iowa (purple), Illinois (blue), Minnesota (blue), Nebraska (red), and Texas (red). And even so, the margins are not huge - at most about 2/3 and 1/3, and usually closer - so the idea of "red states" or "blue states" doesn't quite make sense, I think.

EDIT: I ran the data - looking at the 2020 results (and rounding off Maine to D and Nebraska to R), "blue" states have $64B agricultural exports and "red" states have $73B agricultural exports. So the answer is that while red states export a bit more, it can hardly be described as one feeding the other.

alwillis2• 6 years ago

Going to a popular vote system essentially means the Republican Party as currently constructed would have a very difficult time winning the presidency.

The democratic nominee has won the popular vote in 7 out of the 8 previous presidential elections, including 2016 when Clinton won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College.

Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000 but lost the Electoral College to George Bush.

exclusiv2• 6 years ago

If your goal is a United States, then purely populous isn't ideal.

Electoral college essentially requires cross-regional appeal in order to win.

We also have to remember that there are some really key states to the US that don't have population. Ex: Alaska and Hawaii.

It's not good to lose states (or regions) from the union based purely on votes cast from more populated regions.

But it does need to be damn close to # of votes. The electoral college is not perfect but it's pretty masterful.

berdario• 6 years ago

How does normalizing Alaska and Hawaii's representation to their population cause them to be "lost from the union"?

Puerto Rico has 0 representation, and yet they're still part of the united states (ok, plenty of puerto rican might want a different arrangement... but my point is that you'll lose Puerto Rico before losing Alaska)

RicoElectrico• 6 years ago

I am not from the US, but probably not gonna happen due to state politics? As in the whole point of EC is that mostly urbanized states won't overwhelm the sparsely populated ones?

zepto3• 6 years ago

“ As in the whole point of EC is that mostly urbanized states won't overwhelm the sparsely populated ones?”

Pretty much.

Also the idea that the election would have been the same only less close if the EC was abolished is a fiction.

It would just change where the battleground states are, largely to the places with the biggest urban populations.

wan232• 6 years ago

People always say this, but it doesn't make sense. The reason there is such a thing as a battleground state is because some voters matter and others do not, thanks to the EC. Look at this map from the 2016 election. New York is almost all red, but Trump didn't even bother courting voters there because their votes matter not at all. If there were a national popular vote, then every vote everywhere would matter. No candidate could focus on a few places if they want to win, because the whole country would be in play.

alwillis2• 6 years ago

You might want to understand how we got here. States never should’ve been allowed to count 3/5 of their slaves who couldn’t vote of course, for electoral purposes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-fifths_Compromise

latortuga• 6 years ago

Thank you for saying something notably absent from the rest of this thread. The EC was invented because of racism, period.

darth_avocado• 6 years ago

The whole point of EC is that mostly urbanized states won't overwhelm the sparsely populated ones

This should pretty much stay as is. This could easily backfire. Case in point, India, where 2 states with highest populations are also states with the most poverty, illiteracy, and crime. But unfortunately these states decide the overall politics for the country and therefore work against any and every form of progress and instead move towards more socialist and populist policy making.

mattnewton4• 6 years ago

The United States still has a senate that disproportionally awards power to rural and low population states by design, and house districts that do so in practice. It doesn’t need to also affect the presidency.

And I would argue that it is already not functioning properly so I’m not as worried about hypotheticals of how it could go wrong. We just had 4 years of ineffective populism thanks to the electoral college. It continues to elect presidents without popular support and a gridlocked congress with historically low approval ratings.

thesuperbigfrog• 6 years ago

“Pure democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” – James Madison, Federalist 10, 1787

This bill is unlikely to pass in the Senate.

Why would lower-population states reduce their own representation power?

geofft4• 6 years ago

The amount of empirical data about pure democracies that James Madison had in 1787 is minuscule compared to the amount of empirical data anyone with a free half hour and a connection to Wikipedia has today.

(Madison was also a slaveowner and an advocate of expanding slavery into new territories. Now, yes, he was apparently considerate to his slaves compared to the average slaveowners, and I suppose you could make the "by the standards of his time" argument, but - the standards of his time were that you could literally own slaves and still be a considerate person and a respected authority on fair republican government.)

kemitchell• 6 years ago

This isn't a proposal for pure democracy. Depending on how you define it, that would require proportional allocation of the senate, or its abolition, as well.

Our not-so-pure democracy, based on the constitution Madison signed, has lately been quite the spectacle and proved incompatible with basic rights and security. It hasn't lasted very long, and arguably fell apart in 1860. Our president elect has been alive for a third of its lifespan, counting the long way from 1788. Which is another way of saying our president elect is pretty old, and our government pretty young.

