Clearly the EU is the most cursed with the Belgian college representing some separate political unit and the 9 electors for Luxembourg with it's 1/100 the population of Germany (with 99 electors).
Honestly, the bigger problem with the American electoral college is the winner-take-all part. The European Parliament is way less proportional among member states, but still manages to be pretty close to proportional by requiring proportional representation within each member state (except for Belgium's German-speaking electoral college which is poorly named and uses plurality but close enough)
@seneca983 yeah but they're the exception, not the norm and are in less populous states. What would really be interesting is if you only win a certain proportion of a state's electoral votes similar to how state primaries during a presidential election work. Instead of winning all of Texas, you only take in a percentage what you actually won
Fun fact, Brazil used to have a electoral college during the military goverment, during it Brazil turned into a two party state, one party for the goverment (ARENA) and one for the opposition (MDB) they used the electoral college as a way to rig the vote within the law and always have the government party win the majority.
@lordmike1627 You do realize you misses the step where the trial was ruled unlawful because the judge presiding over it was in constant contact with the presecution without the defense's presence and said judge was then reward by the opposition (who was very interested in the trial finding Lula guilty so that he could not run for office) with a ministerial post. The case is being reviewed, and those involved in the clearly corrupt first trial are likely to face charges themselves.
Germany actually elects its president via an electotal college-type system called the "Bundesversammlung". Also the election described in the video was the office of chancellor, not president. Obviously the chancellor is still the important person in charge, and the point of the video still stands, but I think it would've been nice to clarify.
Georgia was mentioned in the video, and it will have an electoral college system for electing the president, while having a parliamentary system where the prime minister is in charge.
@@ArturoSubutex I think the point is that Germany has a President AND a chancellor... and chancellor, not President, is where all the power is. So talking about the President of Germany implies that ET didn't do his research (kinda like conflating Electoral College with First Past the post, which is the ACTUAL problem)
@@jayasuryangoral-maanyan3901 Correct, because not all Electoral Colleges function via First Past The Post, which is the ACTUAL problem, as opposed to the Electoral College itself, which is how Emperor Tigerstar ignorantly presents the problem.
I mean it’s really not that crazy compared to the US electoral college system if that’s what we’re going with here. Our system doesn’t exactly make sense. England has 55 million people California has 40 million people Scotland has 5 million people Indiana has 6 million people Wales has 3 million people Kansas has 3 million people Northern Ireland has 1.8 million people Idaho has 1.9 million people Yet in the American electoral college system even if California had 100 million people if a 51% majority of their population voted for a president then all of their electoral votes would go to that president.
Yea, I would have expected the UK one to go by county. Except apparently there's like a billion different ways that county lines are defined there, so maybe not...
We already have an electoral college system, but we have constituencies, not states, so it's a lot more granular, but the problems are the same, and many times the party with the highest popular vote hasn't won the most seats (due to votes being concentrated in certain areas for certain parties). The way our system works in theory is that each constituency elects an MP and these MPs choose who will be Prime Minister. In practice the candidates are members of political parties with leaders who most people are really boring for so it is a lot more presidential than it should be. The elected MPs for a party will support their leader to be Prime Minister, but just like in the USi don't think the have to, they could change their minds of something happened between election day and the Prime Minister being sworn into office. This is why in the past 5 years or so the UK has changed Prime Minister without having a General Election, the ruling party's MPs just decided not to continue backing the leader they had, kicked them out, and backed someone new, this happened to Teresa May, Boris Johnson, and Liz Truss (thank God for the last 2 of these, possibly all 3)!!!
UK shouldn't be there, it is not a federal state and does not have this kind of regional sub-divisions. India or perhaps Malaysia would have provided better examples.
I think the electoral college confuses a lot of people, but the outcome would still be the same in the election given. It is also important to note of the 4 countries (states) of the UK All but England has it's own legislation body, so while matters are determined for much of the UK it is an English parliament as well as England have 80% of the population, so many matters are within England by popular vote would also favour England. This is the reason for the Electoral College it helps give a more prominent vote to less population areas that likely are easier overlooked, which given the high level of SNP and Plaid Cymru (I would include Sinn Fein, but I don't think the ethos is quite the same for NI) having nationalist for their constituent country this would likely be a good thing for the UK. It would theoretically mean that the how the representative vote election turn out would determine who controls the executive instead of a direct election for leader by the people, but as Prime Ministers are chosen from the majority party once elected to their constituency they are directly elected by an overall population either and as stated do not have to hold a general election to change.
For the UK one the English regions are actually still used for stats (which was why they were made in the first place) - and they were also used as constituencies for EU elections until ... you know.
About japan; You said that *had* Japan had an electorla college system it would result in every election being a Liberal Democrat landslide and Japan being practically a one-party state - and while Japan is not a one-party state, it is already the case that every election is a Liberal Democratic landslide. Even with the aforementioned consistent 35-40% of the vote the LDP gets, they still usually win a *majority* of seats, as the representation in Japan is not fully in proportion to population either - rural areas have more power as their amount of allocated seats did not stay up to date with the migration from rural to urban areas. Apart of 2 short breaks of less then one term, Japan had been under the rule of the LDP since 1955 under what is known as the "1955 system", and is in practice a dominant-part democracy. The LDP is well entrenched in the Japanese Bureucracy and strongly allied with most if not all corporations so their candidates in local elections (the election to parliament in Japan are mixed but to a large degree personal rather then party based) can ensure the funding and support of all major companies and employers, and the opposition is unable to effectivley rule the state machine which is practically an extenstion of the LDP by now.
There's an interesting twist with Canada - since Senators mainly* don't belong to political parties and aren't elected**, they're really just bulking out the electoral college numbers. I'm guessing for each province you combined the total popular vote for all ridings in that province together. I wonder if the result would be different if you used the number of MP seats each party won for that province - basically doubling up first-past-the-post. I'm assuming in this world everyone is still voting for an MP as well (so a Parliamentary system), and that the Senate still exists in it's current form, which implies then that Canada has got rid of the GG and made the PM the Head of State, with the title of President. That would mean there would be fewer checks on a PM's power, since they would have a partisan veto on any bills instead of the Royal Assent we have now, and would pass through Parliament as PM the same bills they would approve as President. However, if the PM and President are technically separate roles (leader of the party with the most MPs vs. winner of presidential vote, chosen from the same party leaders), I wonder if it would be mathematically possible for them to be different people - say a Liberal PM but a Conservative Leader of the Opposition ... who is also President. Also, the territories would be easy to calculate, since they all only have one MP each. That's where the NDP's two votes come from - the MP for Nunavut is NDP. * When Justin Trudeau was first elected, he made all Liberal senators into independents, they don't sit in caucus anymore, and any new senator appointed is independent. However, the existing Conservative senators still remain in the Conservative caucus and vote along Conservative lines. Assuming the Senate still exists in this scenario, I'm guessing Senators' alignment doesn't come into play - especially since there would be no one "independent" party leader to get those electoral college votes. ** Alberta holds an unauthorized vote for Senators - it's non-binding and hasn't been agreed to by the federal government. However, so far Ottawa tends to respect the outcome and appoint the winner - but they can totally ignore the result if they wish and appoint someone else.
I did that with really the only competitive election in Russia in 1996, and got Yeltsin winning as well, and while the margin is quite comfortable, it is still competitive.
The only other election honestly that MIGHT have been competitive in Russia's modern history was 2008, when Putin was (at the time) term-limited at least consecutively by the constitution. His deputy Dimitri Medvedev ended up winning comfortably, but there was genuine speculation for a while as to whether his appeal would be strong enough to the public (on a related note, 2008 was also believed by observers to be one of the last elections in Russian history to date where there was any sense of a real democracy, once Putin began his second stint it all went to neo-fascism).
@@thunderbird1921 maybe the last one with any sense of liberalism, that is sort of true, but not democracy. Electoral fraud and legal restrictions in election laws have been put in place since early 2000s. Sergey Shpilkin estimated that around 15 mln ballots were tossed in in 2008 (which yeah, still put a fresh face of Medvedev at ~60%, but with a turnout of only 56%).
@PwP if by RP you mean the GOP, then no. The GOP is dominant in over a dozen states and competitive in all but about 7. Even in states that consistently vote blue for national elections have large voting blocks vote red for state and local elections: new hampshire, all of New York outside of three citieis, San Diego, eastern washington, ect.
@@coolandhip_7596 Without winning a presidency for 30 years and constantly losing any house that is based on popular vote Republicans would lose the institutional backing and funding needed to run those candidates.
Bigger states and cities would actually get the attention they deserve, instead of a lot of time spent on courting a few (usually small) swing states. The GOP would probably have to pivot leftward a bit and court voter bases they currently just ignore (like urban voters).
@@coolandhip_7596 Also this scenario is just about the EC. EC or not, the GOP does pretty well at the state level, in the Senate (heavily weighted towards small states, which are often Republican), and even in the House of Representatives (where the capping of representatives at 435 gives them a boost). The main effect of no EC would be that getting the presidency would be much more difficult, especially if the party continues its rightward lurch. The Republicans have won exactly one popular vote election in the past 30 years (Bush in 2004). It's likely had Bush not been the incumbent they would have won zero.
The EU map has many mistakes. If you include the 2019 European elections post-Brexit seats with the European Council voting members, Poland should be ECR, Belgium, Netherlands and France should be Renewal and Italy should be ID. I think there might be other mistakes but these are the most obvious ones to me, I didn't check every country and some parties aren't easy to assign to one political group. EDIT: The numbers of seats seem to be wrong in almost every country, the only ones that seem correct are Portugal and Greece for some reason. For example: Cyprus, Luxembourg and Malta all have 6 seats in the EP + 1 in the European Council so it should add up to 7, not 8/9/10 like in the map. And for the big countries, Germany should be 97, France 80, Italy 77 and Spain 60. 2ND EDIT: It seems he added seats for each party that is member of the national govt in each country. So Germany is 96+3=99, Spain is 59+4=63, etc. Of course this makes no sense, each country only gets one seat in either the European Council or the Council of the EU, not the number of parties in govt. Not to mention that some national parties in one country belong to the same European political group, so could be counted as the same European party. Thanks to Uebeltank for pointing this out to me! Not to mention that if there was this system, there would be coalitions between parties/political groups to ensure a plurality like it happens with the electoral college elections for president in Germany and Italy and even for President of the European Commission. In 2019 von der Leyen was elected mostly by EPP, S&D and Renewal and even then, some parties on those groups refuse to vote for her.
