How big of a vote gap would it take for you to drop the Electoral College?

[Dill]

(04-03-2019, 06:22 PM)hollodero Wrote: Sure focussing on population centers, but I don't see anything wrong with that. Protecting rural areas from areas with more votes seems a bit odd to me, especially since those lesser populated states have a huge overrepresentation in the senate already.

I have a fundamental issue with the government telling me my vote should be weighed less because I live in the city and not in a rural state. That is strange to me. Why should it? Are my wishes and desires less valuable in a democracy just because where I live?

(04-04-2019, 08:41 AM)Belsnickel Wrote: I agree with you on this. I think where you're having trouble, and the reason debates around the Electoral College stall, is similar to a lot of differences between the US and the rest of the Western world. Democratic theory has evolved since the founding of this country. The Age of Enlightenment was a progressive movement at the time, but those ideas are now over 200 years old. A lot of Europe has continued that progress while the United States, because it is more conservative than most Western nations, has not moved on as significantly.

At the time, there was a split in the Convention over the election of president. Some wanted a national popular vote, some were skeptical of the abilities of the average citizen to make an informed vote and so it should be left to Congress. The Electoral College was a compromise. It wasn't ever about the states making the choice or allowing smaller states to have a say or anything like that. Federalist No. 68, Hamilton's defense of the system, doesn't talk about that. It was because they didn't trust the American people to make a good choice due to lack of information.

Direct election, citizens having their say directly, is a more progressive position in democratic theory. While the rest of the developed world has moved on, the United States in its more conservative way has struggled with this. Democratic theory has left the United States behind.

I quite understand Hollo's problem with "protecting rural areas with more votes." How do we get there from the Enlightenment premise of NATURAL political equality for citizens?  How could increasing the weight of votes cast in Alaska be different, in principle, from the unappealing determination that votes of rich men or Christians or white people should be weighted more?

Yet these are points on which democratic theory, in its body, cannot be unproblematically referenced in favor trashing the EC. Sure, as Bels says, the EC is "200 years old," but the concept of majoritarian rule is far older.

So, regarding the evolution of democratic theory: there have been two waves of new state formation since WW II.  The first began immediately after the war, as democratic governments were imposed on the defeated and occupied Axis powers, and state boundaries in Eastern Europe were redrawn.  You guys know the story of how this progressed, as former French and British colonial states also emerged in areas where Europeans had drawn boundaries to suit their administration, often enclosing ethnic populations destined be perpetual minorities.  A second wave followed the collapse of the Soviet Union with a similar problem. 

In all of the affected regions--Central/Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Central, South, and South-East Asia, the matter of vote weighting was a central question in many states because the one man-one vote principle permanently empowered ethnic/regional majorities over permanently dis-empowered minorities. Genocide, civil war and secession have been a part of this history--even where democracy was the intended goal. Each case is different, and there are many factors at work in state failure (including absence of education and liberal democratic tradition). But my point here is that majoritarian democracy did not prove the solution in every case because it could not deliver security and the "equal justice" democrats proffer as their main talking point, and often-as-not because of the one man-one vote problem.  Other weighted systems have appeared to function for a while (Zimbabwe comes to mind, initially reserving 20% of its parliamentary seats to whites (1% of the pop.) to keep them from fleeing).  So the world has been quite a hothouse of experimentation over the last 8 decades.

Democratic theory in its evolution, then, has often turned to "proportional" solutions as less likely to produce conflict. And with some success (I rather admire the Germans' MMP system, and their ban on referendums). This may be what you are referring to, Bels, when you say "the rest of the developed world has moved on."  But most outside the Western Hemisphere have not moved on to direct presidential elections (Russia, Turkey and Kazakhstan being telling exceptions). Even in the developed world the results are rather uneven (cough Hungary cough cough Poland).  If this is evolution, it is of the ramifying bush type with many failures as well as successes, not necessarily a teleology approaching some democratic higher form. The U.S. electoral system does not look all that outdated in this global context. (We've had one civil war and elections are still race- and region-inflected contests.)  

And there has been quite a bit of experimentation (at the local level) in the U.S. as well--precisely because we are a federal system of states, and it is the states who determine voter eligibility.  As a result, the proportion of voters to population is hardly uniform from state to state, and in any case, exacerbated by other factors like percentage of non-citizens (14% in CA) and percentage of under-18 (Utah has 31% underage, as opposed to 21% for aging Florida).*   Were the Federal government to take over all responsibility for national elections, eliminating the states' role, it could not likely even out these imbalances in representation.  And, as SSF noted, this would indeed be an essential transformation of the U.S. system, and a conflict with the 10th Amendment.  I cannot at the moment visualize what the U.S. would look like were Congress to take over the states' election rights and responsibilities, simply bypassing them as (theoretically) co equal entities, as a state government might might bypass a municipality within its territory.

I have a few more things to say about the Framers' reasons for the electoral college (not an originalist, by the way, and not going in that direction), but I will save them for Monday. Got some more reading to do.

*(2012 numbers from Derek T. Muller "Invisible Federalism and the Electoral College." Arizona State Law Journal. Fall 2012, Vol. 44 Issue 3,  p. 1261)
http://eds.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?vid=0&sid=e3d24474-222a-4eb1-8d89-af224abb76d8%40sessionmgr4006&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#AN=97057636&db=lgh.