Why the Electoral College Will Be Banished

https://dvorak.substack.com/p/why-the-electoral-college-will-be

by chrisabraham • 6 years ago

24 86 6 years ago

dvorak.substack.com

anewaccount20212• 6 years ago

Zero chance, if only because the resulting chaos would put the assets of the wealthy at risk.

I get where this comes from, but it’s very obviously wrong. It acts like media is the only group with money and influence. Many, many, many interests depend on the voting power that the Electoral College supplies to resource-rich states out west. I’d bet my left arm that the Electoral College will not disappear in my lifetime.

cafard• 6 years ago

According to something in the papers recently, the idea gained some popularity about 1970, but it was the Southern Democrats who were down on the idea.

I am not holding my breath.

Spooky232• 6 years ago

The beef about the electoral college is similar to the beef about the Senate filibuster -- terrible when it benefits the other guy.

Modern marketing for political campaigns will adapt either way. It's pretty easy for campaigns to target demographics, and I'm sure that a GOP candidate could pull the right strings to get a plurality vote. Hispanics, for example, are the weak link in the Democratic tent, as are asians who vote democratic but live in a fairly conservative way.

war10254• 6 years ago

I'm sure that a GOP candidate could pull the right strings to get a plurality vote

There was a bunch of hubub on the Right in the fall about a Democrat win leading to Democrats tilting the tables in all sorts of ways that would lead to a "permanent Democrat majority".

I always came back to the same point as you, two-party politics will naturally self-balance at a pretty even split.

At a city / state level, you might be able to maintain one-party control through various levels of corruption / influence, but the nation itself is way too fickle to put up with that for long.

The weak link in the current majority will always tend to switch sides as soon as it appears that they might gain an advantage by doing so.

darth_avocado• 6 years ago

^this. Yes while it may be true that media will benefit from this, it almost virtually guarantees no more Republican presidents. Given that the House is also trending in that direction, the only real place where power still remains with the Republicans is the Senate. Too many mega corporations benefit from keeping the Dems out, (taxes, employee rights, minimum wage, etc.) and they will fight tooth and nail to maintain the status quo.

pmoriarty5• 6 years ago

"the only real place where power still remains with the Republicans is the Senate"

And the Supreme Court, and many lower courts, which have been packed with Republicans.

Not to mention the military and the police, and probably the intelligence agencies too.

dragonwriter3• 6 years ago

it almost virtually guarantees no more Republican presidents.

No, it doesn’t, unless the Republican Party doesn’t adapt to changing conditions as it has continuously since it’s founding. It probably guarantees the Republican Party will realign slightly around some peripheral issues to shift it's geographic focus slightly while retaining it's core economic message, and continue on without breaking stride.

maxerickson2• 6 years ago

Republicans gained 10 seats in the house and lost several in the Senate (and also lost the majority). Typically the house moves away from the President in the first election after they take office, so there is a fair chance that more seats will go Republican in 2022 also.

jacinabox• 6 years ago

NPVIC is state level-electoral meddling exactly on a par with what 45 tried in Michigan and Georgia, and aiming for the same outcome. The democrats pushing for it are not trying to correct some abstract statistical imbalance or make it easier for third party candidates to get seats: they are trying to swing elections in those states democratic, pure and simple.

gameswithgo• 6 years ago

Any change to any voting system is likely going to benefit one party more than others, and said party will always be motivated for that reason. This is a given. This should not then imply that we never change how voting works. When republicans want to do the right thing for bad reasons, and when democrats want to do the right thing for bad reasons, roll with it.

yokaze3• 6 years ago

How is it state level meddling? It is up to the states to legislate how to appoint their electors: https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S1-C2-1...

Trump was not trying to change the respective laws in the states, but to get someone to change the outcome where they were not in his favour. _After the fact_.

