>The Presidency should not be a popularity contest.
Correct. Well, I mean, popular among the states, but not the people individually. I'm stunned how this is a difficult concept for people. I'd bet the people arguing for popular vote would change their mind in a hot second if LA and NYC went red.
The whole union's representative model is bent over backwards to keep consensus with the south eastern US for reasons that have little relevance this century, but are impossible to change.
The electoral college is from when there were 800,000 free white males in all the original states (US 1790 census), and the union still felt like it needed Georgia and South Carolina to agree to be a part of this contract for strategic reasons. I wonder how many of them were literate land owners!
Is that relevant today? Is ANY of that relevant today? Many other countries looked at the electoral college over the last 250 years and saw how it was a strategic compromise masqueraded as a feature. They decided not to do it and stick with popularity contests.
DO other countries not use it because they are not a collection of geographically / culturally / and relatively-recently separate states that have united so there is little reason to adopt a system that fairly treats unique states in relation to a larger unified federal body?
The people vote in thier states, the states vote for the president. Without it, all 48 other states get railroaded by the 2 with the highest population. We have a representative democracy because that's not fair.
You may even think you want NYC and LA to pick the president every year, but you don't.
For reference [0] I think you're going to have a bad time if you tell the people outside of NYC and LA that their voice, concerns, representation is totally irrelevant. We don't have a perfect system, but we have one that's been working for 240-some years.
> We don't have a perfect system, but we have one that's been working for 240-some years.
What does that mean?
Just because we haven't had a military coup then our system is good enough and the should not be questioned?
I'm really curious what you and other people mean by that
You know people laugh at ours right? People laugh at our religion of checks and balances, since they don't accomplish that in the most optimal way. I'm not promoting any alternative, only pointing out that accepting its flaws is missing in the collective conscious in the US. Practically all attempts at democracy over the last 200 years contain patches seen as improvements over what the US created and mostly stuck with.
> For reference [0] I think you're going to have a bad time
Youre going to have to be more specific.
> if you tell the people outside of NYC and LA that their voice, concerns, representation is totally irrelevant.
Nobody is saying anyones representation is irrelevant.
But how is it fair that the vote of someone living in Wyoming weighs 3.5x that of someone in New York or California?
"Thats just the way it is" is not a counter-argument.
Electoral college votes are not weighted by population, 20% of the votes are divided evenly between states and the remainder is weighted by population.
There is nothing intrinsic to representative democracy that requires this particular arrangement and practically no other developed country uses a system like the electoral college.
Plenty of fair elections occur with popular votes in developed nations; Brexit is a whole separate can of idiocy and just obscures the debate here.
> Without it, all 48 other states get railroaded by the 2 with the highest population.
You're viewing things from the point of view of the states instead of the people. Either
- The states get railroaded because each person gets an equal vote, OR
- The people get railroaded because each state gets an equal vote.
> DO other countries not use it because they are not a collection of geographically / culturally / and relatively-recently separate states that have united so there is little reason to adopt a system that fairly treats unique states in relation to a larger unified federal body?
There are plenty of countries with proportionally representative/popular-vote (or at the very least, mixed-member PR) models that are culturally and geographically diverse. Germany is the best example that comes to mind.
> The people vote in thier states, the states vote for the president. Without it, all 48 other states get railroaded by the 2 with the highest population. We have a representative democracy because that's not fair.
The alternative was shown in 2016. Trump lost the popular vote by millions, but won in three smaller states by ultra-thin margins. So instead of California, Texas, Florida, and NY dominating Presidential elections, we have Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Michigan dominating them. Considering that small states are already dangerously overrepresented in the Senate, it seems reasonable to have the one truly national official elected by true popular vote.
> We have a representative democracy because that's not fair.
This is wrong on two fronts. First, we have a representative democracy because southern states essentially held the Constitutional Convention hostage. Second, the truly "representative" part of government is already sufficiently exhibited in Congress. If you want empty space to have power, you already have that in the Senate (and the House, in which small states are also over-represented).
Correct. Well, I mean, popular among the states, but not the people individually. I'm stunned how this is a difficult concept for people. I'd bet the people arguing for popular vote would change their mind in a hot second if LA and NYC went red.