[Nitramp]

Without commenting on the other issues, but something that struck me as very odd living in the USA, was how people in California appeared fully disenfranchised during presidential elections.

Yes, as a Californian you can vote, but your vote is near guaranteed to have no effect, and as a result, neither of the sides cares to address your interests, solicit your opinion, advertise for your vote.

It struck me as really bizarre.

[terr-dav]

This is true for the vast majority of states, and the vast majority of people's interests. The political systems in this country have been shaped by -- and frankly, designed by -- by wealthy interests to make the US an oligarchy with various performances of democratic representation.

[yywwbbn]

I’m not sure that’s the reason why it’s only worth campaigning in Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona and some other states during presidential elections.

Also it is the system that was designed over 100-200 years ago. The problem is the lack of meaningful reform because the people in power are there only because of the current system.

That’s the reason why is it so hard to change electoral system without some external/internal shock. And “unfortunately” US has been way too stable politically during the 20th century compared to most other countries.

[masklinn]

> Without commenting on the other issues, but something that struck me as very odd living in the USA, was how people in California appeared fully disenfranchised during presidential elections.

That's the case of every state which is away enough from swing. Only "purple" states[0] matter during presidential elections.

Then again, swing states only get pandered to for a few months every 4 years.

[0] and Maine and Nebraska which use district voting, but at 4 and 5 electors they're to small to really matter

[thewebcount]

This is the exact opposite of my experience. It's the only place where my elected officials were actually engaged. I received regular updates from my representatives without even asking for them. They just mailed all of their constituents flyers explaining the current issues and how it affects the community. I've lived in 5 different states and never saw anything like this in any of them except California. Go figure.

[inetknght]

> I've lived in 5 different states and never saw anything like this in any of them except California.

I live in Texas, around Houston. Here we certainly do have representatives (but not members of the Senate) who send mail to constituents with information. Our Senators send emails once in a while, if you sign up for them.

But good luck ever figuring out the real information from the spam and ~~malicious dis~~incorrect information and opinions.

[hollerith]

You missed the word "presidential".

[gruez]

>Yes, as a Californian you can vote, but your vote is near guaranteed to have no effect, and as a result, neither of the sides cares to address your interests, solicit your opinion, advertise for your vote.

Isn't that partly their fault? If you're always going to vote for one party regardless of what they or the other party does, of course neither party is going to bother catering to you. It's kind of like declaring that you will always buy apple products, then complaining that apple doesn't address your grievances.

[bigfudge]

That doesn’t follow. A similar proportion of electors in swing and non swing states could have fixed voting patterns. The only difference in California is that the proportion of fixed electors for each party is further from 50%. That is, it might be the case that only 10% of electors in any state are ever prepared to change their mind, but the ones in Ohio get more say than the ones in Cali.

[joenot443]

I think it makes perfect sense. Presumably, if one made the declaration (as many have) that for the rest of their life they’ll always and only vote Democrat, it wouldn’t be in the party’s best interest to cater to that voter’s preference, since that vote is already secured. Much better politics to focus their campaigning and policies on the more marginal voters who are undecided or may not vote at all.

I’ve heard Americans lament about this exact concept and coming from Canada I don’t know what the solution. Sometimes I think Ross Perot was the country’s last shot at anything but the present status quo.

[cpurdy]

California has already passed the National Popular Vote bill. https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/written-explanation

Republican controlled states don't want people's votes to count, so none of them have passed the bill.

[yellowapple]

In other words: California has promised to disenfranchise its own voters even more than is already the case. I can already see this backfiring spectacularly with a solidly-blue state like California being on the hook to put its electors toward a Republican popular vote winner.

[cpurdy]

That's a weird way to look at it.

The many states that have agreed to this (have passed the bill) have simply accepted that the votes of the people is worth more than the feelings of the billionaires who have sponsored the Republican gerrymandering movement.

Right now, effectively, the land votes, and the people's vote is often ignored. Wisconsin is a good example, where the Republicans keep losing the vote, but yet with less than 50% of the vote, they somehow have a super-majority in the legislature.

