SHould the Electoral College be abolished?

[#TheShadowyAbyss]

Yes, it makes absolutely no sense why a popular vote winner loses the election because of the electoral vote,

[I’m not Stu]

Yes. The popular vote is the number of all the voters, which is the most important. Contrary to popular belief, the winner is not determined only by large liberal cities. The popular vote takes everyone into account. If Donald Trump would have won Texas (a solid red state) by the same margin as Mitt Romney, Trump would have won the popular vote.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Of course. Even if you ignore the bizarre method for allocating electors that strips votes away from more populous states in order to give extra votes to small states, the fact of the matter is that the electoral college, as presently constituted, allows 538 faceless party hacks to override the verdict of their constituents and elect any random 35-year-old natural born citizen they choose to the most powerful office in the country. This is a horrible, horrible system and it needs to be scrapped immediately.

[Mr. Reactionary]

No. I like that you have to win a lot of people in a lot of different places instead of just a lot of people in a few walled off cities. But that's just me.

[Cashew]

Yes. There has yet to be any explanation as to why the votes of rural people should matter more, and its not even effective at that!

[Mr. Smith]

Yes.

You shouldn't be able to win by bouncing off a few targeted people in Whocaresville, Some Rural State That Happens To Be Agreeable This Time.


A campaign should be forced to go everywhere to make their case.

No. I like that you have to win a lot of people in a lot of different places instead of just a lot of people in a few walled off cities. But that's just me.

Clearly.

[Blue3]

Yes, but implement IRV at the same time.

[Intell]

No. I like that you have to win a lot of people in a lot of different places instead of just a lot of people in a few walled off cities. But that's just me.

1 person 1 vote, but that's me. I'm also sure, that people always go to wyoming in a presidential election.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Hell no. There, in my opinion, is no good, or not enough good,  reasons to "fix" it.

[Sir Mohamed]

Yes. But I would also be in favor to abolish it had Hillary won the EC but not the PV. Every vote has to count. The president should be elected like governors, senators or mayors.

[SWE]

No. I like that you have to win a lot of people in a lot of different places instead of just a lot of people in a few walled off cities. But that's just me.

So, you'd like a system that doesn't have the electoral college, but don't support getting rid of it? I don't follow you.

[DavidB.]

So, you'd like a system that doesn't have the electoral college, but don't support getting rid of it? I don't follow you.

ow the edge

No, the Electoral College is good.

[SWE]

So, you'd like a system that doesn't have the electoral college, but don't support getting rid of it? I don't follow you.

ow the edge

No, the Electoral College is good.

My objection to a system where a candidate can ignore most of the country and focus on just a few cities is too edgy for you? In blackraisin's case, I can chalk that up to him simply not being particularly bright, but this is pretty surprising, coming from you.

[RINO Tom]

Yes.

You shouldn't be able to win by bouncing off a few targeted people in Whocaresville, Some Rural State That Happens To Be Agreeable This Time.


A campaign should be forced to go everywhere to make their case.

No. I like that you have to win a lot of people in a lot of different places instead of just a lot of people in a few walled off cities. But that's just me.

Clearly.

Since I've been here, you've gone from being this socially conservative populist with his heart in the right place to no different than Lief, all in the name of HATING your opposition.  Sad, to say the least.

Happy Thanksgiving.  Electoral College was designed exactly because the Founders didn't want our candidates taking the disgusting attitude you just conveyed toward "Who Caresville."

[SWE]

Yes.

You shouldn't be able to win by bouncing off a few targeted people in Whocaresville, Some Rural State That Happens To Be Agreeable This Time.


A campaign should be forced to go everywhere to make their case.

No. I like that you have to win a lot of people in a lot of different places instead of just a lot of people in a few walled off cities. But that's just me.

Clearly.

Since I've been here, you've gone from being this socially conservative populist with his heart in the right place to no different than Lief, all in the name of HATING your opposition.  Sad, to say the least.

Happy Thanksgiving.  Electoral College was designed exactly because the Founders didn't want our candidates taking the disgusting attitude you just conveyed toward "Who Caresville."

If the founders had their way, most of the citizens of" Who Caresville" wouldn't be enfranchised at all.

[Mr. Reactionary]

In blackraisin's case, I can chalk that up to him simply not being particularly bright, but this is pretty surprising, coming from you.

lol.

[ElectionsGuy]

I'm going to discuss some counter-arguments to pro-EC arguments I see constantly

1) "It'll ignore most of the country". Our EC system already ignores most of the country, since only swing states decide the election. In 2016, 134 electoral votes were decided by less than a 5% margin. That's 25% of the country, the other 75% were clear and didn't matter to the outcome.

2) "People in rural areas will get ignored". So let's look at elections at the state level where no EC system equivalent is present. Do people in rural counties get ignored? Or rather, do people who don't campaign in rural areas get slammed in those areas come election time? I think it's the latter. Going back to #1, people in urban and rural areas alike get ignored in safe red and blue states. Yet there's this mythical idea that once we get rid of the electoral college, politicians will only care about the big cities.

3) This is more my own counter-point, but do we need a system like this at a state level? Do we need to assign a certain number of votes to counties, winner take all, and then have the election be determined by how a few counties vote? In Nevada, whoever wins Clark County would be the winner of the state, even if the person who didn't win the county won overall something like 52-45. We would NEVER accept anything like that, so why do we do it at a national level? Is it because the country is so big? I mean California is bigger now than the nation was at one time, so I don't see that point.

