Omnibus Politics Thread: Campaign 2016 EditionFollow

Current voting laws don't just disenfranchise Dems in CA; they negatively affect Republicans in CA.

You guys are hit by the double whammy of your EC votes being worth much less than everyone else, even if you don't live in a dense metro area, but also, you get hit by the non-competitive late voting state effects.

There is a reason people spend roughly 80-200 times the money per vote in places like NH rather than CA.

I get it, your guy won (well sorta) so I can see the appeal in not wanting to mess with a "working" system, but when you are directly hurt by a system, why not look at alternatives? For the record, this is a problem that I had prior to the campaign, and something I would still consider a problem had Hillary won. Part of that is selfish, as I am hit by some of these effects the same way you are, to a lesser extent than CA though, but even if I moved a half hr north into NH, I would still think a representative system is important.

Edited, Nov 16th 2016 9:01am by Timelordwho

Probably not, since that's exactly what conservatives were doing in 2012, and are doing now. Unless we're going to conveniently forget that they were going out of their way to say the EC was broken before the votes were counted and then quiet after the results. Guess we'll find out since that was the one that got elected. A billionaire that self funded his campaign and actually used it as a selling point? That's a scary thought, right?

No, but plenty of Republicans would instead. Witness now where you have Republicans already arguing that the Senate needs to abolish the filibuster. Saying "These guys only care at this time" doesn't really reflect the value of their arguments even if they're being opportunistic for presenting them now. Events like this are when people actually give a shit about the EC so now is the time to talk about it.

There's valid reasons for thinking that the Electoral College is a poor system that remain valid whether or not any select individual is even in their criticism regardless of who wins. "My vote should count as a single vote and the person with the most votes should win" is a simple and compelling argument. It is, after all, how most of us were initially taught that the system works and, in fact, how it works in almost every election excepting the presidency. You don't, after all, have a system that weights a vote for senator in Los Angeles different from a vote in rural California although the same arguments for preserving the EC apply ("But then senatorial candidates only really need to win the big urban areas and the rural voter is forgotten!"). This goes back to the "Founding Fathers assumed we're too dumb to make these decisions on our own" reasoning since the election of senators used to be out of the public's hands entirely and were selected by the state legislatures. But now we vote for them directly and the republic hasn't collapsed as a result.

I personally don't care a ton either way. It would certainly be to my advantage politically if the EC were abolished but I accept the fact that everyone's known the rules for a couple hundred years now and should be acting accordingly. On the other hand, if the EC were abolished either through Constitutional change or a 'soft' change like state pacts to award their EC votes to the national popular vote winner, I wouldn't have any particular quarrel with it.

But the House is there to balance it. If only the Senate existed it would be more problematic. But, ya know, compromise. Not complaining about the way the senate work doesn't nullify anything previously mentioned.


I meant in general. One person one vote wouldn't stop a single billionaire from buying an election.

Edited, Nov 16th 2016 10:27am by TirithRR

Actually, the Senate was designed as it originally was (two per state, selected by state legislatures) to provide a counter to the democratically elected morons in the House, not the reverse. Point being, however, that allowing senators to be chosen by popular vote hasn't actually created a problem or watered down that role despite the diverse populations within single states.

More to the point, the role of the electoral college is unique to the presidency and, since it is the exception, it needs to be defended as to WHY an exception needs to be made for this one position when other elected positions get by just fine on a popular vote. We have one other example of a non-popular vote system being changed (the senate) and it didn't adversely affect the nation nor even really the states on a more local level so the bar goes up about why it's necessary for the presidency.

Edited, Nov 16th 2016 10:19am by Jophiel

It's not because the House wasn't designed as a counter to the Senate. The House was proposed and faced significant opposition because a number of the Framers didn't believe in the ability of the people to directly represent themselves. The Senate was created directly and intentionally as a hedge against the House. No one was ever arguing that the House was needed to prevent the tyranny of the Senate nor was it designed as such.

This is important because it's the same argument that was used for the electoral college; that the people couldn't be trusted to represent themselves without a hedge in case they all proved too incompetent for the task. When those safeguards were removed for the Senate, we didn't collapse into chaos so it's completely valid to ask why we're not directly trusted with the presidency.

The presidency being unique is not, in of itself, a good reason for anything. I mean, we might as well say that the president-elect needs to battle a minotaur because, hey, there's only one office like it so let's just throw whatever trapping we want on it. On a state scale we directly elect governors to serve as Chief Executive for states with widely varying populations and it seems to work out fine. Closer to the role, we used to determine the vice-president based on the runner-up until we realized that that idea was stupid and didn't work well and so we changed it so both run on a single ticket. Just because a role is unique doesn't mean that the two-hundred forty year old reason for determining it isn't flawed.

My two dream is to learn the basics of English grammar.

Ben Carson isn't going to take a cabinet position because he believes he's experienced enough to run the country but not a cabinet.

Exactly.

Nominate qualified and responsible individuals for positions of power that are more interested in the people and not just their constituents so when a situation like this comes up again then at least the losing side won't fear for their rights.

