The problem is not the allocation of votes based on the size of states population. That in itself is very common throughout the world. The issue is why does winning by a margin of 1% for say Texas, means winning all of the 38 electoral college votes. So the 49% of voters in Texas gets no representation and the 51% gets full representation.
Would this not be the same thing as a popular vote for the nation? 51% being able to tell the other 49% how things should go? As a nation, this is a larger issue. People tend to think based on their group and surroundings. This means that large cities (approx 7-8 of them) would make the rules for the rest of the entire country. The electoral college allows us to give the little guys in ND and SD and AK all the same say as huge swarms of people in CA and NY. TLDR: it cuts down on the potential for mass hysteria
@@linusavogadro1421. it's wouldn't be like the 51% party having full and uncontrolled power. That's why you have the house and senate congress. With the senate dominated by GOP because each state can nominate 2 senators regardless of the size of population. This exactly addresses your concern. 2. Philosophically, of course the party that has more support should have a greater say how the country is run. That's how democracy should work. Majority rules. We should all vote based on policy not ideology. The American notion of red vs blue, GOP vs Dem, us vs them is very unusual. In most countries people vote for whichever party has the best policies to bring the country forward, not on perceived ideology attached to a party. So if the party that had the best policies and is rightly supported by winning the majority of the popular vote not win the government, how will they implement those policies?
@@mutopz not uncontrolled power. My point was that if it goes off majority, only the major cities would have any legitimate say in the polls. The issue comes from how ideas are spread. 'Crime and Punishment' is an amazing example of this. It's not a "what-if" it's more of a "thats-why" A nation should give equal weight to the parties involved. Majority rules would be fine if all the states had the same laws and customs but this isn't the case. In the same way that I don't have a say in how africa should do things, Seattle should not have a large say in how the state of Florida should implement healthcare. Two different places, two different types of people. People are not ideal, so they system can't be treated like they are.
@@linusavogadro142 yes I know exactly what you are saying, but surely you see how this creates division and disunity in America, which is the issue here. I don't live there so I can't see the reason why you would have a system that creates more division
@@mutopz it seems logical that more division would come from assigning everyone a 1 or 0. Less division happens because you vote as an entire state instead of a single person. I've never seen the president, he operates on a mainly state basis. It makes more sense for the state to elect, not individual persons.
Is the "winner gets all" not the most critical problem? What would be the problem of allocating electors proportionally to the votes at a particular state?
The designation of electors is decided at the state level. Most choose the "winner take all" method, but that isn't actually inherent to the electoral college system as a whole. IMO, the ideal option would be a microcosm of the electoral college itself -- each state designating two of its electors based on the state's popular vote, and a single elector by district (to be determined by the outcome of the vote in that district). A couple of states already do it it this way, and there's nothing keeping the rest of them from doing it this way, as well, other than the states themselves.
Yes, it is and here is my non-partisan solution that does not subvert the Constitution nor require Constitutional Amendment: ruclips.net/video/xE5vcuaqO90/видео.html
Well, a state with 14 electors where a candidate wins 51% of the vote would allocate 7 votes to each, so you’d have to win absolute landslides to get any actual votes.
Republicans would lose. Republicans cannot win in a democracy because they offer nothing more than trickle down promises, deception and treachery, none of which are big voter incentives.
The problem with that is that a self-perpetuating gerrymander of the Congressional districts can be used to create an overwhelming electoral vote majority that contradicts the will of the people of that state, almost as badly as the winner take all system, but often in the other direction. The two states that have this electoral vote allocation have no more than four districts, but in a larger state the districts can be gerrymandered much more creatively. In fact, after the 2008 or 2016 election, some Republican leaders suggested that Republican controlled legislatures in states that consistently vote Democratic in Presidential elections (i.e. those with minority-gerrymandered legislatures) should go to the Congressional district plan to get more Republican electors, while those in states that consistently vote Republican should keep the winner take all system, to avoid choosing ANY Democratic electors. They computed that had such a plan been in effect during the just completed election (i.e. a year earlier), the Republican would have won. I would much prefer a winner take most, others take proportionally less system in each state. This would allow third parties to grow in influence according to their merits, rather than being locked out, especially when combined with ranked voting (instant runoff) in each state.
Not true. Delaware, Rhode Island, Vermont and Hawaii have already joined the Nation Popular Vote Compact in an effort to subvert the Electoral College.
Not just states. Since the Civil War, there have been four presidential elections n which the Electoral College has overridden the popular vote: in 1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016. In _every_ case, the Republican candidate was awarded the presidency.
What the video failed to neglect in the creation of the Electoral College is the need to keep the 13 states as a unified nation against the potential threat of being divided into "spheres of influence" by the major powers...The UK 🇬🇧 France 🇫🇷 and Spain 🇪🇸. Most of the people who lived in the states saw themselves as citizens of their states (if their state was an individual country), instead of being a US citizen.
Here are some facts about USA history, the Electoral College, the 3/5ths rule, USA slavery, and the *civil war*. The sources of this information are the USA Constitution and actual events in USA history: *Slavers are terrorists. Slavery is terrorism. Those who go to war to defend slavers and preserve slavery are also considered terrorists.* The Electoral College was written for only one purpose. The Electoral College was written by terrorists(slavers) to be nothing more than a "welfare benefit" for themselves and other USA terrorists. The E C, plus the 3/5ths census rule, awards excessive national governmental and political power to terrorists(slavers). The Electoral College encouraged and rewarded the terrorism of slavery. The Electoral College allowed terrorists to dominate the USA national government until around 1850-1860. The USA's "founding fathers" were the USA's first group of "welfare queens". Ten of the first twelve presidents were terrorists. What happened around 1860 when abolition and the prohibition of slaver terrorism in the new territories and Western states greatly reduced the "free stuff" to which the terrorists had become so accustomed? One of the biggest blows to the "terrorist welfare queens" was the prohibition of slaver terrorism in Western states. That's one of the reasons you hear that whiney, old csa/kkk terrorist propaganda phrase, "We don't want to be ruled by the coasts!". What happened when the terrorist "welfare queens" lost their "free stuff" from the USA government? What happened when the terrorist slavers could no longer easily dominate the USA national government and national politics? The csa was just a low-life, MS-13-type gang of butthurt "welfare queens". After causing the civil war, the Electoral College became a "welfare benefit" for states which suppress voting. I wonder which states LOVE to suppress voting .......... might they be the former terrorist states and terrorist sympathizer states? Eliminate the Electoral College. It has poisoned the USA!
He is correct: Under the Articles of CONFEDERATION (ratified 1781), the states kept INDIVIDUAL sovereignty and gave NO enforcement authority to the Confederation Congress. The system clearly did not work well and was replaced by the CONSTITUTION in 1788 which DIVIDED sovereignty in a Federal Republic and created three INDEPENDENT branches at the central level. The Congress is DIRECTLY elected (Senate since 1913) by the citizens of the INDIVIDUAL states; The Executive is CHOSEN by the STATES through APPOINTED electors with each state's electors equal in number to the total Congressional representation of the state; The Judiciary is APPOINTED by the Executive with approval by the Senate. States have individual sovereignty as to how their electors are appointed. Current inequities are the result of EVERY state being nearly homogenized into Extra-Constitutional PLURALITY WINNER-TAKE-ALL elections of PARTY-NOMINATED slates of Electors. There is a non-partisan solution that does not subvert the Constitution nor require subversion of the Constitution: ruclips.net/video/xE5vcuaqO90/видео.html
All political persons need term limits. Nothing can move forward if some has been in office since the 1950's. 10 years should be the maximum time in office. New generations and new ideas can prosper.
@@chipgar63 you have no idea what you are talking about. You have no facts, no statistics, and no real sources. The only sources you have is what others told you. You’re clearly who can write but can’t read beyond the 4th grade level.
The biggest issue is that the electoral votes does not relate to the population. Why is an electoral vote in Alaska worth 240,000 votes & 675,000 in Arizona?
It is related to population. Amount of electors is total of the state’s representation in congress, Senate and House. Representation in the House is directly proportional to population but every state gets 2 senators which will skew the numbers in smaller states.
@@jamesandrews4853 If it stands in the way of one person, one vote, then it's anathema to our federalist style of democracy or any other style. Increasingly, I see states' rights advocacy as in opposition to democracy. Minority rule has nothing to do with equality. We rightly call it a dictatorship when we see it anywhere else in the world.
@@daveburrows9876I understand that states rights advocacy is largely just a political tool, but I find it sad that this is the case. I truly think that we could be better off if the diverse regions of the country had more autonomy, but generally the movement is just used to squeeze as much power out of the system as possible. No matter the voting system, I think the biggest threat to democracy in the US is the extreme partisanship. We really need to rethink the constitution, but that would require an unattainable level of bipartisanship.
@@Biga101011 That was very well said. One of the things that has me concerned about our Democracy is the growing sentiment on the right that we are a federalism, not a democracy. Well, we are a federalist democracy as opposed to a Parliamentary one, but they're both democracies. We do indeed need to rethink parts of the constitution. It's not some god's holy word or anything, and it needs to adapt to the changes in our society.
@jamesandrews4853: The EC wouldn’t be so distorted in terms of reflecting the distribution of the population, if the House expands the number of members in it. The last time Congress voted to increase representation in the House was in 1911, after the 1910 census. They allocated 433 seats to the existing 46 states, with one seat each for AZ and NM, when they became states later in the decade. In the 1920’s, more rural southern states didn’t want to lose their disproportionate representation to population to the rapidly increasing urban cities. For the first tim in U.S. history, Congress didn’t increase the membership in the House after a census. In 1929, they decided to freeze the size at 435 members. The U.S. population in 1910 was 92.2 million. The population has grown by 238 million people over the last 113 years. Increasing representation in the House will rebalance the EC votes to bring them in line to where people live. Otherwise, the EC is an anti-democratic compromise to get slave states to ratify the Constitution that gets more anti- democratic as the population grows.
The question is whether the states should pick the Cheif Executive as originally intended) or the will of the voters (how we think today.). States have combined the two by individual state laws, but it is still possible (as we have seen twice recently) for the winner of the national popular vote to not become the President.
It's also those things, but the root of our political problems IS the electoral college. We can't allow minority rule if we want to self-identify as a democracy. One person, one vote has got to be the way forward. I don't understand how anyone can dispute that fact however complicated fixing it may be. The distribution of the senate (2 and only 2 senators from each state however large or small the population) is equally anathema to a democracy.
It gives certain states and voters disproportionate power, just as an equal Senate does. That allows politicians from those states to extract benefits from the federal government.
What is interesting, or perhaps ironic, is that the states the benefit from the most from government transfers are states that largely elect GOP Senators who want to do away with most government transfers -- except their own!
That’s the story of government in general for better or worse. Some people extract more and some people give more. That’s how government is supposed to work.
@@johnryskamp2943 Does equitable mean breaking the populous states like California, Texas, New York, Florida into more states giving the people in those places more Senate seats and electoral college votes? And grouping the less populous states into larger states reducing their Senate seats and electoral college votes?
If we elected on national population plurality instead of what is supposed to be plurality by individual state populations, then the most populous states would determine the political course for the next however long it takes to abolish it which would infact desinfranchise a good portion of Americans. South west California has little knowledge and even less care about the difficulties of living in Maine. I might argue for electoral college reforms or rebalancing, not abolition. We need to fix how we do things rather than just dropping one thing and moving to an alternative. Just like gas-powered vehicles, do I deny their environmental impact? No, even living in the country, I do not, but dropping something and moving to an alternative at the drop of a hat just leads to further and potentially worse complications. I will not deny history, but we are the most populous democratic state in the world. No wonder we can look at other countries and see that, "If it's fine over there, that it should work here" without considering that we are the only country where it does work. I finish by stating that just because something should work in a certain way, doesn't mean it does or will.
For the same reason we have gerrymanders, the same reason we have the US Senate, and the US Supreme court and the same reason we had the 3/5 compromise--to give an outsized weight to a conservative, wealthy minority so as to slow down or prevent democratic change and a more egalitarian society. It it works, really well for those who are benefitting even as it kills all the rest of us.
So what is "a more egalitarian society?" Is that when "50% plus one" vote to expropriate the property of everyone else and distribute it among themselves? And then who decides what "equitable distribution" is? Pure democracy DOES NOT WORK. It CAN NOT WORK. It will always be the dictatorship of the mob. The founders of the country knew this well and deliberately designed the constitutional system to guard against the excesses of democracy as well as the excesses of autocracy. They did the best they could to provide balances and counterbalances against concentrations of power. Their system wasn't perfect because no system can be. But it was the best that could be devised at the time. Most of the changes made since the Founding Era have not really improved upon the original design very much--in many cases they have tried to cure an inequity by creating a new, different inequity. One major mistake that was made was arbitrarily limiting the size of the House to 435 members starting in the 1920s. The House should be as large as it needs to be and should be composed of members who each represent a fixed number of citizens. After every decennial census, the number of citizens represented by a single congressional district should be fixed as roughly equal to the population of the state with the smallest population (currently that would be Wyoming) since each state is constitutionally guaranteed a minimum of one Representative in the House. So, for example, if that state's population is 500,000, then the total population of the country, (let's use 330 million for example) is divided by that number to yield a House with 660 members. Then the number of members each state gets is apportioned based on its population, as it is now. Every ten years, this number could change. But it would retain the idea of each congressperson representing a certain and roughly equal number of citizens, which was the original intent. This would correct the anti-democratic tendency set into motion by arbitrarily limiting the size of the House. If you need a bigger chamber to conduct House business, just build one or alter the existing one so everyone can fit. Obviously, then, it follows that since the Electoral College is composed of electors equal in number to each state's congressional representation including their two senators, the trend of the EC away from more democratic representation of each state in the Presidential election would be reversed.
I understood that the senate protected small states' rights - 2 senate votes per state regardless of population. This prevents small states being overwhelmed by legislation passed by a popular majority in the other house. No reason why the electoral college is needed as well for selection of the president.
@@extremegrieferbible - sure they could. Federal aid is crack dependency and they’d be better off without it in the long run. That’s the democrats playbook - government largess = dependency and then they have complete authority over policy. That’s how they’ve kept the inner cities voting democrat for decades. The founders put the electoral college in for a reason - they wouldn’t have a union if large population centers completely dominated policy. They wanted smaller states - who have completely different needs, to have more of an equal say in federal policy. You’re never going to get 3/4 of states to ratify an amendment abolishing the electoral college. It’s a waste of oxygen.
You're right. No other country has copied the electoral college system. None would want to. When my country (New Zealand) decided to change their system as a result of the 1981 election when the winner had less votes than the opposition, a German model of proportional representation was adopted and in practice from 1996.
It is the fairest way to have an electoral college. Some may say it's less fair on a state level, but if we didn't do the electoral college in the US - Then election results would literally swing one direction (left) in favor of big cities. This is the only reason they have a discussion about it. In the future, if that ever changed to lets say Republican... Then this same system that is the bane of Democrats would immediately benefit them. The issue that actually affects Americans day to do is within the state - like for example Virginia or New york. Outside of the cities, straight Republican. Virginia is basically damn near split in half. In these states, ALL the voting power is concentrated in a few cities while the rest of the state suffers. To say that the problem is because of the electoral college though? Point your finger at the idiots who are running the DNC, because how it is in VA or NY is a farcry from lets say, Florida which is mostly Republican -- The Democrat cities however are not suffering under Republican policies, in fact they never do -- It's only when these people (DNC) takes power after an election, do they punish the 50% who didn't vote for them. Their outright, KGB/putin style control of media, academia, etc allows them to artificially press the issue of an electoral college further.
The problem in the USA is not the electoral college, it’s the two party system New Zealand and other western countries have several parties in congress hence the electoral system is more democratic and simpler than the USA
@@obviouslytrollmster1532 Ah yes, a majority vote would give too much power to city dwellers because most people live in cities. Instead, we should use the electoral college, which instead of giving each person one vote, makes it so that elections are decided by the ability of parties to mobilize voters in a handful of swing states.