@@andrewjgrimm Now that I checked the numbers in the map and see that they are almost all wrong (check the edit on my comment above), I certainly will!
For the EU one I think taking which national party won would make more sense since people don’t vote for the EU parties, but for their national parties which make up the EU parties
The premise of the video is that all of these places become presidential republics, like the US. And he does mention at the start of the EU segment that he's talking about a scenario where the EU becomes the United States of Europe. So yeah national parties wouldn't matter in this scenario
1:21 Despite the name, Georgia (the country) will not adopt a system similar to the US. Yes, their president will be elected from an elected council instead of direct election; but this council will feature elected parliamentarians and local authorities, not some delegates elected from one area with plurality. They also have parliamentary system, meaning the elected president will be mostly ceremonial compared to prime minister.
Minor correction: the system isn't whole winner take all. How the electoral delegates of a state are allocated is left mostly to the states, while most do use a first pass the post, not all do. And who the delegates vote for is strictly speaking left up to said delegates, though most do tend to vote roughly in accordance with the state's vote.
If you have a winner take all system, like the electoral college, you tend to get a 2 party state. In the UK we tend to have a 2 party situation in most constituencies (seats), since we have a 1st past the post system at that level. It disincentivises 3rd or 4th parties, as they dilute opposition to a given view.
Mexico and Argentina would be interesting cases, Argentina in particular, after all, the Argentine republic was built with A LOT of inspiration from the United States…
mexico’s lower house is kinda like japan’s in that it has a mix of smaller first past the post districts within each state as well as bigger multi-state proportional representation districts, so its harder to make a one to one comparison with the us but elections usually have at least three somewhat viable candidates so it would give pretty lopsided electoral vote counts in the most recent election the second place candidate only won a single state, and in 2012 the three candidates were pretty even in the popular vote (39%-32%-26%) but the winner would get ~55% in the electoral college (thats all ignoring the multi-state proportional seats cause i didnt feel like doing the math, but i might end up doing those later just for funsies)
The EU kind of has 3 presidents already - currently Charles Michel (President of the Council), Ursula von der Leyen (President of the Commission), and Roberta Metsola (President of the Parliament).
Not really. President of parliament is just the first under equals. The council president is more of a chairman. The commission president is more or less the only one who can work more or less by themselves.
I'm afraid your map for Germany is incorrect: Thuringia should be colored red since the Social Democrats (red) got more first votes than the Alternative (blue). I believe it's better to look at first votes here than the second votes, because the first votes already use the winner-takes-all principle
I'm glad you showed a regional map for the UK, as a lot of people (even in our own country) seem to think all of England is Tory-majority. That's far from true, especially for London, and also for the north.
The first past the post exaggerates the differences too. In 2019 in the South, the Tories won 88% of seats on 54% of the vote - sure, about half of voters voted Tory, but if you look at a map of results you would think almost everyone in the South was a Tory. I'd imagine, just like everywhere else in England, once you exclude the pensioners you'd find most are voting Labour or Lib Dem (in fact the Labour/Lib dem/Green competition in the South really drives the massive discrepency, not that the South is wildly more right wing).
@@dantaylor9665 And if you exclude young people, even more are voting Conservative. Just like removing pensioners though, it doesn't really mean anything.
@@mddojo Yes but the age profile of voters is skewed upwards. The average age of a voter is in their 50s (not just because of age restrictions, but voting patterns), while the average age of a person is ~40, so removing pensioners is practically a corrective measure to look at the average person, given age is the biggest predictor of voting in the UK. Plus I'm assuming most viewers here are fairly young/working age so removing pensioners just filters it out to age peers. Tbh I just like reminding people at every possible opportunity that pensioners are to blame. My main point was how electoral outcomes are totally unrepresentative of people's views or votes, in a way that creates a false perception of all Southerners as Tory.
5:16 If any extremist tries to federalize, you won’t have any elections for the occupier’s positions, instead you would have many wars to defend our independence! We didn’t join the EU to lose our sovereignty but to help ensure it and for economic growth. When we say we will defend our independence, that means against anyone and everyone, not just against Russia.
6:45 Japan has been largely a One Party State run by the Liberal Democrats in coalitions since World War II. The last time the LDP has won a majority of the popular vote was 1963. They have a First Past the Post system in the local districts meaning that while the LDP gets the most votes at around 30% there is usually 70% of people there who voted against the LDP. But since there are so many parties their votes get divided between multiple parties. This allows the LDP to win almost all the time. And in the regional elections, the LDP often runs candidates from the same party against each other in order to strengthen factions within the party.
1:19 Italy and Germany also have electoral colleges for the (non-executive) heads of state just Germany calls theirs a federal assembly and Italy calls theirs parliament with the participation of the regional delegates (or more informally the grand electors). It’s also important to note that most countries which use, or have used, an electoral college don’t have elections for citizens to vote for that college while also pretending that the citizens are voting directly for a president and even requiring the electors to vote for a specific candidate in some states. Mostly it is just parliaments and local governments electing people to sit in the electoral college... therefore they aren’t hiding anything that the head of state really isn’t elected by the citizens, and the other thing is that in many of these countries they use the parliamentary system and the (mostly ceremonial and non-executive) head of state being chosen isn’t of much importance or thought to the citizens unlike the prime minister, who is also indirectly elected but most systems use proportional representation which means citizens are effectively electing the PM, except the UK who controversially uses first past the post leading to a situation like the US where the winner doesn’t always get 50% of the votes.
4:16 That second map reminds me of the aftermath of the 1993 federal election in Canada, when issues of national unity became a huge topic in parliament, given that the Bloc at the time was the Official Opposition.
Electoral Strategies wouldn't change all that much in Canada under this, for the Conservatives the path would be to carry the 4 western Provinces and Ontario, and for the Liberals it would be to carry the 4 atlantic provinces, Quebec, and Ontario. Pretty much the exact same strategies they have now, with the whole election coming down to whoever wins ontario.
I’ve often wondered about what a US-senate-like structure would look like in the UK, like the one you mentioned very briefly. Independence movements often mention how they’re saddled with whichever party wins in England (especially since the long-standing winners of the Conservative party win very few seats outside of there). A senate structure could fix that, but it would also be ridiculously lopsided. The electoral college system that you mentioned could perhaps help in that aspect as well
@@beepbop6542 You're deceived. Lords aren't at all linked to geographical regions, they're not elected representatives so they simply do not represent any area of the UK. Also doesn't provide a Senate-like role at all really, because as they're unelected they're not really given much legislative power - for example, they can't outright veto legislation voted through by commons, they can only delay it by a year. Its modern function isn't really to legislate as an equal to the house of commons, but to apply their various fields of expertise to suggest changes to legislation.
Many other nations have single member seats which can result in a similar thing to electoral college where one party wins more votes overall in the country but another gains the majority or plurality amount of seats and thus governs despite more people voting for another party. Just like you can win a state by a landslide but lose a bunch of states by close margins, the same goes in these situations. So in Canada in 2019 and 2021, the Conservative Party won the "popular vote" by plurality but the Liberal Party won the most seats (or plurality of seats). It's the same concept. And I know in those formats, you vote for the party, not the person as in Presidential elections. But in this day and age, if you are voting liberal in Canada, you want Justin Trudeau to be Canadian Prime Minister etc. And I know people have said that more people voted for left of center parties, so Liberals governing while having less votes than conservatives mitigates, well if that is the case, then ANY time the Conservatives don't win more than NDP and Liberals combined, it is illegitimate when THEY govern. Either way, the first past the post system has led to instances in UK, Canada and Australia where one party wins more votes but the other party governs. In America's case, the point is to win as many different regions in the country as you can. Different regions have different interests, whether farming, technology, housing, healthcare etc take the biggest importance. The point is if you can win 3-4 different regions by smaller amounts than just winning 2 regions by large margins, you are more suited to be President. And finally, if in the US, the aim was to win the popular vote, the campaigning would be totally different. Therefore, the popular vote you see is a reflection of trying to win the electoral college. So in 2000, if the object was to win the popular vote, Bush might have beaten Gore in the popular vote. Same thing with Trump vs Clinton in 2016. All that being said, I as an American who leans right can understand the desire for a popular vote, and actually wouldn't be opposed to it. I just want to provide some context
Sinn Féin won't take their seats so the Tories+DUP would be any right wing government in the upper house. Doesn't sound enticing to lefties in Scotland 😅. Wales has been trending Tory since 2001 so it might backfire even on that.
A different way you could have done the UK is by counties, which would actually give it a similar number of divisions as the US and would have a few more crazy population discrepancies - especially if you decided to keep London, Yorkshire, etc. as single units. Would have been more of a headache to put together though.
The UK already does this though. I think we basically have an electoral college, as a result. The PM is decided not by who wins a national popular vote, but by who wins the most counties (each sending one MP ...or two or three in the bigger counties, admittedly..... who vote on the PM, the way US electors do). This is how all parliamentary systems work as far as I know, so the US electoral college really isn't unusual in the slightest.
@@WorthlessWinner the difference is that each constituency is small, and has a relatively equal number of people and one MP each. If we made, say all of Yorkshire one constituency, then gave 10 MPs to whoever won the majority of votes in the whole county, we'd have the US system
@@WorthlessWinner counties don't line up with constituencies anymore. There are many seats that cross county lines (especially in Scotland since they're tiny) and they aren't winner take all but each single member. The new constituencies are +-5% in population and lots of growth in the South East will mean more cross-county seats than ever.
@@WorthlessWinner a county is not the same as a constituency, there are like 80 counties and about 650 constituencies. The scales of difference between how an electoral college works and how parliamentary seats determining the winning party and therefore the PM are so large it would be silly to pretend their similar systems. Their also not separate elections. You dont vote for a president/PM in a parliamentary system, you vote for the MP in your constituency and then based on which party their in and how many MP each party got elected then that party with the mosts MP's has their partys leader be the PM.
The thing with Canada is that everyone and their mother has already complained about how stupid the senate seat aportionment system. I'm assuming that should Canada get an electoral college, the senate seat system would get significantly reworked.
@@Old_Ladies yeah if we make any changes to our system it should be to move to proportional representation. Also we need to rework the division of powers and how municipal politics works. It's insane how much less efficient our municipal system is compared to European municipalities outside of the UK.
The 2nd round of Brazil's presidential elections would become obsolete if they adopted the US electoral college. It's a first-past-the-post/winner takes all system and it already reduces the amount of competitive parties to 2, which means only 2 serious candidates from the start.
