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this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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The electoral college isn't bad per se, it's just been allowed to become bad in a way that hints at a deeper issue.
Notably that the House has not been expanded in 100 years, even as the population has expanded, and two states have been added.
We need to un-cap the house and get it to the point where it's actually representative again. Doing so would take a single act of congress.
Because the electoral college includes the sum of all Senators and Representatives in a given state, rural states with low populations presidential votes carry much more weight than urban states with large populations. You're right about the House not expanding, that's also shifting things around - but a huge reason the electoral college exists at all was to assure the southern states that the institution of slavery would be protected in order to get them to ratify the Constitution. It shifted power to shitheads on purpose.
The electoral college is bad.
It is unneeded in the modern era.
The electoral college didn't shift power to slave states. That was the 3/5ths compromise.
No, the electoral college was created because the fastest way to travel in the 1780s was via foot. There weren't even good roads between the new states. So it could take months to get from Georgia to Washington, DC.
We don't have that problem anymore, but changing things like that would require a constitutional amendment. Something that is fairly hard to do in today's political climate.
And it still wouldn't fix the problem with the House not being representative. But one act of congress to repeal the permanent apportionment act of 1929 would fix both issues.
Massively expanding the size of the House would make it representative, and it would make the electoral college better represent the populations of each state.
It sure did shift power to the slave states. The Senate gives equal power to each state, regardless of population. That's why, as states were allowed to join the union, they were done for quite some time in pairs - one slave, one free - in order to maintain a balance in the Senate.
You're mixing two different things and not quite understanding history.
The House and the Senate are very different things, and together they add up to the electoral college.
The electoral college was created for one reason and one reason alone. To allow people to actually vote in a national election when the fastest way to get from one end of the country to the other was via footpath.
The Senate was actually a check on the power of the slave states, as was the 3/5ths compromise.
Although, the northern states were also slave states at the time the constitution was signed. People often forget that fact.
The problems with slavery were painfully obvious, even then, but rich white guys wanted to own people. This lead to even more problems as the North slowly banned slavery. But that's a different section in the history book.
I'm sorry, but you have this completely backwards.
Yes, I am aware of how the electoral college works, and what the House and Senate are. I have been voting since 1988. Specifically because the electoral college votes from a particular state include those granted by having two senators, low population states' popular vote carries more weight in electing a president (and vice president). I may have worded that badly before, I hope that was clearer.
The three-fifths compromise made it so that, for purposes of counting population, to decide how many representatives in the House a state had, every five slaves were to count as three persons. This gave the southern states a huge boost of power in the House - because slaves got counted to find out how many representatives they had, even though those slaves were in every other way property, with few rights, certainly not the right to vote in the elections for the reps their number served to create seats for.
Again, the fact that each state had two senators, and that those states were kept evenly split between slave and free states (or states which wanted to expand slavery and states which wanted to curtail or outlaw slavery) demonstrates how the balance of power in the senate was kept that way in order to avoid a conflict over the issue of slavery. Since states had different populations, and since much of the concentration of free people was concentrated in the northeast, the Senate (then as now) gives disproportionate power to (I mentioned this before) lower population and more rural states. Then, those states were largely southern slave states. Today, those states are largely rural conservative states.
Yes, of course, there were slaves in northern states, too, but far fewer, and many northern states were curtailing or outlawing slavery while the south was doing everything in its power not only to protect it in the south, but to expand it for all states.
Slavery was a divisive issue in the US from the very beginning, and the issue got kicked down the road many, many times before Lincoln was elected and the south seceded. Everything that happened at the federal level.
Again, you forget that every state was a slave state in 1780. There were agitators who wanted to end slavery, even in southern states, but none had actually achieved it when the constitution was signed.
The split of House and Senate was actually based on geography, as in which states had no defined western boarders.
The Founders called them small states and large states. The house was meant to appease large states, Which included New York and Pennsylvania.
