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[MetalSlimeHunt]

The idea that the EC is representative is indeed bullshit and revisionist, yes. It's about as anti-representative as a system can get, as signified by how our political oracles can end up doing shit like identifying three neighborhoods in Ohio and saying they'll predict the whole election with 99% certainty. Everything but this invisible margin vote to beat 270 becomes meaningless, only a few states and even then only the winning side in those states have votes that really count for anything.

There's nothing to be salvaged from the EC, it just needs to fucking go. There are other reforms to the voting system that can be made, most notably trading FPTP for...literally anything else (I'm partial to IRV for making spoilers impossible), but the EC? Trash it.

We are already verging on civil war because the GOP is finally trying to pull the trigger on technically-legal EC fuckery, it only existed in the first place to sustain slavery, fuck it! Trash the abomination!

[Reelya]

It's not necessarily more fucked than any other parliamentary system in the world. In many countries, the party with the most seats in parliament gets to form the government.

CPGrey on the theoretical minimum percentage of the population to with with the EC system. 21.91%
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=11&v=7wC42HgLA4k

However do the math on the minimum percentage of votes needed in a parliamentary system to win government and it's 25%, not 50%. You form government with half the seats and you win those seats with half the votes per seat. Yet those systems mostly aren't having the same types of problems that America is having.

The real issue however is that switching to direct popular vote won't really solve anything. You have to consider that political manipulators will also change how the act in response to any change in the system, and it won't be to become less manipulating. It'll just change which cities they bombard with promises to get cheap votes. It's still tyranny of the majority. Think about it this way: with the direct popular vote in play, every city will be in play, and you'll get conservative operatives extending their claws in every city to squeeze out a few more votes and build groups in places you'd never think they'd try and organize before. You have liberal oases in America because there are places where your vote literally doesn't count to them, so they don't go there. That would change in a direct vote situation. For example, expect conservative propaganda spending at universities to be heavily ramped up in response to that.

If you want to improve things but keep it recognizable as the American system however, switch Congress to a Mixed-Member proportionate system: each state gets an exact number of seats per population, and the one 'extra' seat allocated per state based on nationally under-represented parties, in order of least-represented first.

Then, do the direct vote thing for president but also bring in ranked choice voting so that third parties no longer act as spoilers. Bringing in direct popular vote won't do much if a likable green candidate can run and the democrat loses to the republican purely because of that.

[Maximum Spin]

So, I've got a political science question.

The electoral college is fucked. Bush and Trump won without popular votes which I think everyone can agree is shitty, even if they delude themselves into thinking "they didn't really lose the popular vote."

The sort of high school response is to think, "Well just get rid of the electoral college and do a direct vote." Which has problems of its own. The electoral college is supposed to be a Republican organization (not the political party, but the politic) offering representation of otherwise minority groups who would be trampled in a pure democracy.

But that doesn't hold up for the presidential election, right? Why should a Kansas vote be worth more than a California vote, on the individual level?

Am I getting that right? Also, are there any solutions being proposed that don't include just throwing out the whole system and starting from scratch?

The electoral college is perfectly fine and doing its job, which was explicitly to make individual votes worth less in highly populated states than those in less populated states, as a compromise to make the less populated states willing to join the union in the first place. If it weren't for the electoral college we would not have a United States, because the northern states were afraid they would be overwhelmed by the much more populous southern slave states, who would be able to control the Executive and Judicial branches and thus the economic future of the country, attempting to, for example, screw over the northern states' trade, which was something they were actually doing under the Articles of Confederation. Equally if not more importantly, the northern states also feared that, without the Electoral College, the southern states would prevent their efforts to ban slavery.
The point here is that the Constitution was designed as a government for the states, not for the people. The governments for the people were still supposed to be the individual states, which are separate countries. The massive arrogation of power to Congress and to the Executive that has taken place over the past century and a half was never meant to be constitutional.

And you had better believe that, if the system is changed, the union will dissolve. The inner states will absolutely ignore a government elected wholly by the coastal states, and the Executive will not succeed in preventing this overall.

Smush's complaints about tiny Ohio neighbourhoods and such are mostly wrong — there really aren't any such places, it's a purely a posteriori postulate, as by chance there will always be some place in the US that appears to have predicted all previous elections with significant certainty — but to the extent that battleground states do exist, this is a problem with our two-party system which is, ultimately, a problem of our people and our level of political polarisation, not a problem caused by the EC, which actually serves to mitigate it to some extent.

[Starver]

What I now want to do is to take fine-grained population density data for the US (county level?) and smoosh the State boundaries around (perhaps with some other 'tidying up' in mind, but with more active anti-gerrymandering) to make every state equipopulous.

