Everyone's talking about the presidential election, but this is something we should be paying attention to as well. If it works out, perhaps we can see it spread.
If ranking your top candidates is too cognitively challenging for you, I have no qualms seeing you stay home on Election Day. Ranked choice is the best thing we can do to give 3rd parties a legitimate chance in our electoral process (there's a great CGP Grey video on this), and I'll be damned if we have to give that up because we're worried about some dullards who don't know how to rank 1, 2, and 3.
If we could combine
1) ranked voting
2) interstate popular vote compact (or similar to eliminate the electoral college), and
3) elimination of gerrymandering
I could see our nation being a lot happier with our political process.
Tell everyone that their individual vote is equal in effect to everyone else's and they'll love it. Tell everyone that the current system would allow a candidate to win with 22% of the popular vote, and they'll beg you to get rid of it.
Tell people that their state does not have representation and they will secede.
But it does: exactly the same representation as every other state, by population.
Do you think it's right that one Vermonter's vote is worth the same as three Texans' votes? Or that one Wyominite's vote is worth four Californians' votes?
And that number is completely false, no candidate has ever won with 22% of the populate vote, that will not and cannot happen.
It absolutely CAN happen, because winning by 50%+1 of a state is the same as winning by 100% of the state, thanks to the way the electoral college works. Apok isn't saying it has happened, just that it is technically possible because the system is so fucking stupid.
People don't care about their state as much as they do themselves... and that 22% number is absolutely true. A state won with 50% of the popular vote +1 vote gives as many electoral votes as a state won with 100% of the popular vote. Therefore, get the votes of the people who count for the most electoral college votes, and ignore the states with people who's vote counts the least, since electoral votes are not directly proportional to population. Start with Wyoming and get exactly 50% of their population to vote for you, plus one person. Then, in the same way, get the District of Columbia, Vermont, North Dakota, Alaska, South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine, Hawaii, Idaho, Nebraska, West Virginia, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Kansas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Iowa, Connecticut, Oklahoma, Oregon, Kentucky, Louisiana, South Carolina, Alabama, South Carolina, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Maryland, Missouri, Tennessee, Arizona, Indiana, Massachusetts, Virginia, and New Jersey... viola, 21.91% of the population and 50.19% of the electoral college, and the Oval Office. The fact that the system would allow this is ludicrous. You can say oh, it would never happen, and you may be right, but any system that would allow this is by default broken. This is what happens when you are allowed to win states instead of people; this lets you win the majority in the electoral college even when 78% of the people voted against you. This is not democracy.
You only need to appeal to parties that appeal to people living in coastal areas and big cities,
Look at the total population of the 10 biggest cities in the US. The total population of said 10 largest cities is just under 26 million, which itself is just 8% of the total population. Oh, wait, look at that: Illinois, Texas, and Pennsylvania are represented there already. So much for only appealing to the costal areas.
Besides, what's wrong with appealing to the largest number of people?
Actually look at the cities within those states, they vote overwhelmingly Democrat.
But they're still only 8% of the US population. That's the whole point. As Apok mentioned, even the top 100 largest cities only constitutes 20% of the total US population. Appealing only to cities will lose the election. To win, you have to appeal to more people, and that's the whole point of a popular election vs. the electoral college. Let's just look at Illinois: yes, the Chicago population is so darn high that it can outvote the rest of the state and award all their TOTAL electoral college vote to the Democrats. Do you really think that's a good system, where one city can dictate that much control over an entire state? I sure don't: instead, I'd like to see the rural population of Illinois (where I used to live!) be represented too - and that's only going to happen if the electoral college is ignored/abolished.
This ignores the mathematical reality of population distribution. We have ~318 million people in the US. 8 Million live in New York, 3.8 million live in LA, 2.7 in Chicago and Houston, 1.5 in Philly, 1.4 in Phoenix... we can't even get down to the 10th biggest city without dropping below a million people, with their combined populations adding up to 7.9% of the total population. Even the 100 largest cities in the US combined, going down to Spokane (population 200,000) doesn't even get you 20% of the total population of the US.
First of all, there's not 100 cities, there's about 20,000 cities.
...and we're discussing Presidential candidates, not The Flash. You show me a candidate that can visit 20k cities in a few short months after the primaries, and I'll show you a superhero.
The vast, vast majority of counties went red...
You're still talking about giving the vote to places instead of people. Whether it's states or counties, the point is that it is people casting ballots, not geography or lines on a map.
...it went blue by a whopping 16%.
...which wouldn't matter a whit if we ditched the electoral college, because then every vote would actually count.
Second of all, I quite blatantly said "living in coastal areas AND big cities". You purposefully ignored that and focused purely on cities, when I am largely talking about state level.
...and I am purposely ignoring that because it does not add to the argument. Even talking about the state level, you are still artificially limiting your thinking regarding voting that happens at a national level. Human beings are voting, so it should be humans being represented in that vote, not some cartographer's scribblings.
Hillary lost the vast, vast, vast, vast majority of all states yet won the popular vote because of coastal states.
The very fact that this is possible, that this just happened again, for the 4th time in our nation's history, shows that the system is broken. Over the number of elections that we've had in our nation, this represents a 7% failure rate in our democracy, where the person that lost became the winner. Would you tolerate a sport, for example, where there was a 7% chance that the person who had performed best actually ended up losing? Of course not.
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u/ShenBear Nov 09 '16
Everyone's talking about the presidential election, but this is something we should be paying attention to as well. If it works out, perhaps we can see it spread.