A national effort to circumvent the Electoral College has gained another state.
Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed a bill Monday that adds the state to the National Popular Vote Compact, an agreement among states to award their presidential electoral votes to the nationwide popular vote winner.
With Virginia, the total number of states signed on to the interstate compact is now 18, plus the District of Columbia, for a total of 222 electoral votes.
The compact doesn’t go into effect, though, until there are enough states signed up to reach the required 270 electoral votes to elect a president.
Finally some honest to God traction. The electoral college is the dumbest fucking thing to ever become a thing. Next up, ranked choice voting.
Yeah, same here honestly. Ranked choice voting can’t come soon enough
The original US system was designed to limit democratic input as much as possible. The EC is a holdover from a time when we thought Senators shouldn’t be directly elected to begin with and only white male land owners should be afforded a vote. It was warmed over liberalized feudalism on its best days.
I like ranked choice by-and-large. But I think the super-massive 700k person House seats and the two-Senator state seats are a bigger problem overall. Our voting districts are so enormous that only celebrities, millionaires, and deep party insiders can operate within the system. That strangled control of the bureaucracy affords phenomenal amounts of control to unelected party officials and entrenched partisan leadership.
Keep in mind that ranked choice voting gave us Eric Adams in NYC. It does nothing to guarantee quality candidates.
The point of ranked choice voting isn’t as much to get higher quality candidates in any individual race, it’s to break the two party stranglehold that first past the post forces on everyone.
Ignoring the racist and patriarchal solution they came up with, it’s hard to disagree with their conclusion that average people don’t make for a reliable voting population. It seems that 1/3 of the population doesn’t give a shit about anything, 1/3 is certifiably insane, and 1/3 put in a reasonable amount of effort to understand the issues and proposed solutions. Statistically speaking, that makes straight up democracy sound like a terrible idea.
There’s probably a better solution to that particular problem than we’ve tried, but I don’t know how you can address it without creating a system just begging to be abused.
“Average people” aren’t voting.
Profile of Voters vs. Non-Voters
Whites, Christians, partisans, and the elderly are all over-represented in the official election day tally. Education level, wealth, suburban/rural populations, and married households are also disproportionately represented. And that’s before you weight the ECs by state population. The state of Wyoming - population 587k - enjoys 3 ECs to California - population 40M - and its 54 ECs. That’s 3.5x the weighted representation per citizen.
To say “the founders were right to structurally exclude 80% of public and then disproportionately represent the rural backwaters against the urban core because voters are dumb”, you need some really funky understanding of what constitutes a functional elected bureaucracy.
It should further be noted that the Founding Fathers generation of Presidents and Legislators largely sucked. They were genocidal both with respect to their First Nation’s neighbors and their ethnically homogeneous neighbors. They accelerated the slave trade directly into a civil war while telling themselves it was going to die out. They inflicted nightmarish ecological harms to their local agriculture via excessive tobacco farming. Their fiscal policy was a forty year long trainwreck, culminating in Andrew Jackson and a generation of cyclical depressions.
None of that is true, though. It’s just back-of-the-envelop vibes math.
What you have is serial nationalist indoctrination at the primary school level, mass media misinformation straight from secondary school to retirement, and a partisan political economy that thrives on pitting half the labor force against the other half through “wedge issue” campaigns.
“Oh, well, these people are just crazy” is the lazy man’s analysis of someone with divergent priors and media diet. For the most part, they’re using the same logical fundamentals as you are, they’ve just got different inputs. Similarly, “these people don’t give a shit” is a casual off-the-cuff response aimed at a population that is chronically overworked, underpaid, and routinely rug-pulled.
Consider who is actually on the ballot in some of these races and you might understand why folks express apathy. When campaigns boil down to a bunch of personal attacks between two corporate hacks who hold all the same policy positions, what you’re voting in is barely more than a vanity contest.
Systems beget abuse when they allow for power imbalances between haves and have-nots. This is particularly true when quality of life is predicated on being in the first group over the second.
At some point, the only system that is beyond abuse is one that holds the least person in it as an equal to everyone else. But it is very easy to agitate against such a model when you are able-bodied, property owning, and racially in-group, while the person you’re profiteering off of is not.
It actually functionally favors milquetoast, moderate candidates.
Your preferred candidate will never win, nobody’s will. But a lot of people will probably agree on 2nd or 3rd choice candidates.
Ranked choice helped Mamdani get elected. It doesn’t have to favor moderate candidates if like-minded candidates form coalitions and campaign together, like Mamdani and Lander did.
I definitely think that RCV is a step in the right direction, but I’m also interested to see where Fusion Voting goes. It also helped Mamdani get elected. Lee Drutman has written some interesting stuff about it: https://leedrutman.substack.com/p/how-fusion-voting-builds-the-new
I see this sentiment a lot. And, as a Native American especially, I really hate to be put in the position of having to defend the electoral college. But the problem isn’t the electoral college itself. It’s that the United States is not a country, It’s a federal system. From the very beginning the idea was that the states were the democracy and the United States government was a federal system of states not people. The whole point is that states elect the president and not people.