@godowskygodowsky1155 sarcasm is the way of intelligence for idiots. In an electoral system you have balance between the two. If you don't like the electoral college then go to France.
The thing is that the electoral college doesn’t incentivize paying any attention whatsoever to small population states which is many proponents claim. No one is doing campaign visits in Wyoming, Alaska, Vermont, the dakotas, etc. Instead it rewards a small subset of swing states. Simultaneously, it deprives the supermajority of people from having meaningful votes. Why would anyone vote in California, Wyoming, Texas, or many other states whether they’re Republican or Democrat? Their vote means nothing as a result of the electoral college because those states have a partisan lean which guarantees the results for each state. By contrast, candidates would have to compete for a much wider share in a much broader portion of the country with national popular vote.
As a non-American, I think the current system is very flawed. Either electoral college should be abandoned totally and popular vote should be accepted instead, or at least the state electors should vote proportionally and not with the "winner takes all" system. Without any of those reforms, current system is doomed to have clear and inherent legitimacy problems
@@arodxmangames2778 lol, the people voted against the winning candidate in their state doesn't get represented under the current system. You think that's legitimate?
@@jesterdayplays771 it’s the popular vote! If the state is 40% dem votes and 60% rep. Votes then the 60% carries just like it would in the popular vote but as a ‘non-American’ you wouldn’t understand that.
FYI people, I know a bit of comparative constitutional and electoral law. As far as I've seen, nowhere else in the world, bullshit like that is seen acceptable
The Electoral College exists to protect State sovereignty, not citizen sovereignty. Citizen sovereignty is protected through different means via Federal and State constitutions. This is why States decide how electoral votes are allocated. Some use winner takes all, some do something else. Either way, it is NOT determined by the general public and for good reason.
How is that not for good reason? Shouldn’t each citizen ought to be directly represented in choosing a leader over states, which may even be actively against parts of the public like in swing states for example? A democrat in a red state or Republican in a blue state is completely unrepresented if everyone around them will just vote against them, so votes should at least collectively count towards the leader because they are supposed to represent everyone in the country. It’s a genuinely broken system.
It is so simple, so the majority do not over power the minority. Itsbthe reason we have a House and a Senate. Small states and states with smaller populations do nit get forgotten and dismissed.
If that is the reason the Electoral College exists, then it has failed. States like Rhode Island, Wyoming, and Montana (which in terms of population are quite small) are not focused on by candidates during elections. In fact, many of the states that are being focused on by their campaigns this election year (Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, etc.) are arguably mid-sized states and not at all the “small states” that the Federalist Papers intended to protect
@@rustybarrel516 ur wrong, because only the swing states matter, ur dum small state does NOT matter, actually name me one small state that matters? keep
Because things can change. If you were a Republican before 2016 in Michigan you'd have the same attitude but what was once a solid blue state was flipped to red. California was red thirty years ago, and it can flip back depending on who's running.
Lincoln also got the plurality of the popular vote in 1860 because the opposition was split three ways and he got the largest total ballot. So he still would have won that election even if the electoral college didn't exist.
@@XenonPyromaniac13 We also do not have a system where someone can be President with a mere plurality, and that would not be the obvious alternative to the electoral college. They could have had, say, a runoff election. Would Lincoln have won? Who really knows?
It is like the 2 sides in the comments are speaking different languages. We are so divided constantly blaming all our woes on the other party. It never changes.
Well, let me explain it like this. Imagine yeah, Ireland had more individuals and they got to elect. Who is going to be your Prime Minister? That's how it would be here. In the United States, there's more democrats in California and New York. That would override all the other citizens across America. So there would be 2 states Deciding. Who would be the President of the United States?
If someone wins 40% of a state that has 10 electoral college votes they should get 4 votes, not 0. That would not defeat the intended purpose of the system as the votes would still be state based, rather than popular vote based.
@@derekdammann6417 Not so, It is about popular vote in a state, there would be no districts. You simply cannot gerrymander the number of votes for a state. You 60% of the state votes, you get 60% of the electoral votes.
One person one vote seems the best way to elect a President of all the people. It makes an individual in Texas exactly equal to an individual in Alaska and directs parties to campaign to the whole nation rather than concentrating effort and funds towards the few geographical locations which can turn the election.
Wrong. That would give ultimate power to large urban areas to dictate to everyone else. Not good. Imagine if 51% voted for the death penalty for people engaged in alternative lifestyles. An extreme example, but a good one nonetheless.
@@TisiphonesShadowI hear this lame argument all the time, “the urban masses will control everything.” Well yeah, duh. Every life matters equally (supposedly) regardless of where you live or what you look like. We should try to help and represent as many people as we can. This theory always assumes that the “urban masses” are a bunch of idiots who would bring the country down. If that’s really how you think, why do you bother to call them your countrymen at all?
@@TisiphonesShadow no ur dumb, then they can SPEND more on those large urban areas to get their votes, its called democracy, if they dont wanna spend, then they dont get it.
The problems is that we keep looking at our electoral system thru the lens of democracy. Our founding fathers did not want a democracy but a representative republic. They never wanted the common man/woman to make decisions on who and how to manage the republic... but a handful of men (white and land owners) that were somewhat educated and informed. We have romanticized these men and have heap the democracy and freedom goddesses on top of them. If we really want democracy and all that it entails... it will begin by discussing what it really means, how it will be implemented and probably have a nationwide referendum to see if we have the appetite to make that change... that will probably take decades to be fully implemented.
Yet more evidence of the decline in the quality of California public schools. I went to public school in the mountains of Appalachia and it was fault there.
The EC in recent US history has elected three incompetent republican presidents despite them all losing the popular vote. George Bush Jr (2000, 2004) and Donald Stump (2016). In the prior centuries it was rare for the EC to 'vetoe' the popular vote but it had happened before. I can't remember the details for back then. It is a horrible system that pigheaded southern politicians want to keep just to piss off the rest of the country. To get rid of it requires a 2/3 vote in one or both of the senate or house of representatives (I'm not sure which) AND 3/4 of the states to ratify such an amendment to the constitution. It will be very difficult to remove this way.because of the south.
If you want a country with a common treasury and common currency you must recycle the surpluses from those states to the deficit states. The EU is a prime example of what not to do. Southern EU nations perpetually in deficit scrapping with Northern EU states over loans and austerity.
We are one nation. One person, one vote. Anything or anyone who ignores that ignores our foundation and that includes states' rights advocacy. End of discussion from my perspective.
The system favors highly urbanized territories voting for a liberal candidate. If any one nation had a larger population than the rest, their college vote would be infinitely worth the rest of the federation
I look forward to the day when you the United States become a true democracy. Here, in Australia, each vote has equal value no matter which state we live in. Voting is compulsory for all citizens. We also have a form of proportional representation that attempts to ensure that the composition of a parliament reflects the will of the voters. The USA is stuck with a moribund 18th century system.
Compulsory voting is not freedom. As a free being I have a right NOT to participate as well. Compulsory voting is common in such states as N. Korea, Russia and Iran. Also, the debate here is the popular vote vs. the Electoral college. No one in the US wants the chaos that parlimentary systems have. The US has a better system, and most Democrats and Republicans agree on that principle, no prime ministers or 'houses' of govement based on an outmoded class system.
Australia does have a good system. Every voter should only vote one political party in which should be Left Wing, Labor Party/Australian Democrats, Democratic Parties.
@@Kopernicus67it’s because Australia wants all its citizens to have a voice in government. All you have to do is show up at a polling place to acknowledge you were there, but there is no compulsion to vote itself if you don’t want to. Election Day is a national holiday. Elections are 6 to 8 weeks long with no corporate money allowed in campaigns. As an Australian friend told me, if our politicians did as yours did in running all the time, we’d take them out in the outback and hang them. We want our politicians working for us. In effect, all citizens showing up is the freedom of having a voice because they care about their country. Instead, we Americans have become selfish with no sense of the commons any more. Our elections are a farce with corporate money lobbying without restraint and with the electoral college. Republicans trying to take voting rights away through gerrymandering and voting restriction laws. Europe learned that you can’t have 50 countries and expect to do trade when they all fight with each other. Thus, the EU to help prevent what happened in the world wars and have a more unified group of nations. Britain, led by the Tories, their version of the Republican ultra conservatives led by their version of Trump, pushed Brexit and now their economy is in a shambles. They realized they made a mistake and are trying to get back in. It’s likely the EU will wait before letting them back in. Every citizen should vote, it’s a responsibility for all Americans who care about this country and want to see the best people working for us.
It seems from the video that Professor Keyssar ignores the primary reason for design and continued existence of the Electoral College. It’s the same reason we have two Senators from each state, regardless of their population. The framers wanted to prevent a tyranny of the majority. A POTUS elected by a majority of the popular vote would be able to ignore the interests of large swathes of the country. Policy would favor the east and west coasts, to the detriment of everyone in “flyover country”. The federal government would mistreat rural areas much as the State of California ignores the interests of its rural areas.
Thank you! One other person here gets it. Apparently, no one else in this comments section understands this. But, I would add, that in this day and age, it also keeps the corruption in one state like California, from impacting too much the entire election. No wonder the left hates the electoral college.
You are correct...!!!!! (We in Canada do not have this wise American process for electing our Prime Minister nor for that matter an elected Senate to truly represent our smaller provinces fairly!)
I usually like to provide my own argument but I think in this case CGP grey explained the counter argument best: ruclips.net/video/G3wLQz-LgrM/видео.htmlsi=nkFHp2GQ5QO-GtZI
You're taking nonsense. The senators make sense to some extent, so that every state (=region) is represented in addition to the population. But you don't need the weird electoral college for that when you have the senate.
Is there another video that delves into why Nebraska and Maine do not have winner take all and what were the political dynamics that led those states to adopt that reform?
@@maskedmarvel imagine the popular vote was tied 170mil - 170mil, and the electorate is tied 269 - 269, and that you live in California and vote Republican. Your vote would tip the popular vote, but not the electorate vote as California is solidly Democrat. Without the EC, you would tip the scales for the Republican candidate, now that it doesn't matter what state you live in for your vote to count equally. Yes, 49.99% of votes would 'not count', but that's how races for a single office work (and is the worst case scenario). Do you really think it better if MORE than 50% of votes did 'not count', as was the case in the elections brought up in this video, or, as shown in one of CGP Grey's videos, if by gaming the EC, make it such that *78%* of votes did 'not count'?
The problem with the Electoral College isn't the Electoral College. The problem with the Elecotral College is the method by which 48 states allocate their Electoral College votes following the presidential results. 48 states allocate all their Electoral College votes by WTA, in which the winner of the states' results by popular vote, no matter how small or big, whether 30% or 70%, are delivered to the winner. Only 2 states, Maine and Nebraska, allocate their Electoral College votes closer to the in-state popular vote. The method used by Maine and Nebraska should be the standard by which true voting results are translated to Electoral College votes.
@@RaymondHng Yes. And in 2000 as well. Imagine how different the world we live in would be if the criminal Republicans had been called out for their criminality decades ago.
@@SonnyBubba Different rules for different states can't exist along side the idea that your vote counts exactly as much as mine does. That's the foundation to my thinking. We're one nation, so one person, one vote. State's rights be damned on issues of equality.
There are two things that compromise the value of my vote whether it be for President or House and Senate representatives. The Electoral College has negated the value of my vote for President more than once. However, my vote for House and Senate representatives has been totally devalued by the GERRYMANDERING of voting districts in the state. It seems bizarre that I voted for a House representative whose district has been gerrymandered away from my residential area. My AREA has NOT voted for House rep twice due to the gerrymandering of the area and the moving of these people who are supposed to represent me being geographically moved from one district to another. It is in this way that the MINORITY THEN REPRESENTS THE MAJORITY WITHOUT THE EXPLICIT CONSENT OF THEIR VOTES. THIS IS NOT DEMOCRACY!
Voting is not about you in the sense that your vote is somehow special. Why are you complaining about your vote ‘not counting’? Unless you are saying that you voted, and your vote was then tossed aside, you have no argument.
@@stoneymcneal2458 The typical example of someone who thinks gerrymandering has eliminated his vote is when a redistricting puts him in a district where that majority is not like-minded. (A Republican now in a 70% democrat district)
@@SonnyBubba I interpreted @sachsrw’s complaints to be more about that continued use of the Electoral College. My apologies for I am unclear as to the clarification you are making.
Sorry, but your hopes are unrealistic. It will never happen. Republicans have benefited greatly from the system, so they will never allow it to change.
One argument I hear supporting the EC is to prevent so called "Mob Rule" that the popular vote would cause. However, if that were the case, then how come we do not implement an EC system at the City, County, and State levels of voting? Or is this another double standard of sorts where it would only Mob Rule for POTUS but not for Mayors, Counsel Members, and Governors? My thinking is if they keep the EC, then at least do away with "winner take all".
The electoral college was designed to select the executive of a Federal union. Cities, Counties and States are not a Federal union so it doesn't make sense to elect a mayor or a governor that way. It might be better to elect the electors by congressional district. This may even go a ways toward restoring faith in the Presidential elections. If one district in Philadelphia started manufacturing votes, it would only affect the election of that elector not the entire state's slate of electors.
the reason is simple. Cities and counties are not nearly as geographically or economically diverse as the entire country. Laws to help traffic and road conditions in Minneapolis would not have much value in Florida. Laws to help forest management in Maine or Oregon would be of no use in Arizona. Federal laws and federal government MUST take into account the entire country, not just the heavily populated areas.
@@morefiction3264 as someone originally from Philadelphia, (who now lives in Tennessee and is so very glad of it) I take it from your "manufacturing votes" comment that you well understand Philadelphia politics, lol.
It is effective at creating the same voter turnout in every state. No state can override the other by having higher voter turnout. Every state regardless of voter turnout gets equal representation based proportionality to their respective population sizes.
@@rustybarrel516 Lol,yup,and the "called shot" by Babe Ruth was a huge part of it 😉. But yeah,not to get off topic,we can't go into something as important as this with a sports mentality
@@henrymanzano2201 True, and the framers of the Constitution would agree. Likewise, they would probably agree that a President should not be selected in the same manner a group of people might decide what restaurant to go to for dinner. And they might also appreciate an apt analogy to describe a particular aspect of the way they decided to elect a President. I mean, why not just use total runs scored to determine a baseball champion? I don’t believe the comparison in the original post was intended to equate the importance of the two events, but rather to point out that there were and are considerations in the establishment of rules for both that go beyond “scoring” totals. Fortunately, the founders left a good deal of documentation in writings at that time, including the Federalist Papers, to indicate why they established the process they did. Notably, those writings included sharp contrasts with, and criticisms of, the British parliamentary system, in which the chief executive was chosen by a majority of legislators, regardless of how many total votes those legislators won relative to their opponents or even whether they won a majority of the votes of those they represent. It was indeed a matter they took very seriously.
The Founders were brilliant. It was designed to keep a few large states from continually ruling and ignore the smaller states. Today, over 250 years later, candidates would contend in only the largest states. “Flyover” would be forgotten and disenfranchised. It’s the small people who benefit. How many other constitutions are still extant?
I don’t understand how it is that the video didn’t mention that to change the electoral college, an amendment would have to pass and be ratified, which is not something that would likely occur.
Mostly because it is propaganda. The EC slowed the development of parties, who, yes, have since illegally wielded it. But the idea that it cause parties is historically ignorant. That it was a mechanism of slavery is also insane. Abolitionists tended to speak highly of the process throughout the 18th century as it protected the free states.