Even the US formally maintains a 2nd round on its books. If it ever happens that there are three candidates with EC votes and none of them has the majority, there would be a 2nd round election.
For the Canada example, you’d need to strike 4 electors from Trudeau and 2 from Singh. Territories do not participate in presidential elections in the US, so if Canada had an American style electoral system, the three territories would not be participating. Also, for the record, Japan already is basically a one party state, they’ve won every election bar one since the 50s, and even that one was declared invalid after the LDP won again.
A slight mistake in your candidates for the UK. You have included Nicola Sturgeon and Arlene Foster as leaders when they were not members of the UK parliament. The UK has four parliaments; the UK Parliament, the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Senedd, and the Northern Irish Assembly. Nicola Sturgeon was the leader of the SNP in the Scottish Parliament and Arlene Foster was the leader of the DUP in the Northern Irish Assembly. Therefore, if you're using the candidates for 'President' in the UK parliament then the candidate in 2019 for the SNP would have been Ian Blackford and the candidate for the DUP would have been Jeffrey Donaldson (However, he resigned 5 days after the election to become leader in the Northern Irish Assembly - so then it would have been Sammy Wilson).
@@EmperorTigerstar Yes, theoretically, however, I'm merely following your system and how it works in tandem with who would become prime minister if they won. If the SNP won (for example), Nicola Sturgeon would not have become prime minister - Ian Blackford would have. The fact they don't have to be MPs surely ruins the whole point of the video?
Doing this for the UK generally wouldn't lead to such wild results because there's not such a wild variation in population and representation, only a slight bias towards Scotland and Wales - which is being reduced in upcoming boundary reviews. Really this is just a scaling up of first past the post, which already delivers some insane results here - such as the SNP taking almost all Scottish seats on about half the total vote and Boris getting a landslide majority in the UK as a whole on 44% of the vote (with more people voting for second-referendum parties). Comparing with outcomes under a proportional system ends up being more interesting, generally (cuts the SNP in half and never delivers a Tory win, assuming lib dems and greens would prefer to partner with labour). That said, as it stands, polling seems to suggest if an election was held now with this electoral college system, the Tories wouldn't get a single delegate vote (it's not very common to get breakdowns by these regions, but YouGov divides England into London, North, Midlands, South, and those all prefer Labour currently, so it's a fair bet Labour would win every proper regional division in England). Scotland would still go SNP (on 34% of the vote) and frankly Northern Ireland does not work in this system at all because I don't think they actually allow British national parties to stand there, so it is literally impossible for them to field a presidential candidate.
It seems like many parliamentary systems sort of do have an electoral system. Each constituency elects an MP via a winner take all vote. Then each MP gets one vote for PM, basically. While you're probably trying to make the constituencies equal in population, you never will, so it will add in the vote value distortions (to a lesser degree). Also, in the event of a failure to reach a majority of electors, the US presidential election is decided by the House of Representatives - but not by a vote of members. Rather, each state gets one vote and the delegations vote among themselves about how to cast it. So the Wyoming rep gets one full vote, while the 52 California reps combine for one vote (and one party gets washed out of that vote entirely).
Why? I don’t think it’s fair that regions of one nation (England) should be equal to entire nations with their own cultures, languages histories, and identities, even if they have a similar population.
@@loadeddice4696 but not to the extent that Wales and Scotland do, as they have their own cultures and languages, as they are nations. That’s why I think the second map was worse, as it gave the English even more power and votes. The first was better because it kept the nations equal. This whole situation, though shows how much England dominates the UK, owing to its larger wealth in population, which is part of why I hope the others leave and live better without having Westminster rule them.
@@PlatinumAltaria There is an English culture with regional variants. But ultimately, England is one nation, just as Scotland is one nation and Wales is one nation.
The legislative bodies of the EU is the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union. The European Council, which is different from the Council of the European Union, is not a legislative body. You're not the first person to get this wrong, since the naming is ridiculously bad. Also the apportionment on the EU map appears completely wrong. How does Finland have 19 electors? In general you can't really say countries have "seats" in the Council under the current treaty framework. Voting is either done unanimously or using qualified majority. Under qualified majority voting, what matters is the absolute number of countries voting in favor and the population of those countries. But there are no "seats".
You are correct, I assumed he chose the European Council so he could count the seats, like you said countries don't really have seats in the Council of the EU and is more consensus-based. But even then, almost all the seats in the map seem wrong - for example, Finland should have 15 electors, 14 from the European Parliament + 1 from the European Council in this hypothetical scenario. And countries with the same seats in the European Parliament have wildly different seats in that map.
@@Ellyerre It seems he used parties in government as the number of seats on the Council of the EU. So for Germany it's 3 with the SPD, Greens, and the FDP being part of the federal government. Finland had 5 parties in its current government. This also doesn't make much sense. The different parties in a national government don't have their own seat. Instead each of the 27 seats is held by a minister from each country. What minister this is depends on the relevant configuration. A country doesn't have more seats just because it's government consists of more parties.
@@Uebeltank Thanks, at least now I understand the numbers, even if they make no sense. Now I understand why my country, Portugal, is "correct", there is only one party in govt. But I can't understand why he chose this, in his scenario it's winner-takes-all so only one party gets the all the electors. And like you said, the one seat in the Council is for each country and depends on the national govt arrangement.
On the eu map, you seem to have joined the ECR and ID groups together. For instance Lega Nord won 28 seats for italy in 2019, but they are from ID and you put them as ECR on the map. Same goes for Front Nationale in France.
4:51 while the lower house selects the winner when no one has a majority of electoral votes, that vote in the American system is done not by members, but by states with each state getting one vote. Applying this to the UK would give both the Tories and Labour 5 votes each, with the DUP & the SNP breaking the stalemate. However, as the SNP is closer ideologically to Labour and the DUP is closer to the Tories, the stalmate may be difficult to resolve. Furthermore, as the SNP is a separatist party, one expects them to keep the stalemate going as long as they can, in hopes of encouraging Scots voters to become sad about UK politics and more likely to vote yes in the next referendum on dissolution.
The electoral college was never designed to be a protection for small states against big states. There are provisions in the US constitution that are small state protections (like a bicameral legislature with equal representation in the Senate), but this isn’t one of them. Rather, it was a protection for elite power against the influence of the uneducated populace. We have documents like the minutes of the constitutional convention and the Federalist Papers that attest to this being the intention. It has also never functioned as a small state protection. Many of the smallest states don’t get any attention from presidential candidates and never have. Rather, functionally, it increases the power and influence of swing states which can either be small (like Iowa) or big (like Florida). It’s a profoundly undemocratic institution that does little more than create an unrepresentative 2-party system.
2:56 I think in BC a lot of people would strategically vote as the province has a 3 way race NDP LIB CON also a lot of green voters. I have a feeling all the left parties NDP LIB GRN would pool votes and Liberals would win all the time
the only reason America has the EC is that slave owners wanted their slaves to count for representation purposes, but would never countenance their voting. So the slave owners got greater representation in the EC than their numbers would warrant. Why would anyone want to have such an undemocratic system? As its virtually impossible to amend the US constitution the best reform would be to make the states divide their EC votes proportionately among the candidates state by state.
The whole point of the Electoral College is so that every state has their voice, which in turn gives everyone in that state a voice. If you leave it up the popular vote, then you give the more populated areas of the country "more power" or voice than others. Presidents would only have on a handful of cities instead of states. For example, NYC alone is more populated than most of the states in the midwest combined. Essentially, one city would cause half of the country to lose it's voice because it's more populated
New York is already larger than 47 other states and no one cares about it because it's a democrat stronghold and this doesn't change. It wouldn't be any different with the popular vote. Plus what's bad about politicians actually having to try to appeal to the largest possible number of voters?
@@mmm7528What's bad? When you have two cities determining how an entire country is run, that's what's bad. Unless you're ok with the other states ceceding? But it seems like liberal, city dwelling americans are a bunch of hypocrites, as seen by their reaction to the american civil war. When Kosovo wants to secede from Serbia that's ok because a population has the right to self determination, but when the confederacy wanted to do the same thing all of a sudden it's not. Just the usual city dweller smooth brain in action.
It's funny to see the massive swing in the UK election depending on if England is subdivided. It's either 533 with the closest contender being 59 or 301-271 which is SIGNIFICANTLY closer, and the party in second actually changes. Goes to show how fragile democracy is.
Other states have an electoral college type of system for electing a president. In the EU, the President of the Commission is elected by a majority of the EU Council (one vote per member state) and the EU Parliament (number of votes roughly proportional to electorate). The main difference is that in the EU, you need a majority in both, while in the US you can compensate a minority in one with a larger majority in the other.
That was interesting. For the UK I'd have liked to have seen the effect if the Electoral College was applied at county level. Our counties are more significant in the country than counties in America are, and the disproportionate power of a tiny county like Rutland would be interesting to point out.
Some huge misconception, is that countries like Japan would be one-party state. Winner-takes-all system naturally create two-party system. It means, that most of the electorat of small parties would go to on of the two biggest (usually centre-right and centre-left) parties. That's what usually happend in second round of most presidential elections.
Gonna be honest, most political scientists consider Japan a de-facto one party state. They don't always landslide, but the LDP has only lost twice since 55
The whole thing where small states matter more is actually a tiny issue, if anything the electoral college makes them matter less. The main issue is that each state is winner takes all, so if 51% of californians vote for 1 person, the 49% don't matter, for example. And if you're in a state where there's no chance that 1 party will win, your vote doesn't really matter. And candidates only really have to focus on states which are either really big so important enough to focus on even if they don't seem that close, or very close races where it could go either way. And that is also the reason why presidents have won without the popular vote. In at least the most recent case with Trump (idk about the others but probably them too) it wouldn't even change anything if you gave each state an exactly proportional number of electoral votes to their population. What makes it skewed is that each state is winner takes all so tens of millions of voters simply don't count
Point well made and I wonder if more people, especially those in states which consistently go to one party would vote if they felt their vote counted instead of what's the point this state will go to the other party forever. I live in Ohio which now has 17 electoral votes, so based on recent elections, it would probably split to 9 red and 8 blue
The states that are safe and competitive always change though, so you never know when your vote for president may actually matter. Your vote still matters for every other election besides the President. I like the Electoral College because it forces candidates to win a majority in specific regions. If you didn't have to do that, you could see a situation where both candidates go to California, New York, Florida, and Texas since those are the largest population centers. They would only campaign to have those states like them. Everyone else doesn't matter nearly as much, which will cause states such as North Dakota, Vermont, Alaska, etc, to not feel like either candidate represents them. But for my first point, battleground states always change. If you go back 10 years, Colorado and Virginia were close states, and now they vote safe Democrat. Ohio and Iowa were toss-up states and now vote decently Republican. Texas is considered a lean Republican state now. Georgia is a toss-up state as opposed to a safe Republican one. Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania are much more than 50/50 than they used to be. Arizona and Nevada are also very competitive states. Trends will occur throughout the country, which will make states become more competitive or less competitive on the presidential level. Based on trends right now, if we look at what new states will be competitive in 10 years, we can have an alright picture of them. States that will be likely decided by less than 10% in 2032 will be Alaska, Oregon (maybe), Nevada, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico (maybe), Kansas (maybe), Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, South Carolina (maybe), Georgia, Florida (maybe), Connecticut (maybe), Rhode Island (maybe), New Hampshire, and Maine.
