US inches closer to change in how presidential elections are counted

zymurgy said:
and I am all for that

But the peoples house was designed to work differently - freezing the total house members in 1913 (or whenever) also gifted rural areas more pull than was intended by our foundation

what that did - is turn the peoples house into a very exclusive club - where fights over districting lines get more and more critical
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The problem is, how many Representatives can you reasonably have in the House and still get it to function? Represenatives are still going to be apportioned by population
zymurgy said:
we aren't much of a representative republic anymore.

When you squeeze a whole state into just 11 districts, every line becomes a weapon. But if Virginia had 138 districts (per the blue line), it would be much harder to gerrymander the state the way we are used to seeing now. There would be too many districts, too many local communities, and too much political variation to rig the whole map with a few clever tentacles.

And yes, part of the historical argument for freezing the House was that a much larger chamber would become harder to manage and harder to conduct business in.

My response is simple:

Prove it.

Prove that a larger House would be more dangerous than what we have now: a tiny, increasingly exclusive political club where representation keeps shrinking, campaigns get more expensive, and every district map turns into a blood sport.
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How do you say, in 1960, deal with a House with say, 1000 representatives in it? At some point the body gets so large that it collapses under its own weight.
 
Damocles said:
Basically, the Electoral College is the genius compromise the Founders built to keep the Executive branch independent of the Legislature while still giving the people a real voice. They explicitly rejected two bad ideas at the Constitutional Convention:

First idea: Letting Congress pick the President (that would make the Executive a puppet of the Legislature).

and B. A straight national popular vote (they feared "tyranny of the masses" and regional factions, Madison wrote about this in Federalist 10, and Hamilton explained the EC solution in Federalist 68)....

Instead, they created a system where each state chooses electors equal to its total congressional delegation (House reps + 2 Senators). That’s exactly why it’s 538 today (435 House + 100 Senate + 3 for DC via the 23rd Amendment). The electors meet in their own states and vote. It’s not Congress picking the President, and it’s not a raw national head-count. Hamilton called it “excellent” because it blends the sense of the people with safeguards against cabals, intrigue, and mob rule.

There is no such thing as “the national popular vote.” It’s just an after-the-fact aggregate of 51 separate state (and DC) elections. Campaigns are run, ads are bought, and turnout is driven by the Electoral College rules we actually have. Pretending otherwise is like complaining that a football game’s final score would be different if they’d played basketball rules.

TA Gardner is right that winner-take-all (used in 48 states) is the biggest practical friction point today. Maine and Nebraska already prove a district-based system can work without blowing up the whole republic. But switching to a true national popular vote wouldn’t “fix” anything—it would destroy the federal balance the Founders deliberately created.

Here’s why a national popular vote is insane in practice:
CA + NYC (and a handful of other mega-population centers) really would decide everything. The top 10 states already hold roughly 51% of the U.S. population. Under a national popular vote, candidates would campaign almost exclusively in the biggest media markets and urban corridors. Flyover country, rural states, the Mountain West, the Plains, the South outside a few big cities, all irrelevant. Why spend time or money in Wyoming, Montana, or West Virginia when you can rack up millions in LA, New York, Chicago, and Houston? The Founders designed the EC precisely to prevent coastal or urban elites from steamrolling the rest of the country. Candidates would never leave these states, they would simply not care about the vote from any other group of states.

It would make most states spectators. Right now, even “safe” states still matter because their electoral votes are in play in the broader strategy. Under popular vote, 40+ states become electoral wastelands. Turnout in those places would crater.

Democrats know this math. Their strongest margins come from huge, deep-blue population centers (look at 2016: Clinton won California alone by over 4.27 million votes, more than her entire national popular-vote margin). Spreading those urban piles nationwide lets them paper over losses in the other 40 states. TA Gardner nailed it: proportional or district allocation would expose that geographic weakness, so they push the popular-vote alternative instead.

The Electoral College forces candidates to build broad geographic coalitions across diverse regions, economies, and cultures. That’s not a bug, it’s the feature that has kept the republic stable for 235+ years with peaceful power transfers almost every time. The handful of times the EC and national totals diverged (5 times total) didn’t break the country; they reflected the system working as designed.

Bottom line: the Founders weren’t idiots. They gave us a republic, not a pure democracy, for very good reasons. Scrapping the Electoral College for a raw popular vote would turn the United States into a country run by whichever side can max out turnout in the biggest cities. That’s not fairness, that’s just trading one set of swing states for permanent coastal dominance. The system we have is still the fairest way to elect a President in a continental republic of 50 sovereign states.
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It gets worse with a national popular vote. Not only do just 7 states dominate elections, but there's no reason for the federal government to take advantage of that and soak the other 43 for every nickel they've got. That is set up systems that soak the little states and benefit the large ones. It makes the system rapacious as well.
 
T. A. Gardner said:
The problem is, how many Representatives can you reasonably have in the House and still get it to function? Represenatives are still going to be apportioned by population

How do you say, in 1960, deal with a House with say, 1000 representatives in it? At some point the body gets so large that it collapses under its own weight.
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why does 1000 house members cause a problem?


is the fear that they can't govern quickly? GOOD that we can't count votes? that we lack space?
 
zymurgy said:
why does 1000 house members cause a problem?


is the fear that they can't govern quickly? GOOD that we can't count votes? that we lack space?
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Today it might-- might, work. It's a technological issue when everything is done manually. The problem that would remain is how many representatives is the optimal choice? Too many could prove indecisive. Too few and you get poor representation.
 
