One half solution that people don't tend to bring up: massively increase the number of members of congress. The formula for a states representation in the electoral college is {number of senators + number of representatives}.
Since the senate is fixed at 2 senators per state, it massively advantages small states in terms of political power per person. The number of representatives per state is currently set at 435, and is allocated proportionately to population. This number is arbitrary, and can be changed by an act of congress. Increasing it will dilute the power of the electors from the Senate.
There's also compelling reason to increase the number of for its own sake: the number of people per representative is higher now than it has ever been. And it's much higher than other Western democracies.
When the Constitution was written, the number of representatives was set so there'd be one for every 30,000 people. The idea was that the number would be increased over time, and there was almost almost an amendment ratified to ensure this would happen, where the ratio would never get above 50,000 per.
But the number of representatives hasn't been updated since 1929. Back then, there was one representative per 218,000 people. Now there's one representative per 744,000. If we had the 1929 ratio in place, we'd have 1505 representatives. And if we set representatives at 50,000 per person (as preferred by founders such as Washington), we'd have 6564.
This is important for way more than just Presidential elections. It helps solve the money in politics problem as well by diluting power and making representatives more accountable.
The fight against the electoral college is one of those things that misses the forest for the trees. The real problem is that too much power has been vested in the federal government (and in the executive branch specifically), and too much power has been taken from the states. People would care a lot less about how the president gets elected if he didn't have so much control over the entire country.
I disagree. Consider our inability to coordinate a proper pandemic response, or the current smoke catastrophe spanning the west coast. The problems facing our country are increasingly national in scope, and require coordinated responses at the federal level. I believe our entrenched commitment to federalism and state's rights is going to hold us back more and more in the years ahead.
And if that state can’t, for one of a hundred reasons, respond appropriately, the effects are not limited to that state.
For the pandemic, people traveling into, out of, or through the state will spread it to surrounding states (Florida is one great example of how a state not responding appropriately has broader impacts on the nation).
For wildfires, fire knows no state boundaries, and smoke is even more promiscuous in its spread.
Europe manage to handle those things just fine and local politics is very decoupled from EU politics. Why wouldn't states be allowed to close borders under emergencies?
Because a state is not a country. It doesn't have a military, border patrol, national guard, etc. That is to say, it doesn't have the manpower. And it could - practically speaking - never raise the money to do so (states have enough trouble paying their teachers, sanitation workers, paving roads, etc).
They have trouble paying for everything that’s on their wish list but that’s true of individuals and the federal government as well. A state COULD have those things, especially if their taxpayers gave up less in federal taxes since the federal government would have fewer responsibilities. Not sure how this changes things.
But if a state has sufficient personnel to handle an emergency (say a tornado strike on a town), they have too much personnel the rest of the time. Whereas, with a governmental entity, they can go from emergency to emergency, keeping wasted resources to a minimum.
The governmental agency can also shift resources from one state to another without having to wait for the resolution of aid politics between the individual states (not to mention the states the aid would be transported through).
Of course, there are significant inefficiencies that exist in those entities in reality, but what would realistically prevent those same inefficiencies from existing in a state-run system as well?
I agree with you; in practice, however, when Alabama enacts anti-abortion law New Yorkers get pissed; when New Jersey enacts anti-gun law Texans get pissed. Everyone want to push their favorite ideology nationwide and the federal government grows as a result.
More practically, states have open borders. In the world where the constitution was written, this was not as big of a deal. However, improvement to transportation technology mean that it has become increasingly possible to circumvent one states laws by traveling to another state. Hence, any law a state may want to make legitimatly becomes an issue of interstate commerce, which is nessasarily a federal concern [0].
For instance, when Alabama enacts their anti-abortion law, they could have a legitamite grievence that their residents can hop in a car and spend a weekend taking a road trip up to New York (assuming every closer state passes a simmilar law) and get their abortion there.
Or, when New Jersey passes their anti-gun law, they can get pissed that their citizens can go to Texas to buy guns and take them back to New Jersey.
We (arguably) fought a civil war over this issue. States had different laws with regards to slavery. The southern states were upset that their laws on slavery were being undermined by the ability of slaves to travel to northern states which would than grant their freedom. A compromise was struck were federal law (the fugitive slave act) would require northern states to honor the slave laws of southern states and return slaves. Some northern states asserted their states rights to not follow this law; thereby continuing to allow slaves freedom once they crossed the border. We may have had a civil war regardless; but if the northern states weren't able to directly undermine the slavery laws of the southern states, it may not have reached that point.
