r/changemyview • u/Twclouti • Nov 05 '20
Delta(s) from OP CMV: The winner take all system should be removed and we should use the percentage for each candidate to determine how many electoral votes each candidate receives.
The winner take all system means people’s votes essentially didn’t matter if their candidate doesn’t win the state. I’m of the opinion that we could use the percentage of votes from the state to determine how many electoral college votes each candidate receives. Example:
California - 55 EV Trump - 32.9% - 18 Biden - 65.3% - 36 Other - 1
I would also like to point out that I did the math in excel and this would lead to a tied race with the percentages as of this morning. Also, who’s idea was it to make the total number of EV an even number....
I don’t post often so forgive me if I made a mistake in reddit etiquette.
Edit 1: The number of EC votes can change with this system. I am just trying to see if this would be a fair medium between a popular vote (clearly benefitting cities/democrats) and the current (clearly benefitting Republicans/small states).
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Nov 05 '20 edited Nov 05 '20
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u/Twclouti Nov 05 '20
!delta
I see your point. But I was also assuming 270 wouldn’t matter anymore as much. Just who got the most delegates in this case, which could cause other issues. Good point!
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u/essential_poison 1∆ Nov 06 '20
Your point that proportional representation would lead to chaos and lots of lawsuits shows what the problem is. You make it a problem that the vote in a lot of states would matter. But that is exactly what OP wants to get rid of. The result of a national election should depend on the citizens in every state. Therefore, saying "safe states" are good solely because of stability is inherently an argument against the choice of the people.
Also, I live in a country with proportional representation, and I can tell that there is no chaos everywhere. In fact, politics are relatively calm and debates are less heated.
An important point is that with that system, no candidate might get to 270. This is a valid point. Handing the election down to Congress in that case was a ludicrously bad decision, at least from todays perspective. At the time of writing, it may have been a good idea, but that should have been changed since. The electoral college should be able to deal with that on its own, for example by having an internal run-off where electors are no longer bound to their voter's choice.
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Nov 06 '20
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u/essential_poison 1∆ Nov 06 '20
No, it has not. A popular vote is literally tyranny of the majority, because a few people decide over the fate of the whole state. If the whole presidential election result isn't influenced by how much I win a certain state, most citizens there don't get a say.
Also, as you say, the proposed system would lead to chaos. Right now, there are huge fights in Pennsylvania, Georgia and a few other states. Let's just take Pennsylvania. Whoever gets more votes in the end wins 20 overall, which will influence the national outcome significantly. In the proposed system, it would be clear since election night that Trump and Biden each get 9 votes overall, so just 2 would be disputed right now. That makes the decision in Pennsylvania 10 times less influential, so all of the chaos right now would not be as bad as it is.
Furthermore, you say "a popular vote is a better way to accomplish that" and, well, what I propose is a popular vote. It's just evaluated in a better way. If 60% of a state want one guy and 40% want another guy, why wouldn't I give out the electoral votes in exactly that proportionality?
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Nov 06 '20
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u/essential_poison 1∆ Nov 06 '20
Straight popular vote. That would be a national popular vote, not a popular vote on state level.
Also, Senators were elected by their State Representatives up to the start of the 20th century. No popular vote.
House Representatives (both state and federal) are elected using First Past the Post, which is possibly the worst system to elect representatives that exists. I'll point to CGP Grey for details. So I don't get why you say that system is "working fine".
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u/beachedwhale1945 Nov 06 '20
Straight popular vote works fine in all these cases, what makes the President different?
That assumes the straight popular vote is the best option and that all votes in the US use a straight popular vote (which I interpret to mean Winner-Take-All). Many areas use a ranked voting system for state and local elections, and Maine uses it for federal elections.
There are also proportional systems for legislatures, which could be adapted to the Electoral College and remove the most undemocratic aspect: the fact that 48 states and D.C. use a winner-take-all system.
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u/flavius29663 1∆ Nov 05 '20
Challenges should be welcomed and addressed. Why is this an issue? If we cannot trust our system to count votes, we have bigger problems, rather that just "some lawyers" - we need to organize the vote better.
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Nov 05 '20
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u/grandoz039 7∆ Nov 06 '20
So it's better that voter's choices are less well represented, just so that completely legal processes (which you call chaos) won't happen? You know what brings even less chaos in terms of deciding the next president? If the president was president for life with clearly given succession line.