And, you know, that ain't gonna happen.

I'm sure many would. But I would disagree with them. I'm not talking about random folks "out there", but responding to posters on this forum who are, right now, arguing that point.



Sure. But I disagree with them. You're free to search my posts from the period 2001 through 2006 and find all the times I argued that the filibuster should be abolished (hint: you wont find any). Same deal. Again, I'm mainly responding to posters in this forum, not addressing what is going to statistically happen at a given rate in the population as a whole no matter what we might do or say. I'm trying to get the people I'm directly speaking to to realize that their own positions seem to shift based on which "side" it benefits.

For the record, I happen to think that the filibuster requirement should be increased to 2/3rds of the Senate. I believe that if you make a filibuster impossible to overcome with just one party's members, it will force legislators to write bills that they can at least get a decent chunk of the other party's members to agree to. Which would decrease the amount of blatantly partisan legislation.

And yes, I'm arguing for that, right now, when my own party has a pretty narrow majority in the Senate. So yes, I'm just that much more enlightened than the rest of you



Ok. That's a completely fair point. Again though, if you actually want to accomplish something more than just whining and winding up young folks who don't actually know any better so we can, I guess, gin up our media advertising value by covering riots, it might be a good idea to make this an actual agenda item and pursue it. Other than the occasional fringe professor or think tank somewhere mentioning it, this topic tends to die out pretty quickly after it's raised. Maybe this time will be different, but I'm not holding my breath.



Sure. But that Senator only represents the state that sent him to congress, and he only has one vote in that congress, just like a senator from NH does. This is actually a pretty bad example, because it supports the same kind of system as the EC, since the ratio of senate representation in a large versus small state is seriously different.

You'd have a better argument using house representatives, but again each representative is based solely on the voters in his district, and not some accumulation of the entire US population. To make an equivalent argument, you'd have to say that each and every voter in the US gets to vote on each and every member of congress in the US. Which is not how we do things.

The EC is weighted in the exact same way we weight representation in congress. So yeah, it is how we do things in other federal elections. The best argument you could make is voting for governors, which is by pure popular vote in the state. So there's that, at least. But again, the state is itself a single legal entity. The US is a collection of states. We have always elected presidents based on the will of the states, not the will of the population of the US as a whole. We can debate if that's a good or bad thing, but simply saying "that's not how we do other elections" isn't really a great argument IMO. Yes, we elect presidents of the US differently than we elect governors of states (or mayors of cities). But is that "bad", or "wrong"? And why?



I think it goes back to the idea that the US government was supposed to be a collection of the States (hence, the name "United States"). So the idea was that each state needed to have a say in the government that they were granting authority over them. The concept that a majority of people in one part of the country should not hold easy sway over the entire country seems to have been very firmly entrenched in the thinking of the founding fathers from day one. And all one needs to do is look at the county by county election maps to see that the current scenario is that very thing, in spades. We've got a nation that is massively divided between high population urban areas, and lower population cities and towns. I believe that kind of thing was *exactly* why the EC was created the way it was.

Which brings me back to my original point that this is the EC working as intended.



Yeah. I heard about that idea. I think it's monumentally foolish especially if just taken on a state by state basis. It's a way to effectively make your own state irrelevant to the process. I've heard a few other suggestions for solutions, and they're also fraught with as many problems as they solve (and in some cases create many more).

I guess my issue with this is that we go through it every election cycle. Someone trots out the "EC process is broken!" argument. Tons of people who don't really understand the process, why it exists, and how it affects representation, jump up and down and agree. Then the arguments die down as people get distracted by whatever shiny whirly thing comes along and nothing happens. Again, maybe this time someone actually does something. But probably not. There are actually a number of very good reasons for using the Electoral College system, and only one, mostly emotional and overly simplistic, reason for using a straight popular vote. I'll stick with the EC system.

While I'm sure there was much back and forth on the details and whatnot, I'm reasonably certain we developed our bicameral system as a mirror to the one that already existed in England. The concept of having two houses and the roles of those two houses wasn't something "new" we invented. And the idea of the Senate being appointed by the states rather than voted on directly was a direct reflection of the appointed nature of the House of Lords in England at the time.



I get that the whole "voters can't be trusted" thing is a nice bit of snark, but it's not like the motivation was disenfranchisement, but rather to balance the direct influence of the voting population with a slower and more deliberate faction in congress. I suppose you could label that as "can't trust them voters", but it's really more a realization that voters can and are subject to the whims of relatively short shifts in popular opinion. It's why the Senate has 6 year terms instead of 2. It's why they have the filibuster while the House does not. The fact that we elect Senators directly rather than by legislative appointment really doesn't change the nature of their role in congress, nor does it change the fact that their relative power in the congress is equal regardless of the size of the population that elected them.

Those are all deliberate and still in place. And, IMO, for very good reason.



I agree. it's also not a good reason for arguing for direct popular vote either.

It's not THAT, it's actually "that" but phrased slightly nicer for the sake of my own argument