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This shit has to go.
Yep, but you also need to get rid of FPTP.
Without that, gerrymendring won’t work, and you’ll actually be able to get more than two parties as realistic optiobs to vote for.
the inherent problem is you’d need some of the less populous states to voluntarily give their disproportionate power away. Even if they agree at the time that a popular vote is in their favor, that doesn’t mean it will be forever. It’s in their best interest to never give that power up.
Maybe it’s time to re-randomize the map. Six Californias, merge a couple Dakotas, and a new state called “Steve” in the middle of Texas for no good reason.
States seem to be a classic seemed-sensible-in-1790 hack, goofier and less relevant as time goes on. At best you get arbitrage plays, finding the most comfortable jurisdiction for your particular graft. At worst, it seems to be a great line for the scum too stupid and/or crooked to get a federal position to settle at.
I wonder if a UK-style model, where the regional governments are devolved narrow lists of things they can play at government with, would work better.
Luv me states. Luv me history. But realistically speaking, if they could be abolished and replaced with nearly any other modern system of national/regional government organization, it would be massive improvement.
You “only” need to convince enough of the current states to elect a president, then they can just join that compact that has states always give their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote.
It’s only as hard as electing a president, but you need to get a lot of state officials on board.
I’m not convinced that interstate compact will work. it would be hugely controversial, and with the way the SCOTUS is stacked for the foreseeable future it would probably be deemed unconstitutional.
It would also probably be a constant battle to keep it in effect anyway, because every state that has entered the compact can always leave. As long as you can shut off the compact by removing one or two states from it, it will be an unstable mess.
Not entirely. An act of congress is all that is needed to repeal the Reapportionment Act of 1929 and allow more members of the house to be seated. Increase the number of house members from 437 (approx 750,000 citizens per rep) to 1093 (2.5x increase yielding approx 300,000 citizens per rep). This is roughly the same ratio of house reps to citizens when this bill was passed nearly 100 years ago.
A capped house significantly broke the balance between populous states and small states further in the favor of the small states. Ending this imbalance would move both the executive branch and the legislature to more accurately represent the will of the people.
even in that scenario you’re relying on some senators/reps of less populous states to cede power. there’s no getting around that fundamental problem.
However, many other delegates were adamant that there be an indirect way of electing the president to provide a buffer against what Thomas Jefferson called “well-meaning, but uninformed people.”
How disappointed he would be to see his idea for protecting against decisions being made by the uninformed masses having been so subverted by the very system he supported.
Any system that remains static for decades inevitably gets gamed by the powers that be. Sadly it seems we might be past the point of no return for this country…this election is everything
The system he supported wasn’t one where the House was capped at a limit causing the Electoral college to be skewed towards the minority.
Issues with the electoral college can be resolved by getting rid of the Reapportionment Act and moving towards Star or RCV voting. Both are significantly easier to do than passing an Amendment to get rid of the EC.
Working as Thomas Jefferson intended. The “well-meaning, but uninformed people” were those who opposed slavery and today oppose the land owning class.
It’s not just the electoral college. The US was the first big modern democracy, and all the democracies that have sprung up since took one look at its structure and said “nah”. This includes democracies the US directly helped setup in their current form, such as Germany, Japan, and Iraq. Nobody wants to replicate that structure, including the US.
States as semi-sovereign entities rather than administrative zones? Nope. Every state gets two reps in the upper legislative branch? Nope. Those two reps plus at least one lower legislative rep means that the smallest state gets at least three votes in the Electoral College? What madness is that? Even the executive being separate from the head of the legislative branch is uncommon everywhere else.
Parliamentary systems, where the Prime Minister is both head of the legislative branch and the executive, are more common. Some of these split some of the duties of the executive off into a President, but that President isn’t as singularly powerful as the US President. The US idea that the different branches would have checks and balances against each other was rendered pointless the moment the first political parties were developed.
Even the executive being separate from the head of the legislative branch is uncommon everywhere else.
The Presidential System (as distinct from the Prime Ministerial System) is common throughout Latin America and West Africa. Incidentally, it is also a governmental structure more vulnerable to coups and similar violent takeovers, as the President being in conflict with the Legislature often leads to these snap power grabs rather than more well-defined transitions of power after elections.
The US idea that the different branches would have checks and balances against each other was rendered pointless the moment the first political parties were developed.