The NPVIC is designed that any change can only come in effect well before an election.

zhoujianfu3• 6 years ago

Nationalpopularvote.com is the (exhaustive) website for the interstate compact, which has an actual chance of enactment by 2024..

anewaccount20212• 6 years ago

No, zero chance. There is no way you will get states to agree to forever nullify their electoral influence. If you really want perpetual one-party rule, granting DC and PR statehood are also unlikely but far more realistic than abolishing the electoral college, which will literally only happen when the US itself is dissolved.

yokaze3• 6 years ago

You need only the states which hold a majority of the electoral votes. The only states with electoral influence are swing-states. Every "blue" and "red" state has practical zero "electoral" influence, meaning their topics will never be as important as the swing state ones.

r00fus2• 6 years ago

While I'd like to agree with him here, if John C Dvorak says it's true, you can bet against it nearly 100% successfully.

Look at some of these doozies... [1]

[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_C._Dvorak

war10254• 6 years ago

It's amazing how many "media personalities" are basically always wrong on the subject they "specialize" in, and yet they get invited back again and again.

I guess that's the whole Gell-Mann Amnesia thing.

r00fus2• 6 years ago

Just the face of media disinformation being more apparent for industry practitioners.

Society as a whole has a major dearth of healthy skepticism - perhaps because a consumerist economy doesn't benefit from skeptics, and more from true believers.

hdivider• 6 years ago

Sadly, you might be right. E.g. in another post he discusses the "mass hysteria" of covid...."psychogenic" illness, and this:

"The severity of the virus from country to country is a reflection of media coverage, not the other way around."

https://dvorak.substack.com/p/mass-hysteria-and-covid-19

trident50004• 6 years ago

This article says nothing about how it will be banished and is more like a wish. You need 2/3 of states to change and ratify the constitution. Its not even close to being banished.

ogre_codes• 6 years ago

This is exactly what I was thinking. Though I suspect any changes are likely to happen on the state level. More likely is individual states switch to splitting their electoral votes based on actual vote counts.

Thats a bit fraught though since unless you have some kind of parity it would instantly screw up the current balance.

ortusdux2• 6 years ago

I think they are indirectly referring to the NPVIC.

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

So banished - no, circumvented - possibly.

trident50004• 6 years ago

Why would any red state join this pact though?

AnimalMuppet3• 6 years ago

Of course, the most populous states are the most in favor of NPVIC. I would expect that most of the states that are going to approve it have already done so; I expect that there will be very little further movement.

votepaunchy• 6 years ago

2/3 of Congress (or 2/3 of the states) to propose an amendment and 3/4 of the states to ratify.

pmoriarty5• 6 years ago

Now if only they could do away with gerrymandering

raiyu2• 6 years ago

Given that republicans have lost the popular vote in every election since 2000 I don't see them getting on board with going to a straight popular vote anytime in the near future to determine the Presidential election.

war10254• 6 years ago

Given that republicans have lost the popular vote in every election since 2000

They also just don't devote resources in heavily blue states for the Presidential race.

Why work to gain votes in a race you will lose anyway? Particularly given that you can win without putting in that effort.

Campaigns are optimized for the rules as they exist. Changing the rules changes the game. Just because the proposed rules look favorable to one side doesn't mean that they would remain that way if the changes took place.

kosievdmerwe• 6 years ago

Exactly.

"But I had more pieces left! Just because I was checkmated doesn't mean I should have lost."

Strategy is informed by the victory conditions.

rascul• 6 years ago

George Bush (Republican) won the popular vote in 2004.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_presidentia...

raiyu2• 6 years ago

Ahh - touche - one time out of 6 - not looking like good odds for Republicans to be in favor of going the popular vote route.

IncRnd• 6 years ago

I think that people aren't addressing the root cause. The existence of a two-party system is intended to keep parties in power. Yes, there are other parties, such as Constitution or Libertatian, but until things change they are inconsequential.

People should elect candidates, not parties. If we do not stop electing parties, we will continue to elect gatekeepers and politicians who spend all their time creating and then pretending they can't solve wedge issues, while spending money frivolously to bribe people and pay-off the corporations who later hire them.