[yellowapple]

> The many states that have agreed to this (have passed the bill) have simply accepted that the votes of the people is worth more than the feelings of the billionaires who have sponsored the Republican gerrymandering movement.

More like that the votes of people outside their state matter more than the votes of their own people. Nothing weird about that being recognized as the disenfranchisement that it is.

> Wisconsin is a good example, where the Republicans keep losing the vote, but yet with less than 50% of the vote, they somehow have a super-majority in the legislature.

The Electoral College - and this compact of states pertaining to it - has precisely zero impact on any legislative branch, federal or state. It solely pertains to presidential elections (and in turn the rest of the Executive Branch).

The solution to the problem you describe would be to address gerrymandering and other instances of geographic electoral manipulation.

[brewdad]

It's not weird when it reflects the reality of the situation. It's the same reason we say voting third party is throwing your vote away. It's important to have more voices heard but in our first past the post system, voting for a candidate who can't get anywhere close to a third of the votes simply doesn't matter.

I haven't read the bill but if certain states are committing themselves to popular distribution of their electoral votes while the red states stick to all or nothing, the reality is that 40% of CA's electoral votes go red and blue candidates don't have a chance at winning.

[matthewdgreen]

The bill only applies when states representing 270 electoral votes adopt it. Since 270 votes determine the winner of the EC, it doesn’t matter at all what the remaining states do. The states that sign on would be required to put their votes towards whichever candidate wins the nationwide popular vote, effectively ending the electoral college in all but name. There’s not really much to criticize here if you believe that electing presidents by popular vote is a good idea.

[thalassophobia]

If I'm not mistaken, the bill only goes in effect when the states that have signed it start making up the majority of the electoral college.

[drdec]

Yes, it's hard to imagine that actually being executed without a ton of lawsuits. And you think people didn't accept the results of the last election, you haven't seen anything...

[ledauphin]

maybe, but according to the same Constitution that creates the existing system, this should be perfectly legal. Ultimately each state gets to send Electors for the President on its own terms.

[matthewdgreen]

However: several Supreme Court justices have signed on to the “independent state legislature” theory, a radical and unsupported interpretation which holds that state legislatures can’t be restricted in how they pick electors (even by their own laws and constitution.) I assume that if states actually adopted the NPV act, the court would instantly bypass it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_state_legislatur...

[starkd]

Not the point of this thread. Popular vote has nothing to do with how responsive or attentive a government is to voter's interests. You vote for a candidate as a whole, but there are likely still issues you disagree with. Voters' interests are largely unaddressed or ignored altogether.

[dragonwriter]

> Not the point of this thread. Popular vote has nothing to do with how responsive or attentive a government is to voter's interests

Actually, it does: more specifically, degree of proportionality does, and antimajoritarianism (systems in which an absolute majority-preferred option can lose to a minority option) are an extreme case of nonproportionality. Having a powerful central executive elected by nonmajoritarian election itself weights the government to nonresponsiveness (though the US has many other factors reinforcing that.)

[lazyasciiart]

It is completely the point of 'voters in specific states are largely disenfranchised during presidential elections'.

[scythe]

That's true recently. But only recently have political alignments been so rigid and predictable in the United States. California went for the Republicans from 1968–92, and before that was somewhat swingy.

More generally, any single-winner election system is prone to a "Rawlsian compromise": something that works out well for 51% of people and poorly for the other 49%. This still isn't so bad if things are changing now and then. But we've been stuck with Clintonist "preachy" Democrats and Gingrichite "edgy" Republicans for nearly my whole life.

[dantheman]

The federal government does far too many things, and that's really the problem. The constitution spelled out what the government was allowed to do and that limitation died in the progressive era.

[yywwbbn]

Yes well the progressive era was truly terrible. Food safety, environmental protection, monopolies etc. are really not something the Federal government should have any right to intervene in. After all the states had no issues handling all the before.. obviously…

[desertrider12]

A lot of good things happened (could add womens suffrage too) but there was also supreme court endorsement of eugenics (Buck v Bell 1927).