In the modern world the terms 'republic' and 'democracy' don't refer to completely different systems of governance. The U.S. is a republic in the sense that it features a separation of power between the legislative and executive branches and robust judicial review through the supreme court as opposed to parliamentary supremacy. But these characteristics notwithstanding, it is perfectly appropriate to describe the U.S. as a representative democracy because legislative decisions are made via majority rule by representatives elected through popular vote. Drawing a clear-cut distinction between 'republican' and 'democratic' states makes sense if 'democracy' refers to a direct democracy where the people vote on individual laws/ policy decisions themselves, but clearly this does not apply very much in our current context. In any case, it matters that a decision-procedure is not democratic because most people take democracy to reflect important values like procedural fairness or civic equality (since democratic decision-procedures assign equal weight to the preferences of all enfranchised citizens). So, it is incumbent on anyone who rejects democracy in a particular context (e.g. the presidential election) to explain why things like civic equality should be outweighed by other values in this case. And simply saying 'we are republic' won't do as a justification since this is simply an empirical assertion about what the current system is, not an argument about what ought to be. Consider the analogous case of a king saying to his disgruntled subjects: 'we are a monarchy so I don't see how it matters that my decisions aren't democratic!' would we expect his subjects to simply accept this reasoning without further argument? I doubt it.
@@ArthurHill88 a republic is different from democracy because of the power the majority has ober the majority not in how the government is structured. A republic can be run by elected representatives or theough direct voting by the people themselves; a deomcracy can also function either way. The difference is that in a republic the majority of the elected representatives or of the people directly cannot abuse the minority. In a democracy the majority of the representatives or of the people directly can do literally anything they vote to do with absolutely no limits to protect the minority. In ancient athens the majority could vote to murder someone and it would be legal; in the roman republic they could not legally vote to kill someone unless they were found guilty of a crime. So technically there are only very few actual democracies in the world today such as China, North Korea, and the United Kingdom. Chinas constitution explicitly says thay your rights are subject to review and suspension by the party if they deem it necessary to the security of the state, same system works in North Korea. The United Kingdom has no written constitution and so parliament or the majority that controls it can literally at any time legally abolish your rights. Whereas in the United States the majority of the congress or of any state legislature cannot legally vote to take away your constitutionally protected rights.
@@libertyordeath5630 Well said, as a foreigner, I learn everything that is so unique about US Constitution and how their founding father think about their nation's future. One cannot understand the constitution if they only read the constitution, we have to go back 2000 years to the Roman Republic and ancient Greece and see how their culture, law, and system of government developed. Polybius, as many Roman and Greek figures, has so much impact in drafting the US Constitution, they wrote many classical literatures about political philosophy, law etc. From this philosophical view, the founders debated that they cannot give all the powers to the majority as that would create a "Mob Rule" that will (maybe sometimes in the future) will oppress the minority. To think that slavery is the cause they proposed EC is very naive and simplifying everything, maybe some of them gain an advantage in this system but what system doesn't? Every system always gives an edge to one side and disadvantage to another, but they also proposed Congress to balance that power, one based on majority to favor state that has more population that is the House and one to balance that power with proportional system that one is Senate. They also proposed Supreme Court which prevent Congress or Presidents to pass a law against the contract that they have made(Constitution) and yes, the constitution is a contract, and as any other contract, they don't 'life' they must be interpreted whatever the written documents say because that's how contracts works, if you want to change it, you include how to change it in the contract as the founders do with the Article V and VII, you can't just interpret the contract as you wanted. US is not a unitary state, they are Union of States that came together to form an alliance so they can protect themselves against much bigger power those of Europe, they don't want big government because its a threat to their rights, they even put a sentence in the constitution "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." see how they put word UNITED STATES refer to a Union of States and a different entity from the State, Which the STATES(the People) giving the UNITED STATES some of their rights and powers to create a Union Manager between the States and not the other way around, so that this Union is not a Unitary State (the plural is very important here). because in the end, governments, politicians is only humans, they have interest, ego and every natural human behaviour, they are easily sway by a charismatic figure like what happen in germany with the election of adolf hitler and dictators in south america, this is why most of the Greek Philosopher don't really like full democracy, because it creates dictator like Sulla, Julius Caesar etc.
@@pande6008 yeah, not many realize that the US is a union of sovereign states. People in the US will say that sometimes, but almost none of them realize that a sovereign state is a "country". Most americans don't understand that Texas is a state just like France is a state or that California is a state just like Spain. I wish more americans understood this because then they would be much more willing to tell the US government to stop stealing the powers of the states. Also It worries me that the EU also seems to be doing the exact same thing to the european states that the the US is doing to our american states...
If a majority of Americans disagreed with my policies, I would like the Electoral College as well. I think we all know whose policies are unpopular today.
If over 300 million people disagreed with me, I would start to reflect on why and maybe consider the phrase "if you come across one asshole in a day, they're likely the asshole; if every single person you come across is an asshole, perhaps you are the real asshole".
@@eq1373Wrong. The country is already btoken in 2 parts. Red and blue. It will break up in more little countries. It's called balkanization. It was bound to happen to a country that was divided into 50 states. Borders will change. They always have.
@@karllieck9064 Problem is, unlike the last Civil War, the division is not so easily confined to a particular geographic area. It is more one of "rural vs urban," with every state having its "red" and "blue" areas. Tennessee in general is very conservative, but then we have Nashville and Memphis which are bluer than blue. Texas is Texas, but then you have Austin. Pennsylvania is often described as "Philadelphia at one end and Pittsburgh at the other with Alabama in the middle." Eastern Washington state and Oregon are nothing like their coastal areas. Upstate New York nothing like New York City. The whole point of a bicameral Congress and the EC which is based upon it is that no one region or faction should be able to dominate the other. It can never be perfect, but it works pretty well, all things considered, despite occasional hiccups. I would like to paraphrase Winston Churchill a bit and offer that it is perhaps "the worst system that could be devised--except for all the others."
I think it's silly to get rid of the Electoral College; the consequences would be terrible. For example, instead of candidates just campaigning in a few states every four years, elections would become an ever-present affair. You would see Republican candidates campaigning in California, New York, and other ultra-liberal states all the time. Every state would become a swing state, which wouldn't be fun. Billions, if not trillions, of dollars would be wasted, and at the end, the results would likely be about 99% of what you would get with the Electoral College. Trump just won the popular vote in 2024 by only doing two or three stops in New York and California. He would have won the popular vote in 2016 if that had been the race. Why fix something that works? People don't realize that fixing one issue can create thousands of other problems. You might see smaller states attempting to secede from the system, and the Senate could be attacked because every state has two senators regardless of population. It won't be pretty, people. If it isn't broken, don't fix it.
It's outdated. Why use un-elected electors with opinions as intermediarys? Do it by hand count and/or or electronically, bypass electors wanting their own outcome, and send the count straight to congress.
I'd rather have a popular vote system to allow third parties to stand a chance-lots of Americans are tired of the Democrat Republican corporate duopoly.
One reason why the duopoly works: both sides have become experts at painting the other side as the villain. There’s a recent video out of a packed sports bar, but the giant tv had CNN on. When they showed Trump’s mugshot, the crowd popped harder than if they had seen the home team hit a home run in the bottom of the ninth in game seven. Watch that video, and then read the first chapter of 1984, where it describes the Two Minutes Hate. You’ll see the parallel.
Surprised the author did not mention the EC value in terms of being an extension of a representative democracy and ensuring that all votes among all counties of all states “counted” vs national popular vote akin to “mob rule” where large urban concentrations of voters would carry political weight overshadowing the political interests (and power) of more rural and less densely populated areas of USA.
the US still has EC because it has STATES not like most small countries. it maintains the fairness over states after UNITING thus united states. states are like European countries and USA is more or less like EU. so imagine disregarding the vote of MALTA because its voting population is very low anyways and only favoring Germany and France since they have top pop
Richard is 100% right! Popular vote is also easy to corrupt from the political machines running in the Democrat cities. This is why Democrats don’t want voter ID so as to facilitate ballot harvesting. Check this out for an example: ruclips.net/video/geCJgAM4_xw/видео.html
I can understand that national popular vote would probably make urban votes more important over rural votes since candidates would often visit urban areas over rural areas. However, that doesn’t mean that urban voters vote in only one way. Urban votes generally tend to favor democratic party but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t any Republican voters in urban area. Same could be said about rural votes. Rural voters usually favor Republican party but that also doesn’t mean that there aren’t any democrats in rural areas either. If Electoral College were to be fair, why does 1 electoral vote in Texas represents about 800,000 people while 1 electoral vote in Wyoming represents about 200,000 people? Texas has about 3 million rural population while Wyoming has about 400,000 rural population but somehow Wyoming rural votes are more important than Texas rural votes even though they are both rural votes but counted unequally just because they are in different state? If you are to say that it’s because people living in Wyoming have different value than people living in Texas, does living in a smaller state makes your value somehow superior than those living in a bigger state so much that their vote count 4 times more important?
@MajorLeague I think I understand your point that the candidate has to to win all parts of United States and Electoral College ensures that the candidate wins “all around” the United States not just certain parts of United States. I think you are right, after all it is United “States”.But I don’t think EC does a good job of that either. In 1976 election, Jimmy Carter won most of the east coast states plus Texas and got 290 electoral votes to secure his victory against Gerald Ford. The interesting thing about this map is that he didn’t win a single west coast states let alone the fact that he did not even win all of the eastern states. Doesn’t electoral college suppose to penalize those who only got support from certain part of the US?
@MajorLeague Also, you said that Wyoming can get 4 times more representation than Texas because Wyoming has 2 senators, just like any other states. I think that the system where one vote is counted 4 times more than other is just not fair. I think every vote should be counted the same and we should never put disadvantage or advantage whether it be big or small state.
Tax Collector = popular vote Sherriff = popular vote City/Town Council = popular vote Mayor = popular vote Governor = popular vote Congressperson = popular vote Senator = popular vote President = not popular vote Why?
As an interested non-American, that was useful; thanks! To the outside world it does seem that the President has become more symbolic...assuming the country is not at war. The Senate with its filibuster seems to be where the real power lies; Trump only got one piece of major legislation passed and that was the corporate tax cuts that McConnell (& Ryan) had always wanted. And his SC picks were Federalist Society picks because Trump is clueless about that stuff. And I don't even want to think about how weak Obama was up against the Senate. Maybe the presidential vote i just part of the political/money-making circus and doesn't matter anyway.
When the United States constitution was debated by the revered ‘We the (rich, Anglo-White Male) People” gang in 1787, James Madison made it very clear that the rich must secure and maintain property and wealth: “....The wealthy, therefore be outvoted in a democratic system and government would be overrun by the majority of working people. To prevent the working class from attaining political power and expropriating the property and wealth of the rich (“an agrarian law”), we have to “wisely” ensure that government “protect the minority” of the rich against the majority of the poor.” The electoral college was concocted by these guys to assure that the wealthy elite remains in power in perpetuity. Hence the electoral college crap. The mystery is why the ordinary Americans never revolted against this election system.
The United States was a union between independent autonomous States. Senators were not elected by popular vote in each state, but by state legislatures. It wasn't a personal popularity contest funded by election campaign donors. This country was purposely not designed to be a pure democracy, because of the potential for the tyranny of the majority. The Electoral College gives power to the states in proportion to the number of people in each state. If this idea is pushed through the next step will be to have people in the House of Representatives elected by popular vote Across the Nation No accountability. No representation on local or Regional issues. Just the way this question headlight is written is biased. ( Why are we "still" allowed to eat meat and not just eat bugs like the wants for us.) The push for the elimination of the electoral college carries with it a whiff of a permanent Democratic power grab. Elections would be ENTITELY controlled by advtertisers on the monopoly of cable TV networks ( the donors praying for those advertisements). When I look at this video, I consider the source. The suspicious nature of this movement is exceeded only by that of ranked-choice voting, assistive which lends itself to be easily rigged and at least theoretically, even without shenanigans, could result in the election of a candidate who is no one's first choice.
It's really a biased movement to begin with, I've been trying my best to have a rational debate with someone about it and all I'm getting told is that I'm not making sense or anything. I feel as if this kind of language is propaganda and more or less a feeling based thing for Democrats. Video is right on one thing, very few people actually understand the electoral college. It's very obvious in this comment section and this person I was and still am debating with.
@jeannovacco5136: “The push for the elimination of the electoral college carries with it a whiff of a permanent Democratic power grab.” Huh? I don’t see how a national popular vote is a Democratic power grab. There’s no reason a Republican candidate couldn’t win a national popular vote for president. I have no idea why you think so little of the Republican Party that they would be incapable of winning a national popular vote.
While there's some reality in your first paragraph and a smidgen in your second paragraph in the rest you're just making up a bunch inane arguments. All media in the US, whether you consider it left or right, are owned by large corporations, hardly a liberal bastion. Also, as pointed out in the video, there was wide bi-partisan support to eliminate the Electoral College in the 1960s, but it died in the Senate due to Senate filibuster rules. It is now mostly opposed by Republicans because they don't believe a GOP candidate can win without it.
You act like we haven't had "Tyranny of the Majority" the whole time. Plenty of minority groups have been disenfranchised and disadvantaged throughout this country's history, because the majority supported it. Also, why is tyranny of the minority better?
What matters to the candidates are the swing states. Nobody gives a shit about Wyoming because they all know they're gonna vote Red no matter what lol.
@@carraway8084 The U.S. was not founded as a democracy. It was founded as a constitutional republic. "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government." -Article 4, Section 4 U.S. Constitution.
Just another example of the US standing almost completely alone. The Electoral College, Govt healthcare, multiple yearlong campaigns & almost NO gun control are just a few things that make US the Stand out in the world(Definitely NOT for the better)!
One question: why the "winner takes all" though? Why not just count the blue (electoral) votes as blue, and red votes as red? This is the point where it's unfair, for me. Kindly explain. Edited: I understand how the EC is needed due to the "mob rule" concern, or the "otherwise 5 states would overwhelm the other 46" concern. I just don't understand the winner takes all thing.
We have individual state representation through the House of Representatives and the Senate already. Using proportional methods in the electoral college doesn’t fully make sense because it’s likely that candidates wouldn’t make it to 270 votes. You could argue then that we should lower the amount of electoral votes needed, but it doesn’t seem necessary when the electoral college in itself is already intended to check and balance the fairness of the system. Winner takes all system keeps politicians accountable and invigorates political change. We wouldn’t have swing states if we did proportional votes, and often swing states serve as the epicenter of political concerns for the entire country. I believe the winner takes all system prompts candidates to focus on the concerns of their bases in many different states.
Great question, ilua, and, in making it, you've undone most of this videos narrative. Winner takes all didn't become common until after 1900. It was, in fact, the parties that pushed for this, and because the rest of the votes in the states were also winner takes all, it was familiar to the average voter. However, this was a ploy from party leadership to establish and domineer states as points of control. This very fact undoes the videos second point. The third point is undone in the mere fact that abolitionists (Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln included) also desired to keep the EC. In conclusion, this video is historical nonsense, politically motivated by the DNC, and generally speaking, garbage.
@ilua as I see it the electoral college causes mob rule, look at the states that produces more in GDP to the states that doesn't and which of those states hold the rest of the country back from moving forward. California adds more than 3.05 trillion dollars to the GDP, or more than 14% to the economy. Now take the most conservative state in the country, Alabama, Alabama adds 1.1% to the GDP of the country. With a population of Alabama at 4.903 million people, compared to California's population 39.51 million people, my point is this more often than not the electoral college allows mob rule, and allows politicians to tailor their message to a small segment of the population, which in my opinion is the mob. I personally believe elections are about the numbers and who ever has the most votes should be the winner.
@@bananasarecool123 "I believe the winner takes all system prompts candidates to focus on the concerns of their bases in many different states." Isn't that what we have now, just not out in the open, if we had popular vote, I personally think we would get candidates that speak to the country as a whole, instead of the slice and dice messages we get now.
The reason we still have the electoral college is cos John Kerry lost Ohio in 2004. If he'd won Ohio, he would have been the 1st Democrat to lose the popular vote, but win the white house. At that point Republicans would have wanted to do away with it. And legislation would've happened that would've abolished it.