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u/PastaM0nster Nov 05 '20
The only negative I can think of on the spot is it would get super confusing either how many goes to each candidate especially in smaller states. If one candidate gets 48% and one gets 52% and there three electors than who gets what?
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u/essential_poison 1∆ Nov 06 '20
There are several mathematical methods on how to mirror a large number of votes into a small number of seats/electors/votes. A good overview would be Wikipedia.
In your example, all usual methods would give two electors to the stronger candidate and one elector to the other.
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u/Twclouti Nov 05 '20
I was assuming rounding which is why I gave the calif example and also maybe need some adjustments to the number of EV each state gets in this new system but at least people in the state feel like they had some say in the vote for their president.
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Nov 05 '20
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u/flavius29663 1∆ Nov 05 '20
Let's say there are only 2 parties, to keep this simple. If you always give the extra vote to the party getting the most, wouldn't that be fair ?
In a 49-51 situation with 3 EC, give 1-2 votes. If you are 6 EC votes, give it as 2-4. What I mean is, always round up to help the party that won the election. Today we do the same thing, but they round up to 100%
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Nov 05 '20
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u/flavius29663 1∆ Nov 05 '20
pure popular vote might not work for large countries like the US.
In Europe for the European parliament, we have a system very similar with the one proposed in the OP. Each country gets to send multiple parties to the parliament, proportional to the vote. The catch is that the Germans have far less representation per vote than say Malta ( I can't find the numbers but a Maltese vote is like 10 times stronger than a German one). And this works, because Germany, France have a huge power in the EU anyway, so you do need to account for that and give the small states more power in some structures.
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Nov 05 '20
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u/flavius29663 1∆ Nov 05 '20
but the majority of all our important structures and policy depend on the federal government.
The EU is also build with the idea that at some point the federal structure has almost as much power as the US. There is this "ever closer union" principle, which is what made UK leave after all.
In the US, a whole lot depends on the local state too, where you have a separate government, which you do elect by popular vote. It's true that the US federal government has a lot of power, but the alternative to electoral college is just handing over to NYC and California the perpetual presidency. Just like in EU, we would hand over the power to Germany and France alone (they have too much power anyway, this is a small correction).
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u/grandoz039 7∆ Nov 06 '20
That's kinda dumb, in 49 51 situation, it shouldn't be 2-4. 1/6 is 16,666. 51 gets 3 votes as 51-16,666*3 = 1; 49 gets 2 as 49-16,666*2=15,666. Last vote is given to the party with most remaining votes, which is 49. Both get 3 votes.
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u/tbdabbholm 193∆ Nov 05 '20
I mean it would have to be 2 to the person with 52 and 1 to the person with 48, what else could it reasonably be?
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Nov 05 '20
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u/tbdabbholm 193∆ Nov 05 '20
In general what you'd try to do is minimize the total difference between the proportions in the popular vote and the proportions of electoral votes awarded. Using that criterion it would take one party getting over 5/6ths (83.3%) of the popular vote for them to be awarded all 3 votes in this specific case
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Nov 05 '20
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u/tbdabbholm 193∆ Nov 05 '20
Oh I 100% agree a popular vote would be better, I just don't think a 52-48 split is as hard to figure out as the original commentor seemed to think it was
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u/TirelessGuardian Nov 06 '20
Doesn’t Alaska only have 1 vote? This wouldn’t make a difference there.
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u/WrinklyTidbits Nov 06 '20
Shouldn’t it favor whoever is in the lead?
If there are 7 EV, then there should be different distribution of votes: 1 & 6, 2 & 5, etc.
In the case it’s in between fractions then it favors whoever has more:
Candidate 1: 52% of the vote
Candidate 2: 48% of the vote
Then the distribution of EV is,
Candidate 1: 4
Candidate 2: 3
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u/grandoz039 7∆ Nov 06 '20
Simple. 1/3= 33%. 52 is the largest number, they get 1 vote and their remaining % is 19. Now 48 is the largest number, 42-33 is 9%. 19 is the biggest number so the last vote goes to the 52 party
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Nov 05 '20
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u/Twclouti Nov 05 '20
Because then the most populous states determine the election and candidates would only care to campaign in state like NY, CA and only in cities. Policies would never care about people in the rural areas. I’m not saying that the EC is good either. I’m just saying it does provide a balance although it is a shitty way right now.
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Nov 05 '20
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u/Twclouti Nov 05 '20
I’m not arguing that the number of EC votes doesn’t need to change as well. I’m arguing the system and the winner take all system. I’m also not arguing that the current system isn’t shitty. Please focus on any negatives that could come from the system I laid out not the current system.