There are founders aplenty to quote on the necessity of amendment, as well. But without further research, I'd guess trouble in the Senate, too.

dane-pgp5• 6 years ago

Why would lower-population states reduce their own representation power?

That is why the supporters of this amendment (and similar approaches like the NPVIC) should be prepared to settle for a compromise which preserves the disproportionate power of the lower-population states.

In fact, such a compromise was proposed in 1950, with the bipartisan Lodge-Gossett Amendment[0]. The idea behind it was that the electors in each state would have to vote proportionally to the popular vote within that state while not changing the number of electors granted to each state.

Because of the small number of electors in some states, rounding issues can be quite significant in some situations, and I believe the proposal required fractional electoral voters, representing a tenth of a percent of the state popular vote.

[0] https://www.fairvote.org/past_attempts_at_reform

Ericson23144• 6 years ago

In 1979 it got close without compromise.

I'm quite against compromise here. The productive parts of the country need to unlearn helplessness and get tough of we can't get a real democracy.

DC Statehood can help with the senate votes despite being a small state too.

mehrzad• 6 years ago

Funny how people always bring up this quote and not the one from Federalist 58 where Madison warns against requiring supermajorities for general legislative work which many defenders of the EC also support (i.e., the filibuster rule).

"It would be no longer the majority that would rule: the power would be transferred to the minority. Were the defensive privilege limited to particular cases, an interested minority might take advantage of it to screen themselves from equitable sacrifices to the general weal, or, in particular emergencies, to extort unreasonable indulgences."

wayneftw• 6 years ago

Probably because it doesn't stand on it's own and it's not nearly as impactful.

I'm still not even sure what it's saying without further context, even with your explanation.

asdfasgasdgasdg• 6 years ago

Is Madison even correct about this? Is the U.S. less turbulent than other countries where the power of each vote is more equal? It doesn't seem so to me from where I sit, but maybe I'm missing something?

perardi5• 6 years ago

I don’t think you’re missing anything. It’s perhaps folly to quantify “democracy”, but looking past that folly, the US doesn’t rank all that highly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index

Mind you, it’s weird to see all those nominal constitutional monarchies rank so highly. But, at least in Canada, which I am most familiar with, all that monarchy stuff is dusty window dressing. The actual house is full of sensibly apportioned voting districts.

yokaze• 6 years ago

As I read it, the discussion was not about the electoral college, but about representative democracy versus direct democracy.

It was written in a time, when there was the negative example of parts of the French revolution, where there was essentially mob rule, and people have been executed left and right, because the public could be sufficiently incited.

mkolodny• 6 years ago

In no way would this law make the US a pure democracy, where citizens can vote directly on whether or not to pass laws. The US would still be a representative democracy, a republic, where citizens vote for representatives, who then pass laws without input from citizens.

munk-a• 6 years ago

Vermont has signed on to this bill in part because it's more democratic and fair then what we have today. I think it's a little bit altruistic of them but honestly - why do folks need to be bought to do something that widens the net of justice?

barnaclejive2• 6 years ago

"Why would lower-population states reduce their own representation power?" To do the right thing, that is why. Not doing it implies that they know that have an over-representation and would only be against it to maintain that over-representation for their own selfish goals.

throw0101a• 6 years ago

Pure democracies

The US is a representative democracy, not pure/direct; Madison explicitly quoted:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_democracy#United_States

bawolff3• 6 years ago

Im not amercian, but isn't one of the factors that lead to "trump", a feeling that rural was very different than urban, and that rural felt disenfrsnchised, so they went for the demagogue who wanted to burn the world down ("drain the swamp")

Seems like effectively reducing rural voting power would just inflame tensions

mattnewton4• 6 years ago

Seems like effectively reducing rural voting power would just inflame tensions

I don’t know why that means we should be stuck with continuing to give small and predominantly rural states disproportionately higher representation.

This feels like the mindset of someone stuck in an abusive relationship.

anewaccount20212• 6 years ago

I'm pretty sure in the next ten years that will be fixed.

dkjaudyeqooe• 6 years ago

What's the argument for rural votes currently having disproportionally more power than other votes?

drak0n1c2• 6 years ago

Fears of Tyranny of the majority, with our geographic size and mutual ignorance of each others' local concerns. An extreme depiction in popular culture is the domination of rural districts in "The Hunger Games".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

grahamburger• 6 years ago

That things that happen (agriculture, manufacturing, etc) in rural parts of the country are important to everyone, but will suffer if the people living there have no voting power.