Then Woodrow Wilson’s Espionage Act during WW1. In Schenck v US and Debs v US, the supreme court upheld convictions (first for the crime of distributing literature arguing the draft was illegal, and second just for hinting that the US shouldnt have joined the war).

[yywwbbn]

Well Wilson wasn’t a progressive.

But yeah allowing the Federal government to have more power is definitely a double-edged sword

[themitigating]

Can you provide an example of something the federal government is doing that should be up to the states?

[cafeface]

You might be interested to learn about Washington, DC, a region which is literally disenfranchised despite having more residents than two states. Residents can vote for president but have no voting representation in the House or Senate.

[1123581321]

The solid red and blue states influence what kinds of candidates can make it to the general election at all. California and the other large, blue states also have significant influence in Washington between elections.

[thereddaikon]

They aren't disenfranchised. Everyone knows which way California will go so they don't spend a lot of time campaigning there. Candidates have a limited amount of time and money. So they focus on the swing states. My state also votes pretty consistently and therefore doesn't get much campaigning. I don't feel like I am disenfranchised for it.

And for everyone who is crying about the popular vote, there is a very good reason we don't do that. It was recognized from the start that if you do a strict popular vote. the more populous and wealthy areas would always call the shots and would dictate politics to the rest of the nation. At the time that meant Virginia. But it doesn't really matter who, the principle still holds. This was a compromise between populous areas and rural areas in order to get the union formed.

If you switch to a pure popular vote then the nation would be run by a handful of mega cities like NYC, LA etc. That's not democracy. The system we have prevents that while still allowing for populous areas to matter. Getting rid of the electoral college would remove one of the main compromises our federal system is built on and in my opinion would be fair grounds for any state to secede. It would be comparable to throwing away parts of the Bill of Rights.

[yamtaddle]

> And for everyone who is crying about the popular vote, there is a very good reason we don't do that. It was recognized from the start that if you do a strict popular vote. the more populous and wealthy areas would always call the shots and would dictate politics to the rest of the nation. At the time that meant Virginia. But it doesn't really matter who, the principle still holds. This was a compromise between populous areas and rural areas in order to get the union formed.

The original intention was not this bloc-voting crap. The idea was that a state would select some trusted, wise, and ideally educated, locals to go get a look at the candidates and vote on their behalf, since expecting everyone in a whole country the size of the US to get any meaningful sense of the candidates, or to understand many of the relevant issues in order to make an informed choice, was obviously crazy in a time before broadcast (and still is, actually; broadcast barely even helped with the core problem of most folks—justifiably!—knowing almost nothing about the things a head of state deals with).

This broke down instantly, as electors began pre-declaring for candidates. But we kept the system, which, while a half-decent (if hopelessly poorly-implemented) idea originally, is now simply very bad—we get all the noisy, absurd national campaigning but most of us don't get a meaningful say in the election, anyway.

[amanaplanacanal]

I’ve heard this take before and it makes no sense to me. Areas don’t dictate anything. It’s people. Why should it matter where the people live? As it stands, people who live in smaller states have more say in national politics than people who live in bigger states.

[masklinn]

> As it stands, people who live in smaller states have more say in national politics than people who live in bigger states.

Not for presidential elections, nobody cares about Delaware or Wyoming's 3 electors. Small-population states matter for the Senate where they're way over-represented.

Not that they're not over-represented for the EC mind, but e.g. for their 0.2% of the national population Wyoming has 0.55% of the Electoral College, versus 2% of the Senate. By comparison California's 11.75% of the national population gives them 10% of the EC and... 2% of the Senate.

States which have a say (or are heard really) during presidential elections are states with large enough populations (and thus EC) that it's worth spending time and dumping money there for campaigns, yet purple enough that there's a chance to swing them.

[cduzz]

As things stand, where every state votes as a block, the ones where the whole population lands within the 50/50 range is heavily contested. If North Dakota were 50/50 the Bismark media market would be flooded by advertising. Every electoral college vote matters.

The actual number of potentially contested states is quite low; states not in contention aren't contested.