There's many more points I could use, If someone wants I could spew them out. Really I just don't understand the defense of this system. From a democratic standpoint, I don't know how its acceptable that the person who got more votes in a national election isn't elected. People just have a gut reaction against change or they were happy with the results this time around

[Tender Branson]

Yes, I have always been in favour of the national popular vote.

[Mr. Smith]

Yes.

You shouldn't be able to win by bouncing off a few targeted people in Whocaresville, Some Rural State That Happens To Be Agreeable This Time.


A campaign should be forced to go everywhere to make their case.

No. I like that you have to win a lot of people in a lot of different places instead of just a lot of people in a few walled off cities. But that's just me.

Clearly.

Since I've been here, you've gone from being this socially conservative populist with his heart in the right place to no different than Lief, all in the name of HATING your opposition.  Sad, to say the least.

Happy Thanksgiving.  Electoral College was designed exactly because the Founders didn't want our candidates taking the disgusting attitude you just conveyed toward "Who Caresville."

Oh, would you have been happier if I said "You shouldn't be able to win off a few Clusterf&*ked, Filthy Cities with X Percentage of Y Demographics with a bunch of identity pandering ploys"? Because that is also true too.

The point still stands that candidates end up more and more encouraged to write off areas and focus entirely on "battlegrounds".

Also, you might call my attitude disgusting, but I think using people in those rural areas for mere Electoral candy and then ditching them is far worse.

Finally, since not all rural areas work out the same, but pretty much all of them are off worse than the cities, the EC forces a lot of one or two specific kind of rural areas to get overemphasized at literally everyone else's expense.


If trump really was supposed to champion blue collar towns, he should've been forced into places like Eastern Oregon, Inland NorCal, much of New Mexico, etc.

If Clinton were about minority majorities, she should've been forced to at least try Northern Alaska, dip into The Back Belt of the Deep South, visit some reservations in the Dakotas, etc.

[nolesfan2011]

No. I like that you have to win a lot of people in a lot of different places instead of just a lot of people in a few walled off cities. But that's just me.

This, plus I like not having a national recount

[The world will shine with light in our nightmare]

No. I like that you have to win a lot of people in a lot of different places instead of just a lot of people in a few walled off cities. But that's just me.

This. CA and NY alone shouldn't decide who is president.

This is such a ridiculous argument.

It's been said a thousand times here before, but cities do not vote, people do.  New York and California get more votes because more people live in those states.  They are just as affected by the president's policies as are people in Ohio and Wisconsin and Florida and Vermont and Wyoming.  The use of the electoral college was justified back when the country became a republic because no other country operated by majority rule, the Founders were afraid of letting the uneducated and non-influential deciding who serves in the government, and the powers of the president were, for better or worse, minuscule compared to how they are now, which is the product of generations of administrations and cultural changes, as well as increased global influence and communication between different parts of the country and the world.

Since it didn't really matter who the president was, it made more sense to give the individual states more deciding power since the local governments already had considerable influence over the people living in their domains.  Since times have changed, the electoral college is an outdated system and it only exists now as a way for the parties to get into power by appealing to twelve or thirteen states which maybe make up a third or so of the people living in the country.  (So obviously it won't be going away any time soon, because the Dems want to keep (or rebuild) their mythical blue freiwal and the Pubs want to continue getting elected without having the confidence of a majority of the people they govern.)

I've already said that people would probably be a lot happier if the US just split into two or even three (or, hell, even four) separate countries so that we wouldn't have to keep a system where two polar opposite ideologies swap power every two years and force half the country to unwillingly cater to their whim, but there's no basis for the EC existing in our current time.

[Santander]

Keep the Electoral College, abolish the voters.

[ElectionsGuy]

No. I like that you have to win a lot of people in a lot of different places instead of just a lot of people in a few walled off cities. But that's just me.

This. CA and NY alone shouldn't decide who is president.

California alone decided the popular vote in this election. What you can do is try and persuade people in California, or anywhere in the country really, since everybody's vote will matter equally. Unlike in the electoral college, where a vote in Wyoming counts more than three times more per electoral vote than one in New York. On top of that, it wouldn't matter under our system that you could get California from 60-40 to 55-45, because all 55 electoral votes would still belong to Democrats. Under popular vote, that could be the difference of the election.

Everybody would decide who's president, every vote would be equal. California and New York are big states, if Republicans won the popular vote then it would make just as much sense to say "Texas alone shouldn't decide who is president". Really, its more like a certain margin of voters which happens to be a margin in one particular state decided who was president. And I don't see what's wrong with that.

[GoTfan]

No. I like that you have to win a lot of people in a lot of different places instead of just a lot of people in a few walled off cities. But that's just me.

This. CA and NY alone shouldn't decide who is president.

Except that this has happened 4 times in American history now, including twice in twenty years; a failure rate of 7%. That is unacceptable.

Going by the population, it's one every 574,000 people who should have one vote, but larger states, such as Texas, Ohio, New York and California have to give the votes they should be entitled to. Instead, because of the mandatory three votes per state, it screws everything up.

And if the goal was to protect smaller states, it's failing spectacularly. I don't recall many visits to Idaho, Wyoming or Montana this election, while states like Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan got more visits. This is a fundamentally flawed system, as a person in a small state has more influence over where their EVs go.

Currently, the Presidency can be won with just 22% of the popular vote. And as for the worries about cities, even if you win every vote in the top 100 most populated cities, then that still adds up to less than 20% of the vote.

[Enduro]

I believe so, yes.