[0] Although, even with modern transportation technology, Wickard v. Filburn (1942) takes a very broad view of what constitutes interstate commerce.
There's nothing wrong or unexpected about people circumventing laws in one state by traveling to another state. Interstate travel was already quite common when the Constitution was written so nothing has really changed.
I tend to not want to re-vest any power to the states for a couple reasons:
1. The Peter Principle seems to be in action in government-- the guys who are too insane, too openly crooked, to incompetent to get into the federal government, seem to be welcomed into our state houses.
2. It encourages arbitrage and race-to-the-bottom on regulatory and economic issues. I'm sure we have states bidding against each other to attract economic boons, even with their limited current tools. If you denationalized OSHA or minimum-wage standards, the future is obvious.
Yes. Is there a word or concept for this to a majority of issues in the zeitgeist? Dilution of choices into illusion of choice that is manipulating the masses? The removal of critical thinking? The lack of conversations taking into account 2nd order effects or first principles?
I fully agree with this statement. Jefferson's vision of America was the better one, where the federal is weak and the states are what people are most loyal to, and which hold the most power over people's daily lives.
I want to see universal healthcare, but I think if state's taxes were higher than federal, and they were required to come up with a plan that covers everyone, however they want to do that, that it would make more sense for everybody.
Serious question - how do you think this applies to states that have historically, and recently, discriminated against race, relationships, abortion, and blurred the lines between not separating church & state (as IIRC, the way things were supposed to be)?
It's not really a speculation, more of a fact, that if some higher power doesn't make them be what many see as humane/practice equality, then... they just wouldn't. If they don't, other states might have major issue with them... which isn't good for the prosperity of the nation.
Serious answer: it is hardly a given that a "higher power" will favor your idea of "good" over your idea of "bad". Or even if it does, that it will always continue to do so and will always continue to enforce your preferences, even if your preferences someday change.
All that a higher power will enforce is uniformity, which could just as easily be (or later become) uniformly bad for you as uniformly good for you. Without the enforcement of uniformity, you might still have the option of choosing for yourself by moving elsewhere instead of having the choice imposed on you wherever you go.
I just don't understand having "United" states at that point.
In your vision... which I'm not arguing for or against - I can't fathom a reason in which we don't just break up into countries.
As it stands, the states with the highest levels of education and economic output in the U.S. truly do tend to prop up the states with the lowest levels of education and output. However, the states being propped up also seem to actively disagree and attempt to impose their own preferences onto the very states that prop them up. There's no logical reason to not just be your own country at that point. Maybe even then going on to steamroll over the arguably weaker countries for their natural resources, as humanity has throughout most of history.
I don't care about favoring my idea of good or bad. The education mandated by nearly all states and the fed government has been teaching all students about equality and a standard level of defined human decency that should be seen to ensure a prosperous nation. The imposed curriculum showed us other variants of government that didn't include these basics leading to failed states/failed other forms of government throughout the centuries. However, even though this is what was mandated to be taught to us, we're growing up and being thrown into a system in which we see what we were forcibly taught in the mandated gov education system... simply isn't applied in some places. Whether or not this is "good" or "bad" - they forcibly taught us this... so it think there's a general consensus of surprised pikachu face to be had as to why things are different.
I personally think we're to far accelerated towards great filtering ourselves either way, to be honest. Very pessimistic view point, I know.
Aside from that - the majority of the U.S. population cannot just decide to move elsewhere. Therein lies the issue. If we grow up being taught that we're a United nation, though for some reason something is legal/enforced in one place and not in the other despite being under the same "Unity" - and we don't even have the choice to go to the place we would personally prefer... Where is the incentive to care much about anything? Any when there's no incentive to care much about anything... how well does the prosperity of the nation fare?
The "united" part was to prevent large, external states (initially, Great Britain) from taking away the liberty of each small state to live as its own citizens chose to live. The US Constitution was a mutual-defense pact meant to defend that liberty while, at the same time, defending the states from similar threats from one another. Most things in life would be state-based, where the citizens lived. Federal things were for state vs state, both internal and external, not state vs citizen.
The point of it was to defend the independence of small groups against the large. When local opinions changed about the "right" way to live, which history shows happens again and again, this system allowed the local group to change how they lived without requiring the "permission" of other states (internal to the union or external). If your own group (or you) changed, and you no longer liked your local state as much as some other where they made "better" choices, you would have the option to vote with your feet, as hundreds of millions have over the centuries. This system also attracted vast numbers of people from other places who chose not the "country" but the specific state that most suited them.
