Connecticut Senate passes bill giving electoral votes to winner of pop vote
42 replies, posted
http://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/386450-connecticut-lawmakers-vote-to-give-electoral-votes-to-presidential
had to shorten title, character limits are a bitch
That's an interesting initiative, the US should really fix their broken ass system but this should be a good enough band aid in the meantime.
Although I'm not sure if voters will understand if the winner in their state ends up not getting the electoral votes.
Well since trump most absolutely positively won the popular vote, this shouldn't be an issue.
Connecticut has 7 electoral college votes. Why not just have a system where if a candidate wins x% of the vote across the state, they then win as close to x% of the electoral college votes? If a candidate wins 51% of the votes, then they get 4 electoral college votes, while their rival gets 3 electoral college votes etc. Why is that system so hard for American states to comprehend?
The idea of this initiative is to give electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. So if a state that signed this law gets 0% vote for the Democratic candidate but the Democratic candidate wins the popular vote, all of this state's electoral votes will go to the Democratic candidate regardless.
The aim is to circumvent the whole electoral college nonsense and give results that are identical in practice to a proportional system. If the signatories of this law cumulate over 270 electoral college votes, then the electoral college step will become a mere formality and it will be obsolete.
It's good on paper, but I don't like the idea in practice. This has been how it's been essentially happening for the past while (sans two infamous results in recent history, obviously), and while this is a step in the right direction, nothing short of establishment of the electoral college will solve the issue.
Say every state takes this approach. Candidate-R wins 51% of the votes in 40 states, and 49% in the remaining 10. That's a close race, isn't it? Extremely close. But thanks to this system, they win in a land slide.
Election results should never have a scenario in which the results can provide such a drastic difference in vote ratio for the two candidates, between the popular and electoral vote.
All this bill does is ensure the electoral college been working the way it has been, sans Bush's and Trump's victories.
What? Why does it matter whether the winner wins in a landslide or not if they win the popular vote? The result is the same either way. It's not like legislative elections, you can't elect half of a presidential candidate and half of another.
Sounds to me like you're making a problem out of nothing TBH.
Next we'll be seeing.. "State passes bill to hold their own popular vote"
What should happen in a 51-49 popular vote situation then?
it doesn't though. they only pledged to do this if they can get enough states sadly.
Which is kinda stupid, with the amount of votes they have already it should be enough to compensate for most cases.
Well damn. Normally you see people wanting to only disenfranchise minority voters. Conneticut stepping it up to disenfranchising everyone in their state.
because fuck you we like our election systems to be rigged and pointless thank you very much.
no power in our voting, no siree bob. A wasted vote is an american vote.
no but in reality the system isn't set up like this purely because doing so would be making efforts to counter jerrymandering and that just wrong.
Aaah yes, because the entirety of a state's electoral college vote going to its majority, no matter how slight, is obviously more important than ending the absurd situation where the votes of one third of the US population that happen to be red/blue voters in a blue/red state don't count and where the voting power of big states citizens is several times lower than their small state counterparts.
We've been over this dozens of times already, you bringing up the exact same rhetoric that has been destroyed time and again won't change that fact.
You're contradicting yourself here:
Which one is it? If their electoral votes go to the popular vote winner of THEIR state, then that's fine, no issue. But you and the article seem to be saying otherwise, which means that there is no point in them voting if their electoral votes won't always go to the candidate that wins their state.
Uh, how is that contradictory?
There is a point in voting since it adds your vote to the popular vote tally, which is the only thing that matters thanks to this initiative. So your vote always counts. It's pretty simple stuff, it's the basis of the vast majority of Western democracies. I'm not sure why you can't wrap your head around something as trivial as a proportional voting system.
Because it's not proportional. It's even farther into FPTP, which everyone agrees is genuinely shitty. I don't even know why you're defending it. It's an actual step in the wrong direction that's going to mean that an entire state could want another candidate, but their votes would go to the one other states want. It's literally giving up another layer designed to give more precise representation.