@kosmokritikos9299 not exactly. A group of states are recognizing the winner of the popular vote as the winner of their electoral college votes. Once enough states get on board to do this, it'll be de facto popular vote winning the election because in order to win a majority of the electoral college, you have to win the popular vote.
@@remlapwastaken8857 "No State shall, without the Consent of Congress,... enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power" Further, what you're asking the states to do is act against the wishes of their voters and select electors the voters expressly rejected to the electoral college. And they claim this is _more_ democratic?
Under the Articles of CONFEDERATION (ratified 1781), the states kept INDIVIDUAL sovereignty and gave NO enforcement authority to the Confederation Congress. The system clearly did not work well and was replaced by the CONSTITUTION in 1788 which DIVIDED sovereignty in a Federal Republic and created three INDEPENDENT branches at the central level. The Congress is DIRECTLY elected (Senate since 1913) by the citizens of the INDIVIDUAL states; The Executive is CHOSEN by the STATES through APPOINTED electors with each state's electors equal in number to the total Congressional representation of the state; The Judiciary is APPOINTED by the Executive with approval by the Senate. States have individual sovereignty as to how their electors are appointed. Current inequities are the result of EVERY state being nearly homogenized into Extra-Constitutional PLURALITY WINNER-TAKE-ALL elections of PARTY-NOMINATED slates of Electors. There is a non-partisan solution that does not subvert the Constitution nor require subversion of the Constitution: ruclips.net/video/xE5vcuaqO90/видео.html
What so many people fail to understand or recognize is that the United States is just that, a federation of nominally sovereign states. It is the states that choose the chief executive of the federal government, not the people. If fact, for many years the legislatures of some states chose that state's electors and no popular vote was even held. Such are the details that made the Union of the states possible in the first place. Apparently the scholars at Harvard are no better informed about the basics of American history and civics than is the general population, or else they are willing to let their politics trump their academic integrity.
Correct. What the professors at Harvard and elsewhere seem to keep remembering is that the electorate sees itself in a different system with those annoying 21st century ideas about enfranchisement, and they keep highlighting the anachronisms.
How does this look like equality to you? Are you so intent on minority rule that you're willing to dismiss the idea of equality for all? One person, one vote. Anything that interferes with equality is anathema to this federal style of democracy of ours.
We are not a democracy, but a representative republic. If you really want to change it, you need to amend the constitution through the constitutional process.
@@TisiphonesShadow don't care. it's pretty lame. States don't vote, people vote. And the current system doesn't even work either. Just makes politicians go to a handful of swing states.
But then,too many 'Murricans start crying " but the Constitution!", whenever any type of changes are proposed. We're stuck with basically the same document from 1787. It's not 1787 anymore! Other countries update (and modernize) their national constitution,on average,every 20 years or so,and they turn out just fine- even in Europe,and most of them are doing better than us.
Hmmm... So why the USA blamed other countries (as Sovieta Union, as an example from other times) as "not democratic", if the USA itselves claim to be not a "democracy"?
As a former Presidential Elector for Hawaii. I believe that small or low population states would have littte or no power if we went to a stright voting system.
But each individual Hawaiian voter would have the same voice in choosing the president as a voter in any other state, and specific Hawaiian interests could e addressed by legislation. As things are now, a voter in Hawaii is in effect more of a citizen than the _same_ voter would be if he or she lived in California.
If democrats are allowed to get away with a direct democracy, all it did take for democrats to win elections is to dump 20 Million migrants and give them amnesty.
You could make the same argument against the people who want the presidential elections changed from the electoral college and the "winner takes all" system, that a simple majority by popularity also disregards 49% of constituents in many elections. The focus of early American government foundations was the states and the representatives from those states. I constantly hear people complain about one institution or another, but those same people fail to understand the compromises that landed this system on those decisions and would be remis to go back on the compromises that were given on the issues they like and then reversed.
Its because it benefits republicans and it can’t be renovated without the consent of republicans Kinda like how supreme court reform requires the consent of the supreme court to become less corrupt
@@raymondjensen4603You can’t ratify an amendment without the approval of 38 states. logistically speaking, it's nearly impossible with how many red states there are
Democrats only whine about the Electoral College when they are worried about losing. The ONLY thing that matters to them is power and control over others.
I wish I had seen this when it came out. It’s so frustrating how people do not understand the electoral college. It’s doing precisely what the founders meant - so that large cities cannot become a tyrannical majority, and protect the rights of the minority. It creates a situation where parties have to compromise….I agree to the points of having political parties, and that it would be better if they had not formed, but as Jefferson has always pointed out, you’ll never prevent people of like minds coalescing together. With that said, there is only one feature of the electoral college that is a severe problem. When it was created, populations of congressional districts were supposed to be of equal size. That has never been adhered to, and at one point early in the 20th century forever capped in the House. The idea was that people in rural states would have influence by two additional electoral votes being represented by their senators, and that’s how they could possibly overcome the difference in population gaps in larger states. Today it’s so lopsided, because you will have huge disparities in district size. If this was addressed, I believe people will feel better about the electoral college.
People such as the Harvard professor are mad at the electoral college because it has prevented democrats from winning. As for the district size differences, that doesn’t affect the electoral college at all, because the number of districts each state gets is proportional to population. At least as proportional as possible, given that no state can have a fraction of a district.
How does the EC stop a "tyrannical majority" of large cities? Today most Americans live in a large city or a suburb of one, which was not the case in 1789. If you add up the EVs of the 12 most populous states, all of which have populations dominated by large cities, that's a winning majority right there. I have no idea how the EC creates a situation where parties have to compromise. Maybe if no party wins a majority of EVs in a three-way race and one party is able to get enough faithless electors to switch to backing them? I don't think that's ever happened in U.S. history and that's not even legal in many states.
@@jamesfunk7614 i love that idea…fixes a lot of problems. People also don’t realize gerrymandering, which wasn’t as a sensitive topic as it is today, is only worsening because we haven’t addressed this.
@@eq1373 only a selfish dick would try to shoot his fellow americans in the face just because a system that unfairly rigged voting in his favor, was taken from him in favor of a more fair and equal one.
It was an elitist move by the founding fathers who didn't trust "da peepul" (and initially thought the Senate should elect the president) - today amendments are hard to dump and the EC makes campaigns a whole lot easier, with candidates only having to concentrate on a handful of states!
@1Tomrider You got it backwards . The Popular vote would make it possible to win with just winning few large population centers. The EC makes it necessary to consider all the states
Glad we "dumped" the utterly stupid and predictably doomed 18th Amendment by way of the 21st. Wish we could also dump the 16th and 17th. All three (16, 17 and 18) were mistakes enacted during the wonderful "Progressive" era.
The reason the Electoral College was created was to prevent a tyranny of the majority, meaning the large population centers riding roughshod over the rest of the country. A tyranny of the majority is an ever-present danger in a democracy, therefore it is wise to maintain the Electoral College.
Yes, eliminating tyranny of majority and in the process creating tyranny of minority, when smaller areas holding entire countries at hostage. EC is NONSENSE. It is no more than a tool of minority of some people (slaveowner) to control majority. US does not have the right to call itself democracy or representative republic as long as it has EC
Instead,we have financial tyranny,where those with the deepest pockets decide who the candidates are, who wins and rules over the rest of us,and it's their money that influences what laws are passed (laws which only apply to us and never them),along with the price of everything. It's not about red vs blue in this country. It's about the super-rich vs everybody else, regardless of party or demographic. Whoever is in the White House (Harris or Trump this year) may be President,but it's the corporate and billionaire class that is the boss
One thing that would fix the Electoral College is to end the cap on the members of the House of Representatives. If we could have a Congress that better represents the population, the Electoral College would too. Those of you claim the Electoral College is not representative or direct, just look at countries with a parliamentary system like the UK or Canada, We're the chief executive is elected by parliament instead of the people. That is less direct.
Well said and I have made this point elsewhere in this discussion. The 435-member limit on the size of the House is completely arbitrary; something that came about in the 1920s. Going back to each representative representing a certain number of people, no matter how large the House gets as a result, would also go a long way toward fixing the perceived problems with the EC.
There is one big reason you have not looked at. The electoral college gives smaller states a say. Typically big cities vote democratic. However the food belt, all of it, votes republican. How would the big cities like it if the farm belt got upset with the "popular vote and cut food off to the cities? One of the big issues of the revolutionary war was fought over taxation without representation. If the vote of a small state makes no difference why would they listen to anything that came out of Washington? A popular vote will further divide the country and the small states have the food.
California grows about half the produce in fruit, nuts and vegetables in the country and is not a small state. Many farms states mostly grow corn for ethanol fuel, animal feed and high fructose corn syrup. Corn gets federal subsidies for ethanol and crop insurance which shifted many states to focus on corn.
So yes, much better to have a system that is systemically undemocratic than risk having to put something in place that reduces the risk. Amazing how other countries manage to hold democratic elections. But - you know - American Exceptionalism.
@@steveknight878 the USA isn’t a democracy it’s a constitutional or federal republic. The Founders did this intentionally because democracies are so unstable.
There are over 120 countries that manage to elect a president by popular vote without having that problem. Most of those are heads of state rather than head of government but the principle remains the same. Examples - Ireland, Germany, Poland, Austria, South Korea, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, Israel.
Lol, I love how you would rather have the one with fewer votes win, than have a nationwide recount to make sure the one with more votes won. If you support the Electoral College why would you even care about having a nationwide recount? It's not like you care who won the most votes anyway.
The reason why we use the electoral college is for the time when you have 5 candidates running for president, and the most popular one get say 28% of the popular vote. The electoral college system ensures that the person, sitting in the Oval Office, was put there by a majority of votes (either by the electoral college, or Congress). The only thing that I would change about the system is that if someone wins a majority (50%+1 vote) of the popular vote, then he/she should automatically be president, and not use the electoral college. To date, it's only happened once that someone won a majority of the popular vote, and lost the electoral college: 1876. As the US Constitution allows states to determine delegates anyway they want, nothing is stopping states from applying Maine's, and Nebraska's system of assigning 2 delegates (1 for each senator) based on 1st place in the popular vote across the state, and 1 vote in each Congressional district that a candidate comes in 1st in.
But it’s almost unrealistic under current American politics. Yes there are parties like green party or libertarian party but none of them gets enough votes to even have a say in terms of electoral votes. The most successful 3rd party candidate I would say is Ross Perot who received about 20% of popular vote but received zero electoral vote because he didn’t win any states. Also you mentioned that “when you have 5 candidates running for president, and the most popular vote one get say 28% of the popular vote” . In 2016 presidential election there were officially 6 candidates (Jill Stein, Gary Johnson, Darrell Castle, Evan McMullin, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton). 94 % of voters voted for two major party candidates and thats even when both of the candidates were widely unpopular. The idea that most popular candidate getting 28 percent of the vote is theoretically possible but simply unrealistic given that there are only 2 established major parties and most don’t vote for 3rd party candidate.
Exactly - only Boomers remember the great days of 5-6 different parties running and then - the government changed us into a 2-party Nation by forcing candidates to BUY AIRTIME (NEVER ALLOWED) and allowing CORPORATIONS TO BUY CANDIDATES! Remember it was ILLEGAL for Corporations to donate more than $5000. This prevented CORPORATOCRACIES - which we have evolved into as BILLIONS BUY OUR ELECTED OFFICIALS!
@MajorLeague In a manner of speaking, yes, I agree in principle, but the other parties existed, active, and were gaining members, back in the 60's as equal airtime was given - and given free of cost. No one was hindered in getting out their message and platform. In an age of "reach" thru Television, & Radio, the other parties grew. That had to be quashed and so it was by changing campaign laws and allowing CORPORATIONS an increased donation total that the other parties faded. Add the Special interest and lobbying "pays to play". Democracy is now only in word (in many respects) and we've become a CORPORATOCRACY, or one could argue, a Technocracy 😳 scary stuff!
@Maher - Why are you lying? In 2016, "We, the people" elected Mrs.Clinton to be prez by a margin of 3-million votes. DJ Trump was GIVEN the presidency via the "welfare benefit" for terrorists(slavers) in the USA Constitution, the Electoral College. In 2000, Al Gore was elected by "We, the people" to be prez, but GW Bush was GIVEN the presidency via the "terrorists' welfare benefit", the Electoral College. Please stop lying and remove your head from QAnus!
Someone who studies so much and yet overlooks the obvious. One of the major reasons the Electoral College still exists is because it would require a Constitutional Amendment to remove it. This would not have the support of the majority of the States, because it would then put far too much power into the coastal States while leaving the Midwestern States to be nothing more than a resource to be exploited to exhaustion. For all its flaws, the Electoral College has the effect of distributing power rather than allowing it to become too concentrated. Someone seeking the Presidency can't just appeal to the elite and the desperate - they also need to gain the support of a reasonable number of Middle states, who can also band together to protect their own interests. This protects the rights of the Midwest not to simply be a tool for the Coastal Elite. It's an imperfect system to be sure, but still better than the alternative.
So,why not separate? Even the smallest states,in terms of population,have GDP's that are comparable to,or greater than entire countries. Plus,we won't have to have this debate, and everyone will have the leadership they want. Texas doesn't want to be at the mercy of New York, and California doesn't want to be at the mercy of Florida,so it's a win-win. People would also flock to states which align with their personal values,creating an influx of revenue,jobs and growth. Look at how Texas (especially Austin and Houston), Tennessee (especially the area around Nashville on eastward) and Montana have grown,and how people still flock to places like the East Coast and Northern California
@@SonnyBubba But each state has the power to decide for itself whether it wishes to use a "winner take all" (as most states do) or a proportional system (as Maine does.)
@@therealniksongs Uh... so we shouldnt do that. Because that effectively gives a state to a party, which effectively doesn't represent it accurately. Now we have "red" or "blue" states, and "purple." This is a misnomer as this was caused by "winner takes all."
In a national popular vote, there won’t be any swing states, only the overpopulated areas full of like minded idiots. The founding fathers didn’t want a democracy and for good reason.
Full disclosure: I am from Canada, but I have had an interest in U.S. history and politics for almost four decades, since I was in high school. The best answer that I have heard as to why the electoral college still exists is that (basically) it gives smaller states a slight "leg up" versus larger states in choosing the chief executive. I once heard an argument that if you had a pure popular vote system for picking the President, under the current (and projected) demographic situation, the winning candidate would essentially be decided by just California, New York, and America's 10 largest metropolitan areas outside of those states. Those constituencies are historically mostly Democratic, so that Republican voters in other states and outside of urban areas would feel like their vote hardly matters, and the Democratic candidate would win virtually every time. The Republicans wouldn't stand a chance. I realize that this is a somewhat partisan argument, but I think that a good point is raised. You don't want a situation where one party has an unfair adventage over the other.
I understand what you're saying, but you know what that unfairness is called, it's called democracy, one man one vote, The electoral college was set up to favor slave holding states, the old Confederacy, the damn thing has to go!!
@@SonnyBubba it was created to give former slave holding states a bigger say in how to run the country, my response to that is f*ck them, they just got their asses kicked in the civil war, they don't deserve a say for treason against the United States.
Oh my, that was sweet...the EC gave us Bush and Trump. Enough said. Abolish it before it does the country in. Oh, and attempted fake electorates in our 2020 presidential conformation process...Oh, and Jan 6th. Yeah. Stick to your Canadian politics.
WAKE UP! Texas and Florida have larger populations than New York. Voters, not delegates should decide the presidency. A president should be elected by the majority of voters. Think about this. If a candidate wins the 11 most populated states by just 1 vote, and doesn't get any votes in the remaining 39 states, he or she wins. A voter shout;d count the same regardless of what state it was cats in. The electoral college can elect a candidate who loses the majority vote by an incredible margin and still get elected! The truth be told, the electoral college is disgraceful!