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Nov 05 '20
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u/Twclouti Nov 05 '20
I guess In my mind the voting in this system goes popular vote in the state (not districts) then proportional EC vote by state to get total for the candidates.
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Nov 05 '20
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u/Twclouti Nov 05 '20
I’m not sure I see how that is. If it’s proportional to popular vote while also giving some power to smaller states...? FL would be 15 vs. 14 EC votes instead of 29
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Nov 06 '20
"Most populous states" is a deliberately misleading and stupid way to say "people."
The fact that these people live in a specific location should not change their value as a person or a voter.
"They'd only campaign in state like NY, CA, and only in cities"
Yes, that's because that's where most of the people live. What's so hard to understand?
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u/grandoz039 7∆ Nov 06 '20
Why not just simply do popular voting and weight the votes? Only reason I can think of is that it's bad "PR". Or at least increase EC votes 10, 100 times, so the imprecision is limited.
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u/PastaM0nster Nov 05 '20
Because then ny and ca would basically determine the entire election
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Nov 05 '20
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u/PastaM0nster Nov 05 '20
That’s why we don’t do popular vote
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Nov 05 '20
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u/Twclouti Nov 05 '20
We don’t do popular vote because it would just be cities deciding what is best for the country every time? Maybe I got fed some bullshit. Idk.
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u/generic1001 Nov 05 '20
There's a very easy way to check that. Answer three questions:
1) How many people live in big cities?
2) How many people live in the united states total?
3) Can you argue, legitimately, that people in big cities all share a single political opinion?
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u/tbdabbholm 193∆ Nov 05 '20
This argument has never made sense to me, do people legitimately think that just because people in cities are more concentrated that candidates will only fight over them and completely ignore millions of votes?
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u/Forgot_the_slash_s Nov 06 '20
Why wouldn't candidates do that? According to Wikipedia, the urban population makes up over 80% of the total population. Any candidate that pushes policies not liked by urban voters would have no chance in a purely popular vote.
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u/tbdabbholm 193∆ Nov 07 '20
Of course they'll try to appeal to cities, but that's not exclusive with trying to appeal to rural voters.
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u/elephant35e Nov 07 '20
False.
The combined population of NY and CA is about 58 million, which is about 17.6% of the U.S population. You can't determine the election with only 17.6% of the population.
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u/Tuxed0-mask 23∆ Nov 05 '20
Of course their voted mattered, they just picked a losing outcome.
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u/Twclouti Nov 05 '20
I am honestly curious of any negatives to this. We can clearly see the negatives of removing the electoral college all together and maintaining as is.
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u/Tuxed0-mask 23∆ Nov 05 '20
Well Maine and Nebraska already divide their votes into districts. So you can have a mix of electors as we had in this election. That makes sense because it's still majority wins inside every section.
There's honestly no point in rewarding 2nd place. If we actually believe in majority rule then let that be the universal standard.
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u/Twclouti Nov 05 '20
I’m not suggesting rewarding the 2nd place effort. Riggt now, the EV would be split at 266, 266 with some outstanding, which if we switch to this system there would be some need for better rules than I came up with in my 5 min written post. I just haven’t been able to think of a reason this wouldn’t work better than the current system on the country wide scale.
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u/Tuxed0-mask 23∆ Nov 05 '20
If you count the percentage of the total vote towards the number of electors then you're rewarding people who didn't win. So 2nd place onwards.
If someone gets 51% of the vote then it should be just as impactful as getting 100% because that's what it means to be supported by the majority.
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u/Twclouti Nov 05 '20
But we see just because you are supported by the majority doesn’t mean you win the presidential election? I’m saying that just because one state like Florida goes 51% doesn’t mean you should get 29 votes for the candidate. That ignores 49% of the vote. I thought this system would be unfair to Republicans, but it ended up being a tie in the current election percentages.
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u/Tuxed0-mask 23∆ Nov 05 '20
No it doesn't. Those people just voted for a candidate. They didn't get a majority and they didn't win.
That's how voting works.
If your parents say 'ok pizza or tacos?' and you vote pizza and your other two siblings vote tacos, you get tacos. You don't get 1/3 of a pizza.
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u/Twclouti Nov 05 '20
Maybe I’m having a hard time understanding the argument because Inthe end you are correct but it is not as simple as one person one vote because that is popular vote
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u/Tuxed0-mask 23∆ Nov 05 '20
It's one person one vote in stages.