albntomat02• 6 years ago

On the one hand, the Senate has always been unequal, long giving less populous states an outsized voice relative to their population.1 But for more than a century, this hasn’t posed much of an issue: Until the 1960s, Republicans and Democrats competed for both densely and sparsely populated states at roughly the same rate
But over the last several decades, that’s changed. The parties have reorganized themselves along urban-rural lines, and there is now a clear and pronounced partisan small-state bias in the Senate thanks to mostly rural, less populated states voting increasingly Republican. In fact, it’s reached the point that Republicans can win a majority of Senate seats while only representing a minority of Americans.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-senate-has-always-f...

baumandm• 6 years ago

It's less about rural votes and more about population. Electoral votes per state are based on population not population density, but with an additional 2 each. That tips the scale in favor of states with smaller populations.

E.g. Rhode Island and Idaho both have 4 electoral votes, but Rhode Island is certainly not rural.

Idaho also has a population of 1.8 million compared to 1.0 million in Rhode Island, so technically Rhode Island voters have more voting power than their rural counterparts in Idaho.

Anyways these are just cherry picked states; my point is that the Electoral College is designed to give a disproportionate vote to smaller states, not rural states.

bawolff3• 6 years ago

Voting by land area vs voting by population is one of the oldest debates ever. There's pros and cons to either side, but the general idea is that in a representative democracy you want the different groups to have their interests represented (i.e. if you have 30% of the vote, you should have 30% of the "power"). Pure population might be more likely to lead to policy for population centeres at the expense of rural centers, since you just need 51% of the vote to do what you want, as the majority takes all the power. E.g. if 75% of population is urban and 25% rural, and assuming that they are unified voting blocs (big if), rural effectively has 0% of the power, as 25% of the vote is going to win a majority vote 0% of the time. Ideally they would win 25% of the votes (or have 25% of the "power" somehow), but failing that, having half the power seems more fair than having none of it.

I remember i heard once the idea that if the percent of the representitives was porportional to the sqrt of the population, that that tracks the amount of effective power much more closely to the population distribution than linearly assigning representitives, but i dont know how true that is.

trianglem• 6 years ago

Inflame them to do what? Rural people are overrepresented in our nation’s politics. What’s the worst they can do? Start an armed rebellion? We’re already there.

bawolff3• 6 years ago

Inflame tensions. Make people feel even more so that they are not practically represented.

If you think its bad now, imagine if they had an actual legitament grievence :P

jhayward3• 6 years ago

Why do you think that having 15% of the population controlling the most powerful house of Congress, and something like 35% of the population being able to control the executive branch will lead to less tension?

masonic2• 6 years ago

Barely 1/3 of eligible California voters voters for Clinton in 2016, yet she got 100% of the electoral votes.

So if we're throwing "fairness" and "parity" around, let's make it so across the board and avoid partisan cherry-picking.

yongjik• 6 years ago

I'm sure many rural voters will strongly feel that way, but when you look into it, this will give equal voice to rural voters of CA central valley (who have basically zero voices now), while reducing the voice of overwhelmingly liberal Philadelphia, PA and Milwaukee, WI as much as anyone else.

perardi5• 6 years ago

The Electoral College is not going away via an amendment. No small state Senator would vote for that, nor would any small state legislature.

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact? Maybe.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/12/09/how-to-get-...

wl• 6 years ago

The National Popular Vote Compact still needs the approval of Congress.

No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.

US Constitution, Art. I §10 Cl. 3

perardi5• 6 years ago

Yes, but that is a “simple”* majority vote, and not the 2/3 majority needed in the House, Senate, and the states.

*not that any majority is simple these days, but you get what I mean.

BugsJustFindMe• 6 years ago

https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/section_9.16#myth_9.16.5 says that the Supreme Court has on several occasions interpreted that clause differently. The rule so far appears to be that it only applies if the states try to oppose the power of the federal government, but that doesn't apply to voting because control of vote apportionment is given to the states.

geofft4• 6 years ago

There is quite some debate about whether - despite its name - the NPVIC counts as an "Agreement or Compact" in the sense that constitutional law has interpreted that phrase: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...

Ericson23144• 6 years ago

Eh, I think this is more clearly about diplomacy than, say, the "well regulated militia" stuff.

And still, i the compact is repealed, the states are free to apportion their electors however they like. States could also independently match the popular vote when it wouldn't make a difference. Even such a "dry run" would shake things up.

Bottom line, unless there is a different law to require the states to apportion electors a cetain way, I don't really know how to stop it.

smitty1e• 6 years ago

The electoral college was arguably mooted by the events of this cycle.

jfengel• 6 years ago

How so?

dragonwriter• 6 years ago

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact requires small state legislatures, too, and a number of small states have adopted it.