There are many "within the constitution" ways of adjusting this -- states chose electoral college reps as chosen by nation wide popular vote, as chosen by state election ratio, etc. But as things stand, no individual state would do this by itself because an inconsistent implementation would (IE if california or texas stop sending all or nothing electoral college reps) tip the balance to one or the other party for forever.

There's some indications that the republicans won the house in this current election cycle because new york didn't aggressively gerrymander, allowing several republicans to be elected when the absolute math would have made it trivial to exclude them.

Politics is hard. It's better than mass murder, though, which is the typical alternative.

[masklinn]

> As things stand, where every state votes as a block

Not every state. Two states (Maine and Nevada) have district voting, so they allocate one elector per congressional district (based on that district’s vote), plus two statewide. Tough they only account for 9 electors combined. And it’s still far from proportional representation.

[moate]

>> Politics is hard. It's better than mass murder, though, which is the typical alternative.

Weird thing that politics does is convince you that it’s not in control of the mass murder. I promise you we have hundreds of thousands of state sanctioned or willfully negligent deaths annually in <country name of your choice>.

Modern politics isn’t about stopping the deaths, it’s just better at hiding how the sausage is made.

[cduzz]

I believe it's a continuum between "minimal politics / lots of violence" and "effective politics / minimal violence".

[drdec]

The easiest way to fix this without an amendment would be to greatly increase the number of representatives and use the Maine/Nebraska method to split the electors. It's not perfect, but it would be close enough, depending on how large you make the House of Representative.

[masklinn]

It’s not the easiest way to fix this because it makes states which adopt this lose out in the meantime:

- let say you’re a “solid” state (whether red or blue), odds are that’s on both presidential and state (governor, possibly to likely assembly), if you adopt district voting you parcel out EVs to “the other party” without that favour coming back the other way

- if you’re a purple state, then you lose out on campaign presence, money, and publicity, because instead of shifting, say, 10+ EVs getting that extra % popular votes shifts 2 EVs if they’re not in a purple district, 3 if they are

That’s why the NPVIC was designed with a threshold: when the NPVIC covers 270EVs it comes into force and everybody gets the same thing at the same time.

[moate]

>>I’ve heard this take before and it makes no sense to me.

I’m assuming that’s because you’re not trying to vote in candidates who consistently support a small group of loudly aggrieved people to inflict their will on the vast majority of the country.

[hexane360]

The electoral college wasn't created to restrict the power of large states like Virginia.

The electoral college was created because it was expected that state governments would elect the president, not citizens. In the presence of direct election of the president, it's an anachronism at best. It was never about "tyranny of the majority", and in a two-party system, trying to prevent the tyranny of the majority is just a tyranny of the minority.

If you want, weight the votes so votes in small states count more, or votes in rural areas count more. It'll still be a much more fair and equitable system than the electoral college, which effectively means that anyone outside a swing state has no representation.

Of course, doing it that way would make it much more obvious that there's no credible reason we should give 1,000 suburbanites Wyoming more voting power than 1,000 farmers in rural California, or 1,000 voters in Columbus more power than 1,000 voters in Brooklyn.

[cycomanic]

Even though that gets brought up as a reason very often it is not true. Firstly the US (like many other democracies) has a two house system. The senate is designed to counter balance the power of high population states. Even if the US went to a popular vote system now it would not be governed by california and NY, because the senate gives disproportionate power to smaller states.

If you read historians opinions there are several reasons, the "big States get all the power" is typically not cited [1], however one important reason which does get cited is slavery. The southern states wanted a way to count slaves as population without actually letting them vote. The three fifth rule was the compromise [2 - 4]

[1] https://uselectionatlas.org/INFORMATION/INFORMATION/electcol...

[2] https://historyofyesterday.com/the-racist-origins-of-america... [3] https://www.npr.org/2020/10/30/929609038/how-electoral-colle... [4] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/electoral-...

[neura]

Yeah, I guess it's as black and white as you state. There's no in-between like keeping the per state allotments while still having that allotment be chosen by the people instead of adding another layer in between that is "voting for the people", which I provide in quotes because who actually believes that is happening? "voting on behalf of their supporters", at best.