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The US National Popular Vote is a little bit closer

There's also the fact that small states have much greater EC voting power than big ones. A vote in Wyoming is worth almost four in California.
Please explain how this is so. Electoral votes are apportioned by population and based on the latest census. If that is so how can a Wyoming voter have more voting power than a voter in California?

Here is a super simplified example. Let's say that the US has three states with these populations and Congressional delegations:
  • Oceania -- population 20M -- House 4 -- Senate 2 -- EC 6
  • Flatland -- population 10M -- House 2 -- Senate 2 -- EC 4
  • Montana -- population 5M -- House 1 -- Senate 2 -- EC 3
Note that the number of electors each state has is the sum of the numbers of that state's Reps and Senators.

Oceania votes for Team Blue and Flatland and Montana for Team Red.
  • Popular Vote: Blue 20M, Red 15M
  • Electoral Vote: Blue 6, Red 7
Nothing I read about how Electoral Votes are apportioned - by population - says anything about the U.S. Senate. Are you saying that each state has two additional electoral votes that are not based on population? How could I not have read that somewhere?

EC votes are not apportioned by population.
Tom

ETA ~Nationalpopularvote.com has information on all this. You might check it out.~
 
There's also the fact that small states have much greater EC voting power than big ones. A vote in Wyoming is worth almost four in California.
Please explain how this is so. Electoral votes are apportioned by population and based on the latest census. If that is so how can a Wyoming voter have more voting power than a voter in California?

Here is a super simplified example. Let's say that the US has three states with these populations and Congressional delegations:
  • Oceania -- population 20M -- House 4 -- Senate 2 -- EC 6
  • Flatland -- population 10M -- House 2 -- Senate 2 -- EC 4
  • Montana -- population 5M -- House 1 -- Senate 2 -- EC 3
Note that the number of electors each state has is the sum of the numbers of that state's Reps and Senators.

Oceania votes for Team Blue and Flatland and Montana for Team Red.
  • Popular Vote: Blue 20M, Red 15M
  • Electoral Vote: Blue 6, Red 7
Nothing I read about how Electoral Votes are apportioned - by population - says anything about the U.S. Senate. Are you saying that each state has two additional electoral votes that are not based on population? How could I not have read that somewhere?
I'm uncertain how you hadn't read that somewhere either. That is how it is. Each state has a total of EV's that equal the number of house reps and senators.

US Constitution said:
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed a fucking Elector.
 
EC votes are not apportioned by population.
EC votes are apportioned by population in the House. The Senate is what changes the formula. All the reading I have done says it is based on population, which it is, and says that each state gets an EC vote for each representative in Congress. I was just being an idiot and forgetting about the Senate.

Thanks, All, for the help.
 
EC votes are not apportioned by population.
EC votes are apportioned by population in the House. The Senate is what changes the formula. All the reading I have done says it is based on population, which it is, and says that each state gets an EC vote for each representative in Congress. I was just being an idiot and forgetting about the Senate.

Thanks, All, for the help.

That's kinda where the rub comes in.

It's been awhile, so don't quote me. But IIRC, the 8 least populous states have more EC votes than California. But Los Angeles metropolitan area alone has more people. That's before you get to the other big cities or the millions of rural Californians.
Tom
 
The Senate, yes. But it's also not quite right to describe the apportionment of Representatives as strictly based on population either, or if that's meant to be the case it isn't handled well. They only have 435 seats to divide on the House, and no state can have less than one representative, and the formula we've been using for apportionment since the 40s further widens the gap by deliberately favoring smaller states by rounding up the apportionment quotient whenever it exceeds the geometric mean of the two nearest whole numbers; though not as blatantly as with the Senate, this still advantages tiny states and disadvantages -- well, mostly New York, California, Florida, and Texas, the four states where more than a fourth of Americans live but where people's votes are most blatantly devalued. The advantage is only to the tune of around 3-4% to the smaller states, but the more tiny advantages you throw on to the already existing pile, the more shenanigans become possible. You can read about the issues with apportionment, which I've glossed over a bit, in much greater detail here.

Another factor is that apportionment is based on the National Census, which is why Trump was fighting so hard to put a citizenship question back on the Census, tried to eliminate undocumented immigrants from the census count altogether, and did limit the number of census-takers and cancel or minimize public education programs in 2020; he knew he could encourage a deliberate undercount of certain states and thus affect apportionment. It's also why the US nearly went to war with itself over the question of how to represent slaves on the census, back when we admitted that we have slavery. The process has never been a perfect representation of the national population, and arguably was never intended to be.
 
the four states where more than a fourth of Americans live but where people's votes are most blatantly devalued.
This is so important.

The big states are far more representative of the country as a whole than tiny ones like Vermont and Wyoming.

Devaluation of votes in big states skews the Federal Government away from the values and concerns of Americans as a whole.
Tom
 
Here's another huge problem I have with the obsolete relic of the Electoral College. Voter suppression.

From California to Indiana, most Americans know who will win their state's EC delegates. There isn't much reason to go out of your way to vote, if the results are predetermined. I sincerely believe that if everyone's vote counted equally Americans would be better informed and more engaged.
Tom
 
Here's another huge problem I have with the obsolete relic of the Electoral College. Voter suppression.