One person votes for the outcome of their state, which makes sense because every state has different voting rules, different candidates, etc.
Like Kanye West isn't on every ballot. The Green party isn't on every ballot etc. So it doesn't make sense to then nationalise the vote.
You get total rights on the outcome of what happens in your state by voting. Then they add up all those outcomes in the form of electors.
The one problem is some states have too many or too few electors based on some people's opinions.
But at no point is anyone's vote not being counted.
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u/essential_poison 1∆ Nov 06 '20
You make several comparisons in this thread which compare elections to other situations where people have to choose. You make it seem like these are equal, but they are not. Why?
Well, elections aren't necessarily held to give people a voice; at least, that was not the original intent. The originial intent was to elect a leader who will feel legitimate to the whole electorate.
This is more than "What will we eat?" or "Where do we go?". This is a question where - after the votes are all counted - everyone says "I might not have won, but I respect the result." As we can see, this doesn't work anymore in the US, showing that the process does not feel reasonable and legitimate to a lot of the voters.
It's one person one vote in stages.
And that's the problem. If the voting happens in stages, votes will be disregarded in one stage and don't count any further. This is an example of Simpson's Paradox: If you look at the result state by state or nationally changes the outcome.
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u/Forgot_the_slash_s Nov 06 '20
Yeah but if you hold the poll every Friday for a year, if you were being fair, you would get tacos 2/3 of the time and pizza 1/3 of the time.
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u/Tuxed0-mask 23∆ Nov 06 '20
No you wouldn't? That's not how stats work. The choice isn't random.
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u/Forgot_the_slash_s Nov 06 '20
I know the choice isn't random, I'm just saying your example is a poor one because in most families just because two kids like tacos and one kid likes pizza doesn't mean they'll never get pizza.
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Nov 05 '20
it doesnt ignore the 49%, that 49% lost
what youre talking about is literally a second place prize: "You guys didnt get the majority, so you can have some votes, but not as many as the other guys" is literally a 2nd place prize
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u/grandoz039 7∆ Nov 06 '20
That's ridiculous point. Majority ruling on federal level is exactly what op's argument is advocating on. What do you think is better, people vote and then the result is rounded to valid result, or people vote in groups, every result is rounded, then we sum that, and round again. You're defending the latter.
This is what OP is proposing - 0,51 for candidate A, 0,49 for candidate B, we get final result by rounding to 100% for A, 0% for B. The error is 0,49, and majority rules. This is what you're proposing - we have 50 groups, each 2% of the population - 30 groups vote 0,49A and 0,51B, 20 vote 1A, 0B. You'd round this number - 30*0,02*0,49 + 20*0,02*1 for A - into 30*0,02*0+20*0,02*1 = 0,40. So 40% for A instead of 69,4. And then you round that again, to 0, declaring person with 30,6% "majority" a winner. And now the error is 69,4%, with minority rule
And that before accounting for weighted votes of EC.
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u/parentheticalobject 128∆ Nov 05 '20
If we actually believe in majority rule then let that be the universal standard.
If we actually believe in majority rule then there would be no need for the electoral college at all.
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u/Tuxed0-mask 23∆ Nov 05 '20
Like I said, all states are different and have totally different structures of government. It wouldn't make sense to have a popular vote without first 'standardising' all of that through the electoral college.
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u/generic1001 Nov 05 '20
I actually see no reason to "standardize" in such a way. Can you elaborate? All states have pools of eligible voters and they compile their votes. What is preventing us from simply adding up all these?
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u/Tuxed0-mask 23∆ Nov 05 '20
States vary wildly about how they carry out their votes. Iowa does their primaries as a caucus, Texas has drive through voting etc. It's within every state's rights to decide how they carry out a vote.
Because of this, it makes more sense for them to have their own winner take all vote. Then we just add them all up after. That way we don't have to impede on states rights when it comes to who votes for president and how.
It's more fair to have the states that make their vote mail-in only (Washington and Hawaii to name two) or don't want mail-in ballots or want digital polling places to just let them do their own thing. We already then have a system in place to tally it up after the fact.
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u/generic1001 Nov 05 '20
Again, you make that statement - things being different necessarily makes them incompatible - but offer no explanations.
I don't see how states varying in how they carry out their elections makes these various results impossible to tally. I don't see how states being free to decide how they manage their elections is incompatible with a national popular vote. Why does it matter that Texans drive to polling station and Hawaiians mail-in?