The small states, got the Senate. Several of the small states had higher populations when the constitution was signed, but they knew it would shift out of their favor given enough time.
The line that the House was meant to appease Slave states is true only because New York and Pennsylvania were slave states at the time.
The 3/5ths compromise was thrown in to address this, but it isn't the red herring you think it was.
The electoral college was then added again, because it took months to get from one end of the country to the other, and there was a distinct chance that the winner of an election would be dead by the time the Georgia electors got to Washington in order to officially cast the vote. That's it. That's the full reason it exists.
The presidential election was in the fall, and the certification was in the spring. All because there were no roads up and down the East Coast. No rail lines, no anything.
You could take a ship, but there was a distinct risk of dying at sea.
The Electoral College did give the slave states more power, by way of the three-fifths compromise: the number of Electors depends on the number of Representatives, which depends on the census of inhabitants, not vote-eligible citizens, including, at the time, 3/5 of the slave population. So a state like Virginia, with more slaves than free people, got a boost compared to a state with only free residents.
It's bad per se and also ludicrous. It gives way too much power to states with small populations, which tend to be rural and very right wing. But it is also ludicrous, we should all vote for the person selected to rule the nation, and every vote should have equal weight. Those same states - the right has a hugely unbalanced say in the senate for the same reason, small rural states have massively disproportionate representation. Reforming presidential elections can be done by amendment or by efforts like the popular vote compact, by agreement between enough states. The stupid constitution forbids amending the way the senate is apportioned, so there might have to be a court fight over changing that rule.
Again… The outsized power of smaller states is 100% an artifact of the permanent apportionment act of 1929. It decreed that the size of the House would be set at 435 members. And then we added two states and tripled the population.
And the House is still 435 members. Some congressional districts have more than a million people. How the hell can a Representative actually be said to represent 1 million people?
To fix this would take a single act of congress. Just a simple repeal of one law, and the adoption of a new apportionment standard. That's it. Then the popular vote would mostly line up with the electoral college, because the votes would have to line up. Because it would actually be representative of the actual population.
Just massively increase the size of the house to match the actual population.
I agree the house needs expansion, however I also think that would only moderately address the electoral college skew toward rural states. Also it is in my opinion irrelevant as it does not address the core problem: the president should be elected by a direct national vote, each person getting one vote of equal weight to every other vote.
I'm saying that if you expand the house, the skew that you are complaining about goes away.
Here's a Time article on the subject that uses the current algorithm to find the most representative number of Representatives while still being a fairly low number. The answer comes out to 930.
That's the on the lower end of fixing the House. There are proposals that go much higher.
And all it takes to get to any of them is a simple act of congress. No need for a constitutional amendment, no need to get the states on board, just one law passed.
Fixing the House would also massively curtail gerrymandering. Particularly the packing and stacking tactics.
And again, all it takes to do this is a single law passed by congress.
Ditching the electoral college completely? That's either get the states to agree to the National Interstate Compact, or a constitutional amendment.
Both would be very hard to actually accomplish.
The skew in the house would be reduced, it might even go away, but with 2 exceptions the states do not allocate electoral college electors proportionally , it’s winner takes all, and doesn’t even require a majority. The small population rural states would continue to have inordinate representation in the presidential vote.
Yeah, that's the second issue. Now, that might be able to changed with an act of congress.
Congress can change the rules around elections, but the federal government tends to be pretty hands-off with elections at the state level, and we'd have to fix the supreme court to get anything like that to stick.
It might take a constitutional amendment, which again, is almost impossible in today's political climate.
So the easiest thing to work towards is un-capping the House, because that would instantly make the government better represent the people, and being honest here, would deny conservatives the House and probably presidency for the foreseeable future. All because conservatives are not actually as popular as the slanted voting system makes them seem to be.
Allow me to evangelize the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which aims to bypass the Electoral College and elect the president by popular vote.
Which still doesn't fix the problem with the House not being representative.