Can someone do me the favor of selling me on the electoral college...

It originally was perfectly proportional to the state population, but that left small states without a voice, but Shays Rebellion flared up because of no government representation for Massachusetts while Virginia and New York dominated American politics in 1787.

After Shays Rebellion along with other flares of violence, the articles of confederation were reworked into the constitution we have now, and Shay's Rebellion influenced it by letting smaller states have a favorable curve in terms of members in the House of Representatives and electoral votes, the goal was to prevent large population centers dominating and leaving the rural areas neglected as the US still relied on agriculture.

This worked for the early history, as New York and Virginia were really the only real population centers for the US, but over time as population centers diversed to California and Texas as well as New York, then the smaller states found themselves with a smaller voice yet again now that it's 50 states as opposed to 13 or 25.

I agree that the electoral college is overdue for a reworking, but having everything completely proportional to the population will leave entire regions such as the Midwest and Pacific Northwest in a state of political neglect, something to try and avoid.

Making states more equal in terms of voting power is probably good for stability of the union long term. And like says your vote being 'worth less' is completely untrue if you're in a swing state

Californians are mostly retards, yet we have an archaic rule that somehow exists from the 1700s to keep them out of doing anything on the national political scene. Why change this?

>t. Californian

There are three separate things the electoral college does.

#1. Make regional overmajorities not matter
By making it a fixed number of votes awarded based on who wins per state, they make it not matter if you get 51% or 100% in that state. This removes the ability to simply appeal to the population of the few largest states and say fuck the smaller ones. ie you can't win by giving California puppies and rainbows while saying you'll dump nuclear waste in the flyovers.

#2. removes turnout mattering per state
If say New York put out a law stating that everyone who is registered to vote, must vote, or face a fine, you'd see a massive jump in turnout that would make New York pull far more weight in the popular vote category. By making it a fixed number per state, it removes the abilities of states to influence that number through laws as such. A 40% turnout (like we get) is the same value as a 100% turnout. You might ask how that is fair, but statistically when you have a sample that large of the whole, you're gonna get a similar sample as you go up the rest.

#3. It gives smaller states a voice
We are not a Country, but a Union of States. The President was intended to be the President of the States, representative of all of them. It is no coincidence the founders made electoral college votes tied directly to legislative representation.

I wasn't even factoring in swing states, I just meant that if people vote randomly then your vote is generally more likely to change the outcome if you live in a high population state. But that is an important thing. Mathematically, Californians and Texans may have the most powerful votes, but in reality the elections in those states are unlikely to be at all close, so that makes your vote significantly weaker.

>It would make more sense if the states were more independent but they aren't.

You answered your own question. States in the US are highly independent.

California has 55 electoral votes and a population of ~39,250,000. This works out to 713,636 votes per elector.
Wyoming has 3 electoral votes and a population of ~586,000. This works out to 195,333 votes per elector, around 3.65 times less than the number in California.

Why should California have ANY votes? They literally let illegals to vote in that shithole state.

That's not how it works.

You know this is the only good answer and with the exception of the last I think those are good reasons. I don't believe that United States is a federation of states anymore the federal government has taken to much power for that to be anything other than a convenient fantasy.

Only so as the federal government allows them. States rights has been dead for awhile.

>I don't believe that United States is a federation of states anymore the federal government has taken to much power for that to be anything other than a convenient fantasy.

But that is literally what our constitution says. The federal government has ALWAYS held more power than the states did.

Well no if you follow the constitution there are things the federal government can't do. It is change but there are restrictions put on the Fed by the states. In today's system regardless of what the people say it is the Fed that let's the states keep their power. The ability for the states to actually keep the Fed in check is basically zero.

People will go on and on about the "wisdom of the founding fathers" but in reality they weren't a monolithic entity, and the electoral college was a compromise from the get-go. A popular vote was proposed but that would have shifted the balance of power in favor of the North because they had a larger voter base. The South had a larger population but obviously slaves couldn't vote.

So instead slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of calculating representatives and to give the North and South a more equal amount of electoral votes. This had the """side-effect""" of making the first four out of five presidents wealthy slave-owning Virginians. Ultimately the electoral college was not some grand masterwork, it was a pragmatic political maneuver that managed to stall the inevitable conflict over slavery for about half a century, and is now a (mostly) benign relic of our Constitution.

The reason that the electoral college hasn't been abolished is because most of the time it doesn't contradict the popular vote, and no one with any power wants to go through the hassle of pushing through an amendment to remove it. It's basically a formality. The electoral college is already widely unpopular, if results like 2000 and 2016 start happening more frequently then you will start seeing a larger and larger movement to abolish it. There's no huge undeniable unquestionable reason why it's still around, just post hoc justifications.