From California to Indiana, most Americans know who will win their state's EC delegates. There isn't much reason to go out of your way to vote, if the results are predetermined. I sincerely believe that if everyone's vote counted equally Americans would be better informed and more engaged.
Tom
I agree.
 
I don't think over-weighting smaller states is necessarily a problem. It could be considered as a feature. The problem with EC is the disenfranchisement of all the voters of minority parties in each state that do so. There were 5.2 million Biden voters in Florida, who might as well be zero. And six million Trump voters in California. And so on.

Of course, if or when the interstate popular vote pact is taken into use it will throw the disproportionality also out the window. But it wouldn't have to. There's no reason why the votes couldn't be counter mathematically so that smaller states get higher weight. One way to do it would be to keep the electoral college, but so that every state has to have electors in the same proportion as votes given in the state (like a few states already do I believe).
 
I don't think over-weighting smaller states is necessarily a problem. It could be considered as a feature.

I strongly disagree.
Could you explain why you think giving small minorities extra voting power is a feature?

How about us gay folks. Should my vote count more than the straight guy next door? Or @Gospel , since he's black should his vote count more than DeSantis' vote? Or Trump's? They're all Floridians.

Tom
 
I don't think over-weighting smaller states is necessarily a problem. It could be considered as a feature. The problem with EC is the disenfranchisement of all the voters of minority parties in each state that do so. There were 5.2 million Biden voters in Florida, who might as well be zero. And six million Trump voters in California. And so on.

Of course, if or when the interstate popular vote pact is taken into use it will throw the disproportionality also out the window. But it wouldn't have to. There's no reason why the votes couldn't be counter mathematically so that smaller states get higher weight. One way to do it would be to keep the electoral college, but so that every state has to have electors in the same proportion as votes given in the state (like a few states already do I believe).
States don't vote. People do.
 
I don't think over-weighting smaller states is necessarily a problem. It could be considered as a feature.

I strongly disagree.
Could you explain why you think giving small minorities extra voting power is a feature?
Not just any arbitrary minority, but people living in a same geographical and administrative area.

I'm not saying it would be a bad thing to get rid of the disproportionality, but it's not the main reason for scrapping the electoral college in favor of national popular vote. If disproportionality was the issue, it could be fixed by just removing the extra 2 electors from each state.

How about us gay folks. Should my vote count more than the straight guy next door? Or @Gospel , since he's black should his vote count more than DeSantis' vote? Or Trump's? They're all Floridians.
No. But only because it would get impractical to classify people into different voting groups based on race or sexual orientation.
 
As a rural person in an urban state, I disagree with Toni’s premise that the rural people need to be protected from the urbanites. A vigorous legislature has the ability to make people see the needs of all groups. Indeed, most urban people are GOOD at seeing the needs of those not like them, they do it all day long.

This was an argument that came up during Katrina - where many of us were understanding of providing funds for those flooded out and glad to help them stay in their crowded city where they were apparently happy and out of our lovely unpopulated countryside.

Well the same is true in the day-to-day in our state where the legislature indeed *is* proportional and there are fewer reps for rural people than urban people because there are fewer rural people than urban people. And here we are living for that same 250 years without it being the end of the world nthat our reps are actually proportional.

Yes there are arguments. “Why should we have to pay for your homeless costs and public transportation?” ”Oh yeah? Why should we have to pay for your drug programs and your mile of road for every house??” “Why should you be getting 5G when we don’t even have 1G?” Why should get your empty streets plowed in 5 hours and we have to wait 3 days?”

And yet in the end, it turns out to be essentially workable and we rural folk still live our lives happier here than ther, ehile our urban friends are happier there than here.
 
The constitution was set up as a national democratic republic, not a direct democracy. They thought direct democracy would lead to chaos.

The idea of electors in part was educated property and business owners who had a stake in a stable country choosing POTUS.

It was a hedge against a populist authoritarians gaining power. as with Trump. As was separion of p[owers.

The firsdt [resdents did not vcampaign nationally. I think it was Jackson who was the first to appeal directly to the people.
 
If disproportionality was the issue, it could be fixed by just removing the extra 2 electors from each state.
No, it would not. You will still have each representative representing different numbers of people because you can’t divide the population by 435 and have enough for Wyoming to get a whole number.

For example:
\
You can see that Rhode Islanders get twice the voting power over Delewareans.

When you multiply the large number of districts getting stiffed in California versus a state like Wyming, you can see that millions of people in Cali (INCLUDING RURAL PEOPLE) do not have proportional voting.
 
Not just any arbitrary minority, but people living in a same geographical and administrative area.
Why would those arbitrary minorities take precedence over much larger minorities?
If disproportionality was the issue, it could be fixed by just removing the extra 2 electors from each state.

Here's the problem with that.

It would require a constitutional amendment. I cannot trust the bozos in Washington DC with something like that given that they're generally self-centered partisans. Not absolutely all of them, but a voting majority are dumbasses.

The Nationalpopularvote.com plan doesn't include a constitutional amendment, it's strictly an Originalist plan. No need to change the Constitution, just state legislators deciding to elect a president based on The Will of the People.
Tom
 

Personally, I think our nation and Democracy would benefit a lot more from a contracted primary season starting in August of the General Election year and moving Election Day to the weekend.
In Australia our campaigning season is usually 30-40 days. Plenty of time to bore the electorate. And we vote on a Saturday.
 
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