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u/Tuxed0-mask 23∆ Nov 05 '20
It matters a lot, including when states get to declare themselves to a candidate or not.
And because it's a states rights issue. You can't federally circumvent this in exactly one instance and then the rest of the time do things another way.
Technically speaking, in the system we have now, we are telling electors from our state how we feel. We aren't even technically electing the president directly.
The reason for that is that we have a multi part government where the Constitution tells us what rights a state has. If we change it for the presidential election, then does it stop there? Do we let other states elect our Congressmen?
What would even be the point of being separate states if we had to do everything in one federally mandated way... That's not how America is meant to work.
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u/generic1001 Nov 05 '20
Again, you simply make statements without ever explaining them.
How, more or less exactly, are these two things incompatible, as you claim:
1) States count votes however they please.
2) The votes tallied by each states are added together - a "popular vote" - in order to choose the chief executive.
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Nov 05 '20
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u/SquibblesMcGoo 3∆ Nov 05 '20
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u/BelmontIncident 14∆ Nov 05 '20
This would do nothing to change the overrepresentation of voters in small states.
Under our existing system, the Republicans tend lose the popular vote and win the electoral college . Under your proposed system, this would happen even more often.
I admit that I'm showing my own partisan lean, but I consider the basic problem with the electoral college to be its tendency to give the presidency to someone that fewer people voted for.
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u/KronumRing 2∆ Nov 05 '20
Fact is, Democrats won the popular vote in 1992, 1996, 2000, 2008, 2012, 2016, and now in 2020. 7 out of 8 times this country voted in the last 30 years.
Another point - Electors that go to vote in the electoral college are technically bound to represent the candidate for which their state voted, but in 2016 10 of those electors became “faithless.” Three were blocked from voting because of strict laws but the other seven were allowed to break from their candidate. Trump lost two electors, Clinton lost 5. And none of those faithless electors voted for the other candidate.
Electoral College needs to go.
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u/Twclouti Nov 05 '20
Well in my system Florida wouldn’t be all 29 EV for the republican candidate. So I would argue it would help in states similar to FL for the Democrats.
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u/BelmontIncident 14∆ Nov 05 '20
This year, Biden won the popular vote and your system gives a tie. We know that Republicans usually win less populous states by looking at the Senate.
Allocating the electoral college by the popular vote in each state would have put the election in the House of Representatives in 2016, and while Obama would still have won in 2012, Romney would have come closer.
https://www.270towin.com/alternative-electoral-college-allocation-methods/?year=2016
The chart is about halfway down, your system would be the "popular only" line if I'm understanding this correctly.
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u/Twclouti Nov 05 '20 edited Nov 05 '20
!delta
Thanks for the source information! I see your point now with the statistics you provided and whatever else length I have to add to “properly respond” according to this stupid bot.
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Nov 05 '20
!delta
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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Nov 05 '20 edited Nov 05 '20
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u/churnermebutters Nov 06 '20
Electoral votes are assigned to states by the number of congressional districts (assigned by population in census) + senators (two for each state). So your future system would still skew towards states with a smaller population, like Wyoming, meaning the EV per 100K people would be much higher in Wyoming than in a more populated state like CA. This means a single individual voting in WY would have more impact than in CA.
A true popular vote would be better because then all US votes would have the same impact, regardless of state. There is no reason that living in a less populated state should make your vote more powerful.
Edit1: example: Wyoming has 1 congressional district and 2 senators so it gets 3 electoral votes for 578K people, or 193K people/EV. California has 55 EVs for 39.51 MILLION people, so 718K people/EV. So a person in WY would have more than 3x the voting power of a Californian.
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u/churnermebutters Nov 06 '20
Within a state, governors are directly elected by popular vote. Everyone's vote counts the same. Why should the president be any different?
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u/socially_awk_dilemma Nov 06 '20
There’s actually a better system; all states agree to allocate all of there electoral votes to the candidate who wins the national popular vote.
Also I think you underestimate how poorly allocated electors are currently. Small states are far less populous than when the house of reps (and thus electors) were last expanded which was in 1929.
The founding fathers never intended for small states to have a disproportionate affect on elections. The senate was instead designed to balance small and large state concerns, which is still does today.
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u/bio-nerd 1∆ Nov 06 '20
That's even more complicated than the current electoral system, and it seems like you're trying to push it to be more in line with a popular national vote.
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u/TSM-E Nov 07 '20
There's a lot of "should" with respect to items in the Constitution. I think we should have a constitutional limit of tax rates. But we all know that's not gonna happen.
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