These politicians, who all seem to hate each other, are friends with each other, and they play citizens for fools. Why don't we all take a step back and stop playing _their_ game? The problem isn't the electoral college, it's the people who we let matriculate and the party system.

lern_too_spel• 6 years ago

It won't happen until foreign actors deliberately exploit the electoral college by taking actions that harm the GOP specifically in swing states. As long as the electoral college gives an edge to the GOP, none of the reliably red states will want to abolish it, and together with the swing states benefiting directly from the electoral college, there aren't enough votes to get rid of it.

jmclnx• 6 years ago

The issue is not with the Electoral College, but with the artificial limit on the House of Representatives. The limit of 435 Reps skews the numbers.

House of Representatives is suppose to be 1 Rep per a fixed number of people. But Congress put a hard limit of 435, that means Small States have more people per Rep than Large States.

For example, Wyoming has 1 Rep for 480900 people.

California has 1 rep per 736000 people. To be fair and agree with the original intent of the US Constitution, California should have about 82 Reps instead of 53.

Texas for that matter should really have 52 Reps instead of 36 as it as now. The way it is now it has one rep per 700279 people.

Fixing that limit should solve a lot of problems

godelski5• 6 years ago

Why is the conversation always "abolish vs keep as is?" The EC seems like a good idea that brings equity to a diverse nation but needs some updating as things have changed dramatically since its creation. There are other possible changes that might help, like removing the winner take all situation. But just basing on popular vote alone creates the same problem we're in but from the other direction. We need cities but we also need the rural areas (like our farm lands) and we need to represent both. But rural areas will never have the population size/density of cities. We shouldn't let fly over states decide the elections just the same way we shouldn't let California and New York decide them. There's got to be a better solution here that provides good equity.

mreome8• 6 years ago

While I understand your point, the counter argument to this is "Land doesn't vote, people do." Why does someone deserve to have greater representation because they live on a larger plot of land in a different part of the country? Why does someone in a big city deserve to have less representation?

yters6• 6 years ago

It seems like geographical proximity influences votes. I am not sure why cities tend to lean so heavily dem, but they do. So if it were just raw vote count the cities would control the whole country. Not sure that is preferable. Then it starts to look like a serfdom, where cities gain wealth through taxing the poor rural areas.

godelski5• 6 years ago

That's because it isn't the land that is voting. You're trying to represent a diverse set of people and industries. We shouldn't screw over farmers because laws that work in cities are disastrous in rural areas and we shouldn't screw over cities because of laws that work well in rural areas. We need the farms, mining, energy (solar and wind as well as coal and natural gas), fishing, etc that comes with rural areas. They provide us with food and many of our essential resources. Similarly we need cities and the resources they bring us: tech, finance, logistics, etc. We need both for a highly functioning state. So it isn't so much land as voting but labor and utility.

And I want to be clear, I'm talking about equitable not equal. It seems weird to me that we don't talk about it this way when we do in so many other conventionally left topics (race, gender, culture, religion, etc). So why screw over the other side just because they disagree with us politically? I'm all for proportionate representation but at some point you have to strike a balance. You need both sides of the country to be operating as efficiently as possible and while now we favor the rural states swinging in the opposite direction isn't a balance, it is still a skew. Fairness doesn't always mean equality because the nature of reality isn't equal. Pretending that doesn't exist just creates inequality.

JPKab2• 6 years ago

This discussion was had when the original 13 colonies made a decision, for the second time, to unify under a single federal umbrella government.

After the complete failure of the Articles of Confederation, a second initiative was created to desperately try to get the 13 states to subjugate themselves to a collective government. They all wanted the benefits of this shared collective, but had various gripes about joining it.

The biggest gripe:

At the time of the drafting of the Constitution, Virginia alone had over 20% of the entire population of the US. New York and Pennsylvania were also populous, compared to states like Delaware, Connecticut, South Carolina, etc.