If we had it your way, the surplus states would be fine but the deficit states would crash. That's why when there's a new military contract they often build it in a deficit region, balancing the surplus out. The reason why the the states are "united" is so that the region as a whole is better off than just a few states that do well.
As far as legal, historical, and constitutional reasons go, the original idea of the US was sovereign states under a limited federal government. The federal government inherently had no power except that explicitly granted to it by the constitution. Several part of the constitution (most notably the commerce clause) have been stretched far beyond their original meaning and purpose to make the federal government far more powerful than the states.
As far as moral reasons go, I've personally always been of the opinion that government should be as close to the people as possible. National governments (and international ones like the UN and EU) make it almost impossible to truly hold elected officials accountable.
> the original idea of the US was sovereign states under a limited federal government
That's history, but not reasoning. The constitution adapts to the people's needs, I don't believe we've gone down the "wrong" path, but either way the constitution is neutral towards the debate.
Then tell OP to keep their anti-electoral college agenda off of HN
The EC isn't inherently broken, most critiques of it miss the point that it was explicitly designed so that the states, and not the people, elect the president. Representatives were the only federal office holders intended to be directly elected by the people
> Then tell OP to keep their anti-electoral college agenda off of HN
Discussing a better electoral system is not inherently partisan. Any electoral reform that ends up with America still having to pick between Republicans and Democrats would be a failure in my books.
America needs a better electoral system so that it can finally move on from a 2 party system and move towards better representation.
> The EC isn't inherently broken, most critiques of it miss the point that it was explicitly designed so that the states, and not the people, elect the president
Do you think that's something worth keeping? Honest question.
But that means it is inherently broken in today's USA. Firstly, federal law is clearly very powerful and applies everywhere regardless of states. Secondly, the difference between a state and it's neighbours is basically nil in today's America.
The president should be elected by the people. The executive branch is too enormous to be elected (in effect) by such a small percentage of votes cast.
I think you're right about the outrage that the electoral college gets, but not its actual faults.
To be sure, it's silly to oppose the electoral college due to personal political leanings. But arguably, the president wouldn't wield so much power were she more representatively elected.
I guess my objection is just that there's a clear feedback loop in power structures, and better representation is one of many avenues available to slow that.
It's not obvious that deleting the electoral college would cause US presidential elections to have more representative results.
Firstly, US presidential election results are largely determined by turnout and switching from an electoral college to a single, winner-take-all bloc wouldn't change that underlying reality.
Secondly, even if you accept that "most votes wins" produces representative election results, it turns out that there are all kinds of wacky situations that can emerge in seemingly simple voting systems based on that idea.
Finally, there's a very strong argument to be made that "most votes wins" results in significant minorites being perenially underrepresented, increasingly ignored, and then ultimately disenfranchised.
Literally your entire comment is based on the assumption that I advocated "a single, winner-take-all-bloc." Elementary reading comprehension in all its scarcity reveals that I never said that.
I'm hungover and posted a non-sequitur response to your comment which - as you pointed out - was largely responding to my own imagination. A mental lapse on my part. My bad.
There's a sad irony in the fact that in reminding me to assume good faith you actually did the opposite - assumed I was attacking you rather than having just made a mistake. And now you're rudely suggesting that I lack elementary reading comprehension. Maybe in my current state, sure. Not generally.
There are deeper cases for revisiting the Electoral College than "I don't like it when the popular vote doesn't favor me". One primary issue is that the Electors for each state are not elected. A patch for this and guidance for their behaviors is something that has to be addressed in each state on their own, with a few states here or there seeming to force Electors to submit certain information, such as the popular vote result.
Revisiting the simpler argument about not liking the representation provided by the Electoral College, it is valid that its purpose was for a much smaller nation of like 12-14 states at time of inception. It should be obvious that this argument will fall flat because it will never reach the level of consensus necessary to change it, as you need 75% ratification of the states, most of which benefit from the Electoral College amplifying their vote and relevancy. There are better uses of energy.
Regulating the Electors is a better use of energy, as there are real inefficiencies and a lack of accountability in who they are and what they do, as they can submit literally anything to Congress no matter what their own state voted for.
I think there's a quite strong argument that "I don't like it when the outcome doesn't favor me" is one of the worst available reasons to make major structural changes to a system of government. Major changes can easily be made for short-sighted, petty, power-seeking, partisan, or other unwise reasons. The US Constitution is difficult to change in no small part to guard against these.
Every time I see someone advocating for an Amendment on the basis that they think it will favor their brand of partisanship, I inevitably find myself thinking that they're exactly what the system was designed to stop.
