California gets 54 electoral votes; Wyoming gets 3.
California has 38.94 million citizens; Wyoming has 0.575 million.
California gets one electoral vote for every 721,110 people. Wyoming gets one for every 191,660. This means that per capita, Wyoming gets 3.76 times as much say in who gets to be the president as California.
Don’t forget to implement proportional representation in the House, blow up the senate, and implement ranked choice voting or something similar in all elections
That is it’s own different thing yes, but the house members were supposed to be proportional to the USA population, except they capped it and it’s out of whack now.
Instead smaller states have out proportioned power.
Made up numbers, but in some states it might be 100k people per house member, and another state it’s 300k people.
Aka FPTP wasting votes in most USA states since someone thought it great idea to issue electors as state size blocks. When Constitution gives each state right to decide ways of apportioning their awarded electors.
State starts awarding 3 democrat electors and 7 Republican electors and suddenly both parties care to entice voters to try to make it 2 and 8 or 4 and 6.
Doesn’t even take removing the electoral college. Just state deciding “state wide FPTP is stupid”, we are going to start using something more proportional.
Even in swing states it would still work, work better. Since there would be fight over is it 5 and 5 or 6 and 4.
Problem is that without giving smaller states a bit more weight than their population, you risk loosing them, because they have no means to weigh in. Thats why in the EU smaller countries also have more representatives relative to their population.
For the US, if only the coasts would have political power in the federal level, the mid would have a lot of motivation to fuck things up for them.
This isn’t the electoral college causing the problem. It’s Congress capping the size of the house 100 years ago. It needs to be increased, but it won’t happen without force as it requires Congress to agree to reduce their individual power.
This isn’t direct democracy, we aren’t voting on every issue that would otherwise come across the presidents desk. We are still electing representatives to make decisions on our behalf.
We are still a federation of states (federalist) represented by elected decision making leaders (Republic).
Our current system is far more direct than intended. The masses weren’t supposed to pick senators and presidents, that isolated from populist candidates. Leaning even harder to systems vulnerable to populism is a poor choice.
And we do. It seems silly to hold their wishes in such high regard compared to our own anyway though, we know more about how our system works in practice than they did when thinking of it after all, both because things dont often go completely as planned and we have the actual experience of using the result for a significant time, and because the system has been already changed in various ways already over that time.
California gets 54 electoral votes; Wyoming gets 3.
California has 38.94 million citizens; Wyoming has 0.575 million.
California gets one electoral vote for every 721,110 people. Wyoming gets one for every 191,660. This means that per capita, Wyoming gets 3.76 times as much say in who gets to be the president as California.
Indeed. Scrap electoral college and remove the arbitrary cap on House reps.
Don’t forget to implement proportional representation in the House, blow up the senate, and implement ranked choice voting or something similar in all elections
I think thats what they meant?
If you’re thinking about proportional representation, that’s a separate thing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation
That is it’s own different thing yes, but the house members were supposed to be proportional to the USA population, except they capped it and it’s out of whack now.
Instead smaller states have out proportioned power.
Made up numbers, but in some states it might be 100k people per house member, and another state it’s 300k people.
I thought you were conflating these two. If not, then I have no idea what you were talking about when you said
I’m talking about actual proportional representation, single member house districts are way too easy to gerrymander
And that’s even before the bullshit that is swing states.
Aka FPTP wasting votes in most USA states since someone thought it great idea to issue electors as state size blocks. When Constitution gives each state right to decide ways of apportioning their awarded electors.
State starts awarding 3 democrat electors and 7 Republican electors and suddenly both parties care to entice voters to try to make it 2 and 8 or 4 and 6.
Doesn’t even take removing the electoral college. Just state deciding “state wide FPTP is stupid”, we are going to start using something more proportional.
Even in swing states it would still work, work better. Since there would be fight over is it 5 and 5 or 6 and 4.
Yeah, there is a laundry list of ways to improve the current system. It just sucks that so little progress is being made.
Problem is that without giving smaller states a bit more weight than their population, you risk loosing them, because they have no means to weigh in. Thats why in the EU smaller countries also have more representatives relative to their population.
For the US, if only the coasts would have political power in the federal level, the mid would have a lot of motivation to fuck things up for them.
This isn’t the electoral college causing the problem. It’s Congress capping the size of the house 100 years ago. It needs to be increased, but it won’t happen without force as it requires Congress to agree to reduce their individual power.
sigh
Yes, it is the EC causing the problem. You’ll never get 1:1 with it in place no matter what congress does.
There’s 0 reason the president, representative of all people, should use this shitty system for election
It’s a federalist Republic, direct democracy is the opposite of the design.
This isn’t direct democracy, we aren’t voting on every issue that would otherwise come across the presidents desk. We are still electing representatives to make decisions on our behalf.
We are still a federation of states (federalist) represented by elected decision making leaders (Republic).
Our current system is far more direct than intended. The masses weren’t supposed to pick senators and presidents, that isolated from populist candidates. Leaning even harder to systems vulnerable to populism is a poor choice.
I don’t care what it was meant to be. I really don’t. What it is is bullshit.
We don’t have to stick with the original design, the founders were in no way perfect
We should have a good reason to to swap, especially to something they purposely avoided.
And we do. It seems silly to hold their wishes in such high regard compared to our own anyway though, we know more about how our system works in practice than they did when thinking of it after all, both because things dont often go completely as planned and we have the actual experience of using the result for a significant time, and because the system has been already changed in various ways already over that time.
What is the good reason to keep it? That our slave-driving wealthy elite founders were infallible?
Tread on me harder, daddy.
A good reason like the current system not actually being representative of the will of the people?
Sure but I don’t think anyone could look at it and critically think the current system is for the benefit of the common man in any way shape or form.
It was designed to prevent Trump, instead Trump happened. That’s a flaw in our current system that needs to be fixed.