The original design of just having a purely population-based House of Representatives (and Presidency) was immediately rejected by all of the smaller states. Only the big states were ok with that. The smaller states were unwilling to join under an umbrella government that could be fully controlled by two or three populous states, at the expense of the interests of their own citizens. They immediately rejected the Constitution. This resulted in the creation of the Senate, and it's role as being the UPPER body of Congress, with more power than the House of Rep.

Without removing the pure popular vote, the union could have never been created in the first place, because it was immediately viewed as a way for populous states to subjugate less populous states. And those states and their citizens were unwilling to take that risk.

When you understand that this system was DEMANDED by smaller states before they were willing to join the union, you quickly realize why removal of such a system would likely result in some form of gradual disintegration of the union.

The system now makes it so liberals in Mass and rednecks in Wyoming occasionally get people that match their beliefs running the Federal government, with cycles of fury from the losing side every election. Abolishing the EC would have the near-term effect of having one of those groups, the one that dominates large, sparsely populated states that control most food production, become perennial losers, in a permanent and unending fury at a government that doesn't listen to or care about them. If you want to understand what this looks like, go talk to your average voter in upstate New York, whose state government and tax policies are dictated by NYC voters who are mostly renters. Do you think upstate New York has similar needs to NYC? I can guarantee they don't, and those needs are unaddressed. Ditto for voters in southern Illinois. The animosity is palpable, and that's for neighbors a hundred miles away.

Eventually, states will secede. And in a modern world like ours, I don't think it would be dramatic and violent. Likely just modern secession referendums.

The current conversation about abolishing the EC has always been a partisan power-game, just like giving DC statehood. If the conversation around DC statehood were actually about representation, rather than 2 new Senate seats that are guaranteed to represent city-dweller interests, the Congressional Act that allocated land from Maryland to be DC would simply be reversed, with the land ceded back to Maryland, and the addition of two new Congressional representatives to Maryland. This is exactly what was done in the 1800s with the unused portion of land Virginia allocated to form DC with Maryland. (the Virginia side of the Potomac was ignored by Fed gov, so the residents demanded to be rejoined with Virginia, and they were.)

pmoriarty5• 6 years ago

If most people live in the cities, I don't see an argument for letting rural areas have more than their proportional share of representation.

ardy42• 6 years ago

If most people live in the cities, I don't see an argument for letting rural areas have more than their proportional share of representation.

It does act to prevent the rural areas from becoming totally neglected hinterlands, help them implement polices that may be necessary because of the different conditions of non-urban areas.

That said, I do think the current bargain tips the balance too much, so I'm now in favor of abolishing the Electoral College, and giving the House an advise-and-consent role (in addition to that of the Senate), at least for judges. These smaller states can keep their extra representation in the Senate.

godelski5• 6 years ago

Because their labor matters too. But the thing is that their labor, which is extremely essential to the operation of the country (and the country would fail without their labor), requires more land than hands (especially as we've drastically introduced automation into their labor). We need food and natural resources, arguably more than we need investment bankers and programmers (not that we don't need these things, but one is essential to being able to breathe). The idea is to create a system that can fairly represent those laborers too.

war10254• 6 years ago

I had the thought back in the fall that a reasonable compromise could be:

Every house district gets an electoral vote, and then each state's popular vote counts for the two votes provided by the senate seats.

mreome8• 6 years ago

I think you're describing exactly what Maine and Nebraska already do: https://www.fairvote.org/maine_nebraska

candybar• 6 years ago

I don't think the concerns you're bringing up have anything to do with Electoral College, which doesn't care about cities or rural areas and doesn't favor small states in any case. It favors a handful of medium to large states that are seen as battleground states. The swing states that received disproportionate attention in the last election are on average quite a bit more urban than the United States as a whole.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-urban-or-rural-is-y...

drewcoo• 6 years ago

Because in this country there are dichotomies. There's my chotomy and the wrong chotomy.