Which is really deeply unfortunate on many levels. These are very often kind, compassionate, caring people who have correctly identified a very real problem in dire need of addressing.
If you can't legally be a faithless elector, then there is no point to having an electoral college. Just let the popular vote decide, since that's how the electoral college is obligated to vote anyways.
Electoral College votes aren't distributed by population; they're distributed based on representation in Congress.
So each state receives 2 electors from the Senate even if only a single person lived in them.
But of course the Electoral College should be abolished.
Because in fact, in a truly dystopian scenario, someone could be elected President with only 44 votes in their favor.
That is, if only one person each voted in the 41 states with the least amount of electors (2 people for Maine and Nebraska which split their EVs) and DC, and all voted for the same candidate, that candidate would receive 280 electoral votes.
Even if the other 9 states voted 100% against that candidate, representing ~100 million voters, our system would declare the first candidate the winner.
Maine and Nebraska are the two states that don't do winner-take-all. Most states won't switch to proportional allocation because the party with the most political power in a state is likely to lose electoral college votes by switching.
> In forty-eight states and D.C., the winner of the plurality of the statewide vote receives all of that state's electors; in Maine and Nebraska, two electors are assigned in this manner and the remaining electors are allocated based on the plurality of votes in each congressional district.[1]
True, but that's arguably just as difficult a change to make. Either getting enough State's to swap that the ones that don't are insignificant, or amend the Constitution. If it comes down to state-level changes, the threshold for that popular vote compact may be lower.
In a proportional system there is no reason for a presidential candidate to do anything but rack up numbers in the largest states where they've support. Everywhere else would be ignored.
It's still an issue in that this wouldn't afford equal representation. The way the number of electors is determined is {senators + members of congress + 3}. Since the senate affords massively more representation per person to rural states, rural states will be overrepresented in this system as well.
For people that complain a party won without the popular vote under the current rules, if you changed the rules for what defines winning, then that party would have campaigned in a completely different way
E.g. under the old rules, maybe the winning party purposely didn't campaign in a state they knew they couldn't win (a logical use of campaign funds), dragging down their countrywide vote. If the countrywide vote was important though, they wouldn't have campaigned like this.
You could argue that the current rules for winning don't accurately match the general will of the people but it's illogical to me to argue that the party that won under the current rules would have or should have lost if the rules changed.
Making it easier for people to vote and getting more people to vote seems like a no-brainier improvement though.
It amazes me the sheer number of people that just don't get this.
I personally believe that this influence Republicans to move a bit more center. but who knows?
A good example of what could happen to close the national voting gap: Republicans would actually campaign in California and a few of the big blue states. Right now, someone voting for a republican in California has very little incentive to show up to vote. Republicans start campaigning there and the voters now have a reason to show up. Maybe not enough to close the gap completely, but it could close it a lot with no policy changes, just campaigning and a reason for people to show.
The same could happen the other way, but the big population blue states are more abandoned by Republicans than the big red states are by dems (it seems).
Anyhow, if you change the rules, the players are going to change their game.
I’ve long been in favor of rewriting the constitution. Everyone hates how the government operates—courts are politicized and at risk of being captured, the legislature is at a constant impasse, everything is hyper partisan, the executive is either way too powerful, or not powerful enough. The only things people can point to that they like about the constitution are the first amendment, and sometimes the second and fourteenth amendments. Other countries have tried out different forms of representative government in the last 231 years. There’s a lot we can learn from them.
And given all of these screwed up things, you would put it to these people to write a better framework?
You say "The only things people can point to that they like about the constitution are..." and then proceed to point out things that are not even in the constitution.
Here is something to like about the constitution: a system of government that has seen the peaceful transition of power every 4 years for 244 consecutive years.
Referring to the bill of rights, which is a separate document from the US constitution. Functionally it serves a different purpose, whereas the constitution details how the government is structured and what it can do, the bill of rights enumerates what it cannot do. The bill of rights (1-10) does not change anything in the constitution.
I'm sure you could get pedantic on this matter, but the subject of OP was related to structure and function of the US government. This is the purview of the constitution and not the first 10 amendments.
I don't know where you got the idea that the bill of rights is a separate document from the US constitution. Amendments alter the thing amended. They aren't somehow separate, the become incorporated into the thing they amend.
Functionally, they may serve a different purpose. So does the preamble, but it's still a part of the constitution. As is the bill of rights.