Because America is not a democracy, its a federation. If the small states did not have an equal stake in picking the president their would be no reason for them to stick around

This
More than half of our founding documents were put together on the fly. Hell, the Bill of Rights was begrudgingly added at the end.

it makes sense to me, not because of some libertarian fear of 'mob rule' or 'democracy is communist' but because people from the coasts can't dictate policies for parts of the country with an economy more based on agriculture and industry instead of services

To elaborate on this, what I think you're assuming is that the probability of one's vote changing the outcome of the election is directly (that is, linearly) proportional to the number of total voters in your state and the number of electoral votes your state has. This is obviously not true since as the number of voters increases, the value of your vote approaches, but never reaches, zero. Of course, electoral votes also decrease in value the more you have (and beyond a certain point, namely 50% of the total, they become worthless), so it's complicated. Full disclosure, I'm talking based on a lecture at my uni a few months ago that I don't remember the details of.

>There would be no reason for candidates to appeal to anyone outside of the metropolitan citizens if it were based purely on population.

That isn't how it works at the state level, or in countries that don't have such a system. So no, that rationale doesn't work.

Makes sure mega states don't start determining everything. It's a balance between proportional representation (since California still has the most EC votes) and state representation. Geography does in fact affect the culture and priorities of people and places.

It's helped us avoid civil war and general discontent with the federal government.

>It's helped us avoid civil war

You know this is a history board, right?

>If a person in California had as much of a vote as a person in Wyoming, Wyoming's votes are meaningless.

No, their votes would be exactly as meaningful as Californians'. If there ends up being so few of them that they don't matter, why should they be dictating policy?

The electoral college is the reason California, New York, Texas and Florida do not run the USA.

>Makes sure mega states don't start determining everything.

Nope. "States" wouldn't determine anything. It wouldn't matter where you lived - your vote would be worth the same. It's the electoral college that gives some states outsized influence.

Bullshit.
See

>Nevada isn't run by Clark County
>New York isn't run by New York City and Long Island
>Illinois isn't run by Cook County

get it together

None of those states consistently vote in one party. Because guess what, "the city" is not a monolithic entity, because they don't use electoral college systems. A city person's vote counts exactly the same as a rural vote.

Yeah instead it's Iowa, Florida, New Hampshire, and Nevada.

Let's have some fun.

>Cuomo signs SAFE ACT
>act is opposed by every county in the state outside of greater NYC and long island
>gets passed and enforced anyway
>the vast, vast majority of Illinois is rural midwest, like Indiana
>the Chicago political establishment wants gun control
>gun control gets forced on everyone else

You'll find the same pattern with King County in Washington and SF/LA in California.

City political establishments tend to dominate state governments in areas with high urbanization.

I think that the electoral college is dumb, but let's not pretend that power doesn't tend to concentrate politically in its absence.

If you want a national level example, just look at the stranglehold Paris has on French politics.

Does land have right or do people have rights. I mean I agree that more local government is better so you don't have situations where people have to live under laws they don't like. But I don't think the solution is to give rights to land. I'm mean if Wyoming split into 4 states it would have 4 times the electoral college votes does that seem to make sense.

Well, there's no perfect solution.

All I'm saying is that the electoral college does in fact limit the geographic concentration of political power.

It had imperial churches, it function in a way reminiscent of Rome, it was an agglomeration of minor kingdoms who lessened themselves back to their tribal confederations under a traditional monarchy, that is to say it was an Empire.

Nope. Your analysis is wrong for assuming that votes can be split into "deciding" or "non-deciding" or whatever stupid criteria you invented. From the perspective of the elector, you just count all the votes and all that matters is the votes per elector.

That's de facto equivalent to saying "limits the power of votes a person has based on how much land they occupy". If you own more land, you get more votes. That's literally how it works.

>act is opposed by every county

Already your description is wrong, because counties don't vote, people do. "The city" doesn't vote for anything - a city voter's vote has exactly the same effect as a rural voter's. It's not like the minority of conservative urban voters votes don't count or something. But yes, the majority wins. Are you seriously claiming they shouldn't?

No matter where you are in the world, there's a fair amount of people in rural areas, and anyone that's dumb enough to not appeal to them is not gonna get elected.

Plus rural voters are a more cohesive voting bloc than urban voters. If a candidate doesn't appeal the interests of rural folks, they will vote en masse against them, hence why politicians in literally every developed countries give agriculture billions in unnecessary subsidies, or why in the US gun control measures never get passed despite having supermajority support. Whereas urban people are deeply divided

How is a couple of swing states determining all the election any better than a couple of big states determining all the election?

I mean at least big states have the population argument.

I don't get what you're arguing here. It's not like the candidates are saying "we will give New Hampshire all the money and jobs if you vote our way", a swing state is one made of a fairly even divide in party affiliation nothing more.

I think that the idea of America as a federation of states is mostly obsolete. The cultural differences are minimal, and a lot of the states in the west were created/divided on political grounds.
Nowadays, the state governments just form an extra layer of expensive bureaucracy with little visible benefit.

