[Terrario]

California has 55 votes, Montana and DC only have 3 each. Is that not enough influence? Cali and NY make up almost a third of the electoral votes.

Is it really fair for these two places to control and dictate the policies of a country spread as far and wide as the US? Hasnt the blue/red divide, not only in the country but within states themselves show that the desires and attitudes of people are heavily influenced by their geographic location? Isn’t a good thing there’s a political system (the electorates) that accounts for this?

[yongjik]

> California has 55 votes, Montana and DC only have 3 each. Is that not enough influence?

No, California and DC always vote Democrat, and Montana always vote Republican. Individual Republicans in CA and Democrats in MT have zero voice - their voices literally don't matter. In fact, even Democrats in CA and Republicans in MT have zero voice - because these states' outcome is predetermined, no presidential candidate has any incentive to promise anything for them.

Not convinced? Just look at the map for 2016 presidential campaign - https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/campaign-events-2016

No places should control an election. People should.

[rndgermandude]

>No, California [...] always vote Democrat

Except 1988, 1984, 1980, 1976, 1972 and so on. Aka in my lifetime (yes, I am old).

Georgia always votes Republican, except in this election (probably) or when Carter is running.

An acquaintance who hails from Indiana recently told me Indiana always votes for the Republican candidate, and was surprised to find out Obama took Indiana in 2008.

The Rust belt is deeply blue, except in 2016 when it was more purple with a tint of red.

Kennedy defeated Nixon in Georgia and New York and Nevada, but not in California. (And New York had more electoral votes than California until 1972).

The South used to be Democrat. The West used to be Republican. Except again when Johnson, Nixon, Reagan took essentially the entire nation.

Another example: Support for gay marriage between 1996 and now went from 68% opposition to 67% support. Proposition 8 in 2008 banning gay marriage in California was accepted by Californian voters just 12 years ago with 52% voting against gay marriage, and only 5 years later in 2013 that opposition had dwindled to 34%.

Even parties change: Republicans went from the party of Lincoln to the party of Trump with many stops in between. Demoncrats went from the party in favor of slavery and segregation to the party that claims to be all about racial/gender/sexuality justice.

Demographic and ideological shifts do occur regularly, often at a sluggish speed but sometimes quite quickly.

My point: don't say always.

(That isn't too say that I am in support of the electoral collage or the first-past-the-post voting system resulting in a defacto two party oligarchy; both are bad in my humble opinion).

[nl]

Always red Texas is another example.

While it didn't flip this year it is increasingly competitive.

[acdha]

> California and DC always vote Democrat, and Montana always vote Republican. Individual Republicans in CA and Democrats in MT have zero voice - their voices literally don't matter.

This is only true if you hyper focus on the President (and ignore Bush/Reagan/Ford/Nixon in CA, Clinton in MT, etc.) - those voices are heard in the House and Senate, which have key impacts on what a President can actually do.

It’s also omitting the question of why those states vote the way they do. California now votes for Democrats not because the Republican Party forgot to campaign but because they pushed Proposition 187 through and convinced multiple generations of Latino voters that the GOP hated them. It is very easy to imagine, say, a world where George W. Bush put the state back in play after being successful in the effort to get the party shift away from the anti-Latino positions - call it the Trump opposite-world. That’s a big incentive but not enough due to where those states have considerable voice: the primaries. California might not be in question for the general but it definitely delivers a lot of votes for the primary winner, which affects their positions.

[zerocrates]

This discussion is about the Electoral College, of course it's focused on the President.

[acdha]

Yes, my point was that it wasn’t true that voices in certain states are ignored even if they don’t directly produce EC votes. A Republican Presidential candidate isn’t going to ignore California and New York voters who still elect members of Congress they’ll need to work with, donate the increasingly large amounts of money needed to run, and whose presence in the primaries affects who’s going to make it far enough to care about the EC.

[Terrario]

Your argument doesn’t follow. It sounds like you have a problem with the winner takes all system in us elections and not the electorate. Conservative voices in Cali and Liberal voices in Texas would be more relevant in a proportional system and not a winner takes all. These would be particularly relevant for states with split populations.

> No places should control an election. People should.

You say this but you dont mean it. In practice, removing the electoral college today would guarantee that certain places (coastal/densely urbanized states) control the election.

Should a Taiwan be able to dictate the laws and policies of a Tibet just because they have a larger population? The reason there are borders (in theory at least) is for different communities with different interest to have certain autonomy to choose their own destinies. It was part of the “deal” when the union was made because of this. If you want to remove the electoral college, then there should be a painless and democratic way for states to secede.

There are very few countries as large as the US, this circumstance is not shared by many countries. We should have a proportional system and then there wouldn’t be much of a need for an electorate AFAIK.

[yongjik]

> removing the electoral college today would guarantee that certain places (coastal/densely urbanized states) control the election.

You're still arguing in terms of places. Coastal urbanized states will "control the election" only in the sense that they have the majority of population and their average preference will have greater influence than the rest, when you average the whole area. In other words, they will control the election in the same way "people living to the south of Minneapolis" or "people who ordered Chinese food in the past year" will control the election.

[lmkg]

A 'place' is not a meaningful unit of civic participation.

From one direction, California and New York are populous. California has 4 individual cities that each have a higher population than Wyoming. Is it unfair that California's influence is larger than Wyoming?

From another direction, is California a single place? The Electoral College lumps together San Francisco, San Diego, and Sacramento into a single unit. Those are miles apart from each other culturally, economically, and demographically (and for that matter, they're hundreds of miles from each other geographically). The Central Valley's relative lack of influence at the national level is because they're tacked on to the same 'place' as Los Angeles and San Francisco, which is an arbitrary division.

The House of Representative does a much better (but not perfect) job of geographic representation, because the geographic units are more proportional, and are continuously re-drawn with community cohesiveness as an influencing factor. Much of the skew of the Electoral College comes from the +2 votes per state, when state lines are fixed for centuries.