I think we are missing the larger point of why a national popular vote is not appropriate for our form of government. We are the United States of America. The President is not elected by one national campaign for the popular vote but by building coalitions within 50 separate states. A president must be able to speak the the wants and needs of very diverse groups across all 50 states. By having only 1 national vote candidates could largely ignore states with small populations and focus on the relatively few states with large populations. Also candidates would almost be forced to ignore rural areas and focus on urban and suburban areas. Donald Trump won by focusing on rural areas in key states to overcome his disadvantage in urban centers. In a national vote he could not do that and rural communities would become largely ignored in Presidential elections. The electoral college works because it forces candidates to listen to diverse groups that represent the entirety of our nation and penalizes those that don't.
Imagine a parent- teacher association (PTA) where the families with more kids get to decide the policies for families with only one child. Now imagine a country where California and New York decide everything for the other 48 states because they have more population.
There are 333 million people living in the US as of now, NY and CA only have 20 Million and 39 Million respectfully, that ads up to 59 million. If you do simple math you can see that they hold less than 1/5 of the whole population of the country, meaning if you even had 4 NY-CA agglomirations added into US they still can be outvoted. USA dosen't need electoral college, let the PEOPLE vote, not states.
The Electoral College system decentralizes the process, so that states can withstand corruption from the federal government. Currently, states are allowed to decide most of their own election rules. With a "national popular vote," the courts would eventually hand over election rule-making to Congress in the name of "equal protection." Election centralization tends to lead to corruption and consolidation of power under the ruling party.
I place much more importance on individual equality than I do for states' rights. We are a federalist democracy (as opposed to a parliamentary one, for example), and in a democracy, one person's vote must carry exactly the same weight as any other. Anything that stands in the way of equality is anathema to any democracy including our federalist democracy.
@@daveburrows9876 The United States is not a federalist democracy. It is a democratic republic. States send representatives to the Senate and House to vote on our behalf. We, the people, don't vote on federal legislation. Similarly, states send electors to represent the collective will of each State in a vote of the States for U.S. President. We, the people, don't vote for President. We vote to decide what our State (electors) will do. The genius of the EC is that it protects smaller states from tyranny of the majority (e.g., Los Angeles County forever drowning out voices of several small states in mountain, midwest, or southern regions who have completely different needs than a high-density urban area). In a pure democracy, two wolves and a sheep vote on what's for dinner. The EC also forces candidates to campaign in more of the country than just major coastal cities. So as Alexander Hamilton said, the Electoral College is if “not perfect, it is at least excellent." Best to you.
For all of its flaws the electoral college forces candidates towards the center instead of their extremes. With a hard look at California you can see what a straight popular vote would do to this country. The real question is are we better off with the Presidency changing party every 4 to 8 years or one party always in power with zero reason to consider what the other half of the country thinks and feels?
I live in a swing state and my small hometown has been visited by two different setting Presidents. The only thing being in a swing state gets its residents is more election ads than you can stand. Our local and state elected officials hitch to the coattails of their party presidential candidate and largely get a pass on their local record. I am no fan of the electoral college but it does it's job by stifling single party rule. Every country that is controlled by a single party oppress their citizens. When looking at the results I can not see a more balanced way
@Chris Jones I don't believe that the electoral college is why we don't have single party rule??? If it had not been for the electoral college we would have had 28 years of Democratic rule. Gore and Hillary would have been president and that is why you all are pushing for a straight popular vote which will force the country to the far left. Current system fairly balanced power keeping ideology more or less centered by allowing power to change hands in every decade. Popular vote 49% of the country will be alienated and futher divided. When one half of a country is powerless they are either killed or they cause a revolution.
@Chris Jones If you look at the Democratic platform call it centrist while saying the Republicans shifted to the extreme right we must not be living in the same country. Especially considering I was a registered Democrat until 10 years ago. I supported blue dog dems and pulled for Joe Lieberman. I didn't leave the Dems they left me. You are going to get your wish and we will be worse off for it. The only two polices I do not agree with is immigration and abortion but when the dems run to the left of course the repubs run right. The far left liberals flushed their party of their centrist candidates and independents like me with them.
@Chris Jones One of the biggest issues I've always been bothered by is the idea of a living constitution because it gives legislative power to an authority that is unaccountable to the voters. Critical Race Theory I have listened to several lectures from its proponents and their conclusion is we are in one of groups the oppressor and the oppressed. This idea goes against everything Doctor MLK worked towards. I want something that gets us past all of the racial divides instead of making them deeper Unfortunately no one is working for it. The Green New Deal and the Paris Accord on Climate Change The overarching idea sounds good but the details will drag our economy down. The GND will destroy businesses and they will run to places like China because they wouldn't have to match our standards for over a decade in the Paris Agreement. The Democratic idea on climate change is the stick when the conservative idea is the carrot. Instead of forcing people\businesses to pursue green ideas reward them if they willingly do it. If global warming is the most dire problem facing the planet then do not stand in the way of nuclear energy. The nuclear energy debate is painting the barn door when the barn is on fire. Taxes Every tax break I have ever had came in an Republican administration every increase came under Clinton and Obama. This post is just off of the top of my head but I don't like how Trump will not shut up so I was holding out to see who and what faction of the democratic party was running before I decided. When I saw it was the far left woke liberals that sealed the deal. The idea that because I have some center right conservative ideas I should be shut\shouted down. I can not support phony virtue signaling. I want to hear all sides and I don't see people on the right protesting peoples first amendment rights. All and all the woke virtue signaling was the last straw for me
Until 2001 it never mattered. That was the very first time that the person winning the popular vote didn't win the electoral college. If you want every American to believe that every vote counts then get rid of the electoral college. Are we by the people and for the people or are we a government for some people?
'Until 2001 it never mattered. That was the very first time that the person winning the popular vote didn't win the electoral college." Actually ...it had happened three times before the 2000 election. 1824, 1876, and 1888. You can (and probably should have) look it up.
Without a doubt, you make the electoral college proportional and you drastically improve the system. You'd no longer be fighting thin margins in the current swing states, but pretty much everywhere else. As a Republican, campaigning in California, Washington, Illinois, MA is no longer a loonie thing to do. Democrats could campaign in Texas, Montana, Missouri, the Dakotas or states that have a good solid blue center they may be able to help take one vote from (that's right: *small states* that "dOnT mAtTeR" with the popular vote). Make /every/ electoral vote count. And by design the smaller states STILL get their advantage.
The founding fathers saw the city-state of Paris dictating to the rest of the country unchecked is one reason.
So you should be happy now that MAGA is running the country unchecked.
how well the electoral college works is evidence of how much smarter our founders were and how much thought they put into the constitution.
I agree with ya. Too much propaganda in these days.
@@lapprentice let me guess, you are Republican
@@emmapeel4259 Well he put together a sentence without mentioning his feelings, race, or gender so yeah, clearly a Republican circa 2024.
The problem is not the allocation of votes based on the size of states population. That in itself is very common throughout the world. The issue is why does winning by a margin of 1% for say Texas, means winning all of the 38 electoral college votes. So the 49% of voters in Texas gets no representation and the 51% gets full representation.
Would this not be the same thing as a popular vote for the nation? 51% being able to tell the other 49% how things should go? As a nation, this is a larger issue. People tend to think based on their group and surroundings. This means that large cities (approx 7-8 of them) would make the rules for the rest of the entire country. The electoral college allows us to give the little guys in ND and SD and AK all the same say as huge swarms of people in CA and NY. TLDR: it cuts down on the potential for mass hysteria
@@linusavogadro1421. it's wouldn't be like the 51% party having full and uncontrolled power. That's why you have the house and senate congress. With the senate dominated by GOP because each state can nominate 2 senators regardless of the size of population. This exactly addresses your concern. 2. Philosophically, of course the party that has more support should have a greater say how the country is run. That's how democracy should work. Majority rules. We should all vote based on policy not ideology. The American notion of red vs blue, GOP vs Dem, us vs them is very unusual. In most countries people vote for whichever party has the best policies to bring the country forward, not on perceived ideology attached to a party. So if the party that had the best policies and is rightly supported by winning the majority of the popular vote not win the government, how will they implement those policies?
@@mutopz not uncontrolled power. My point was that if it goes off majority, only the major cities would have any legitimate say in the polls. The issue comes from how ideas are spread. 'Crime and Punishment' is an amazing example of this. It's not a "what-if" it's more of a "thats-why" A nation should give equal weight to the parties involved. Majority rules would be fine if all the states had the same laws and customs but this isn't the case. In the same way that I don't have a say in how africa should do things, Seattle should not have a large say in how the state of Florida should implement healthcare. Two different places, two different types of people. People are not ideal, so they system can't be treated like they are.
@@linusavogadro142 yes I know exactly what you are saying, but surely you see how this creates division and disunity in America, which is the issue here. I don't live there so I can't see the reason why you would have a system that creates more division
@@mutopz it seems logical that more division would come from assigning everyone a 1 or 0. Less division happens because you vote as an entire state instead of a single person. I've never seen the president, he operates on a mainly state basis. It makes more sense for the state to elect, not individual persons.
Is the "winner gets all" not the most critical problem? What would be the problem of allocating electors proportionally to the votes at a particular state?
The designation of electors is decided at the state level. Most choose the "winner take all" method, but that isn't actually inherent to the electoral college system as a whole. IMO, the ideal option would be a microcosm of the electoral college itself -- each state designating two of its electors based on the state's popular vote, and a single elector by district (to be determined by the outcome of the vote in that district). A couple of states already do it it this way, and there's nothing keeping the rest of them from doing it this way, as well, other than the states themselves.
Yes, it is and here is my non-partisan solution that does not subvert the Constitution nor require Constitutional Amendment:
ruclips.net/video/xE5vcuaqO90/видео.html
Well, a state with 14 electors where a candidate wins 51% of the vote would allocate 7 votes to each, so you’d have to win absolute landslides to get any actual votes.
Republicans would lose. Republicans cannot win in a democracy because they offer nothing more than trickle down promises, deception and treachery, none of which are big voter incentives.
The problem with that is that a self-perpetuating gerrymander of the Congressional districts can be used to create an overwhelming electoral vote majority that contradicts the will of the people of that state, almost as badly as the winner take all system, but often in the other direction. The two states that have this electoral vote allocation have no more than four districts, but in a larger state the districts can be gerrymandered much more creatively.
In fact, after the 2008 or 2016 election, some Republican leaders suggested that Republican controlled legislatures in states that consistently vote Democratic in Presidential elections (i.e. those with minority-gerrymandered legislatures) should go to the Congressional district plan to get more Republican electors, while those in states that consistently vote Republican should keep the winner take all system, to avoid choosing ANY Democratic electors. They computed that had such a plan been in effect during the just completed election (i.e. a year earlier), the Republican would have won.
I would much prefer a winner take most, others take proportionally less system in each state. This would allow third parties to grow in influence according to their merits, rather than being locked out, especially when combined with ranked voting (instant runoff) in each state.
We still have the EC because abolishing it would require consent of states that benefit from the disproportionate power that in confers.
Not true. Delaware, Rhode Island, Vermont and Hawaii have already joined the Nation Popular Vote Compact in an effort to subvert the Electoral College.
TL;DW is at 8:57 people on the left wanna move goalposts whenever they do not win :)
Not just states. Since the Civil War, there have been four presidential elections n which the Electoral College has overridden the popular vote: in 1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016. In _every_ case, the Republican candidate was awarded the presidency.
The states that would otherwise be ignored as in every other democracy
That’s a funny way of saying “balance of powers”.
The president isn't the problem it's congress without terms
Preach!
Congress has the true power.
True, but we can, as evidenced, elect bad Presidents, as well.
@@Leonard_Wolf_2056Just as it should be.
Then the real problem is the voters because they can impose term limits whenever they want by a simple majority
he problem is Progressives.
What the video failed to neglect in the creation of the Electoral College is the need to keep the 13 states as a unified nation against the potential threat of being divided into "spheres of influence" by the major powers...The UK 🇬🇧 France 🇫🇷 and Spain 🇪🇸. Most of the people who lived in the states saw themselves as citizens of their states (if their state was an individual country), instead of being a US citizen.
Here are some facts about USA history, the Electoral College, the 3/5ths rule, USA slavery, and the *civil war*.
The sources of this information are the USA Constitution and actual events in USA history:
*Slavers are terrorists. Slavery is terrorism. Those who go to war to defend slavers and preserve slavery are also considered terrorists.*
The Electoral College was written for only one purpose.
The Electoral College was written by terrorists(slavers) to be nothing more than a "welfare benefit" for themselves and other USA terrorists. The E C, plus the 3/5ths census rule, awards excessive national governmental and political power to terrorists(slavers). The Electoral College encouraged and rewarded the terrorism of slavery. The Electoral College allowed terrorists to dominate the USA national government until around 1850-1860. The USA's "founding fathers" were the USA's first group of "welfare queens". Ten of the first twelve presidents were terrorists.
What happened around 1860 when abolition and the prohibition of slaver terrorism in the new territories and Western states greatly reduced the "free stuff" to which the terrorists had become so accustomed?
One of the biggest blows to the "terrorist welfare queens" was the prohibition of slaver terrorism in Western states. That's one of the reasons you hear that whiney, old csa/kkk terrorist propaganda phrase, "We don't want to be ruled by the coasts!".
What happened when the terrorist "welfare queens" lost their "free stuff" from the USA government?
What happened when the terrorist slavers could no longer easily dominate the USA national government and national politics?
The csa was just a low-life, MS-13-type gang of butthurt "welfare queens".
After causing the civil war, the Electoral College became a "welfare benefit" for states which suppress voting. I wonder which states LOVE to suppress voting .......... might they be the former terrorist states and terrorist sympathizer states?
Eliminate the Electoral College. It has poisoned the USA!
Why are you lying?!?
@@rb032682 How am I lying?
Facts
He is correct: Under the Articles of CONFEDERATION (ratified 1781), the states kept INDIVIDUAL sovereignty and gave NO enforcement authority to the Confederation Congress. The system clearly did not work well and was replaced by the CONSTITUTION in 1788 which DIVIDED sovereignty in a Federal Republic and created three INDEPENDENT branches at the central level.
The Congress is DIRECTLY elected (Senate since 1913) by the citizens of the INDIVIDUAL states; The Executive is CHOSEN by the STATES through APPOINTED electors with each state's electors equal in number to the total Congressional representation of the state; The Judiciary is APPOINTED by the Executive with approval by the Senate.
States have individual sovereignty as to how their electors are appointed. Current inequities are the result of EVERY state being nearly homogenized into Extra-Constitutional PLURALITY WINNER-TAKE-ALL elections of PARTY-NOMINATED slates of Electors.
There is a non-partisan solution that does not subvert the Constitution nor require subversion of the Constitution:
ruclips.net/video/xE5vcuaqO90/видео.html
All political persons need term limits. Nothing can move forward if some has been in office since the 1950's. 10 years should be the maximum time in office. New generations and new ideas can prosper.
without the electoral college big cities would select the president. Democrats would love it
Wrong.
The electoral college allows minority voting blocs to select the president without the support of the majority… that is antidemocratic
@@AustinStarDustnot wrong. Absolute truth. You are clearly one of the democrats he is talking about
@@chipgar63 you have no idea what you are talking about. You have no facts, no statistics, and no real sources. The only sources you have is what others told you. You’re clearly who can write but can’t read beyond the 4th grade level.
The biggest issue is that the electoral votes does not relate to the population.
Why is an electoral vote in Alaska worth 240,000 votes & 675,000 in Arizona?
It is related to population. Amount of electors is total of the state’s representation in congress, Senate and House. Representation in the House is directly proportional to population but every state gets 2 senators which will skew the numbers in smaller states.
@@jamesandrews4853 If it stands in the way of one person, one vote, then it's anathema to our federalist style of democracy or any other style. Increasingly, I see states' rights advocacy as in opposition to democracy. Minority rule has nothing to do with equality. We rightly call it a dictatorship when we see it anywhere else in the world.
