Comment by MomoXenosaga
4 years ago
Abolish the electoral college and people in NY will stop giving a shit about what happens in Georgia immediately.
4 years ago
Abolish the electoral college and people in NY will stop giving a shit about what happens in Georgia immediately.
And that’s why the founders set up the electoral college. We are a federal republic of states.
The federal government was supposed to be small, because the founders understood the downside of a large federal government.
> The federal government was supposed to be small, because the founders understood the downside of a large federal government.
Those that want to return to this need to start advocating to abolish freedom of movement and permit states to implement residency requirements to access services. That way State A can go ahead an implement locally the "large federal government" services like Medicare or Social Security, while State Z can choose not to. At the moment our constitutional rights mean State Z residents can freeload by moving to State A. This kind of problem simply wasn't conceivable when the country was founded.
That's why the homeless go to San Francisco or Maine. Better services.
The states are like incubators for different policies. The rest of us watch, and see what does work, and what doesn't work. For all I know, there are residency requirements for services in some places.
One of the things the Constitution protects is freedom of movement.
If a state wanted to implement something like Medicare for All, I think they could just do that.
If you don't like the laws in your state - change them.
If you live in California and you don't like the law in Alabama, what business of yours is that?
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This is sort of how it works in Canada; healthcare, disability, welfare and (some) pensions are all managed individually by each province. When you move, you have to jump through hoops to get access to those services in the new province. Still gets funded federally though and how money is transferred between provinces is huge point of contention.
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Having a small federal government has no relationship with eliminating the Electoral College.
The "land votes, not people" scheme of the US is a holdover from appeasing wealthy landowners and slavers. We need at least one branch of the federal government that is directly democratic.
The way things are going, an increasingly small minority of extremists will make decisions at the federal level, as we are starting to see now.
The Electoral College is a triviality that we get hung up on because every loser blames it for their loss.
The real undemocratic institution in the US is its most powerful, the US Senate. It should be directly democratic.
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The founders were not that homogenous, and plenty of them wanted to recreate the British government for the new United States.
The founders think they understood the downside of a large federal government.
But I don't like being a federation. Having 50 states each infighting, competing to race to the bottom and attract business from each other, like 50 tiny nations, it's not what I want.
"competing to race to the bottom"
Looking at the US in the last 200 years, it has grown enormously rich, while many ossified systems in the world around it have collapsed. It seems that the competition you dislike does not turn individual Americans into paupers. An average American's living standard is so high that it is actually ecologically unsustainable.
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Then set up a Constitutional Convention. People in NH view life differently than those in CA, and don’t appreciate the idea of one way for everyone, as determined by the folk in the large blue cities.
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Well, that’s the direction it’s been going for 100 years, so you should be happy
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Actually it was more about making sure slave states were represented. Not as noble of an idea as you're pitching.
This sounds like a great recipe for disintegration, Yugoslavia- or at best Spanish American empire - style.
If a distant metropolis does not have to care what people in the flyover land think, why not declare independence?
It is a small wonder that the US had, so far, only one secession and civil war crisis, and a testament to your resilient constitutional order.
> If a distant metropolis does not have to care what people in the flyover land think, why not declare independence?
The distant metropolis is rich enough to pay a lot of taxes to support a long war. Flyoverland is definitionally low density meaning it has relatively few people. All they have to fight the war is some extremely stubborn people. That can be enough but an awful lot of people are going to die. There’s a great deal of good on avoiding civil war.
Yeah, that right to bear arms against the tyranny of the state sure is working well . . .
I am not an American, but it is my impression that most American gun owners, if they carry their gun at all, have mostly defense against common crime in mind, and that the loud minority screaming slogans about the tree of liberty watered by blood of patriots and scoundrels is pretty tiny, much like most loud minorities online.
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Yeah because then the entire country will only have to care about what NY thinks
This is just ignoring basic math. As it is right now, it's drastically easier to win a national election with far fewer voters in the most populous states than it is to win a direct election - and in each of those populous states, with the electoral college you only need to win a plurality, meaning you can ignore up to half the state.
Consider it another way - to win the electoral college, you only need to win the 10 most populous states with a plurality. To win the popular vote, you still need to win basically the exact same set of 10 states but now you would need to win every vote in them (which is functionally impossible).
We also have to agree that even with the EC candidates don't care about the majority of the country. Any voter in a state that goes consistently opposite to them is made completely irrelevant, with no point to trying to reach out to them. If the EC was gone suddenly all those voters actually get a voice.
Basic math suggests that a place with more population would have an outsized say that overrides a place with lesser population (and generally with very different ideas of what is important to them). You want representatives to represent the populace, look no further than the House of Representatives. The Senate is disproportionately represented on purpose. It was designed this way, on purpose.
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No. I don't even know how you get to this idea. First of all, there is only one national election, you still have your Representative and 2 Senators in addition to your State, County, and Local governments. Second of all, there are more Republicans in New York and California then in a significant amount of the middle states combined. The idea that NY or California has some singular voice that will be force upon you is just a ridiculous concept.
The country clearly leans slightly center left as a whole, but we are trending hard right right now and that is a recipe for disaster and the electoral college is in large part to blame.
It’s what I call the Democratic wobble.
We’ve been trending left for fifty years. Maybe it’s time to go the other way for awhile. And hand some power back to the states, where it belongs.
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