In Australia, sometimes a party or coalition wins government while having a minority of two party preferred votes: 1998 (Coalition), 1990 (Labor), 1969 (Coalition).
A related question would be to look at several of the last elections and see which states would be swing states in these systems. For example in Germany, the popular support can sometimes swing a lot between the CDU/CSU alliance and the SPD. (At least the SPD was down a lot during Merkel's time.) However, Bavaria would always be dominated by the CSU and City states always by the SPD.
OOH this is a fun one for the Netherlands considering how the BBB (Farmer's party) became the biggest in all provinces, thus meaning they would get all electoral votes. Would it be fair? No because they didn't win outright majorities. Would it be interesting? Certainly!
In the UK it is actually not certain that Johnson would win. In the lower house each state gets one vote, and both the labour-party and the conservatives have a majority in five. Also, you need an absolute majority meaning 7. The SNP, however, is never gonna vote for the tories, meaning that that would make a Johnson-presidency de-facto impossible.
One should probably include proportional voting too, since making the US parliamentary probably wouldn't change that much as is. The prime minister and therefore leader of government would likely just switch a bit more frequently between Democrats and Republicans with first-past-the-post in place. And of course the Midterm elections would just become far more important.
Would require assumptions about a lot of the variables. Namely the fact that it depends pretty much entirely on how many constituencies the country would be divided into. The reason why the German parliament is so large is exclusively due to the CSU being overrepresented on the constituency seats, which causes the need for so many levelling seats.
4:33 Actually, Johnson won the popular vote in Yorkshire and the Humber in 2019. That would push him up from 301 electoral college votes to 355. He would still be elected President.
Each state gets the same number of electors as its number of Senators and Congressmen combined. So having small states "count more" as you put it is not controversial.
as someone familar with a lot of different elections seeing how dramatically skewed the results get if you apply a american electoral system is genuinely flabergasting i didn't realise how unfair america's system really was,,
What happens if you are not bunching together CDU and CSU in Germany? It was an nonsensical mathematics exercise, because a voting system like this quickly become a two party system as parties group together. And the political landscape will become a polarized mess with two parties having basically the same politics, while claiming to be polar opposites they differ in some small details.
"This would result in every election being an LDP landslide" I think it would result in even more internal factionalism within the LDP (which is neither liberal nor democratic nor a party).
Other countries basically DO have an electoral college. Here in the UK MPs vote on who the PM will be, which is basically what electors voting on who the president will be (except the electors also go to congress).
I think that an amendment to proportionally distribute electoral votes would significantly improve the US electoral college system, while maintaining the disproportionate power of smaller states. I'd prefer a national instant-runoff system for presidential elections, but I wanted to put this idea out there. Anyone have any thoughts?
It's already happening with the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. An amendment would never happen because the electoral college hugely favours republicans and you need a 2/3rds vote to pass any amendment.
I think it would be a good idea to make the results in each state be proportional to the vote. It would have to be imposed upon all states at one time because no party running any state would agree with the idea. It would help break the idea that any state is only in one camp or another and we need to divide the country in two along party lines. Using congressional districts won't work because they are geremanders and we should expect some state to come up with different much more gerrymandered districts just for the electors. Another idea would give each state 10 electoral votes for each one they have now. Vermont and Wyoming would each have 30 electoral votes. The small states would not divide 2-1 between the two main candidates, but would be 17-13 or 16-14. Each state would have to have the same minimum percentage to get an electoral vote, otherwise California (550) and Texas (380) would get candidates with one or two votes for little reason. The point is to elect a President and not a Parliament. We should also get rid of the idea of actual electors and just talk about electoral votes for the state. We're not choosing electors and expecting them to make a decision. They are supposed to just vote for their party's candidate or they are removed.
1:22 That map is slightly misleading. India does elect president by electoral College but president has hardly any power as India has more British style of govt with prime minister being head of government. Also president is elected only by members of legislature not all the people.
I live in Canada and it seems Aberta(the current Provence I live in) and B.C( the Provence I grew up in) votes come in so late that it doesn't seem to matter much.
This is a result of colonization and you can see the same effects in countries like Brazil and Australia. Larger population centres are on the East coast, as you move west the majority of people have already voted. This is increasingly so when places always vote the same way.
4:17 that UK nation map is outdated. If an electoral College formed in the UK and functioned like this, Northern Ireland would be returning Sinn Fein electors, as SF is now larger than the DUP.
Cdu Csu already run one kandiate: The Csu is only active in one state (Bavaria) and the Cdu doesnt run in it. They form a Union: The are the same faction and have one „Kanzlerkanidat“ but internaly they work like two partys.
You forgot to mention that Maine and Nebraksa don't give ALL their votes to the state wide winner but instead give out votes to the candidate who is most popular in those states congressional districts.
The first UK map shows why the UK can never be a "union of equals" and why (at least from a democratic accountability point of view) the nations of the UK would be better off if they split up
As far as I know, it was intentional to make individual votes of smaller states be stronger, so larger states wouldn't have as much power. They do still have a lot of power. Also, not every state has it that the popular vote is the winner of the state. In these states, your vote is a mere suggestion, similar to how in the UK, the king elects the prime minister, and your vote is a mere suggestion. Plus in some states, the popular vote doesn't win the whole state, only in proportions. They should at least do this with every state; you shouldn't win the whole state of California, just your proportion of it.
The electoral college is way less bad than giving California and Texas the same number of senators as Wyoming and Vermont or having an unelected second chamber like we do in the UK
@@dopamine-crash I'm just saying that we already have the senate part you mentioned, not making a suggestion on whether or not it's good ot bad. But yes, the whole point of the US Senate is that every state gets an equal amount of members regardless of population.
Thought this was a fun/cursed scenario. Which one was your favorite?
It really was. Original and novel idea. Well done, keep it up!
How about ancient countries? How would Rome look like if it had an electoral college?
Just here to remind you all of the electorate of saxony
HRE REPRESENT
Clearly the EU is the most cursed with the Belgian college representing some separate political unit and the 9 electors for Luxembourg with it's 1/100 the population of Germany (with 99 electors).
Cool video, but probably if I didn't know the original results of the elections I wouldn't see how it affected them
Honestly, the bigger problem with the American electoral college is the winner-take-all part. The European Parliament is way less proportional among member states, but still manages to be pretty close to proportional by requiring proportional representation within each member state (except for Belgium's German-speaking electoral college which is poorly named and uses plurality but close enough)
Technically there are a couple of states where the electors can be split between candidates.
@seneca983 yeah but they're the exception, not the norm and are in less populous states. What would really be interesting is if you only win a certain proportion of a state's electoral votes similar to how state primaries during a presidential election work. Instead of winning all of Texas, you only take in a percentage what you actually won
@@Spongebrain97 That would probably be the best option. Also, it would be constitutional
I thought the European Parliament was proportional to national populations in seats allocated?
@@gustavusadolphus4344 a two round system or ranked choice voting
Japan already runs like a 1 party state by how their electorial laws work.
LDP if Japan had an EC: Now I still win, just even harder!
@@danshakuimo LDP "Im sorry, I can't heard you from the constant waterfall of winning!"
I told everyone Japan was a dictatorship
Fun fact, Brazil used to have a electoral college during the military goverment, during it Brazil turned into a two party state, one party for the goverment (ARENA) and one for the opposition (MDB) they used the electoral college as a way to rig the vote within the law and always have the government party win the majority.
What period was this?
@@PintoRagazzo the Military dictatorship 1964-1985, and the first civilian government 1985-1990
brazil let a guy be president who was previously in jail for corruption while being president before.
@lordmike1627 You do realize you misses the step where the trial was ruled unlawful because the judge presiding over it was in constant contact with the presecution without the defense's presence and said judge was then reward by the opposition (who was very interested in the trial finding Lula guilty so that he could not run for office) with a ministerial post. The case is being reviewed, and those involved in the clearly corrupt first trial are likely to face charges themselves.
@@lordmike1627 the charges were dismissed
These kind of thought experiments are always fun to do. Thanks for another great video!
Germany actually elects its president via an electotal college-type system called the "Bundesversammlung". Also the election described in the video was the office of chancellor, not president. Obviously the chancellor is still the important person in charge, and the point of the video still stands, but I think it would've been nice to clarify.
It's the whole premise of the video, that all of these countries switch to a presidential system and elect their presidents via an Electoral College
Georgia was mentioned in the video, and it will have an electoral college system for electing the president, while having a parliamentary system where the prime minister is in charge.
@@ArturoSubutex I think the point is that Germany has a President AND a chancellor... and chancellor, not President, is where all the power is.
So talking about the President of Germany implies that ET didn't do his research (kinda like conflating Electoral College with First Past the post, which is the ACTUAL problem)
My understanding is that many countries in Europe have electoral colleges but they don't always function like the US one.
@@jayasuryangoral-maanyan3901 Correct, because not all Electoral Colleges function via First Past The Post, which is the ACTUAL problem, as opposed to the Electoral College itself, which is how Emperor Tigerstar ignorantly presents the problem.
doing it by uk nation is insane, it would make more sense to use nearly any smaller unit
I mean it’s really not that crazy compared to the US electoral college system if that’s what we’re going with here. Our system doesn’t exactly make sense.
England has 55 million people
California has 40 million people
Scotland has 5 million people
Indiana has 6 million people
Wales has 3 million people
Kansas has 3 million people
Northern Ireland has 1.8 million people
Idaho has 1.9 million people
Yet in the American electoral college system even if California had 100 million people if a 51% majority of their population voted for a president then all of their electoral votes would go to that president.
Yea, I would have expected the UK one to go by county. Except apparently there's like a billion different ways that county lines are defined there, so maybe not...