@@daveburrows9876I understand that states rights advocacy is largely just a political tool, but I find it sad that this is the case. I truly think that we could be better off if the diverse regions of the country had more autonomy, but generally the movement is just used to squeeze as much power out of the system as possible.
No matter the voting system, I think the biggest threat to democracy in the US is the extreme partisanship. We really need to rethink the constitution, but that would require an unattainable level of bipartisanship.
@@Biga101011 That was very well said. One of the things that has me concerned about our Democracy is the growing sentiment on the right that we are a federalism, not a democracy. Well, we are a federalist democracy as opposed to a Parliamentary one, but they're both democracies.
We do indeed need to rethink parts of the constitution. It's not some god's holy word or anything, and it needs to adapt to the changes in our society.
@jamesandrews4853: The EC wouldn’t be so distorted in terms of reflecting the distribution of the population, if the House expands the number of members in it.
The last time Congress voted to increase representation in the House was in 1911, after the 1910 census. They allocated 433 seats to the existing 46 states, with one seat each for AZ and NM, when they became states later in the decade.
In the 1920’s, more rural southern states didn’t want to lose their disproportionate representation to population to the rapidly increasing urban cities. For the first tim in U.S. history, Congress didn’t increase the membership in the House after a census. In 1929, they decided to freeze the size at 435 members.
The U.S. population in 1910 was 92.2 million. The population has grown by 238 million people over the last 113 years.
Increasing representation in the House will rebalance the EC votes to bring them in line to where people live.
Otherwise, the EC is an anti-democratic compromise to get slave states to ratify the Constitution that gets more anti- democratic as the population grows.
The problem isn’t the electoral college, it’s our campaign finance laws, gerrymandering, and bad primary systems.
Did you watch the video? The Electoral College obviously is outdated, corrupt and detrimental to democracy-- on top of what you mention
Those things you listed existed primarily due to the electoral college.
The question is whether the states should pick the Cheif Executive as originally intended) or the will of the voters (how we think today.).
States have combined the two by individual state laws, but it is still possible (as we have seen twice recently) for the winner of the national popular vote to not become the President.
It's also those things, but the root of our political problems IS the electoral college. We can't allow minority rule if we want to self-identify as a democracy. One person, one vote has got to be the way forward. I don't understand how anyone can dispute that fact however complicated fixing it may be. The distribution of the senate (2 and only 2 senators from each state however large or small the population) is equally anathema to a democracy.
Will you stand up and fight the extreme gerrymandering in Maryland and California?
It gives certain states and voters disproportionate power, just as an equal Senate does. That allows politicians from those states to extract benefits from the federal government.
What is interesting, or perhaps ironic, is that the states the benefit from the most from government transfers are states that largely elect GOP Senators who want to do away with most government transfers -- except their own!
You're mistaking effect for cause. Change state boundaries to make them more equitable. Didn't think of that, did you?
That’s the story of government in general for better or worse. Some people extract more and some people give more. That’s how government is supposed to work.
@@johnryskamp2943 Does equitable mean breaking the populous states like California, Texas, New York, Florida into more states giving the people in those places more Senate seats and electoral college votes? And grouping the less populous states into larger states reducing their Senate seats and electoral college votes?
If we elected on national population plurality instead of what is supposed to be plurality by individual state populations, then the most populous states would determine the political course for the next however long it takes to abolish it which would infact desinfranchise a good portion of Americans. South west California has little knowledge and even less care about the difficulties of living in Maine. I might argue for electoral college reforms or rebalancing, not abolition. We need to fix how we do things rather than just dropping one thing and moving to an alternative. Just like gas-powered vehicles, do I deny their environmental impact? No, even living in the country, I do not, but dropping something and moving to an alternative at the drop of a hat just leads to further and potentially worse complications. I will not deny history, but we are the most populous democratic state in the world. No wonder we can look at other countries and see that, "If it's fine over there, that it should work here" without considering that we are the only country where it does work. I finish by stating that just because something should work in a certain way, doesn't mean it does or will.
For the same reason we have gerrymanders, the same reason we have the US Senate, and the US Supreme court and the same reason we had the 3/5 compromise--to give an outsized weight to a conservative, wealthy minority so as to slow down or prevent democratic change and a more egalitarian society. It it works, really well for those who are benefitting even as it kills all the rest of us.
That's the dumbest conclusion.Little communism speaking??
Sure. Exactly what Fox News has taught you. Egalitarianism equals communism. And you call me dumb?@@robertnielsen2461
Democracy does not have a good track record
So what is "a more egalitarian society?" Is that when "50% plus one" vote to expropriate the property of everyone else and distribute it among themselves? And then who decides what "equitable distribution" is? Pure democracy DOES NOT WORK. It CAN NOT WORK. It will always be the dictatorship of the mob. The founders of the country knew this well and deliberately designed the constitutional system to guard against the excesses of democracy as well as the excesses of autocracy. They did the best they could to provide balances and counterbalances against concentrations of power. Their system wasn't perfect because no system can be. But it was the best that could be devised at the time. Most of the changes made since the Founding Era have not really improved upon the original design very much--in many cases they have tried to cure an inequity by creating a new, different inequity. One major mistake that was made was arbitrarily limiting the size of the House to 435 members starting in the 1920s. The House should be as large as it needs to be and should be composed of members who each represent a fixed number of citizens. After every decennial census, the number of citizens represented by a single congressional district should be fixed as roughly equal to the population of the state with the smallest population (currently that would be Wyoming) since each state is constitutionally guaranteed a minimum of one Representative in the House. So, for example, if that state's population is 500,000, then the total population of the country, (let's use 330 million for example) is divided by that number to yield a House with 660 members. Then the number of members each state gets is apportioned based on its population, as it is now. Every ten years, this number could change. But it would retain the idea of each congressperson representing a certain and roughly equal number of citizens, which was the original intent. This would correct the anti-democratic tendency set into motion by arbitrarily limiting the size of the House. If you need a bigger chamber to conduct House business, just build one or alter the existing one so everyone can fit. Obviously, then, it follows that since the Electoral College is composed of electors equal in number to each state's congressional representation including their two senators, the trend of the EC away from more democratic representation of each state in the Presidential election would be reversed.
Basically
Happy New Year ! Thank You for this 🥨🔥💎🎩
There is absolutely no incentive for small states to participate in the union without an electoral college. The union would split up.
I understood that the senate protected small states' rights - 2 senate votes per state regardless of population. This prevents small states being overwhelmed by legislation passed by a popular majority in the other house. No reason why the electoral college is needed as well for selection of the president.
@@euanthomas3423 - give it up. Read your history
right now there is no incentive for minority-party voters in any state of any size.
Lmao, if Wyoming, Mississippi, Missouri and Alabama think they can run the show without financial support from wealth Democratic states, best of luck.
@@extremegrieferbible - sure they could. Federal aid is crack dependency and they’d be better off without it in the long run. That’s the democrats playbook - government largess = dependency and then they have complete authority over policy. That’s how they’ve kept the inner cities voting democrat for decades. The founders put the electoral college in for a reason - they wouldn’t have a union if large population centers completely dominated policy. They wanted smaller states - who have completely different needs, to have more of an equal say in federal policy.
You’re never going to get 3/4 of states to ratify an amendment abolishing the electoral college. It’s a waste of oxygen.
You're right. No other country has copied the electoral college system. None would want to. When my country (New Zealand) decided to change their system as a result of the 1981 election when the winner had less votes than the opposition, a German model of proportional representation was adopted and in practice from 1996.
It is the fairest way to have an electoral college. Some may say it's less fair on a state level, but if we didn't do the electoral college in the US - Then election results would literally swing one direction (left) in favor of big cities. This is the only reason they have a discussion about it. In the future, if that ever changed to lets say Republican... Then this same system that is the bane of Democrats would immediately benefit them.
The issue that actually affects Americans day to do is within the state - like for example Virginia or New york. Outside of the cities, straight Republican. Virginia is basically damn near split in half. In these states, ALL the voting power is concentrated in a few cities while the rest of the state suffers.
To say that the problem is because of the electoral college though? Point your finger at the idiots who are running the DNC, because how it is in VA or NY is a farcry from lets say, Florida which is mostly Republican -- The Democrat cities however are not suffering under Republican policies, in fact they never do -- It's only when these people (DNC) takes power after an election, do they punish the 50% who didn't vote for them. Their outright, KGB/putin style control of media, academia, etc allows them to artificially press the issue of an electoral college further.
The problem in the USA is not the electoral college, it’s the two party system
New Zealand and other western countries have several parties in congress hence the electoral system is more democratic and simpler than the USA
@@obviouslytrollmster1532 Like why does DC even get a vote I often wonder but Guam and Puerto Rico don't?
@@obviouslytrollmster1532 Ah yes, a majority vote would give too much power to city dwellers because most people live in cities. Instead, we should use the electoral college, which instead of giving each person one vote, makes it so that elections are decided by the ability of parties to mobilize voters in a handful of swing states.
@godowskygodowsky1155 sarcasm is the way of intelligence for idiots. In an electoral system you have balance between the two. If you don't like the electoral college then go to France.
A strictly popular vote would mean that the eastern seaboard and southern California would make the laws and policies for the entire country.
The thing is that the electoral college doesn’t incentivize paying any attention whatsoever to small population states which is many proponents claim. No one is doing campaign visits in Wyoming, Alaska, Vermont, the dakotas, etc. Instead it rewards a small subset of swing states.
Simultaneously, it deprives the supermajority of people from having meaningful votes. Why would anyone vote in California, Wyoming, Texas, or many other states whether they’re Republican or Democrat? Their vote means nothing as a result of the electoral college because those states have a partisan lean which guarantees the results for each state.
By contrast, candidates would have to compete for a much wider share in a much broader portion of the country with national popular vote.
As a non-American, I think the current system is very flawed. Either electoral college should be abandoned totally and popular vote should be accepted instead, or at least the state electors should vote proportionally and not with the "winner takes all" system. Without any of those reforms, current system is doomed to have clear and inherent legitimacy problems
No it makes it very hard for people that don’t live in big populated cities to get representation.
@@arodxmangames2778 lol, the people voted against the winning candidate in their state doesn't get represented under the current system. You think that's legitimate?
@@jesterdayplays771 it’s the popular vote! If the state is 40% dem votes and 60% rep. Votes then the 60% carries just like it would in the popular vote but as a ‘non-American’ you wouldn’t understand that.
@@sistergoldenhair0727 and as an American you don't see the inherent illegitimacy in that
FYI people, I know a bit of comparative constitutional and electoral law. As far as I've seen, nowhere else in the world, bullshit like that is seen acceptable
The Electoral College exists to protect State sovereignty, not citizen sovereignty. Citizen sovereignty is protected through different means via Federal and State constitutions.
This is why States decide how electoral votes are allocated. Some use winner takes all, some do something else. Either way, it is NOT determined by the general public and for good reason.
How is that not for good reason? Shouldn’t each citizen ought to be directly represented in choosing a leader over states, which may even be actively against parts of the public like in swing states for example? A democrat in a red state or Republican in a blue state is completely unrepresented if everyone around them will just vote against them, so votes should at least collectively count towards the leader because they are supposed to represent everyone in the country. It’s a genuinely broken system.
@zombies4evadude24 Because America is not a country it is a federation of countries
@@OrDuneStudios It is not, it is a single country broken down into states.
@@zorkmid1083 You need a history lesson.
@@Mark-bi4ne History in this case is not as relevant as the present.
Just ask Nancy Polosi she would know she has been in office for hundreds of years.
Wow an old joke how funny everyone ages dickhead
@@TheMirmir225 learn to laugh, you’ll live longer.
or you could ask trump because he's got good genes. He will tell you. you blindly believe anything he says without any evidence.
Actually only like 12yrs.
Mitch McConnell? Lol
It is so simple, so the majority do not over power the minority. Itsbthe reason we have a House and a Senate. Small states and states with smaller populations do nit get forgotten and dismissed.
Exactly. Anyone who bothers to read the federalist papers knows this. If they were mentioned in this video, I must have missed it.
California has more Republicans than any state and they dont matter your acting like if it is a blue state there is no republicans
If that is the reason the Electoral College exists, then it has failed. States like Rhode Island, Wyoming, and Montana (which in terms of population are quite small) are not focused on by candidates during elections. In fact, many of the states that are being focused on by their campaigns this election year (Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, etc.) are arguably mid-sized states and not at all the “small states” that the Federalist Papers intended to protect
no the minority is dumb
@@rustybarrel516 ur wrong, because only the swing states matter, ur dum small state does NOT matter, actually name me one small state that matters? keep
So if I'm a Republican living in California which is considered a safe Democrat state, why should I bother voting when I know my vote won't count?
Because things can change. If you were a Republican before 2016 in Michigan you'd have the same attitude but what was once a solid blue state was flipped to red. California was red thirty years ago, and it can flip back depending on who's running.
There are more than just the president and vice president running for office on your ballot.
Senate and Congress and local election. But this is why the electoral college is flawed
@@taylorisaiah3496 What in life is perfect? In today's bi-partisan environment could it be improved and get through Congress?
You're black and Californian how's your life makes any sense?
Abraham Lincoln in 1860 is,the only candidate to poll a majority of the Eloctoral College and get less than 40% of the popular vote.
Lincoln also got the plurality of the popular vote in 1860 because the opposition was split three ways and he got the largest total ballot. So he still would have won that election even if the electoral college didn't exist.
Well, so much for the "protects slavery" argument, even though it was never much of an actual argument.
@@baigandinel7956 The reply above yours explains why your sentiment is incorrect.
@@XenonPyromaniac13 We also do not have a system where someone can be President with a mere plurality, and that would not be the obvious alternative to the electoral college. They could have had, say, a runoff election. Would Lincoln have won? Who really knows?
Get rid of it---ONE PERSON, ONE VOTE!!!
It is like the 2 sides in the comments are speaking different languages. We are so divided constantly blaming all our woes on the other party. It never changes.
I am British and have never understood why America has the Electoral College and I still don't, voting should be decided by American citizen's only.
Because America is a republic of 50 independent states, not a democracy of 350,000,000 people
@@eq1373i mean, Mexico is also a republic of 32 independent states, and it elects by popular vote.
Well, let me explain it like this. Imagine yeah, Ireland had more individuals and they got to elect. Who is going to be your Prime Minister? That's how it would be here. In the United States, there's more democrats in California and New York. That would override all the other citizens across America. So there would be 2 states Deciding. Who would be the President of the United States?
@@musicrecordschannel981 And hasn't Mexico worked out well?
Please redirect all searches for the “PragerU” electoral college video here.
Yes!
Why? PragerU deals in fact rather than Leftist fiction.
wat is that guy
If someone wins 40% of a state that has 10 electoral college votes they should get 4 votes, not 0. That would not defeat the intended purpose of the system as the votes would still be state based, rather than popular vote based.
All that's doing is breaking it down a little further into districts, which would be ripe for gerrymandering.
@@derekdammann6417 They already do something like this in Maine.
@@derekdammann6417 Not so, It is about popular vote in a state, there would be no districts.
You simply cannot gerrymander the number of votes for a state.
You 60% of the state votes, you get 60% of the electoral votes.
But that would kill the Republican party. They could never survive if deceit and treachery were no longer tolerated.
@@kosmokritikos9299 BOTH parties use deceit and treachery, not just one.
One person one vote seems the best way to elect a President of all the people. It makes an individual in Texas exactly equal to an individual in Alaska and directs parties to campaign to the whole nation rather than concentrating effort and funds towards the few geographical locations which can turn the election.
Thank you well said your response needs to be pinned to the top you said it simple and concise where everyone can understand
Wrong. That would give ultimate power to large urban areas to dictate to everyone else. Not good. Imagine if 51% voted for the death penalty for people engaged in alternative lifestyles. An extreme example, but a good one nonetheless.