(Serious question:) What, specifically, do you see that's new in the past 233 years that we can learn from? Aren't most democracies created since 1787 also extremely flawed and/or mostly copied from the American Constitution? Hand-waving that "it's been 200 years, there must be better ways to do it" without actually providing any is not something I find particularly convincing.
In any case, I think a lot of the problems you're describing are not strictly constitutional, or at least lead to contradictions if you try to fix them.
* It's very hard to keep courts from becoming politicized unless either everyone acts in good faith (ha), or you figure out a way to pick judges that doesn't ultimately get its power from elected officials. The lifetime appointment idea is about the best I can think of for that - even something like a single 20-year term has the problem of kickbacks after leaving office. For a long time, the requirement of supermajority approval was also a really good moderating idea, until McConnell realized that he could win by default by just not doing his job. Maybe a combination of large supermajorities and forced votes? But all of this runs into the problem that one party simply does not want the government to function. It's relatively easy to design a system that prevents people from doing something; it's much harder to design a system that forces them to do something when they benefit from stagnation.
* Executive power will always ebb and flow as laws are passed, unless you disallow Congress from delegating its own power, which would be silly.
* Legislature is at an impasse - I mean, if you have disagreements on the order of 40% of the population thinking that large minorities shouldn't be considered citizens, then I'm not sure how you can get past impasses. This is a symptom of hyperpartisanism, which is itself, I think, a symptom of poor education and misinformation. People disagree. You can't force them to agree unless you a priori give some of them power over others, which kind of defeats the point.
As for what's good - I think most people are also fans of the 4th and 5th amendments, and the 8th gets a reasonable number of references even in casual conversation (even if people don't know which one it is). And the 13th-15th are all pretty damn important.
The Constitutional structure as a whole is pretty good. The things I can easily think of that I /don't/ like about it, and which haven't been cleaned up in amendments, are:
1. Senate apportionment. Corn shouldn't get a vote. Admittedly, this is pretty major, but it would also be very, very hard to change in a new Constitutional convention, since even if you first agree that the Constitution should be rewritten, states won't ratify a new one if they feel like they're losing power.
2. Lack of clarity on what to do when there's a criminal in a position of power. It's tough, because any procedure can quickly become a farce if you make impeachment and removal too easy, but it would be nice if at the very least there were some minimal enforced procedures with regards to witness testimony and debate. And we could maybe strengthen the bit about the House having subpoena powers with a "yes, that means you, Donald."
3. Mandate better voting systems for Congress. As it stands, states are free to, on their own, adopt proportional representation (at least in states with sizeable delegations; Wyoming can't), ranked-choice voting, or any of the other better-than-first-past-the-post ideas that political scientists and mathematicians have come up with. This doesn't /have/ to be a Constitutional change, but it might be better if it were.
4. Mandate a formula for resizing, not just reapportioning, the House after every census. 435 is not enough to capture the variance in sizes of states without severe compression, and leaving it up to Congress to make itself more representative is a bit of an oversight.
One thing that fascinates me is the blind spot for political parties.
There were parties in the UK by the time of the revolution. By the 1790s there were warnings being emitted about their potential toxicity in the US. But there's nothing done to formally recognize political parties or manage their risk
I always theorized the two-party system on a national level was less a function of first-past-the-post and more a function of a presidential, rather than prime-ministerial system. You need a political machine capable of running a national campaign, and the ones that are big enough to do that will also likely conquer down-ballot elections.
If you no longer have to run a national campaign, you'd end up with primarily state-level parties. The California Democrats and the Illinois Democrats would have about as much in common as the current US and German Green parties. Each state may have two main parties due to FPTP still, but they'd likely be less coordinated and financially linked, forced to form blocs and consensuses at the federal level.
I don't think I follow the argument about presidents vs. prime ministers. Empirically, the UK does have a strong two-party system, so to the extent that they're a comparable case (i.e. setting aside minor things like the history leading to SNP and Sinn Fein), that's a point against your argument.
In the US, we do in fact have parties that are dramatically different across state lines at the state level. This is changing a bit in the last few years, but it used to be only at the national level that the parties were internally homogenous. And even in Congress, except on the hot-button issues, there is some diversity across delegations from different states. Elizabeth Warren and Doug Jones are not the same.