Well, that’s another big difference between the US system and systems in countries with more settled populations. Regional parties (the Scottish National Party being a large and distinct block of voters in the UK, the uMkhonto weSizwe as a Zulu nationalist group in South Africa, the Taiwan Solidarity Union as a Taiwanese nativist faction, or Otzma Yehudit in Israel which draws its doctrine from a single ultra-nationalist Rabbi Meir Kahane) can all exist in parliamentary systems in a way that a Mormon Party or a Texas Party or an African-American Party has failed to materialize in the United States.
The idea of checks and balances doesn’t work when you’re forced into coalition with one of the two dominant (heavily coastal) parties to have any sway in Congress or within the Presidential administration. And that goes beyond just “Voting for President”. The Democrats don’t nominate bureaucratic leaders (Sec of State, Attorney General, etc), the President does. This gives enormous influence to a singular individual who functions as both Party Leader and National Leader.
Compare this to Brazil or Germany or India or Israel, where power-sharing agreements between caucusing parties encourage the incoming Prime Minister to choose from the leaders of aligned party groups to fill cabinet positions. There’s an immediate payoff to being the head of a small but influential partisan group under the PM system in a way that the American system doesn’t have.
Now, do you want Anthony Blinken or Janet Yellen to have to hold a Congressional seat and act as Secretary of State or Secretary of Treasury? Idk. I’ve seen Brits scoff at this system as being its own kind of mess. But I can imagine a country in which a Yellen-equivalent head of the Liberals for Better Economic Policy Party has half a dozen seats and Blinken’s Americans for NATO Party has half a dozen seats, and this is what Biden needs to be Prime Minister, so he appoints them to his cabinet as a trade-in for their support.
Pretend democracy
The Electoral College is outdated and should be dissolved. Another problem in the USA, the wealthy are admired and considered heroes. In the EU, nobody trusts the bastards and people will strike. I believe the French are the best when they disagree with their leaders and upper class because they would drag out the guillotine.
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The only reason we have it is because Republicans know that if we got rid of it, they’d never win the white house again without overhauling the whole party.
See Also: Why Puerto Rico and Washington DC are not states
“Hey, Puerto Rico is economically moderate and somewhat socially conservative! You should really want them as a state, right GOP?”
GOP: “Uh, it’s just about the shade of… c-cultural differences…”
The thing is, the GOP is dying and they know that. They built a brand around elderly blue collar white folks who love the bible they’ve never read and are so racist they even hate white guys with a tan…
Their brand appeals to this guy and excludes everyone else. That’s why they Gerrymander, that’s why they don’t want fair elections, that’s why they’ve became supportive of fascist ideals.
They know they either fade away and cease to be or…
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And also because democrats would lose their big tent anti-republican status.
I don’t get it.
The title should probably specify “for a presidential election”. France uses an electoral college for its Sénat, it’s made of regional/departmental elected people.
does it work like us presidential election tho? or are senators in France in the same “level” as electors in the US (i. e. there is no intermediate step between a voting person and elected one)?
Senators are elected by a college of locally elected people. Those locally elected people were elected, during various kinds of prior local elections, by direct universal suffrage (one adult citizen = one vote).
This doesn’t really explain the difference, if any. Americans have one adult citizen = one vote. The core problem with their college is that it’s not representative of the population, so the number of electors from a low population state can be the same as a high population state, effectively giving those citizens significantly more control in federal elections. It’s geographical discrimination, and entirely anti-democratic. How is yours different?
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And they won’t let go of it because the Electoral College keeps the wealthy in power.
As loathe as I am to use a BS argument…
Both Sides are wealthy. ;)
This is such a lazy, circle jerk answer. And also patently wrong because both parties have wealthy interests, and one would love to get rid of the EC because it would give them more power.
The answer is much more obvious: it would require a constitutional amendment which would require a bunch of states and representatives voting to dilute their power and the power of the people they represent when it comes to choosing the POTUS.
The National Popular Vote movement is a shortcut around the need for a constitutional amendment. States that sign on to it change their EC allocation process so that their state’s votes go to the winner of the national vote – but it only kicks in when enough states sign on to constitute a majority of EC votes.
IIRC it has passed in enough states to be just over 200 EC votes, but getting the last 70 will be a tough process. Still, it is an easier lift than an amendment. And maybe if it ever passes and makes the EC irrelevant there might be more momentum around the amendment to get rid of it altogether.
