It'd be nice to go beyond and have some sort of ranked voting while we're at it. Essentially being forced to pick between two parties or risk having your vote being wasted sucks.

BREAKING: group of people whose only chance of getting elected is relying on the Electoral College not thrilled about the idea of abandoning the Electoral College

Ranked choice voting please.

Part of this piece has an excellent insight into the dichotomy of the Republican Party. Of those highly engaged with politics, only 27% want to ditch the electoral college! These people understand the party is unpopular and the tactics used to hold power are a necessary way to get their policies.

The rest of the group feels otherwise, probably NOT because they don’t care if their candidate gets elected, but rather that they don’t understand how crucial it is to their party (along with gerrymandering). And their first gut instinct is that popular vote is justified/rational/logical whatever.

Now for a little thought experiment: What would happen if this became an actual campaign issue? I’d put my money on those 27% being able to convince the rest of the party how important it is, flipping their view. Maybe I’m wrong, but since many R voters tent to put self interests above all else, it logically follows that they’re just not understanding how critical the electoral college is. If their talking heads went on air/TV each day and stopped talking about how immigrants are stealing jobs or poor people are taking their hard earned money, and instead focused on the importance of the electoral college, they’d flip. Not because they think it’s right or justified. Because they think it’s best for themselves and their party. And it’s the current rallying cry.

Now apply this across an entire party, with those highly engaged telling the others how to vote, what to think about policy, and what the outcomes will be. Bring together uneducated people already susceptible to misinformation, and pair them with intelligent and extremely vocal/active groups who can sell snake oil like the best of them. Take that minority vote and put some real numbers behind it… likely not enough to get a majority, but enough to win a sophisticated electoral college or gerrymandered district.

Republicans would never win a nationwide election again. They'd actually have to come up with policies people want. Not gonna happen anytime soon.

Americans, lobby your state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact

If the president was chosen by popular vote, I think you could make a reasonable case that the last Republican president would have been George H.W. Bush in 1988. George W. Bush did win the popular vote against John Kerry in 2004, but he lost it to Al Gore in 2000 so it's debatable whether or not he would have beaten an incumbent Gore in 2004 I think.

National Popular Vote Interstate Compact

Introduced in 2006, as of August 2023 it has been adopted by sixteen states and the District of Columbia. These jurisdictions have 205 electoral votes, which is 38% of the Electoral College and 76% of the 270 votes needed to give the compact legal force.

Two things I'd love to see. Eliminating the electoral college and then getting rid of superdelegates. Two fundamentally anti-democratic concepts.

My vote would finally matter. My state already knows who it's supporting with or without me.

They will never allow that because it'll kill the entire republican party lol

The electoral college was created at a time when faster-than-horse communication didn't exist. It made sense then, but has not grown with the times.

The whole thing is absurd and overly represents rural areas and Republicans. We already have a huge problem with the "2 senators per state" thing and the House representing Republicans far too much in relation to their numbers.

Instead of tilting at the windmill that is removing the EC how about we do something much easier and simpler and simply expand the House of Representatives? Not only would this add votes to the EC and make the Presidential Elections more representative it would also, you know, make the HoR more Representative! For extra fun it would also diminish the returns of gerrymandering since there would be so many more districts.

All we need is a change to the Re-Apportionment Act of 1929. There is no good reason that the size of the HoR is fixed at 435. None.

Unfortunately the elected representatives don't care what the majority of citizens want.

When you say majority, do you mean by popular vote, or...

I propose the National Popular Vote Interstate compact. Cgp grey has an amazing video on it. It's a "petition" of sorts that basically says that states that sign it will have its elective representatives vote with the majority vote of their said state.

Here's the video if anyone wants to watch it: https://youtu.be/tUX-frlNBJY

The "founding fathers" would be against the electoral college today too. The electoral college was an idea to try to get the people to directly vote for the president.

I feel like while the electoral college is an issue, it's the gerrymandering that is ultimately the biggest issue.

And in fact probably also contributes to the electoral college issue.

First we need a federal initiative/ referendum system. Because the existing politicians will never vote to limit their own power.

After we have this, we can start with initiatives that set maximum ages, fix the voting systems. Fix Roe. Dismantle the terrible stranglehold the two party system has on getting anything done.

Do all the things that are popular but politicians will never do.

there is absolutely no valid argument to do anything that isn't simply tallying all the votes. because of course that's how it should work

We could start by reconsidering the Reapportionment Act of 1929...