The problem is, if you go to a prime minister (e.g., if Speaker of the House got the powers of the President), then the individual state elections effectively become the national election. Imagine that there are no parties, but you and your friends have a few billion dollars to throw around, and want to make sure that the Prime Speaker is Nancy Pelosi. You'll do that by supporting politicians who would vote for her (donating, but also organizing get-out-the-vote drives, etc. - campaign finance laws can't prevent this). If anyone new wants to enter politics, they'll want to take advantage of your machine, which means that if they're on the fence about a policy they'll default to agreeing with you to make sure you pick them, and oops now you've reinvented parties. It's just an inevitable consequence of two facts put together: (1) FPTP voting, and (2) campaign organization having economies of scale, both in terms of money and in terms of voter attention span.
Again, this is fundamentally impossible to get ratified, because ratification takes 2/3 of states, which means you're going to have to get the ones currently benefiting from the Senate structure to sign on.
EDIT: Also, splitting up states is wildly inefficient, to the point of being laughable as a solution to any problem. First of all, how do you choose where do you draw the line? Maybe California makes it relatively easy, since there's exactly two major population centers, and maybe you can find a way to split Texas in the desert and Florida in the swamp, but once you get to New York in the 4th cycle you're going to have a big problem. Then, you have to split up all the existing stuff the state has - who gets custody of prisoners? who gets the state treasury and/or debt? And finally, you have the simple task of setting up a second state government from scratch - just write a new constitution, have snap elections for all your officials at every level, write new building and utility codes (and figure out how to handle what you already have, especially if the new sub-state is not politically aligned with the old one), hire and train an entirely new civil service, and start collecting taxes.
With the way our legislature and senators are captives of lobbyists, global dictators and billionaires today, what makes you think a rewrite would be in your best interests?
Or do you imagine the little people like us would have a say in such a rewrite?
I think we should split the executive into three. Have one person responsible for economic matter, one person for international affairs and the military, and one person for all other domestic policy. Have 6 year terms and stagger elections (like the Senate). That way, power is more divided and elections can be focused on policy. Each position would be less susceptible to a “cult of personality,” and it would be relatively clear what would qualify a person for the job (eg. economists & businesspeople for the first, military & diplomats for the second, lawyers & activists for the third).
For the legislature, I’d go for a lower house that would be a form of proportional representation. Each representative would have voting power in proportion to how many votes they receive. There could be thresholds and limits, and could allow people to split their votes for representatives (so you could get single issue candidates in).
The upper house wouldn’t vote for bills at all. They’d be regional, and regions could easily design themselves (so a city could form its region and expand with expanding suburbs, or split off from its suburbs). They’d basically be glorified lobbyists to promote local issues, or delay a bill if their region would be adversely affected by it. Regions aren’t as important as they used to be (Phoenix and Atlanta are politically pretty similar), but you still want to preserve their voice.
>Have one person responsible for economic matter, one person for international affairs and the military, and one person for all other domestic policy.
This is an incredibly unrealistic idea for the same reason the Commerce Clause can be used to justify anything. How do you govern international affairs without the power to oversee implementation of treaties? How do you do anything in "other domestic policy" without affecting the economy? All of those things are intrinsically linked to each other, and trying to split them apart and consider them in isolation would be catastrophic, except for the fact that it's impossible.
I remember one of my teachers proudly saying how great the constitution was since it has hardly changed in 200 years. I now realize that while the constitution was great for it's time, the fact that we haven't changed it to apply what we've learned from both our own experience, and that of other democracie, or account for changes in technology and society, is not a good thing.
There is a mechanism to amend the constitution, which has been used numerous times over the years, as the country and culture have shifted. I think it's somewhat naive to think, especially in the current climate, that a rewriting of the constitution would do anything to serve the people.
That may be. But if you want to start a successful movement, think about how it would look as a constitutional amendment. How would you define the amendment in such a way that it accomplishes the desired change, but in a way that 2/3 of congress could still get behind it?
I’m not sure anyone has succeeded in preventing courts from being politicised, but it’s probably one of the most important things to do to preserve democracy.
Turkey was a thriving democracy turned slowly authoritarian by stacking the courts with political judges. Poland is in the midst of a similar transformation.
If the nation was intended to be a union of states, then the electoral college is one mechanism that can be used to ensure that each state, as an entity, has an equal vote for federal leadership. I understand it as less of a person voting directly for the President, and more as each person voting for how their state should vote for President. The idea from the article that any argument for the electoral college is racist is a shallow attempt to quiet any real discussion.
The threshold for changing the constitution is exceptionally high, requiring 38 states. If the Electoral college gives more power to smaller states, why are they going to give that power up? Why is Wyoming and North/South Dakota going to give up their more valuable electoral votes to get rid off the electoral college? Also it benefits one party over another. Unless there is overwhelming broad appeal, this isn't going to happen. The only way it would change is if the party that benefits from this structure were to suddenly lose because of it. Why would that happen? I understand how pro-democracy argument, but the logistics required to make this happen is far removed.