We already have an electoral college system, but we have constituencies, not states, so it's a lot more granular, but the problems are the same, and many times the party with the highest popular vote hasn't won the most seats (due to votes being concentrated in certain areas for certain parties). The way our system works in theory is that each constituency elects an MP and these MPs choose who will be Prime Minister. In practice the candidates are members of political parties with leaders who most people are really boring for so it is a lot more presidential than it should be.
The elected MPs for a party will support their leader to be Prime Minister, but just like in the USi don't think the have to, they could change their minds of something happened between election day and the Prime Minister being sworn into office. This is why in the past 5 years or so the UK has changed Prime Minister without having a General Election, the ruling party's MPs just decided not to continue backing the leader they had, kicked them out, and backed someone new, this happened to Teresa May, Boris Johnson, and Liz Truss (thank God for the last 2 of these, possibly all 3)!!!
UK shouldn't be there, it is not a federal state and does not have this kind of regional sub-divisions. India or perhaps Malaysia would have provided better examples.
I think the electoral college confuses a lot of people, but the outcome would still be the same in the election given. It is also important to note of the 4 countries (states) of the UK All but England has it's own legislation body, so while matters are determined for much of the UK it is an English parliament as well as England have 80% of the population, so many matters are within England by popular vote would also favour England. This is the reason for the Electoral College it helps give a more prominent vote to less population areas that likely are easier overlooked, which given the high level of SNP and Plaid Cymru (I would include Sinn Fein, but I don't think the ethos is quite the same for NI) having nationalist for their constituent country this would likely be a good thing for the UK. It would theoretically mean that the how the representative vote election turn out would determine who controls the executive instead of a direct election for leader by the people, but as Prime Ministers are chosen from the majority party once elected to their constituency they are directly elected by an overall population either and as stated do not have to hold a general election to change.
For the UK one the English regions are actually still used for stats (which was why they were made in the first place) - and they were also used as constituencies for EU elections until ... you know.
Yeah, some of those english regions have almost as much people in them as Scotland + Wales + NI combined haha!
@@lordgemini2376 London is about 10 million which is a similar amount to the popular of NI, Scotland and Wales. Less I think but its close
About japan;
You said that *had* Japan had an electorla college system it would result in every election being a Liberal Democrat landslide and Japan being practically a one-party state - and while Japan is not a one-party state, it is already the case that every election is a Liberal Democratic landslide.
Even with the aforementioned consistent 35-40% of the vote the LDP gets, they still usually win a *majority* of seats, as the representation in Japan is not fully in proportion to population either - rural areas have more power as their amount of allocated seats did not stay up to date with the migration from rural to urban areas.
Apart of 2 short breaks of less then one term, Japan had been under the rule of the LDP since 1955 under what is known as the "1955 system", and is in practice a dominant-part democracy.
The LDP is well entrenched in the Japanese Bureucracy and strongly allied with most if not all corporations so their candidates in local elections (the election to parliament in Japan are mixed but to a large degree personal rather then party based) can ensure the funding and support of all major companies and employers, and the opposition is unable to effectivley rule the state machine which is practically an extenstion of the LDP by now.
There are many, many things in this video that indicate that ET's knowledge was, unusually, just cursory. a lot of errors and non-understandings
There's an interesting twist with Canada - since Senators mainly* don't belong to political parties and aren't elected**, they're really just bulking out the electoral college numbers. I'm guessing for each province you combined the total popular vote for all ridings in that province together. I wonder if the result would be different if you used the number of MP seats each party won for that province - basically doubling up first-past-the-post.
I'm assuming in this world everyone is still voting for an MP as well (so a Parliamentary system), and that the Senate still exists in it's current form, which implies then that Canada has got rid of the GG and made the PM the Head of State, with the title of President. That would mean there would be fewer checks on a PM's power, since they would have a partisan veto on any bills instead of the Royal Assent we have now, and would pass through Parliament as PM the same bills they would approve as President.
However, if the PM and President are technically separate roles (leader of the party with the most MPs vs. winner of presidential vote, chosen from the same party leaders), I wonder if it would be mathematically possible for them to be different people - say a Liberal PM but a Conservative Leader of the Opposition ... who is also President.
Also, the territories would be easy to calculate, since they all only have one MP each. That's where the NDP's two votes come from - the MP for Nunavut is NDP.
* When Justin Trudeau was first elected, he made all Liberal senators into independents, they don't sit in caucus anymore, and any new senator appointed is independent. However, the existing Conservative senators still remain in the Conservative caucus and vote along Conservative lines. Assuming the Senate still exists in this scenario, I'm guessing Senators' alignment doesn't come into play - especially since there would be no one "independent" party leader to get those electoral college votes.
** Alberta holds an unauthorized vote for Senators - it's non-binding and hasn't been agreed to by the federal government. However, so far Ottawa tends to respect the outcome and appoint the winner - but they can totally ignore the result if they wish and appoint someone else.
I did that with really the only competitive election in Russia in 1996, and got Yeltsin winning as well, and while the margin is quite comfortable, it is still competitive.
The only other election honestly that MIGHT have been competitive in Russia's modern history was 2008, when Putin was (at the time) term-limited at least consecutively by the constitution. His deputy Dimitri Medvedev ended up winning comfortably, but there was genuine speculation for a while as to whether his appeal would be strong enough to the public (on a related note, 2008 was also believed by observers to be one of the last elections in Russian history to date where there was any sense of a real democracy, once Putin began his second stint it all went to neo-fascism).
@@thunderbird1921 maybe the last one with any sense of liberalism, that is sort of true, but not democracy. Electoral fraud and legal restrictions in election laws have been put in place since early 2000s. Sergey Shpilkin estimated that around 15 mln ballots were tossed in in 2008 (which yeah, still put a fresh face of Medvedev at ~60%, but with a turnout of only 56%).
Great video! I'd love to see a video on what if the US had a parliamentary system.
It would be really interesting to see how other countries' voting systems would play out in the US.
a total wipe out for the RP, forever. Hence why electoral reform is a non-starter.
@PwP if by RP you mean the GOP, then no. The GOP is dominant in over a dozen states and competitive in all but about 7. Even in states that consistently vote blue for national elections have large voting blocks vote red for state and local elections: new hampshire, all of New York outside of three citieis, San Diego, eastern washington, ect.
@@coolandhip_7596 Without winning a presidency for 30 years and constantly losing any house that is based on popular vote Republicans would lose the institutional backing and funding needed to run those candidates.
Bigger states and cities would actually get the attention they deserve, instead of a lot of time spent on courting a few (usually small) swing states. The GOP would probably have to pivot leftward a bit and court voter bases they currently just ignore (like urban voters).
@@coolandhip_7596 Also this scenario is just about the EC. EC or not, the GOP does pretty well at the state level, in the Senate (heavily weighted towards small states, which are often Republican), and even in the House of Representatives (where the capping of representatives at 435 gives them a boost). The main effect of no EC would be that getting the presidency would be much more difficult, especially if the party continues its rightward lurch. The Republicans have won exactly one popular vote election in the past 30 years (Bush in 2004). It's likely had Bush not been the incumbent they would have won zero.
The EU map has many mistakes. If you include the 2019 European elections post-Brexit seats with the European Council voting members, Poland should be ECR, Belgium, Netherlands and France should be Renewal and Italy should be ID. I think there might be other mistakes but these are the most obvious ones to me, I didn't check every country and some parties aren't easy to assign to one political group.
EDIT: The numbers of seats seem to be wrong in almost every country, the only ones that seem correct are Portugal and Greece for some reason. For example: Cyprus, Luxembourg and Malta all have 6 seats in the EP + 1 in the European Council so it should add up to 7, not 8/9/10 like in the map. And for the big countries, Germany should be 97, France 80, Italy 77 and Spain 60.
2ND EDIT: It seems he added seats for each party that is member of the national govt in each country. So Germany is 96+3=99, Spain is 59+4=63, etc. Of course this makes no sense, each country only gets one seat in either the European Council or the Council of the EU, not the number of parties in govt. Not to mention that some national parties in one country belong to the same European political group, so could be counted as the same European party. Thanks to Uebeltank for pointing this out to me!
Not to mention that if there was this system, there would be coalitions between parties/political groups to ensure a plurality like it happens with the electoral college elections for president in Germany and Italy and even for President of the European Commission. In 2019 von der Leyen was elected mostly by EPP, S&D and Renewal and even then, some parties on those groups refuse to vote for her.
Gonna nominate it for terrible maps?
the amount of mistakes in this video is legit disturbing.
I have high standards for ET, and I've never seen him miss this terribly
@@andrewjgrimm Now that I checked the numbers in the map and see that they are almost all wrong (check the edit on my comment above), I certainly will!
Numbers seem to be based on the amount of parties within the government of each country. Which is inaccurate.
Elections in other countries would be an absolute nightmare.
Even in the USA elections are an absolute nightmare.
Yeh if they were diverse
Imagine this in Bosnia, India or Switzerland. It would absolutely destroy them
@@peoplesrepublicofliberland5606 it may destroy the US. It already cause one civil war.
@@peoplesrepublicofliberland5606 India already does have an electoral college (sorta)
For the EU one I think taking which national party won would make more sense since people don’t vote for the EU parties, but for their national parties which make up the EU parties
But those parties do form factions EU wide.
The premise of the video is that all of these places become presidential republics, like the US. And he does mention at the start of the EU segment that he's talking about a scenario where the EU becomes the United States of Europe. So yeah national parties wouldn't matter in this scenario
Just wait until Volt Europa becomes a proper European party ;)
1:21 Despite the name, Georgia (the country) will not adopt a system similar to the US.
Yes, their president will be elected from an elected council instead of direct election; but this council will feature elected parliamentarians and local authorities, not some delegates elected from one area with plurality.
They also have parliamentary system, meaning the elected president will be mostly ceremonial compared to prime minister.
Minor correction: the system isn't whole winner take all. How the electoral delegates of a state are allocated is left mostly to the states, while most do use a first pass the post, not all do. And who the delegates vote for is strictly speaking left up to said delegates, though most do tend to vote roughly in accordance with the state's vote.
If you have a winner take all system, like the electoral college, you tend to get a 2 party state.
In the UK we tend to have a 2 party situation in most constituencies (seats), since we have a 1st past the post system at that level.
It disincentivises 3rd or 4th parties, as they dilute opposition to a given view.
I'm curious of how Mexico's case would work
Yeah I wonder why he didn't include it since
It wouldn't. lol.