In fact, the skewing away from the hybridization of national and federal elements of our government, that was the big experiment, is a part of the problem. Right now the house has been capped. Thus the federal side of the government has more power than the national side. Which is part of what makes the electoral college feel like it has more power. Right off the bat for instance there are dozens of Indian nations that are supposed to have voting members of Congress that don’t.
Sure but I would say racism had a strong role here otherwise we wouldn’t have the 3/5ths compromise in regards to representative count and EC votes. The EC doesn’t even have to vote the way the state does they are free people that many swear an oath to respect the vote but we’ve seen lately what rules with no actual enforcement mechanisms leads to.
What are you talking about?
The federalization of power over the last 250 years was in large part due to SCOTUS jurisprudence applying the bill of rights to the states, along with a fairly liberal reading of what counts as “interstate commerce”. Neither the electoral college nor the population of the house are directly related to the separation of power between the federal government and the 50 states.
You are right in noting that the US House is artificially capped at 435 members, although you don’t seem to realize that electoral college votes are exactly equal to congressional (senate + house) representation (Plus “the amount given to the smallest state” for DC, getting to 538). This cap leads to a less responsive legislature with uneven allocation of power, mostly by giving small states an unfair double-bump even though that’s what the senate is for, but that cap doesn’t really do a thing when it comes to centralization of power.
(And the whole “federation of separate democracies” was a zombie idea in the original constitution with a directly elected house, was mostly killed when the senate also became popularly elected, and only lingers on as a justification to give Wyoming and other small states way more power in choosing the president than their population deserves. Which is even dumber when we realize that the population of Republicans in NY and CA or Democrats in TX and FL is way larger than most small states, and yet they essentially don’t get a say anymore.)
I’m a little confused about what’s confusing you. Unless you are just unfamiliar with the idea that the United States federal government was intended to be an experimental hybrid between national and federal interests. The original fear being that a purely federal system would give too much power to too few and allow the creation of a single party state. Not that that seems to be happening right now or anything…
You seem to be mostly pointing out the same thing that I was trying to point out except my point was more if we uncapped the house it would take some of that undo power away from the smaller states and states in general. Also fulfilling the obligation from over 100 years ago to give Indian nations voting members of Congress would also expand the electoral college.
My overall point was simply saying killing the electoral college wouldn’t do anything to remove federal power or create a more democratic nation. Because of the reasons you outlined, we need to do more, either to reinforce the hybridization or do away with the federalization altogether if the goal is direct democracy.
Also:
Can you elaborate on what you mean by this, specifically?
I’ve heard the same assertion you make elsewhere, that there was a treaty by either the pre-constitution federal congress or the modern constitution-and-president government that promised some form of representation in congress. But I can’t find any actual citation of when this treaty was actually made.
I’m fairly certain that it wasn’t only 100 years ago, since that would be 1926 and that’s about the time Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 which granted non-assimilated native Americans formal citizenship. Doing so included them (along with blacks, gays, jews, and other minorities) under the the aegis of general democracy. It would be very weird for Congress to promise a group of newly-declared citizens additional representation when they just did that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Citizenship_Act
Maybe instead you’re alluding to the 1778 treaty of fort pitt, which by all accounts did include an overt offer of recognizing a native state? (Although, if wikipedia’s text is accurate, that treaty would have been fatally invalidated when the Lenape joined the revolutionary war on the side of the British).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Fort_Pitt
The antecedents of the American legal system are nations and empires with a complex web of local and sovereign interests, going back at least to the Magna Carta and the immediate pre-indepndence relationship of the colonies with the British Parliament.
When the current US Constitution was written I suspect the more pressing interests were “not being abused by Europe” and “avoiding wars between the states over currency or slaves” rather than any high-minded experiment with federal democracy.
Anyway…
You’re making a correlation I just don’t see. Either direct election of the executive or dramatically increasing the membership in the house would make definitely make the federal government more equitably responsive to larger states. But I don’t see how this at all this would affects the balance of power between the state and federal governments.
The vertical separation of power between the federal government and the fifty sovereign states is not directly affected by how the federal government is chosen. One nationwide election, fifty statewide elections (plus DC), or just a vote by the governors or congress or teh various state legislators would all result in the same enumerated and interpreted power.
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That’s not a problem, it’s a good thing.
Not if your particular opinion Is that the United States federal government should be a direct democracy, In my experience, most of the people championing the end of the electoral college have that opinion.
Personally, I kind of feel like we need a bigger reforms than that, but that’s just me.
My opinion is that the federal government should be mostly irrelevant. About as significant as the EU government, thereabouts.
In theory it would prevent Trump from becoming president regardless of the vote.
Since it doesn’t function, there’s no need for it.
Exactly. The whole point was to keep a monster like Trump out of office, but the Electors didn’t do their jobs, so its clearly not performing as it’s supposed to, so time to retire it.
Many places are actively outlawing RCV ahead of time, because they know it would chip away at their duopoly. Mainly they’re doing it in Republican places because they know they can never win on a fair play field, but there are a surprising amount of Democrats against RCV.
Why is it surprising? RCV threatens their power just as much as the GOP’s.
Because Democrats would also suffer if people could vote for aactually good candidates