Okay.
Since you're saying you're not in favor of either popular vote or electoral college system, what system do you believe would work more effectively, affording equal and fair representation to all? (I like proportional representation+ranked voting for this purpose, myself, I think, since that helps with partisanship and the far-[side] politicians that FPTP encourages)
Additionally, is there a way to do this without making it so that some individuals have a directly larger impact in terms of their vote having more weight in the counting methods? Because I know if I didn't specify that you'd talk about elites influencing and media and so on and so forth. But I still believe in truth. Arms race between truth and deceit, constantly going on, basis of human psychology, evolution, and communication. Signalling games in order to play status games, all the way back. It's why we have science and logic; best way to determine whether someone is signalling accurately is to find out what's actually true, or makes sense. Obviously isn't perfect, since we're also built to lie to each other which means lying to ourselves in order to avoid giving off the cues that we've learned to pick up on to tell when someone is lying.
As for other folks: Electoral college does give more weight to rural votes, by happenstance rather than intent. Yes, yes, it focuses on swing states, but it's the stage before that where it gives more weight. Obviously it affects low-pop states more than anything, but nonetheless, most of those are rural. Thus affecting which states are swing states. Hell, I bet there's been analyses of which states would be swing states if it was purely by population. Somewhere, at least.
Finally, re: urban disenfranchisement. There's been a few sources of anecdata in this thread, I remember.
Not precisely scholarly, but then people seem to distrust academia research when it comes to politics. Which isn't entirely unwarranted, mind you, I just don't know what can really be done about it, other than look for signs that it's authors have motivated reasoning/testing strategies that shine through (I've said it before, I'll say it again: science is
hard). I was hoping to get some info from
official sites, but it seems none of those pdfs work for me. :/ If they work for you, please let me know what they say. >_>
EDIT: Haven't fully read through
this, and it's from 14 years ago, so I'm not certain how applicable/unbiased it is, but it's probably worth a look.
Author
Topic: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American: T+0 (Read 1418438 times)