Mexico and Argentina would be interesting cases, Argentina in particular, after all, the Argentine republic was built with A LOT of inspiration from the United States…
mexico’s lower house is kinda like japan’s in that it has a mix of smaller first past the post districts within each state as well as bigger multi-state proportional representation districts, so its harder to make a one to one comparison with the us but elections usually have at least three somewhat viable candidates so it would give pretty lopsided electoral vote counts
in the most recent election the second place candidate only won a single state, and in 2012 the three candidates were pretty even in the popular vote (39%-32%-26%) but the winner would get ~55% in the electoral college
(thats all ignoring the multi-state proportional seats cause i didnt feel like doing the math, but i might end up doing those later just for funsies)
The EU kind of has 3 presidents already - currently Charles Michel (President of the Council), Ursula von der Leyen (President of the Commission), and Roberta Metsola (President of the Parliament).
Not really. President of parliament is just the first under equals. The council president is more of a chairman. The commission president is more or less the only one who can work more or less by themselves.
@@walli6388 Hence "kind of".
@@walli6388 but the commission president doesnt get elected
@@silberwolf0794 There is infact an agreement that the top candidate of the party with the most votes becomes president.
@@walli6388 the point is that von der Leyen wasn't a top candidate and also not in the European parliament at the point of the election
I'm afraid your map for Germany is incorrect: Thuringia should be colored red since the Social Democrats (red) got more first votes than the Alternative (blue).
I believe it's better to look at first votes here than the second votes, because the first votes already use the winner-takes-all principle
I'm glad you showed a regional map for the UK, as a lot of people (even in our own country) seem to think all of England is Tory-majority. That's far from true, especially for London, and also for the north.
The first past the post exaggerates the differences too. In 2019 in the South, the Tories won 88% of seats on 54% of the vote - sure, about half of voters voted Tory, but if you look at a map of results you would think almost everyone in the South was a Tory. I'd imagine, just like everywhere else in England, once you exclude the pensioners you'd find most are voting Labour or Lib Dem (in fact the Labour/Lib dem/Green competition in the South really drives the massive discrepency, not that the South is wildly more right wing).
@@dantaylor9665 And if you exclude young people, even more are voting Conservative. Just like removing pensioners though, it doesn't really mean anything.
@@mddojo It means everything because Pensioners don't live forever.
@@mddojo Yes but the age profile of voters is skewed upwards. The average age of a voter is in their 50s (not just because of age restrictions, but voting patterns), while the average age of a person is ~40, so removing pensioners is practically a corrective measure to look at the average person, given age is the biggest predictor of voting in the UK. Plus I'm assuming most viewers here are fairly young/working age so removing pensioners just filters it out to age peers. Tbh I just like reminding people at every possible opportunity that pensioners are to blame. My main point was how electoral outcomes are totally unrepresentative of people's views or votes, in a way that creates a false perception of all Southerners as Tory.
@@solid7468 Nobody does and nobodies views views stay the same either.
I would love it if you countinue this series, showing Switzerland, Sweden, Greece? ... North Korea? xD
Really interesting (and a little scary) to see how this would work for different countries
4:33 Weird hearing you call him Johnson since everyone over here just refers to him as Boris :)
Is it because he is a massive Johnson! Haha
Can we all agree to give the map in the political cartoon at the end the coveted "Nope out of 10"?
Honestly, do this scenario for more countries, I want my eyes to bleed even more
5:16 If any extremist tries to federalize, you won’t have any elections for the occupier’s positions, instead you would have many wars to defend our independence! We didn’t join the EU to lose our sovereignty but to help ensure it and for economic growth. When we say we will defend our independence, that means against anyone and everyone, not just against Russia.
A lot of people seem baffled that Europe doesn't want to become a united superpower.
6:45 Japan has been largely a One Party State run by the Liberal Democrats in coalitions since World War II. The last time the LDP has won a majority of the popular vote was 1963.
They have a First Past the Post system in the local districts meaning that while the LDP gets the most votes at around 30% there is usually 70% of people there who voted against the LDP. But since there are so many parties their votes get divided between multiple parties. This allows the LDP to win almost all the time. And in the regional elections, the LDP often runs candidates from the same party against each other in order to strengthen factions within the party.
1:19 Italy and Germany also have electoral colleges for the (non-executive) heads of state just Germany calls theirs a federal assembly and Italy calls theirs parliament with the participation of the regional delegates (or more informally the grand electors). It’s also important to note that most countries which use, or have used, an electoral college don’t have elections for citizens to vote for that college while also pretending that the citizens are voting directly for a president and even requiring the electors to vote for a specific candidate in some states. Mostly it is just parliaments and local governments electing people to sit in the electoral college... therefore they aren’t hiding anything that the head of state really isn’t elected by the citizens, and the other thing is that in many of these countries they use the parliamentary system and the (mostly ceremonial and non-executive) head of state being chosen isn’t of much importance or thought to the citizens unlike the prime minister, who is also indirectly elected but most systems use proportional representation which means citizens are effectively electing the PM, except the UK who controversially uses first past the post leading to a situation like the US where the winner doesn’t always get 50% of the votes.
You don't know what the electoral college is. It's not the circunscription system every democratic country has
4:16 That second map reminds me of the aftermath of the 1993 federal election in Canada, when issues of national unity became a huge topic in parliament, given that the Bloc at the time was the Official Opposition.
By virtue of the Progressive Conservative Party falling apart.
Electoral Strategies wouldn't change all that much in Canada under this, for the Conservatives the path would be to carry the 4 western Provinces and Ontario, and for the Liberals it would be to carry the 4 atlantic provinces, Quebec, and Ontario. Pretty much the exact same strategies they have now, with the whole election coming down to whoever wins ontario.
I’ve often wondered about what a US-senate-like structure would look like in the UK, like the one you mentioned very briefly.
Independence movements often mention how they’re saddled with whichever party wins in England (especially since the long-standing winners of the Conservative party win very few seats outside of there). A senate structure could fix that, but it would also be ridiculously lopsided. The electoral college system that you mentioned could perhaps help in that aspect as well
Doesn't the House of Lords essentially fulfill that role? Or am I deceived on it's nature?
@@beepbop6542 You're deceived. Lords aren't at all linked to geographical regions, they're not elected representatives so they simply do not represent any area of the UK. Also doesn't provide a Senate-like role at all really, because as they're unelected they're not really given much legislative power - for example, they can't outright veto legislation voted through by commons, they can only delay it by a year. Its modern function isn't really to legislate as an equal to the house of commons, but to apply their various fields of expertise to suggest changes to legislation.
Many other nations have single member seats which can result in a similar thing to electoral college where one party wins more votes overall in the country but another gains the majority or plurality amount of seats and thus governs despite more people voting for another party.
Just like you can win a state by a landslide but lose a bunch of states by close margins, the same goes in these situations. So in Canada in 2019 and 2021, the Conservative Party won the "popular vote" by plurality but the Liberal Party won the most seats (or plurality of seats). It's the same concept.
And I know in those formats, you vote for the party, not the person as in Presidential elections. But in this day and age, if you are voting liberal in Canada, you want Justin Trudeau to be Canadian Prime Minister etc. And I know people have said that more people voted for left of center parties, so Liberals governing while having less votes than conservatives mitigates, well if that is the case, then ANY time the Conservatives don't win more than NDP and Liberals combined, it is illegitimate when THEY govern.
Either way, the first past the post system has led to instances in UK, Canada and Australia where one party wins more votes but the other party governs. In America's case, the point is to win as many different regions in the country as you can. Different regions have different interests, whether farming, technology, housing, healthcare etc take the biggest importance. The point is if you can win 3-4 different regions by smaller amounts than just winning 2 regions by large margins, you are more suited to be President.
And finally, if in the US, the aim was to win the popular vote, the campaigning would be totally different. Therefore, the popular vote you see is a reflection of trying to win the electoral college. So in 2000, if the object was to win the popular vote, Bush might have beaten Gore in the popular vote. Same thing with Trump vs Clinton in 2016.
All that being said, I as an American who leans right can understand the desire for a popular vote, and actually wouldn't be opposed to it. I just want to provide some context
Sinn Féin won't take their seats so the Tories+DUP would be any right wing government in the upper house. Doesn't sound enticing to lefties in Scotland 😅.
Wales has been trending Tory since 2001 so it might backfire even on that.
A different way you could have done the UK is by counties, which would actually give it a similar number of divisions as the US and would have a few more crazy population discrepancies - especially if you decided to keep London, Yorkshire, etc. as single units. Would have been more of a headache to put together though.
The UK already does this though. I think we basically have an electoral college, as a result. The PM is decided not by who wins a national popular vote, but by who wins the most counties (each sending one MP ...or two or three in the bigger counties, admittedly..... who vote on the PM, the way US electors do). This is how all parliamentary systems work as far as I know, so the US electoral college really isn't unusual in the slightest.
@@WorthlessWinner You mean constituencies, not counties.
@@WorthlessWinner the difference is that each constituency is small, and has a relatively equal number of people and one MP each. If we made, say all of Yorkshire one constituency, then gave 10 MPs to whoever won the majority of votes in the whole county, we'd have the US system
@@WorthlessWinner counties don't line up with constituencies anymore. There are many seats that cross county lines (especially in Scotland since they're tiny) and they aren't winner take all but each single member.
The new constituencies are +-5% in population and lots of growth in the South East will mean more cross-county seats than ever.
@@WorthlessWinner a county is not the same as a constituency, there are like 80 counties and about 650 constituencies. The scales of difference between how an electoral college works and how parliamentary seats determining the winning party and therefore the PM are so large it would be silly to pretend their similar systems. Their also not separate elections.
You dont vote for a president/PM in a parliamentary system, you vote for the MP in your constituency and then based on which party their in and how many MP each party got elected then that party with the mosts MP's has their partys leader be the PM.
The thing with Canada is that everyone and their mother has already complained about how stupid the senate seat aportionment system. I'm assuming that should Canada get an electoral college, the senate seat system would get significantly reworked.
As a Canadian I would fight a civil war if they tried to implement the US style electoral college.
I like almost everyone would love to fix the senate appointment stuff but if they tried to change us to an electoral college system i would leave
@@Old_Ladies yeah if we make any changes to our system it should be to move to proportional representation. Also we need to rework the division of powers and how municipal politics works. It's insane how much less efficient our municipal system is compared to European municipalities outside of the UK.