I was interested to learn there's a sort of workaround to resolving the electoral college without a constitutional amendment, and it's some 70% of the way implemented:
Essentially, a block of states with sufficient electoral votes to determine the election legislates that they will cast their electoral votes in accordance with the national popular vote. It's interesting because it takes advantage of the large freedom states have to regulate their own electors, and substantially reduces the number of small states that have to get on board, as compared to an amendment.
Obviously somewhat more fragile though, as states could in principle leave the pact later on.
There's also the issue with SCOTUS potentially declaring it an interstate compact (as defined by the Constitution's compact clause) and striking down its legality - although IIRC the point of that was preventing secession and it hasn't been used for anything else. I would think that other sorts of interstate compacts like the shared peach pass(GA)/sun pass(FL)/quick pass(NC) would be illegal if someone were to challenge the constitutionality of them under that clause.
What frustrates me about this constant argument is that there's a way to retain the electoral college, which serves to at least somewhat fairly designate votes by state populations, and still make every vote count: Make states assign electors proportionally. A couple states already do it, and if all fifty did, we'd have a much fairer system that is still somewhat insulated from differences in how states manage voting.
This reads more like a case to end the United States of America. The fundamental problem is that ditching the electoral college will subject many people of varied opinions, backgrounds, lifestyles, and cultures to a tyranny of the majority (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority). This is already a problem even within states, where a few cities end up with enormous political power and can basically subject everyone else to their whims. The urban-rural divide is incredibly unhealthy (https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/02/26/across-cou...) and makes those subject to the tyranny of the majority lose belief in democracy because they feel unrepresented. The solution is not less electoral college but more, so people can live their own lives. And governments that are broader in geographical scope (state and federal) should have incredibly narrow political/legal scope, with the majority of power seated at more local levels. That is how everyone can feel represented, retains locality of culture, retain faith in the system, and coexist without eventual civil war.
The word democracy doesn't appear anywhere in the US republic's constitution.
The USA was set up so that the electoral college had the final say over any populist choice of leadership, ie veto power. This is similar to the way the far more recent unelected EU commissioners are the senior decision and strategy makers.
The issue is centralized federalism and how to dilute this.
I find a lot of Americans display a belief that 'democracy' can only refer to a direct democracy and 'republic' is the accurate term to refer to representational democracies, but with the implication often being that the point of representative democracy (vs direct democracy) is primarily to prevent majoritarianism or 'mob rule'. None of that meshes with my knowledge of political science gleaned from education in my home country (parliamentary system) or in the United States, so I really wonder where this idea began.
As per my knowledge, representative democracies have an advantage over direct democracies primarily in ease of administration and legislation. I don't think there are any particularly strong reasons to suggest representative democracy is less prone to a tyranny of the majority than a direct democracy.
My hypothesis is that the idea is borne out of a necessity to resolve the dissonance between the US founders and constitution being in many ways anti-democratic, with a culture that holds up democracy & freedom as its highest ideals. (democracy in this case defined as it would be in the dictionary)
The "We're a republic, not a democracy," comes from the 1930s as an isolationist slogan to argue against getting involved with "the defense of democracies" (the FDR argument) during World War II. From there it became a quip from the John Birch Society to delegitimize a political party. I know that sounds, hyperbolic, but it's true.
Jamelle Bouie recently did yeoman work tracking down it's start.
I do wonder whether the electoral college system somewhat insulates the US from election tampering or voter fraud. The current system disaggregates election certification to the state level, which is then made official by a discrete vote of the electoral college. For instance, if Donald Trump wants to claim that the election was rigged or tampered with, it's sort of moot as it's ultimately up to the state electors.
It feels like in the face of this, it's very hard for one candidate to dispute the election, as it's ultimately resolved by electoral vote. If we were to change the system to one based only a national first past the post poll, even one certified by vote totals from individual states, I wonder how you'd ensure an impartial certification of the final result.
They were supposed to be regular people, not politicians. And certainly not the worst people ever conceived: party loyalists. That's The system we use.
It's also not the ultimate decision making body. If the results are disputed, and no candidate gets 270 Electors, House of Representatives chooses the president, one vote per state. Senate choose VP, one vote per senator.
Elections are run by the states, not the federal government. We have — and would still have, since the electors aren’t even bound until after the election — to have 57 separate elections. It’s this separation that adds a level of security, not the EC.
