[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.