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this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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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.