Not sure about Hawaii. Assuming, without looking, less populous than average, either set their pop as the "new state normal" and increase numbers, or cede them some West Coast territory. Maybe East Coast instead, for Hilarity.) Alaska could extend a bit down the corridor, or perhaps do a deal with Canada in exchange for a suitably shifted Parallel across the rest of that area.

Bonus points if I can somehow shuffle borders to make equipopulous and equal area, but might be far less neat (probably be based on 50 stripes, coast-to-coast(-and-beyond), with a few wiggles to capture/avoid population hot-spots).

[wierd]

Wont work without merging several states into one single state.  Central plains for instance, would require THE WHOLE CENTRAL CORRIDOR to equal California's Los Angeles population.


(For reference, the *city* of Los Angeles has a population of 12,447,000 people in 2020 according to census data.  The central pains states-- WHOLE STATES-- had populations of: 

Nebraska: 1,775,176 people
North Dakota: ~800,000 people
South Dakota: 858,469 people
Kansas: 2,774,044 people
Oklahoma: ~4,000,000 people
Texas:  29,472,300 people

So, you would need *ALL* of the central corridor, and part of texas, JUST TO EQUAL LOS ANGELES.)

[Maximum Spin]

perhaps with some other 'tidying up' in mind,

Giving the UP to Wisconsin without fixing the Toledo Strip is definitely going to reignite the Toledo War, just so you know!

Wont work without merging several states into one single state.  Central plains for instance, would require THE WHOLE CENTRAL CORRIDOR to equal California's Los Angeles population.

It would be so much easier to just move the people.

[A_Curious_Cat]

What I now want to do is to take fine-grained population density data for the US (county level?) and smoosh the State boundaries around (perhaps with some other 'tidying up' in mind, but with more active anti-gerrymandering) to make every state equipopulous.

And it'll all be for nothing once people start moving around.

[wierd]

RE: Relocating people

Phhht---  That would defeat the whole purpose of having state cultures being represented, and by abstraction, the raison-d'ętre for the Electoral College in the first damn place---

[Maximum Spin]

RE: Relocating people

Phhht---  That would defeat the whole purpose of having state cultures being represented, and by abstraction, the raison-d'ętre for the Electoral College in the first damn place---

I mean, redrawing state boundaries to make coequal populations would already do that.

Eg, to use your example, North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas are all very different places that will not want to be made the same state.

[wierd]

RE: Relocating people

Phhht---  That would defeat the whole purpose of having state cultures being represented, and by abstraction, the raison-d'ętre for the Electoral College in the first damn place---

I mean, redrawing state boundaries to make coequal populations would already do that.

Eg, to use your example, North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas are all very different places that will not want to be made the same state.

Which is PRECISELY why I said it "Would not work."

[Maximum Spin]

Which is PRECISELY why I said it "Would not work."

Sure, but I was saying, if we're already doing that by fiat, moving the people is easier.

[wierd]

The POINT, is that it is not really feasible, without violating the purpose of the reallocation to begin with (through completely obliterating several whole states from existence.)


Sure, you could keep those states existing via forced migration, but LA culture is RADICALLY different than what exists here in the central corridor, or basically anywhere else in the US.  I would go so far as to say that many of the less populous states would not *want* those people re-homed here. 


The very notion is a non-starter from out of the gate.


The fundamental problem, is in trying to consider the US as a homogeneous entity in this fashion to begin with.  The issue at hand-- "How to make the popular vote fair on a national level, while respecting state cultural diversity, and actual popular views for those regions, so we can eliminate the EC", is incompatible with the intended design of our federal government which was never intended to work as a top-down authority at all.

It's like trying to ask a rhetorical question about how to convert a horse drawn threshing machine into a 2 door sport coupe with a v6.

It just boggles the damn mind.

[Maximum Spin]

I was pretty sure that Starver's hypothetical goal was to satisfy some OCD, not preserve the sovereignty of the states.

[wierd]

The reason for the OCD, is to correct the issue of "Unfair representation".

WHICH-- If you relocate a huge, alien cultural population en-mass, and transplant it into a less populous region, just imposes a tyranny of the majority, exactly the same as if you just abolished all state interactions, and went straight up with popular vote.  The culture does not suddenly convert upon relocation. 

Basically, the exercise is a fools errand. It wont work.

[Maximum Spin]

The reason for the OCD, is to correct the issue of "Unfair representation".

See, no, I just saw it as a joke about making the states equal, not any deeper than that.