@@TisiphonesShadowI hear this lame argument all the time, “the urban masses will control everything.” Well yeah, duh. Every life matters equally (supposedly) regardless of where you live or what you look like. We should try to help and represent as many people as we can.
This theory always assumes that the “urban masses” are a bunch of idiots who would bring the country down. If that’s really how you think, why do you bother to call them your countrymen at all?
of course it is. One person one vote. The EC distorts the result. It is defended by those who gain unfairly.
@@TisiphonesShadow no ur dumb, then they can SPEND more on those large urban areas to get their votes, its called democracy, if they dont wanna spend, then they dont get it.
The problems is that we keep looking at our electoral system thru the lens of democracy. Our founding fathers did not want a democracy but a representative republic. They never wanted the common man/woman to make decisions on who and how to manage the republic... but a handful of men (white and land owners) that were somewhat educated and informed. We have romanticized these men and have heap the democracy and freedom goddesses on top of them. If we really want democracy and all that it entails... it will begin by discussing what it really means, how it will be implemented and probably have a nationwide referendum to see if we have the appetite to make that change... that will probably take decades to be fully implemented.
I was never taught this in public school. From CA. This video changed me view of the electoral college.
*my
Yet more evidence of the decline in the quality of California public schools. I went to public school in the mountains of Appalachia and it was fault there.
@@Nl-nn3ds I disagree here. I was taught by really good history professor in Cali. Now I write about politics lol.
@@Nl-nn3dscan't even spell right how ironic !
😊 as the foreigner my understanding was that the electoral college was meant to prevent the election of a demagogue..... That worked out well....
The EC in recent US history has elected three incompetent republican presidents despite them all losing the popular vote. George Bush Jr (2000, 2004) and Donald Stump (2016). In the prior centuries it was rare for the EC to 'vetoe' the popular vote but it had happened before. I can't remember the details for back then. It is a horrible system that pigheaded southern politicians want to keep just to piss off the rest of the country. To get rid of it requires a 2/3 vote in one or both of the senate or house of representatives (I'm not sure which) AND 3/4 of the states to ratify such an amendment to the constitution. It will be very difficult to remove this way.because of the south.
To prevent the people's will to be satisfyed...
The system is flawed and favors states that don't pay their own way
If you want a country with a common treasury and common currency you must recycle the surpluses from those states to the deficit states. The EU is a prime example of what not to do. Southern EU nations perpetually in deficit scrapping with Northern EU states over loans and austerity.
The system worked perfectly well and needs to be destroyed
We are one nation. One person, one vote. Anything or anyone who ignores that ignores our foundation and that includes states' rights advocacy. End of discussion from my perspective.
@@daveburrows9876So you believe the Electoral College disenfranchises citizens?
The system favors highly urbanized territories voting for a liberal candidate. If any one nation had a larger population than the rest, their college vote would be infinitely worth the rest of the federation
Narration is so charming and calm. Love it
Slavery & post-Reconstruction:
The longest, most destructive political hangover we all, many generations, have suffered.
I look forward to the day when you the United States become a true democracy. Here, in Australia, each vote has equal value no matter which state we live in. Voting is compulsory for all citizens. We also have a form of proportional representation that attempts to ensure that the composition of a parliament reflects the will of the voters. The USA is stuck with a moribund 18th century system.
I look forward to that too.
Compulsory voting is not freedom. As a free being I have a right NOT to participate as well. Compulsory voting is common in such states as N. Korea, Russia and Iran.
Also, the debate here is the popular vote vs. the Electoral college. No one in the US wants the chaos that parlimentary systems have. The US has a better system, and most Democrats and Republicans agree on that principle, no prime ministers or 'houses' of govement based on an outmoded class system.
Australia does have a good system. Every voter should only vote one political party in which should be Left Wing, Labor Party/Australian Democrats, Democratic Parties.
So if you don’t vote you go to jail. No thanks
@@Kopernicus67it’s because Australia wants all its citizens to have a voice in government. All you have to do is show up at a polling place to acknowledge you were there, but there is no compulsion to vote itself if you don’t want to. Election Day is a national holiday. Elections are 6 to 8 weeks long with no corporate money allowed in campaigns. As an Australian friend told me, if our politicians did as yours did in running all the time, we’d take them out in the outback and hang them. We want our politicians working for us.
In effect, all citizens showing up is the freedom of having a voice because they care about their country. Instead, we Americans have become selfish with no sense of the commons any more. Our elections are a farce with corporate money lobbying without restraint and with the electoral college. Republicans trying to take voting rights away through gerrymandering and voting restriction laws.
Europe learned that you can’t have 50 countries and expect to do trade when they all fight with each other. Thus, the EU to help prevent what happened in the world wars and have a more unified group of nations. Britain, led by the Tories, their version of the Republican ultra conservatives led by their version of Trump, pushed Brexit and now their economy is in a shambles. They realized they made a mistake and are trying to get back in. It’s likely the EU will wait before letting them back in.
Every citizen should vote, it’s a responsibility for all Americans who care about this country and want to see the best people working for us.
It seems from the video that Professor Keyssar ignores the primary reason for design and continued existence of the Electoral College. It’s the same reason we have two Senators from each state, regardless of their population. The framers wanted to prevent a tyranny of the majority. A POTUS elected by a majority of the popular vote would be able to ignore the interests of large swathes of the country. Policy would favor the east and west coasts, to the detriment of everyone in “flyover country”. The federal government would mistreat rural areas much as the State of California ignores the interests of its rural areas.
Thank you! One other person here gets it. Apparently, no one else in this comments section understands this. But, I would add, that in this day and age, it also keeps the corruption in one state like California, from impacting too much the entire election. No wonder the left hates the electoral college.
You are correct...!!!!! (We in Canada do not have this wise American process for electing our Prime Minister nor for that matter an elected Senate to truly represent our smaller provinces fairly!)
Pure democracy is like 2 wolves and 1 sheep voting for what's for dinner.
I usually like to provide my own argument but I think in this case CGP grey explained the counter argument best: ruclips.net/video/G3wLQz-LgrM/видео.htmlsi=nkFHp2GQ5QO-GtZI
You're taking nonsense. The senators make sense to some extent, so that every state (=region) is represented in addition to the population. But you don't need the weird electoral college for that when you have the senate.
What’s the music ?
Probably liberal tears or something xD
Is there another video that delves into why Nebraska and Maine do not have winner take all and what were the political dynamics that led those states to adopt that reform?
I would like my presidential vote to actually count, thank you
It does.
Well technically it doesn't count unless the election is decided by one vote 🤓☝️
@@maskedmarvel imagine the popular vote was tied 170mil - 170mil, and the electorate is tied 269 - 269, and that you live in California and vote Republican. Your vote would tip the popular vote, but not the electorate vote as California is solidly Democrat. Without the EC, you would tip the scales for the Republican candidate, now that it doesn't matter what state you live in for your vote to count equally. Yes, 49.99% of votes would 'not count', but that's how races for a single office work (and is the worst case scenario). Do you really think it better if MORE than 50% of votes did 'not count', as was the case in the elections brought up in this video, or, as shown in one of CGP Grey's videos, if by gaming the EC, make it such that *78%* of votes did 'not count'?
How about if you lived in a farming state? Good luck buying food.
The problem with the Electoral College isn't the Electoral College. The problem with the Elecotral College is the method by which 48 states allocate their Electoral College votes following the presidential results. 48 states allocate all their Electoral College votes by WTA, in which the winner of the states' results by popular vote, no matter how small or big, whether 30% or 70%, are delivered to the winner. Only 2 states, Maine and Nebraska, allocate their Electoral College votes closer to the in-state popular vote. The method used by Maine and Nebraska should be the standard by which true voting results are translated to Electoral College votes.
So would the Democratic candidate have won the 2016 presidential election if the electoral votes were awarded proportionally for every state?
@@RaymondHng Yes. And in 2000 as well. Imagine how different the world we live in would be if the criminal Republicans had been called out for their criminality decades ago.
@@RaymondHng There were also four other times in which the "winner" of the nation's popular vote lost.
Maine and Nebraska do not have proportional representation.
They allocate one elector to each congressional district and two to the statewide vote.
@@SonnyBubba Different rules for different states can't exist along side the idea that your vote counts exactly as much as mine does. That's the foundation to my thinking. We're one nation, so one person, one vote. State's rights be damned on issues of equality.
There are two things that compromise the value of my vote whether it be for President or House and Senate representatives. The Electoral College has negated the value of my vote for President more than once. However, my vote for House and Senate representatives has been totally devalued by the GERRYMANDERING of voting districts in the state. It seems bizarre that I voted for a House representative whose district has been gerrymandered away from my residential area. My AREA has NOT voted for House rep twice due to the gerrymandering of the area and the moving of these people who are supposed to represent me being geographically moved from one district to another. It is in this way that the MINORITY THEN REPRESENTS THE MAJORITY WITHOUT THE EXPLICIT CONSENT OF THEIR VOTES. THIS IS NOT DEMOCRACY!
Voting is not about you in the sense that your vote is somehow special. Why are you complaining about your vote ‘not counting’? Unless you are saying that you voted, and your vote was then tossed aside, you have no argument.
Perhaps a proportional representation system, instead of WTA at the district level, would be better.
@@stoneymcneal2458
The typical example of someone who thinks gerrymandering has eliminated his vote is when a redistricting puts him in a district where that majority is not like-minded. (A Republican now in a 70% democrat district)
@@SonnyBubba I interpreted @sachsrw’s complaints to be more about that continued use of the Electoral College. My apologies for I am unclear as to the clarification you are making.
Right on. These are the same things that compromise our so-called democracy.
It's the way rich land owners can maintain rule over a large population.
? 🙄
So land owners are rich? Their vote counts for more than tenants? Tenants vote according to the wishes of landlords?
@kerriwilson7732 the land is voting, not the owners or the tenants. The land is what gets representation with the electoral college. Not people
poppycock
@@MrMebigfatguy not true at all.
We have the electoral college because the USA is a republic of 50 independent states, not a democracy of 350,000,000 people.
Was a republic of 50 independent states
linocln destroyed that in the 1860’s
@@tomyoung8563not really
@@tomyoung8563I don't think Lincoln operated over 50 states
Now it's an oligarchy
I hope US will get rid of that very soon. Then US would be more democratic.
Democracy has a bad track record
Sorry, but your hopes are unrealistic.
It will never happen.
Republicans have benefited greatly from the system, so they will never allow it to change.
One argument I hear supporting the EC is to prevent so called "Mob Rule" that the popular vote would cause. However, if that were the case, then how come we do not implement an EC system at the City, County, and State levels of voting? Or is this another double standard of sorts where it would only Mob Rule for POTUS but not for Mayors, Counsel Members, and Governors? My thinking is if they keep the EC, then at least do away with "winner take all".
The electoral college was designed to select the executive of a Federal union. Cities, Counties and States are not a Federal union so it doesn't make sense to elect a mayor or a governor that way.
It might be better to elect the electors by congressional district. This may even go a ways toward restoring faith in the Presidential elections. If one district in Philadelphia started manufacturing votes, it would only affect the election of that elector not the entire state's slate of electors.
the reason is simple. Cities and counties are not nearly as geographically or economically diverse as the entire country. Laws to help traffic and road conditions in Minneapolis would not have much value in Florida. Laws to help forest management in Maine or Oregon would be of no use in Arizona. Federal laws and federal government MUST take into account the entire country, not just the heavily populated areas.
@@morefiction3264 as someone originally from Philadelphia, (who now lives in Tennessee and is so very glad of it) I take it from your "manufacturing votes" comment that you well understand Philadelphia politics, lol.
It is effective at creating the same voter turnout in every state. No state can override the other by having higher voter turnout. Every state regardless of voter turnout gets equal representation based proportionality to their respective population sizes.
I really tried to get through this video but the incredibly distracting background noise drove me away.
same
The World Series is not won by scoring the most runs. The World Series is won by winning the most games.
Case in point - 1960 Pirates vs. Yankees.
We're talking about the leadership of the free world. This isn't Yankees vs Cubs or Steelers vs Cowboys
@@henrymanzano2201 Of course not. The Yankees swept the Cubs in 1932.
@@rustybarrel516 Lol,yup,and the "called shot" by Babe Ruth was a huge part of it 😉. But yeah,not to get off topic,we can't go into something as important as this with a sports mentality
@@henrymanzano2201 True, and the framers of the Constitution would agree. Likewise, they would probably agree that a President should not be selected in the same manner a group of people might decide what restaurant to go to for dinner. And they might also appreciate an apt analogy to describe a particular aspect of the way they decided to elect a President. I mean, why not just use total runs scored to determine a baseball champion? I don’t believe the comparison in the original post was intended to equate the importance of the two events, but rather to point out that there were and are considerations in the establishment of rules for both that go beyond “scoring” totals. Fortunately, the founders left a good deal of documentation in writings at that time, including the Federalist Papers, to indicate why they established the process they did. Notably, those writings included sharp contrasts with, and criticisms of, the British parliamentary system, in which the chief executive was chosen by a majority of legislators, regardless of how many total votes those legislators won relative to their opponents or even whether they won a majority of the votes of those they represent. It was indeed a matter they took very seriously.
The Founders were brilliant. It was designed to keep a few large states from continually ruling and ignore the smaller states. Today, over 250 years later, candidates would contend in only the largest states. “Flyover” would be forgotten and disenfranchised. It’s the small people who benefit. How many other constitutions are still extant?
I don’t understand how it is that the video didn’t mention that to change the electoral college, an amendment would have to pass and be ratified, which is not something that would likely occur.
Mostly because it is propaganda. The EC slowed the development of parties, who, yes, have since illegally wielded it. But the idea that it cause parties is historically ignorant. That it was a mechanism of slavery is also insane. Abolitionists tended to speak highly of the process throughout the 18th century as it protected the free states.
I mean we are a republic so I don’t see how it matters that this “isn’t democratic”
In the modern world the terms 'republic' and 'democracy' don't refer to completely different systems of governance. The U.S. is a republic in the sense that it features a separation of power between the legislative and executive branches and robust judicial review through the supreme court as opposed to parliamentary supremacy. But these characteristics notwithstanding, it is perfectly appropriate to describe the U.S. as a representative democracy because legislative decisions are made via majority rule by representatives elected through popular vote. Drawing a clear-cut distinction between 'republican' and 'democratic' states makes sense if 'democracy' refers to a direct democracy where the people vote on individual laws/ policy decisions themselves, but clearly this does not apply very much in our current context. In any case, it matters that a decision-procedure is not democratic because most people take democracy to reflect important values like procedural fairness or civic equality (since democratic decision-procedures assign equal weight to the preferences of all enfranchised citizens). So, it is incumbent on anyone who rejects democracy in a particular context (e.g. the presidential election) to explain why things like civic equality should be outweighed by other values in this case. And simply saying 'we are republic' won't do as a justification since this is simply an empirical assertion about what the current system is, not an argument about what ought to be. Consider the analogous case of a king saying to his disgruntled subjects: 'we are a monarchy so I don't see how it matters that my decisions aren't democratic!' would we expect his subjects to simply accept this reasoning without further argument? I doubt it.
being anti democracy isnt something to be proud of
@@ArthurHill88 a republic is different from democracy because of the power the majority has ober the majority not in how the government is structured.
A republic can be run by elected representatives or theough direct voting by the people themselves; a deomcracy can also function either way.
The difference is that in a republic the majority of the elected representatives or of the people directly cannot abuse the minority.
In a democracy the majority of the representatives or of the people directly can do literally anything they vote to do with absolutely no limits to protect the minority.
In ancient athens the majority could vote to murder someone and it would be legal; in the roman republic they could not legally vote to kill someone unless they were found guilty of a crime.
So technically there are only very few actual democracies in the world today such as China, North Korea, and the United Kingdom.