The electoral college should no longer exist. But if it does, it ought to be proportional for each state, not winner-take-all. If that means, because of California, that Democrats never lose again, and the country finally starts moving left for the first time in decades, then maybe the Republicans should stop being pieces of shit. And hopefully, in the process, Democrats finally realize being beholden to corporate interests won't earn them any praise from us.
Because that would make sense, and this country is filled with bureaucrats.
How the hell is it further into FPTP than what you already have? Yeah it doesn't solve the issue of vote division but neither does the electoral college. It's obviously not ideal but it's still a straight upgrade over what you currently have until you guys can get your ass in gear and change your system.
Also, the electoral college, a layer designed to give more precise representation?
You're pulling my leg, right? It's demonstrably anything but.
You still have to show me how this is less representative than your current system. I have no idea what you don't understand about how the popular vote works.
Its like the pledge to hold a constitutional convention to add a balanced budget amendment, it'll probably never happen but holy shit if it did we'd have a constitutional crisis. this might be legal, but there's a fair chance this would get challenged all the way to the scotus, so 270 votes isn't that bad of an idea since it would be a majority of states
The EC can exist just fine, but only if it actually rearranges its votes to reflect population shifts, which it was originally designed to do and hasn't in over a century.
But the problem there is doing that would immediately diminish the voting power of multiple red states and make it that much harder for any Republican to win in the current political climate. And while I personally think the Overton window needs some more shoving back towards the left, the fact that only one side benefits means that reproportioning the EC is a non-starter, so the better solution is to just fucking kill it and go straight to national popular vote.
Republicans may not like it, but the alternatives are worse for them.
Good, It's been months of making for other state is seemly passed The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact which itself drafted since 2006.
except if you adjust the EC's power to reflect population shifts, e.g. the popular vote, it becomes completely irrelevant
its only remaining function would be as a theoretical check on an unqualified populist tyrant, but as we discovered in november of 2016, it doesn't do that either
so why not get rid of it entirely?
Because being reliant on the popular vote tends to disenfranchise rural and small town folk. Even with cases like New York, a majority of the voting districts are within NYC, and this greatly hinders progress in the rest of the state.
Theirs a reason I'm salty regarding Governor Cuomo. The fucker legitimately doesn't give two shits about the rest of NY, so long as NYC/Long Island are happy, that's good enough. It's gotten so bad that nuclear waste cleanups are postponed because they are in WNY.
Now apply this on the national scale, and you start to see the problem. It'll lead to further political polarization and compromise becoming a dirty word within politics.
because disenfranchising the majority is clearly a preferable state of affairs
so? they already have all the proportional representation they want in the house
Except now we have bumfuck nowhere states and towns taking over the majority which doesn't make sense. Republicans would have absolutely no footing if it wasnt for the bullshit districts they poudly sat up themselves.
Not this shit again...
So you care about rural people being outnumbered by city folks in the presidential election? Alright then, do you care about racial minorities, who are disenfranchised by the very system you claim serves to empower minorities in the face of the "tyranny of the majority"?
It's structurally impossible to create a voting system for a single seat of office that simultaneously empowers every single minority against the "majority". Your shitty system doesn't do that. It favors certain minorities over others, and the people who enjoy such a bias defend it by claiming it serves to empower minorities in general, when all it does is establish their dominance over other, less fortunate minorities.
The "majority" is given rudimentary power because of population density within specific cities. Even in cases where the population of the rest of the state outweighs certain cities, they are getting fucked over because they do not group up in one city.
This is not even just a case of voting. Many state governments will actively use finances and push legislation which benefits those areas, but nowhere else within the state, and in some cases, disadvantages the rest of the state in favor of the cities.
An ideal solution would be the federalization of big cities akin too how D.C. is done, but give them their own EC votes, based of course, on their population. This would remove under repersentation of said populations, and allow for better financing to be handled by each.
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