In times of stress people tend more to seek simple answers. I can only assume forcing false dichotomies on everything is a sign that people don't feel secure.

godelski5• 6 years ago

Interestingly I'm noting most of the replies to my comment are assuming I want to keep the EC as is. Which I'm not sure how to even respond to comments like that since my opening line states the opposite. That just I don't like the conventional alternative. But I guess this is the problem that we're talking about (and seems to becoming increasingly more common), that we're removing the nuance from problems and trying to apply overly simplified solutions. All that results is in continued problems and continued infighting. I'm not sure how to break the cycle when people on HN are forcing a position on me that I explicitly stated I did not hold.

welcometomiami• 6 years ago

This dichotomy between the two types of states along with constant usage of the terms "divisive" and "divisiveness" by the media (and now the politicians themselves) promotes the notion that we are splitting apart along political lines in ways that we've never witnessed before. This is hardly true as any history professor will attest.

Citation needed

AnimalMuppet3• 6 years ago

Well, there was that whole Civil War thing. We are less divided than that, at a minimum.

yters6• 6 years ago

The elephant in the room is voter fraud. If we switch to raw vote count then it takes just one loosely regulated precinct to flood the election with fraudulent votes to win the election, and anyone can do this. Sure, this time around one group may win the fraud vote, but next time it will be another group, and the the best fraudsters will conspire to run the country and we will cease to be a democracy and become a kleptocracy. At least with the electoral college the fraud has to be much better organized and spread more across the country.

IneffablePigeon• 6 years ago

Carrying out voter fraud is pointless unless you can do it without being detected. If you flood one precinct with enough votes to swing an entire election it becomes very obvious that something fishy went on there.

The only way to rig the election with voter fraud and get away with it is exactly the same - by spreading your fraudulent votes thinly so that no one area is too suspicious.

yters6• 6 years ago

Even so, eliminating the college makes it easier. We need defense in depth to maintain rule of the people.

zhoujianfu3• 6 years ago

It seems like it’d be a lot harder to swing a National popular vote election fraudulently, where you’d need to register millions of fraudulent votes, than an electoral college vote where at times you’d only need a few thousand? Or even just a couple high-pressure phone calls...

yters6• 6 years ago

That's a good point. There would be fewer votes required. My thinking is when spread across more distinct political regions a greater amount of collusion is required across a more diverse political body, even if the raw vote count is smaller. In my mind this seems harder to pull off, but I can see where you are coming from.

AnimalMuppet3• 6 years ago

If the president is elected by popular vote, then significant amounts of voting fraud in any one state becomes a national issue. So does significant amounts of voter suppression. Opening that can of worms to be fought on a national scale... well, be careful what you wish for.

dragonwriter3• 6 years ago

If the president is elected by popular vote, then significant amounts of voting fraud in any one state becomes a national issue. So does significant amounts of voter suppression.

If the President is elected by the Electoral College and the parties aligned to near electoral parity, then it often doesn't even take significant fraud or suppression to swing the national election, as long as you target easily-identifiable swing states.

tmaly• 6 years ago

I think a better intermediate step would be to get rid of winner take all electoral college votes. Do it by county. This would move closer to a democracy but still retain the form of a republic.

leroy_masochist• 6 years ago

Here's what I don't understand - this is is constantly framed as a matter of reforming Federal law, when the states could remedy this themselves by changing from a winner-gets-all paradigm to a Maine- or Nebraska-like system that allocates delegates proportionally.

The proximate reason why they don't do this, I would imagine, is that in the short term a party-controlled state wouldn't want a bunch of its Presidential vote delegates to go to the other party; e.g., California Democrats, who currently have the political power to change how their state awards delegates, don't want dozens of delegates going to the GOP and vice versa for Texas Republicans not wanting a bunch of Texas delegates going to the Democrats.

On the other hand, states like Ohio and Florida want to keep the influence they have as swing states -- they want presidential candidates to spend an insanely disproportionate amount of time campaigning there and making promises about future policy decisions that disproportionately affect local industries. If they awarded delegates proportionally, they'd lose the attention they enjoy every four years.

I'm not sure what the way to break the equilibrium would be, but do think that the solution to this is action on the state level rather than Federal. Am I missing anything?

Why the Electoral College Will Be Banished

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