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Majority of Americans continue to favor moving away from Electoral College
(www.pewresearch.org)
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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Restrict the federal government's power to only those powers explicitly delegated to them by the Constitution and I'd be ok with eliminating the Electoral College.
Why would that be relevant to switching to a voting system that produces winners that more accurately reflects the will of the people?
Because the will of the people in your definition is the will of a handful of cities and our country is too big for that.
Also it's the law. It's literally in the Constitution.
No it's not. A popular vote is a vote that reflects what the majority want. It has nothing to do with the location of the voter. We should not have the weight of our votes be effected by where we live, like we currently have with the electoral college. My vote should count the same way as anybody else's, and so should yours.
Ideally the presidency and all other offices would be handled with STAR or approval voting, as they do not produce spoiler effects, weights by voter location, and help reduce extremist candidates.
And it needs to change because the current system is fundamentally flawed. Our current system weights a voter's voice by where they live, ignores huge swaths of people, has a spoiler effect, and does nothing to stop extremist candidates.
People in swing states should not get the only say.
Swing states don't get the only say, a vote in an uncontested or lopsided race is still counted. All you are complaining about is you want your state to feel special on election night.
They effectively do.
But they are effectively meaningless because California will always vote blue and Texas will always vote red. If you try to vote against your state's pre-selected candidate your vote basically just gets tossed.
Actually it's worse, since your population contribution actually ends up going towards electors that vote against what you voted for.
No, I want all votes to be counted equally. I live in a swing state, and unless you live in a tighter swing state, my vote means more than yours ever will. That's bullshit, and a fundamentally bad design.
My state shouldn't be special. That's the whole point of getting rid of the electoral college, to ensure all votes are counted equally regardless of origin of state.
Applying your logic to a popular vote, people's votes won't matter as the margin will be more than 100,000 their vote makes no difference. Is your goa tol make everyone's vote not matter?
But each of those votes are counted the same, and I don't want FPTP like you seem to think.
Instead I want STAR or approval voting. So that complaint doesn't really apply because with both STAR and approval, each vote is counted equally, and give you more control over how your vote contributes to the final count.
Votes are counted equality in the electoral system, popular voting, ranking systems, or approval. Your perceived value of a vote in the swing states vs a vote in solid states is just that. The votes still count no matter which state they are from.
No they aren't, they are weighted by state, and if your state votes against you your vote essentially gets tossed out in favor of the candidate you voted against.
https://theconversation.com/whose-votes-count-the-least-in-the-electoral-college-74280
They literally are not counted equally.
A red vote in a blue state gets ignored. A blue vote in a red state gets ignored. That is a terrible design.
And votes shouldn't just all count, all of them should be counted equally.
So you've shifted from votes only matter in swing states to votes only matter if their side wins and smaller states have a higher elector to population rates.
None of that matters, each person's vote is counted once. You are conflating the outcome of the election to whether the vote counts. It's like saying everyone who voted against an issue that passed vote did not count.
No, I haven't shifted, I'm describing several different problems.
Swing states are the only ones that make a difference. That's why candidates only visit swing states for the most part.
Votes are ignored when your state votes against you (Ex: California votes 51% blue 49% red, but 100% of the electoral votes go to blue, effectively ignoring half the voters). Your vote should go to your choice, not the opposition.
Each vote is weighted differently based on citizen location, which is antithetical to democracy
This is irrelevant, the issue is not the number of times counted, it's how it's counted.
That is quite literally how the electoral vote works. Blue votes from Texas are ignored, with the electoral votes going to red.
Maybe that'd be true if electoral votes reflected the actual vote within a state, but they don't, it's almost always winner take all.
Swing states are not the only votes that make a difference. If enough people believed that in a solid state and didn't vote the outcome would change ie their vote counts.
Your vote doesn't get changed based on the outcome it stays the same. It is still counted.
Issue voting is winner take all and unless I missed it you don't have a problem with that.
What you are asking for is a more granular representation for votes, not to "make everyone's vote count".
I've already addressed basically everything you've said here, so I'm going to leave it at that.
You've yet to address how votes in states that lose are not counted. I can see 6,006,429 people in California voted for Trump in 2020 so their votes were counted.
Did the 6006429 people that voted for Trump in California didn't have their votes counted?
This is some real woosh material right here. The point I'm trying to make seems to be sailing right over your head while you gripe about technicalities.
Those people effectively did not have their votes counted. They effectively voted for Biden in the end because their electoral votes that represent them voted against them.
I'm not arguing about technicalities, everyone's vote counts, except in the minds of election conspiracy theorists.
Your points are not about making everyone's vote equal they are about making the outcomes more granular.
Slabs of stone don't have will. People have.