Why would they be less likely to adopt the Amendment?

onecommentman2• 6 years ago

There is always a constitutional convention

https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/constitution

But that puts the whole constitution in play. I’m guessing those who hope for electoral reform will get a ban on abortions instead.

anewaccount20212• 6 years ago

The Constitution will never again be amended, because you will never get 2/3 of States to ever agree on anything, ever.

As it stands, such an amendment would require rural citizens to effectively eliminate themselves from the electoral system. They will never consent to this and why would they? Since State legislatures are also not pure popular-votes, this assures that nothing remotely resembling this will ever happen. No rural voting district will consent to being washed out by a large metro.

xyzzyz• 6 years ago

At the same time, there is no need to amend it, when you can get 5 robed people to find penumbras emanating from it as necessary.

jimmyswimmy• 6 years ago

It's probably about time this happened, but it is unlikely to occur as an amendment. The least populous states would instantly lose even the minimal power they have, and it would disadvantage the party of the rural, until such time as they can reconfigure themselves to appeal to city dwellers. Doesn't seem likely.

In any event, the simple fact that the electoral college allows a tie is reason enough to eliminate it, to me. What happened in 2020 is nothing compared to what we can expect in the event of an electoral college tie.

throwaway2245• 6 years ago

Abolish the Presidency.

Presidential systems give too much power to a single person, which only entrenches partisanship and the worst of politics.

dane-pgp5• 6 years ago

Or just vastly reduce the president's (and federal government's) powers. If the individual states could decide their own drug policy, gun policy, marriage policy, and the point at which life begins, then the campaign for president could focus largely on trade and military policies.

krapp2• 6 years ago

This is an interesting idea. So many of the problems with American politics seem rooted in the Presidency, either its powers or the politics and system of election, etc.

So why do we need a President? Other than "Because the Constitution says," why not a Prime Minster, or no one at all?

gonational3• 6 years ago

Franklin said, “a republic, if you can keep it”.

Prior to the mid-1800s there wasn’t even a popular vote; people voted for their representatives and the representatives chose the president. This slippery slope of republic -> republic with a popular vote -> republic w/ referendums -> full democracy will be our undoing.

dane-pgp5• 6 years ago

Hamilton said:

"But a representative democracy, where the right of election is well secured and regulated & the exercise of the legislative, executive and judiciary authorities, is vested in select persons, chosen really and not nominally by the people, will in my opinion be most likely to be happy, regular and durable."

Is there any evidence that countries or US states which allow referendums have worse political environments than those which forbid them? Also, how many countries and states that allow referendums have fallen down the slippery slope from there to "full democracy" and whatever disaster you picture at the bottom of that slope?

gonational3• 6 years ago

how many countries and states that allow referendums have fallen down the slippery slope from there to "full democracy"

A joke, right?

I can’t speak for all states, but the last midterms in FL alone had 10 referendums, some of which changed the state forever in big ways, constitutional amendments, etc. (e.g., allowing felons to vote, permanent tax changes, etc.).

If you think that doesn’t represent a low enough bottom of that slippery slope, you’re out of your fucking mind.

anonisko• 6 years ago

I'd much rather see a super majority of Congress choose a prime minister at this point.

jostmey2• 6 years ago

The beauty of the current system is that the federal government gets no say in who is president by placing the election into the hands of the States. Imagine what Trump could have done if the federal government oversaw elections. The electoral college needs updated, but it might not be a good idea to replace it with a popular vote administered by the federal government

tobib• 6 years ago

See Canada for an example of an independent federal institution overseeing the elections, see https://www.elections.ca

jostmey2• 6 years ago

I believe the US requires stronger safeguards. The temptations to abuse power so great, the feeling that it is necessary to steer the world in the "right" direction by holding onto office so immense, that any centralized election system will be abused.

The decentralized election system of the US is extremely resilient to tampering from the top. I personally believe the decentralized nature of the US election system is vital to its democracy. Think of the decentralized election system as a check and balance on power rather than a fair count of each person's vote. That said, I think the US needs to do away with the electoral college middlemen and replace it with a direct vote tallied by each county that is reported by each State. The US also needs to make gerrymandering illegal

benjohnson• 6 years ago

I’d like to keep some sort of state partitioning and vastly improved voting security.

That was one poorly functioning state can’t claim that they had 100% voter turnout and skew the entire result.

joelhoffman• 6 years ago

This will be on the table the day after Texas votes for a Democratic candidate. Not before. Hopefully we can get the first-past-the-post language out of it before then.

An amendment to the Constitution of the USA to abolish the electoral college

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