T. A. Gardner said:
So, what happens in this scenario?

A state signs onto this compact to give their electoral college votes to the candidate that gets the majority of votes nationally.

That candidate is from the, or a, party that doesn't reflect the current government of that state and the state itself voted in the majority for the other candidate.

Since Spanberger was brought up, let's use Virginia for example. The state government, say a Democrat one, is in power and passes this national vote compact law. It is replaced by a slim Republican majority. There is a presidential election. Virginia votes by a slim majority for the Republican candidate, but the national vote overall is slightly in favor of the Democrat.

Do you really think that a Republican majority state government, even by a slim margin, having just held a presidential election in which the residents of that state voted in the majority for the Republican candidate for President are going to give the state's electoral college votes to the Democrat candidate for president who got more votes total nationally? I can't see that happening. I can't see the reverse situation happening even more.

Almost all states currently do "winner take all" based on the majority vote in that state.

Personally, I'd like to see the electoral votes apportioned on the basis of the state vote as a percentage of the whole, or by congressional district.
alifornia with
Basically, the National Popular Vote compact is a really, really, bad idea.
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It is a really good idea. We use majority rule in everything but the presidential election. School boards, dog catchers, city councils, union votes, ..all votes are majority rule.
The presidents without majorities were Repubs. That is why they fight for a bad idea. Why should California with 40 million people, have the same power as Alaska, with 730 thousand ?
 
Nordberg said:
It is a really good idea. We use majority rule in everything but the presidential election. School boards, dog catchers, city councils, union votes, ..all votes are majority rule.
The presidents without majorities were Repubs. That is why they fight for a bad idea. Why should California with 40 million people, have the same power as Alaska, with 730 thousand ?
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They don't dipshit. You're thinking of the Senate.

Take a breath. Organize your thoughts. Then shut the fuck up.
 
Hume said:
“I think this is a very straightforward, long-term plan to get us to a point where the United States is frankly what most people think it is, which is a place where every person’s vote counts the same as every other person’s vote,” Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger said after signing legislation to add the state to the National Popular Vote Compact.

“Unfortunately, that is not the case when it comes to presidential elections, where by virtue of having the Electoral College, depending on the state you live in, your vote does count differently.”

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IMHO the better route would be to portion the vote. No state is truly red or blue, that are all some shade of purple. If the state goes 60/40 then portion out the delegates 60/40
 
Nordberg said:
It is a really good idea. We use majority rule in everything but the presidential election. School boards, dog catchers, city councils, union votes, ..all votes are majority rule.
The presidents without majorities were Repubs. That is why they fight for a bad idea. Why should California with 40 million people, have the same power as Alaska, with 730 thousand ?
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Why should millions of Republicans (this works the other way too) be disenfranchised by things like "Winner take all" and manipulated voting districts that give party advantage to one or the other party. Out of 21 House representatives from the New England states, currently ZERO are Republicans.

California and New York are hardly states where 70 or 80% of the Presidential vote goes to the Democrat, yet Republicans get nothing because they lost the presidential vote by some relatively narrow margin.

What YOU want is mob rule.
 
ULTRA MAGA said:
They don't dipshit. You're thinking of the Senate.

Take a breath. Organize your thoughts. Then shut the fuck up.
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No, I am not. The electoral college is only for the president. The Senate is popular vote. Remember when you Trumpys started an insurrection to stop the certification of the electoral vote. Is there where I say insulting and nasty things? It seems to be normal communication for people like you. Perhaps it is all you can understand.
 
zymurgy said:
why does 1000 house members cause a problem?
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Use parliamentary procedure, for example. One party, not wanting the other to pass something, could simply debate it endlessly taking all the time they have on the floor, one after the other. They could by sheer numbers attach riders and other nonsense to the bill overwhelming the original intent. Imagine some committee with 50 members split roughly in two. A quorum requires, let's say 60% present. The objecting party doesn't show up. Or, they do and endlessly add crap to keep things from happening. Much easier with bigger numbers. Or a Congressional hearing that drags on for weeks to give each member their time to badger witnesses...

Then you have to office and house all these representatives. In the 60's they all need phones, mimeographs, and other office equipment. They take up a huge office building apart from the Capitol building, or the Capitol building has to expand and expand. Getting a quorum to even vote on something could become difficult or impossible. They all need staff too.

Then there's the problem of some state having so few people that it has 1 or 2 representatives out of a 1000 or more. They become irrelevant and their state likewise becomes irrelevant. It has no voice.

It would be an endlessly expanding bureaucracy of inefficiency and nonsense.
zymurgy said:
is the fear that they can't govern quickly? GOOD that we can't count votes? that we lack space?
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They likely couldn't govern at all.
 
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Hume said:
“I think this is a very straightforward, long-term plan to get us to a point where the United States is frankly what most people think it is, which is a place where every person’s vote counts the same as every other person’s vote,” Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger said after signing legislation to add the state to the National Popular Vote Compact.

“Unfortunately, that is not the case when it comes to presidential elections, where by virtue of having the Electoral College, depending on the state you live in, your vote does count differently.”

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stupid.
 
T. A. Gardner said:
It gets worse with a national popular vote. Not only do just 7 states dominate elections
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You are assuming that everyone in those 7 states will vote in unison.

You could use the same argument to say the elections are dominated by white people. Every race could get one unified vote, so that white people would not be able to vote in unison to control everything.

It is a silly argument.
 
Hume said:
Electoral College was designed to prevent popular election of the President. We have arrived as a nation to prefer democracy to aristocracy.
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That is an effect not the purpose. The EC was designed to mollify smaller states in order to secure their necessary votes to enact and ratify The Constitution.
 
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