Personally I say abolish the electoral colleges to ensure that every vote actually matters. That alone will reduce voter apathy and get more people actually out there voting.
Sounds good. Now how do we make that happen? Complaints about the Electoral College are rather meaningless without a realistic proposal for a Constitutional amendment that could achieve the necessary level of political support.
It's the last 20% that's the hardest, though (apart from the first 1%). No state with Republican leadership will ever sign it, because they know that they depend on minority rule. That means that the Democrats effectively have to run enough states to control the Electoral College anyway, and winning enough branches of a state legislature to pass laws is generally more difficult than winning that state in a presidential election. The one thing that's working in favor of the NPVIC happening is that it doesn't have to happen all at once, but that's a double-edged sword - if we get a state or two in the purpleish zone to sign on one year, but it's not enough to get to 270, then they could repeal it the next year.
In particular, it'll be really interesting to see what happens if/when we get to the point where any state joining the NPVIC would push it over the edge. Would that state waver knowing that they're going to be the ones to press the big red button?
You also have the judiciary to worry about. It's not obvious that the NPVIC is constitutional, and I highly doubt that the current Supreme Court, packed as it is with activist right-wing judges, would let it happen.
> You also have the judiciary to worry about. It's not obvious that the NPVIC is constitutional
Interstate compacts without the blessing of the federal government are unconstitutional. This is because the federal government has sovereign power over interstate relations, and a bloc of states that coordinate action are effectively challenging that sovereign power. So if the NPVIC is passed, it would also need to be approved by federal legislation to be deemed constitutional.
There are already interstate compacts over water rights without the blessing of the Federal government. I don't think those have ever been found unconstitutional.
Those don't encroach on federal power like the selection of the president would. The Compact Clause is pretty clear and the courts have ruled that congressional approval is required for any compact that encroaches on federal power. The selection of the president is a bright line issue of federal power.
Consider that our current president is a populist and it could be argued that he only didn't win the popular vote because he didn't focus on that, but rather on the electoral college.
I think the founding fathers would cite our current president as the reason they didn't trust direct democracy...
It's food for thought whenever I think about pushing more towards direct democracy. I've been leaning towards proportional electoral votes, but there are so many unintended consequences.
> it could be argued that he only didn't win the popular vote because he didn't focus on that,
This is exceedingly unlikely. At least not without major platform changes. A trump that appeals to an additional 3-5 million people looks significantly different.
> I think the founding fathers would cite our current president as the reason they didn't trust direct democracy
This makes even less sense, a more direct democracy (proportional approtianmemt in the house and senate) would be a much stronger check on an unpopular president. What you're seeing now is what happens when the value of votes are distributed unevenly, such that a party can appeal to a minority while retaining political power.
That said even if it were the case, a popular vote would have other useful far reaching consequences in terms of how federal funding is apportioned.
I was thinking more in the lines of the electoral college - there was some wishful thinking as the votes came in by some that the electoral college would be the check and balance this last election. Very wishful.
But the college is there historically because the founders didn't trust direct democracy...
1) didn't try to win the popular vote i.e. specifically did not court the votes of certain people
2) In order to run as a populist i.e. shore up votes from his base
3) because the Electoral College system supports just such a strategy, such that winning 51% of a few states while only getting 45% of the vote
Well, other than his entire campaign, the clearest evidence I can give is this in the face of actual polling numbers indicating that #1 and #2 had come to pass in the summer of 2016, the campaign's advertising dollars focused almost exclusively on the Obama states he ended up flipping.
A fairer statement might be its a red herring to criticize any campaign for not getting the popular vote when that's not the game they are playing to win.
But you're right -- he might never have actually gotten a popular vote.
Since the senate is fixed at 2 senators per state, it massively advantages small states in terms of political power per person. The number of representatives per state is currently set at 435, and is allocated proportionately to population. This number is arbitrary, and can be changed by an act of congress. Increasing it will dilute the power of the electors from the Senate.
There's also compelling reason to increase the number of for its own sake: the number of people per representative is higher now than it has ever been. And it's much higher than other Western democracies.
When the Constitution was written, the number of representatives was set so there'd be one for every 30,000 people. The idea was that the number would be increased over time, and there was almost almost an amendment ratified to ensure this would happen, where the ratio would never get above 50,000 per.
But the number of representatives hasn't been updated since 1929. Back then, there was one representative per 218,000 people. Now there's one representative per 744,000. If we had the 1929 ratio in place, we'd have 1505 representatives. And if we set representatives at 50,000 per person (as preferred by founders such as Washington), we'd have 6564.