>It's not like the candidates are saying "we will give New Hampshire all the money and jobs if you vote our way"

So if they don't say that to New Hampshire, which actually does have huge political importance, why would they say that to Texas, when a Texas vote counts no more than anyone else's?

Nice

>State A, population X, has 11% of votes on candidate 1 and 20% on candidate 2.
>State B, population X*2, has 70% of votes on candidate 1 and 5% on candidate 2.
>Candidates are tied even though a candidate 2 has only 10% of total votes.

I don't know whatchu talkin' 'bout OP, shit's sounds legit.

Fake symmetry is not equality.

Who cares about individual vote, California still shits on every other state in terms of electoral votes. I'm tired of those fags complaining about their vote being worth less
>bwaaaaaaah we only have one-fifth of the required electoral votes, we need MORE

Again, what makes you think it's about equality?

It wasn't designed to be equal or fair. It was designed to protect the minority from the majority.

the only problem with the electoral college is the needy states so desperate for more attention and relevance they enacted winner-takes-all systems for electors - which, ironically, has made them far less relevant and caused only swing states to matter
rather than providing any sort of protection for the minority it merely leaves the minority political party of a state at the whims of the majority, even if there are more than enough of them in an enclave (such as Austin, Texas) to warrant one or several electors of their own
of course everyone would rather just bitch for a much more difficult to implement popular vote instead of correcting this minor problem so nothing will change

>>protect the minority from the majority.

I think you'll love Venezuela.

and yet the person who received the minority of the votes won the election

>But yes, the majority wins. Are you seriously claiming they shouldn't?

No one is claiming that the majority shouldn't win. At the county level the majority wins yet the views of it's constituents are not represented at the state level. If you drew the boarders of the state different you would get a different majority.

>tyranny of the minority is better than tyranny of the majority

>number of electors per state is Representatives + Senators
>by switching to popular vote, we essentially cut out the number of Senators from the equation
>total amount of electors (538) essentially drops to 438
>every state loses two electoral votes
>Wyoming (and other states) only get one now
>California is barely effected at 53 electoral votes, and now has an even bigger pull in the election now (Texas and NY also included)
Obviously we probably wouldn't be using electoral votes if we switched to a popular system, but it gives a good idea of what would happen if we switched to a popular vote. California alone would have 24% of the needed votes

Personally, I would prefer a system without tyranny.

Wouldn't that be legal heroin? Why can't we just create free public heroin machines if the government is just trying to keep people uninformed zombies.

heroin zombies are inefficient workers

>It's not like the candidates are saying "we will give New Hampshire all the money and jobs if you vote our way"

They actually do though, they just don't put it in the ads or talk about it in the debates. The swing states get a LOT of promised favors. Why do you think our corn subsidies are so absurd? Why do you think the US has had such a strained relationship with Cuba? Why do you think Israel is such a high foreign policy priority? Each one of those issues lines up with certain key demographics in certain swing states.

I would prefer just doing away with the electoral college, but I agree that at a bare minimum the electoral votes should be proportionally distributed. 2 go to the winner of the state's overall vote (to represent the senators), the rest would be based on population. I'm pretty sure that's how Maine does it.

The majority still wins a lot of the time. Just not all of the time.

Try living in rural New York, you will see why you shouldn't just go by direct democracy.

We have the 9th oldest government in the world, and we are a relatively young country. This tells me that the system we have works pretty well.

>It would make more sense if the states were more independent but they aren't
I wish they were. A lot of people who want to abolish the electoral college also want to run the US Federal government like a European direct parliamentary democracy instead of delegating power and sovereignty to the states.
Of course it's easy to get a lot of people in localized areas saying that because they never experience the needs of the rest of the US's incredibly vast and diverse political, geographical, industrial, etc. territory.

The system is supposed to be balanced by increasing the numbers with population, but it's not.

It would be better with an overall county vote

Would the federal government smack down any attempts to enforce #2? You made a good post btw, better reasoning than trumpfags. Tbh proportional voting ala Maine would be better

>No one is claiming that the majority shouldn't win.

You literally are.

>At the county level the majority wins yet the views of it's constituents are not represented at the state level.

THAT'S NOT HOW IT WORKS. Counties mean nothing, that's the point. If the majority of my county votes against me, my vote still counts just as much. In an electoral college system, it wouldn't.

>If you drew the boarders of the state different you would get a different majority.

No shit? And if Mexico were part of the United States you'd get a different majority too. But it isn't, so what's your point?

I unironically agree with this statement. You're on Veeky Forums, here we are monarchists.

Because otherwise california and new york would be the only places whose votes mattered and the needs and wants of all the farm states would go totally ignored by politicians who don't care to solicit worthless votes.

wrong

I thought technically speaking the electors could pick whoever they wanted and it's the votes that mean shit, however I'm no expert on the US electoral system so maybe I have misunderstood.