Do you think if the electoral college was banned that criminals would give up theirs? Wake up, the only thing that stops a bad guy with an electoral college is a good guy with an electoral college!
Well yea, this country is held hostage by the shitbag wealth class. Get rid of them. Tax them out of the wealth they lied, cheated, and stole via tax schemes, loopholes, and other criminal activity. We still have the power.
What are you talking about, Bozos and Muskrat absolutely earned the 100 billion increase in their wealth over the last 10 years! They just Work Harder™ and are More Valuable™ than us!
/Wrist
As long as they’re able to mislead a bunch of stupid idiots to think that things that don’t affect them, such as trans rights, they’ll keep winning. Class solidarity is impossible when your fellow-poor believe that immigrants are the reason they’re poor. Unfortunately, they’ve succeeded in keeping people stupid and uneducated.
Problem is that half the population is willing to keep the wealth class in power. And, ironically, many in that half of the population are among the poorest in the nation who believe the wealth will eventually trickle down to them.
what other country ever did?
The Roman Republic.
No, really - the Tribal Assembly, the democratic legislature of the Republic, was divided by tribes, and tribes sorted according to geographic residence. Urban tribes got 4 votes, and rural tribes got 31 votes. Just like today!
[sobbing]
thx 4 the info. always nice to learn some history. one of my favorite subjects in school
I know there wasn’t exactly much else to go off of at the time, but it still blows my mind that the American Founding Fathers looked at an empire that collapsed largely due to political corruption and thought “oh yeah, this is what we gotta use!”
The article points out France, Finland, Argentina.
Read the article? Lol I just knee jerk react to the headline.
Something something healthcare is a right elsewhere too something something
We can and should do better.
It is wild to have your state’s vote almost predetermined before you cast it.
Are there many other countries locked in a two party system?
US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and some other smaller countries.
Canada
Australia’s isn’t based on FPTP or anything explicitly, nefariously, anti-democratic — except the part where media ownership is one of the most monopolised of all western “democracies”, or the part where most state and federal politicians are financed by the wealthiest individuals and corporations (not in the American direct payment, openly corrupt, kind of way. More in the golden parachute, regulatory capture, quid pro quo kind of way).
Interesting how 5 eyes are all stuck in a plutocratic two-party system, huh? Almost like the MIC and most advanced mass surveillance apparatus in history has a lot more influence over our politics than any of us realise…
It’s true that many large established liberal democracies right now have only a maximum of two major parties with any realistic chance of holding power.
In Germany, that’s the Social Democratic Party and the CDU/CSU. In Spain, it’s the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party and People’s Party. In Taiwan, it’s the Kuomintang and the Democratic Progressive Party. In New Zealand, it’s the National Party and the Labour Party. In Singapore, it’s the People’s Action Party and the Workers’ Party.
I think I can even argue that liberal electoral democracy in general trends towards two major political parties or permanent coalitions—a centre-left liberal coalition and a centre-right conservative coalition.
Not Canada. The NDP is more than just a spoiler. They hold the balance of power right now!
How many NDP ministers have we had at the federal level in Canada’s history?
What parties have had their leader be the prime minister?
The NDP kept what party in power longer than any other minority government in Canada’s history?
What party would have taken power had the NDP not postponed the elections?
What party will take power to replace the one in place come next election?
That’s not what determines whether a country is a 2 party system or a multi party system. There are plenty of countries that have small parties which have never formed government themselves but nevertheless have held real power in coalitions or minority parliaments.
Canada’s public health care system was created by Tommy Douglas, an NDP MP and party leader. If Canada were strictly a two party system like the US then that would never have happened.
Douglas implemented it in… Saskatchewan. At the federal level it was implemented by a Liberal majority government.
At the federal level the NDP and Bloc only have power insofar as the Liberals and Conservatives choose to entertain them, the Liberals could have decided not to implement any of the NDP demands and then the Conservatives would have taken their place and then all of the NDP objectives would have been buried and forgotten.
It’s not just the electoral college that causes that issue though, first past the post is the culprit in Canada and our lack of precedent for minority alliances doesn’t help.
It’s a product of our fptp voting system, so any country that has this is going to trend towards two parties.
It’s not a national election, but in Hong Kong, a 1,500-member Beijing-controlled electoral college elects the Chief Executive of Hong Kong and controls nearly half of the legislature.