The 2nd round of Brazil's presidential elections would become obsolete if they adopted the US electoral college. It's a first-past-the-post/winner takes all system and it already reduces the amount of competitive parties to 2, which means only 2 serious candidates from the start.
Even the US formally maintains a 2nd round on its books. If it ever happens that there are three candidates with EC votes and none of them has the majority, there would be a 2nd round election.
@@sohopedeco not true, the house would elect one
For the Canada example, you’d need to strike 4 electors from Trudeau and 2 from Singh. Territories do not participate in presidential elections in the US, so if Canada had an American style electoral system, the three territories would not be participating.
Also, for the record, Japan already is basically a one party state, they’ve won every election bar one since the 50s, and even that one was declared invalid after the LDP won again.
the number of appropriate corrections in the comments section is disturbingly high
A slight mistake in your candidates for the UK. You have included Nicola Sturgeon and Arlene Foster as leaders when they were not members of the UK parliament. The UK has four parliaments; the UK Parliament, the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Senedd, and the Northern Irish Assembly. Nicola Sturgeon was the leader of the SNP in the Scottish Parliament and Arlene Foster was the leader of the DUP in the Northern Irish Assembly.
Therefore, if you're using the candidates for 'President' in the UK parliament then the candidate in 2019 for the SNP would have been Ian Blackford and the candidate for the DUP would have been Jeffrey Donaldson (However, he resigned 5 days after the election to become leader in the Northern Irish Assembly - so then it would have been Sammy Wilson).
But anyone can run for president theoretically. They don’t have to be MPs.
@@EmperorTigerstar Yes, theoretically, however, I'm merely following your system and how it works in tandem with who would become prime minister if they won. If the SNP won (for example), Nicola Sturgeon would not have become prime minister - Ian Blackford would have. The fact they don't have to be MPs surely ruins the whole point of the video?
Doing this for the UK generally wouldn't lead to such wild results because there's not such a wild variation in population and representation, only a slight bias towards Scotland and Wales - which is being reduced in upcoming boundary reviews. Really this is just a scaling up of first past the post, which already delivers some insane results here - such as the SNP taking almost all Scottish seats on about half the total vote and Boris getting a landslide majority in the UK as a whole on 44% of the vote (with more people voting for second-referendum parties). Comparing with outcomes under a proportional system ends up being more interesting, generally (cuts the SNP in half and never delivers a Tory win, assuming lib dems and greens would prefer to partner with labour).
That said, as it stands, polling seems to suggest if an election was held now with this electoral college system, the Tories wouldn't get a single delegate vote (it's not very common to get breakdowns by these regions, but YouGov divides England into London, North, Midlands, South, and those all prefer Labour currently, so it's a fair bet Labour would win every proper regional division in England). Scotland would still go SNP (on 34% of the vote) and frankly Northern Ireland does not work in this system at all because I don't think they actually allow British national parties to stand there, so it is literally impossible for them to field a presidential candidate.
It seems like many parliamentary systems sort of do have an electoral system. Each constituency elects an MP via a winner take all vote. Then each MP gets one vote for PM, basically. While you're probably trying to make the constituencies equal in population, you never will, so it will add in the vote value distortions (to a lesser degree).
Also, in the event of a failure to reach a majority of electors, the US presidential election is decided by the House of Representatives - but not by a vote of members. Rather, each state gets one vote and the delegations vote among themselves about how to cast it. So the Wyoming rep gets one full vote, while the 52 California reps combine for one vote (and one party gets washed out of that vote entirely).
4:40 Why didn't you use counties like a normal human bean?
Bc they're way too small and can't be compared to US States
@@ArturoSubutex The largest counties in the UK are bigger than the smallest US states in both geographical size and population-wise.
@@francisdec1615 congrats on being bigger than Rhode Island. 83 is a crowded map
@@francisdec1615 Yeah but comparing the largest counties to the smallest States isn't really a fair comparison now is it
I was filled with rage when you started doing the UK by nation but then you revealed the regions and I was relieved
Why? I don’t think it’s fair that regions of one nation (England) should be equal to entire nations with their own cultures, languages histories, and identities, even if they have a similar population.
@@holdenennis The regions also have their own histories, genius, everywhere in the world has its own history. THAT IS HOW HISTORY WORKS.
@@loadeddice4696 but not to the extent that Wales and Scotland do, as they have their own cultures and languages, as they are nations. That’s why I think the second map was worse, as it gave the English even more power and votes. The first was better because it kept the nations equal. This whole situation, though shows how much England dominates the UK, owing to its larger wealth in population, which is part of why I hope the others leave and live better without having Westminster rule them.
@@holdenennis Why don't you run your theory that England only has one culture past literally anyone from Liverpool.
@@PlatinumAltaria There is an English culture with regional variants. But ultimately, England is one nation, just as Scotland is one nation and Wales is one nation.
So the distribution of seats in Canada's senate is basically arbitrary? That's bizzare.
The legislative bodies of the EU is the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union. The European Council, which is different from the Council of the European Union, is not a legislative body. You're not the first person to get this wrong, since the naming is ridiculously bad.
Also the apportionment on the EU map appears completely wrong. How does Finland have 19 electors? In general you can't really say countries have "seats" in the Council under the current treaty framework. Voting is either done unanimously or using qualified majority. Under qualified majority voting, what matters is the absolute number of countries voting in favor and the population of those countries. But there are no "seats".
You are correct, I assumed he chose the European Council so he could count the seats, like you said countries don't really have seats in the Council of the EU and is more consensus-based. But even then, almost all the seats in the map seem wrong - for example, Finland should have 15 electors, 14 from the European Parliament + 1 from the European Council in this hypothetical scenario. And countries with the same seats in the European Parliament have wildly different seats in that map.
@@Ellyerre It seems he used parties in government as the number of seats on the Council of the EU. So for Germany it's 3 with the SPD, Greens, and the FDP being part of the federal government. Finland had 5 parties in its current government.
This also doesn't make much sense. The different parties in a national government don't have their own seat. Instead each of the 27 seats is held by a minister from each country. What minister this is depends on the relevant configuration. A country doesn't have more seats just because it's government consists of more parties.
@@Uebeltank Thanks, at least now I understand the numbers, even if they make no sense. Now I understand why my country, Portugal, is "correct", there is only one party in govt. But I can't understand why he chose this, in his scenario it's winner-takes-all so only one party gets the all the electors. And like you said, the one seat in the Council is for each country and depends on the national govt arrangement.
On the eu map, you seem to have joined the ECR and ID groups together. For instance Lega Nord won 28 seats for italy in 2019, but they are from ID and you put them as ECR on the map. Same goes for Front Nationale in France.
Colombia also briefly had an Electoral College when it was called the Republic of New Granada
4:51 while the lower house selects the winner when no one has a majority of electoral votes, that vote in the American system is done not by members, but by states with each state getting one vote. Applying this to the UK would give both the Tories and Labour 5 votes each, with the DUP & the SNP breaking the stalemate. However, as the SNP is closer ideologically to Labour and the DUP is closer to the Tories, the stalmate may be difficult to resolve. Furthermore, as the SNP is a separatist party, one expects them to keep the stalemate going as long as they can, in hopes of encouraging Scots voters to become sad about UK politics and more likely to vote yes in the next referendum on dissolution.
The electoral college was never designed to be a protection for small states against big states. There are provisions in the US constitution that are small state protections (like a bicameral legislature with equal representation in the Senate), but this isn’t one of them. Rather, it was a protection for elite power against the influence of the uneducated populace. We have documents like the minutes of the constitutional convention and the Federalist Papers that attest to this being the intention. It has also never functioned as a small state protection. Many of the smallest states don’t get any attention from presidential candidates and never have. Rather, functionally, it increases the power and influence of swing states which can either be small (like Iowa) or big (like Florida). It’s a profoundly undemocratic institution that does little more than create an unrepresentative 2-party system.
This was a really fun concept
Nice video, but for the british example it would actually be a tie because the when the lower house votes each state / region gets one vote.
2:56 I think in BC a lot of people would strategically vote as the province has a 3 way race NDP LIB CON also a lot of green voters. I have a feeling all the left parties NDP LIB GRN would pool votes and Liberals would win all the time
the only reason America has the EC is that slave owners wanted their slaves to count for representation purposes, but would never countenance their voting. So the slave owners got greater representation in the EC than their numbers would warrant. Why would anyone want to have such an undemocratic system? As its virtually impossible to amend the US constitution the best reform would be to make the states divide their EC votes proportionately among the candidates state by state.
The prospect of Boris Johnson being president of the United Kingdom horrifies me.
I think the uk would use counties to divide up England rather than have one huge block
Electoral college anywhere else would be a rigged disaster 😂
The whole point of the Electoral College is so that every state has their voice, which in turn gives everyone in that state a voice. If you leave it up the popular vote, then you give the more populated areas of the country "more power" or voice than others. Presidents would only have on a handful of cities instead of states. For example, NYC alone is more populated than most of the states in the midwest combined. Essentially, one city would cause half of the country to lose it's voice because it's more populated
No. It simply means a politicians actually has to make an effort and try to appeal to as many people as possible.
New York is already larger than 47 other states and no one cares about it because it's a democrat stronghold and this doesn't change. It wouldn't be any different with the popular vote.
Plus what's bad about politicians actually having to try to appeal to the largest possible number of voters?
@@mmm7528What's bad? When you have two cities determining how an entire country is run, that's what's bad. Unless you're ok with the other states ceceding? But it seems like liberal, city dwelling americans are a bunch of hypocrites, as seen by their reaction to the american civil war. When Kosovo wants to secede from Serbia that's ok because a population has the right to self determination, but when the confederacy wanted to do the same thing all of a sudden it's not. Just the usual city dweller smooth brain in action.
7:00 Death Star chambers vs Couscant chambers.
Are we sure all of that happened long ago, in a galaxy far far away?
It's funny to see the massive swing in the UK election depending on if England is subdivided. It's either 533 with the closest contender being 59 or 301-271 which is SIGNIFICANTLY closer, and the party in second actually changes.
Goes to show how fragile democracy is.
Other states have an electoral college type of system for electing a president. In the EU, the President of the Commission is elected by a majority of the EU Council (one vote per member state) and the EU Parliament (number of votes roughly proportional to electorate). The main difference is that in the EU, you need a majority in both, while in the US you can compensate a minority in one with a larger majority in the other.
That was interesting. For the UK I'd have liked to have seen the effect if the Electoral College was applied at county level. Our counties are more significant in the country than counties in America are, and the disproportionate power of a tiny county like Rutland would be interesting to point out.
Some huge misconception, is that countries like Japan would be one-party state. Winner-takes-all system naturally create two-party system. It means, that most of the electorat of small parties would go to on of the two biggest (usually centre-right and centre-left) parties. That's what usually happend in second round of most presidential elections.
Gonna be honest, most political scientists consider Japan a de-facto one party state. They don't always landslide, but the LDP has only lost twice since 55
They're a dominant party system. They aren't a one party state like Vietnam, North Korea, or red China.
The whole thing where small states matter more is actually a tiny issue, if anything the electoral college makes them matter less. The main issue is that each state is winner takes all, so if 51% of californians vote for 1 person, the 49% don't matter, for example. And if you're in a state where there's no chance that 1 party will win, your vote doesn't really matter. And candidates only really have to focus on states which are either really big so important enough to focus on even if they don't seem that close, or very close races where it could go either way. And that is also the reason why presidents have won without the popular vote. In at least the most recent case with Trump (idk about the others but probably them too) it wouldn't even change anything if you gave each state an exactly proportional number of electoral votes to their population. What makes it skewed is that each state is winner takes all so tens of millions of voters simply don't count
Point well made and I wonder if more people, especially those in states which consistently go to one party would vote if they felt their vote counted instead of what's the point this state will go to the other party forever. I live in Ohio which now has 17 electoral votes, so based on recent elections, it would probably split to 9 red and 8 blue
The states that are safe and competitive always change though, so you never know when your vote for president may actually matter. Your vote still matters for every other election besides the President. I like the Electoral College because it forces candidates to win a majority in specific regions. If you didn't have to do that, you could see a situation where both candidates go to California, New York, Florida, and Texas since those are the largest population centers. They would only campaign to have those states like them. Everyone else doesn't matter nearly as much, which will cause states such as North Dakota, Vermont, Alaska, etc, to not feel like either candidate represents them. But for my first point, battleground states always change. If you go back 10 years, Colorado and Virginia were close states, and now they vote safe Democrat. Ohio and Iowa were toss-up states and now vote decently Republican. Texas is considered a lean Republican state now. Georgia is a toss-up state as opposed to a safe Republican one. Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania are much more than 50/50 than they used to be. Arizona and Nevada are also very competitive states. Trends will occur throughout the country, which will make states become more competitive or less competitive on the presidential level. Based on trends right now, if we look at what new states will be competitive in 10 years, we can have an alright picture of them. States that will be likely decided by less than 10% in 2032 will be Alaska, Oregon (maybe), Nevada, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico (maybe), Kansas (maybe), Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, South Carolina (maybe), Georgia, Florida (maybe), Connecticut (maybe), Rhode Island (maybe), New Hampshire, and Maine.
You don't understand Tigerstar. The only true result is a BLOC MAJORITARE!!
In Australia, sometimes a party or coalition wins government while having a minority of two party preferred votes: 1998 (Coalition), 1990 (Labor), 1969 (Coalition).
Argentina used to have an electoral college but I believe the winner didn't take all the votes like in the US
You misspelled laschets last Name on the germany map
A related question would be to look at several of the last elections and see which states would be swing states in these systems.
For example in Germany, the popular support can sometimes swing a lot between the CDU/CSU alliance and the SPD. (At least the SPD was down a lot during Merkel's time.) However, Bavaria would always be dominated by the CSU and City states always by the SPD.
OOH this is a fun one for the Netherlands considering how the BBB (Farmer's party) became the biggest in all provinces, thus meaning they would get all electoral votes. Would it be fair? No because they didn't win outright majorities. Would it be interesting? Certainly!
Minor correction: the candidate of CDU/CSU in Germany 2021 was called "Laschet", not "Lanchet".
a fascinating video, hopefully you do a few more countries in the future
thanks for pointing out what it feels like to vote in a westminster election when not living in england.
The EU does have a president and has had for many years. I’m not sure how they’re elected but I can’t imagine the European population have a say.
Where did you get the information that Spain used to have an Electoral College? I'm from there and I never heard of that so I'm really curious!
It happened during the Second Republic, the only election that used this system was in 1936 to elect Manuel Azaña.
In the UK it is actually not certain that Johnson would win. In the lower house each state gets one vote, and both the labour-party and the conservatives have a majority in five. Also, you need an absolute majority meaning 7. The SNP, however, is never gonna vote for the tories, meaning that that would make a Johnson-presidency de-facto impossible.
you should do one on if the US had a parliamentary system
One should probably include proportional voting too, since making the US parliamentary probably wouldn't change that much as is. The prime minister and therefore leader of government would likely just switch a bit more frequently between Democrats and Republicans with first-past-the-post in place. And of course the Midterm elections would just become far more important.
As part of that, split the two parties into separate parties to represent the various membership blocs.
the winner takes all votes curses the popular vote so much that it makes the experiment pointless
The prime minister would just be the speaker of the house then
Can you make a Video of how big the parliament would be with every country would have a German voting system?
Would require assumptions about a lot of the variables. Namely the fact that it depends pretty much entirely on how many constituencies the country would be divided into. The reason why the German parliament is so large is exclusively due to the CSU being overrepresented on the constituency seats, which causes the need for so many levelling seats.
It was interesting to see how other countries vote compared to us, so thank you for teaching me something!
4:33 Actually, Johnson won the popular vote in Yorkshire and the Humber in 2019. That would push him up from 301 electoral college votes to 355. He would still be elected President.
Each state gets the same number of electors as its number of Senators and Congressmen combined. So having small states "count more" as you put it is not controversial.
as someone familar with a lot of different elections seeing how dramatically skewed the results get if you apply a american electoral system is genuinely flabergasting
i didn't realise how unfair america's system really was,,
What happens if you are not bunching together CDU and CSU in Germany?
It was an nonsensical mathematics exercise, because a voting system like this quickly become a two party system as parties group together.
And the political landscape will become a polarized mess with two parties having basically the same politics, while claiming to be polar opposites they differ in some small details.
good video, did you think what argentina would have look like?
"This would result in every election being an LDP landslide"
I think it would result in even more internal factionalism within the LDP (which is neither liberal nor democratic nor a party).
Other countries basically DO have an electoral college. Here in the UK MPs vote on who the PM will be, which is basically what electors voting on who the president will be (except the electors also go to congress).
Except it's a parlaimentary system so they can change their minds and appoint someone else at any time.
I think that an amendment to proportionally distribute electoral votes would significantly improve the US electoral college system, while maintaining the disproportionate power of smaller states.
I'd prefer a national instant-runoff system for presidential elections, but I wanted to put this idea out there. Anyone have any thoughts?
It's already happening with the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. An amendment would never happen because the electoral college hugely favours republicans and you need a 2/3rds vote to pass any amendment.
@@PlatinumAltaria I doubt napovointerco will ever get enough states to activate, tho
@@thezipcreator Eventually it will.
@@PlatinumAltaria Not what Bloodrider1914 had in mind.
I think it would be a good idea to make the results in each state be proportional to the vote. It would have to be imposed upon all states at one time because no party running any state would agree with the idea. It would help break the idea that any state is only in one camp or another and we need to divide the country in two along party lines. Using congressional districts won't work because they are geremanders and we should expect some state to come up with different much more gerrymandered districts just for the electors.
Another idea would give each state 10 electoral votes for each one they have now. Vermont and Wyoming would each have 30 electoral votes. The small states would not divide 2-1 between the two main candidates, but would be 17-13 or 16-14. Each state would have to have the same minimum percentage to get an electoral vote, otherwise California (550) and Texas (380) would get candidates with one or two votes for little reason. The point is to elect a President and not a Parliament.
We should also get rid of the idea of actual electors and just talk about electoral votes for the state. We're not choosing electors and expecting them to make a decision. They are supposed to just vote for their party's candidate or they are removed.
1:22 That map is slightly misleading. India does elect president by electoral College but president has hardly any power as India has more British style of govt with prime minister being head of government. Also president is elected only by members of legislature not all the people.
Great video. Could you do this for Colombia?
in a winner take all system, many of the smaller parties would either die out or merge, and it would become more of a two party state.
I live in Canada and it seems Aberta(the current Provence I live in) and B.C( the Provence I grew up in) votes come in so late that it doesn't seem to matter much.
This is a result of colonization and you can see the same effects in countries like Brazil and Australia. Larger population centres are on the East coast, as you move west the majority of people have already voted. This is increasingly so when places always vote the same way.
Would it make sense for the British electoral college map to be divided by their counties?
Only if you mean "unitary authority" as some counties like Bedfordshire don't exist administratively .
4:17 that UK nation map is outdated. If an electoral College formed in the UK and functioned like this, Northern Ireland would be returning Sinn Fein electors, as SF is now larger than the DUP.
Cdu Csu already run one kandiate: The Csu is only active in one state (Bavaria) and the Cdu doesnt run in it. They form a Union: The are the same faction and have one „Kanzlerkanidat“ but internaly they work like two partys.
You forgot to mention that Maine and Nebraksa don't give ALL their votes to the state wide winner but instead give out votes to the candidate who is most popular in those states congressional districts.
The first UK map shows why the UK can never be a "union of equals" and why (at least from a democratic accountability point of view) the nations of the UK would be better off if they split up
The nations of the UK would absolutely not be better independent
As far as I know, it was intentional to make individual votes of smaller states be stronger, so larger states wouldn't have as much power. They do still have a lot of power. Also, not every state has it that the popular vote is the winner of the state. In these states, your vote is a mere suggestion, similar to how in the UK, the king elects the prime minister, and your vote is a mere suggestion. Plus in some states, the popular vote doesn't win the whole state, only in proportions. They should at least do this with every state; you shouldn't win the whole state of California, just your proportion of it.
yup
that was the entire point of the Connecticut Compromise, which ET either didn't know about or chose to not mention for... some reason
The electoral college is way less bad than giving California and Texas the same number of senators as Wyoming and Vermont or having an unelected second chamber like we do in the UK
Hate to break it to you, but the point of the US Senate is that California and Texas do have the same amount of senators as Wyoming and Vermont.
@@soapsatellite the fact someone designed it to do that does not mean it is a good idea.
@@dopamine-crash I'm just saying that we already have the senate part you mentioned, not making a suggestion on whether or not it's good ot bad. But yes, the whole point of the US Senate is that every state gets an equal amount of members regardless of population.
@7:18 On screen it says that ScoMo would have beaten Albo but you said the opposite mate.
Try this in Switzerland where you have 22 cantons, and 7 co-presidents.