Chinas constitution explicitly says thay your rights are subject to review and suspension by the party if they deem it necessary to the security of the state, same system works in North Korea.
The United Kingdom has no written constitution and so parliament or the majority that controls it can literally at any time legally abolish your rights.
Whereas in the United States the majority of the congress or of any state legislature cannot legally vote to take away your constitutionally protected rights.
@@libertyordeath5630 Well said, as a foreigner, I learn everything that is so unique about US Constitution and how their founding father think about their nation's future. One cannot understand the constitution if they only read the constitution, we have to go back 2000 years to the Roman Republic and ancient Greece and see how their culture, law, and system of government developed. Polybius, as many Roman and Greek figures, has so much impact in drafting the US Constitution, they wrote many classical literatures about political philosophy, law etc. From this philosophical view, the founders debated that they cannot give all the powers to the majority as that would create a "Mob Rule" that will (maybe sometimes in the future) will oppress the minority. To think that slavery is the cause they proposed EC is very naive and simplifying everything, maybe some of them gain an advantage in this system but what system doesn't? Every system always gives an edge to one side and disadvantage to another, but they also proposed Congress to balance that power, one based on majority to favor state that has more population that is the House and one to balance that power with proportional system that one is Senate. They also proposed Supreme Court which prevent Congress or Presidents to pass a law against the contract that they have made(Constitution) and yes, the constitution is a contract, and as any other contract, they don't 'life' they must be interpreted whatever the written documents say because that's how contracts works, if you want to change it, you include how to change it in the contract as the founders do with the Article V and VII, you can't just interpret the contract as you wanted.
US is not a unitary state, they are Union of States that came together to form an alliance so they can protect themselves against much bigger power those of Europe, they don't want big government because its a threat to their rights, they even put a sentence in the constitution "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." see how they put word UNITED STATES refer to a Union of States and a different entity from the State, Which the STATES(the People) giving the UNITED STATES some of their rights and powers to create a Union Manager between the States and not the other way around, so that this Union is not a Unitary State (the plural is very important here). because in the end, governments, politicians is only humans, they have interest, ego and every natural human behaviour, they are easily sway by a charismatic figure like what happen in germany with the election of adolf hitler and dictators in south america, this is why most of the Greek Philosopher don't really like full democracy, because it creates dictator like Sulla, Julius Caesar etc.
@@pande6008 yeah, not many realize that the US is a union of sovereign states.
People in the US will say that sometimes, but almost none of them realize that a sovereign state is a "country".
Most americans don't understand that Texas is a state just like France is a state or that California is a state just like Spain.
I wish more americans understood this because then they would be much more willing to tell the US government to stop stealing the powers of the states.
Also It worries me that the EU also seems to be doing the exact same thing to the european states that the the US is doing to our american states...
If a majority of Americans disagreed with my policies, I would like the Electoral College as well. I think we all know whose policies are unpopular today.
If over 300 million people disagreed with me, I would start to reflect on why and maybe consider the phrase "if you come across one asshole in a day, they're likely the asshole; if every single person you come across is an asshole, perhaps you are the real asshole".
Electoral college needs to go!!!
That's what you'd do if you want the country to break up again.
@@eq1373Wrong. The country is already btoken in 2 parts. Red and blue. It will break up in more little countries. It's called balkanization. It was bound to happen to a country that was divided into 50 states. Borders will change. They always have.
@@eq1373 I agree with you. Just asking for another civil war if we so casually toss the electoral college.
@@karllieck9064 Problem is, unlike the last Civil War, the division is not so easily confined to a particular geographic area. It is more one of "rural vs urban," with every state having its "red" and "blue" areas. Tennessee in general is very conservative, but then we have Nashville and Memphis which are bluer than blue. Texas is Texas, but then you have Austin. Pennsylvania is often described as "Philadelphia at one end and Pittsburgh at the other with Alabama in the middle." Eastern Washington state and Oregon are nothing like their coastal areas. Upstate New York nothing like New York City. The whole point of a bicameral Congress and the EC which is based upon it is that no one region or faction should be able to dominate the other. It can never be perfect, but it works pretty well, all things considered, despite occasional hiccups. I would like to paraphrase Winston Churchill a bit and offer that it is perhaps "the worst system that could be devised--except for all the others."
I think it's silly to get rid of the Electoral College; the consequences would be terrible. For example, instead of candidates just campaigning in a few states every four years, elections would become an ever-present affair. You would see Republican candidates campaigning in California, New York, and other ultra-liberal states all the time. Every state would become a swing state, which wouldn't be fun. Billions, if not trillions, of dollars would be wasted, and at the end, the results would likely be about 99% of what you would get with the Electoral College.
Trump just won the popular vote in 2024 by only doing two or three stops in New York and California. He would have won the popular vote in 2016 if that had been the race. Why fix something that works? People don't realize that fixing one issue can create thousands of other problems. You might see smaller states attempting to secede from the system, and the Senate could be attacked because every state has two senators regardless of population. It won't be pretty, people. If it isn't broken, don't fix it.
It's outdated. Why use un-elected electors with opinions as intermediarys? Do it by hand count and/or or electronically, bypass electors wanting their own outcome, and send the count straight to congress.
I'd rather have a popular vote system to allow third parties to stand a chance-lots of Americans are tired of the Democrat Republican corporate duopoly.
One reason why the duopoly works: both sides have become experts at painting the other side as the villain.
There’s a recent video out of a packed sports bar, but the giant tv had CNN on. When they showed Trump’s mugshot, the crowd popped harder than if they had seen the home team hit a home run in the bottom of the ninth in game seven.
Watch that video, and then read the first chapter of 1984, where it describes the Two Minutes Hate. You’ll see the parallel.
Surprised the author did not mention the EC value in terms of being an extension of a representative democracy and ensuring that all votes among all counties of all states “counted” vs national popular vote akin to “mob rule” where large urban concentrations of voters would carry political weight overshadowing the political interests (and power) of more rural and less densely populated areas of USA.
the US still has EC because it has STATES not like most small countries. it maintains the fairness over states after UNITING thus united states. states are like European countries and USA is more or less like EU. so imagine disregarding the vote of MALTA because its voting population is very low anyways and only favoring Germany and France since they have top pop
Richard is 100% right!
Popular vote is also easy to corrupt from the political machines running in the Democrat cities.
This is why Democrats don’t want voter ID so as to facilitate ballot harvesting.
Check this out for an example:
ruclips.net/video/geCJgAM4_xw/видео.html
I can understand that national popular vote would probably make urban votes more important over rural votes since candidates would often visit urban areas over rural areas. However, that doesn’t mean that urban voters vote in only one way. Urban votes generally tend to favor democratic party but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t any Republican voters in urban area. Same could be said about rural votes. Rural voters usually favor Republican party but that also doesn’t mean that there aren’t any democrats in rural areas either. If Electoral College were to be fair, why does 1 electoral vote in Texas represents about 800,000 people while 1 electoral vote in Wyoming represents about 200,000 people? Texas has about 3 million rural population while Wyoming has about 400,000 rural population but somehow Wyoming rural votes are more important than Texas rural votes even though they are both rural votes but counted unequally just because they are in different state? If you are to say that it’s because people living in Wyoming have different value than people living in Texas, does living in a smaller state makes your value somehow superior than those living in a bigger state so much that their vote count 4 times more important?
@MajorLeague I think I understand your point that the candidate has to to win all parts of United States and Electoral College ensures that the candidate wins “all around” the United States not just certain parts of United States. I think you are right, after all it is United “States”.But I don’t think EC does a good job of that either. In 1976 election, Jimmy Carter won most of the east coast states plus Texas and got 290 electoral votes to secure his victory against Gerald Ford. The interesting thing about this map is that he didn’t win a single west coast states let alone the fact that he did not even win all of the eastern states. Doesn’t electoral college suppose to penalize those who only got support from certain part of the US?
@MajorLeague Also, you said that Wyoming can get 4 times more representation than Texas because Wyoming has 2 senators, just like any other states. I think that the system where one vote is counted 4 times more than other is just not fair. I think every vote should be counted the same and we should never put disadvantage or advantage whether it be big or small state.
Tax Collector = popular vote
Sherriff = popular vote
City/Town Council = popular vote
Mayor = popular vote
Governor = popular vote
Congressperson = popular vote
Senator = popular vote
President = not popular vote
Why?
As an interested non-American, that was useful; thanks! To the outside world it does seem that the President has become more symbolic...assuming the country is not at war. The Senate with its filibuster seems to be where the real power lies; Trump only got one piece of major legislation passed and that was the corporate tax cuts that McConnell (& Ryan) had always wanted. And his SC picks were Federalist Society picks because Trump is clueless about that stuff. And I don't even want to think about how weak Obama was up against the Senate. Maybe the presidential vote i just part of the political/money-making circus and doesn't matter anyway.
Because popular vote sucks. And the president is the most important role.
@@maxwell8758yeah. Actual democracy sucks doesn’t it.
Let’s be like Russia.
@@TesterAnimal1 We aren’t a democracy, and Russia is closer to a democracy than we are because they use popular vote.
A prime minister in a parliamentary system is also not voted by a popular vote.
Founding fathers: you guys never change anything? I’m amazed
When the United States constitution was debated by the revered ‘We the (rich, Anglo-White Male) People” gang in 1787, James Madison made it very clear that the rich must secure and maintain property and wealth: “....The wealthy, therefore be outvoted in a democratic system and government would be overrun by the majority of working people. To prevent the working class from attaining political power and expropriating the property and wealth of the rich (“an agrarian law”), we have to “wisely” ensure that government “protect the minority” of the rich against the majority of the poor.” The electoral college was concocted by these guys to assure that the wealthy elite remains in power in perpetuity. Hence the electoral college crap. The mystery is why the ordinary Americans never revolted against this election system.
this was a great breakdown! thank you so much!
It was totally flawed and one-sided, it was a joke.
The United States was a union between independent autonomous States. Senators were not elected by popular vote in each state, but by state legislatures. It wasn't a personal popularity contest funded by election campaign donors.
This country was purposely not designed to be a pure democracy, because of the potential for the tyranny of the majority. The Electoral College gives power to the states in proportion to the number of people in each state.
If this idea is pushed through the next step will be to have people in the House of Representatives elected by popular vote Across the Nation
No accountability. No representation on local or Regional issues.
Just the way this question headlight is written is biased. ( Why are we "still" allowed to eat meat and not just eat bugs like the wants for us.)
The push for the elimination of the electoral college carries with it a whiff of a permanent Democratic power grab. Elections would be ENTITELY controlled by advtertisers on the monopoly of cable TV networks ( the donors praying for those advertisements).
When I look at this video, I consider the source.
The suspicious nature of this movement is exceeded only by that of ranked-choice voting, assistive which lends itself to be easily rigged and at least theoretically, even without shenanigans, could result in the election of a candidate who is no one's first choice.
It's really a biased movement to begin with, I've been trying my best to have a rational debate with someone about it and all I'm getting told is that I'm not making sense or anything. I feel as if this kind of language is propaganda and more or less a feeling based thing for Democrats. Video is right on one thing, very few people actually understand the electoral college. It's very obvious in this comment section and this person I was and still am debating with.
@jeannovacco5136: “The push for the elimination of the electoral college carries with it a whiff of a permanent Democratic power grab.”
Huh? I don’t see how a national popular vote is a Democratic power grab. There’s no reason a Republican candidate couldn’t win a national popular vote for president. I have no idea why you think so little of the Republican Party that they would be incapable of winning a national popular vote.
While there's some reality in your first paragraph and a smidgen in your second paragraph in the rest you're just making up a bunch inane arguments. All media in the US, whether you consider it left or right, are owned by large corporations, hardly a liberal bastion.
Also, as pointed out in the video, there was wide bi-partisan support to eliminate the Electoral College in the 1960s, but it died in the Senate due to Senate filibuster rules. It is now mostly opposed by Republicans because they don't believe a GOP candidate can win without it.
You act like we haven't had "Tyranny of the Majority" the whole time. Plenty of minority groups have been disenfranchised and disadvantaged throughout this country's history, because the majority supported it.
Also, why is tyranny of the minority better?
So a tyranny of the minority is better?
The reason we have an electoral college is because the interests of rural people matter as well.
well said 👍
But it’s not very democratic to have some people’s interests matter more than other’s isn’t it
What matters to the candidates are the swing states. Nobody gives a shit about Wyoming because they all know they're gonna vote Red no matter what lol.
@@carraway8084 The U.S. was not founded as a democracy. It was founded as a constitutional republic. "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government." -Article 4, Section 4 U.S. Constitution.
You guys are represented more than anyone
We are the United States, not the United State. Extremely important to keep it, as small states recieve power via the electoral college.
why a serious subject is polluted by background music ? what is the value add ? do you put music in the classrooms in usa ?
Just another example of the US standing almost completely alone. The Electoral College, Govt healthcare, multiple yearlong campaigns & almost NO gun control are just a few things that make US the Stand out in the world(Definitely NOT for the better)!
One question: why the "winner takes all" though?
Why not just count the blue (electoral) votes as blue, and red votes as red? This is the point where it's unfair, for me.
Kindly explain.
Edited: I understand how the EC is needed due to the "mob rule" concern, or the "otherwise 5 states would overwhelm the other 46" concern. I just don't understand the winner takes all thing.
We have individual state representation through the House of Representatives and the Senate already. Using proportional methods in the electoral college doesn’t fully make sense because it’s likely that candidates wouldn’t make it to 270 votes. You could argue then that we should lower the amount of electoral votes needed, but it doesn’t seem necessary when the electoral college in itself is already intended to check and balance the fairness of the system. Winner takes all system keeps politicians accountable and invigorates political change. We wouldn’t have swing states if we did proportional votes, and often swing states serve as the epicenter of political concerns for the entire country. I believe the winner takes all system prompts candidates to focus on the concerns of their bases in many different states.
That's what we do.
Great question, ilua, and, in making it, you've undone most of this videos narrative. Winner takes all didn't become common until after 1900. It was, in fact, the parties that pushed for this, and because the rest of the votes in the states were also winner takes all, it was familiar to the average voter. However, this was a ploy from party leadership to establish and domineer states as points of control. This very fact undoes the videos second point. The third point is undone in the mere fact that abolitionists (Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln included) also desired to keep the EC.
In conclusion, this video is historical nonsense, politically motivated by the DNC, and generally speaking, garbage.
@ilua as I see it the electoral college causes mob rule, look at the states that produces more in GDP to the states that doesn't and which of those states hold the rest of the country back from moving forward. California adds more than 3.05 trillion dollars to the GDP, or more than 14% to the economy. Now take the most conservative state in the country, Alabama, Alabama adds 1.1% to the GDP of the country. With a population of Alabama at 4.903 million people, compared to California's population 39.51 million people, my point is this more often than not the electoral college allows mob rule, and allows politicians to tailor their message to a small segment of the population, which in my opinion is the mob. I personally believe elections are about the numbers and who ever has the most votes should be the winner.
@@bananasarecool123 "I believe the winner takes all system prompts candidates to focus on the concerns of their bases in many different states." Isn't that what we have now, just not out in the open, if we had popular vote, I personally think we would get candidates that speak to the country as a whole, instead of the slice and dice messages we get now.
The reason we still have the electoral college is cos John Kerry lost Ohio in 2004. If he'd won Ohio, he would have been the 1st Democrat to lose the popular vote, but win the white house. At that point Republicans would have wanted to do away with it. And legislation would've happened that would've abolished it.
It would require a constitutional amendment to abolish the electoral college.
@kosmokritikos9299 not exactly. A group of states are recognizing the winner of the popular vote as the winner of their electoral college votes. Once enough states get on board to do this, it'll be de facto popular vote winning the election because in order to win a majority of the electoral college, you have to win the popular vote.
@@remlapwastaken8857 "No State shall, without the Consent of Congress,... enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power"
Further, what you're asking the states to do is act against the wishes of their voters and select electors the voters expressly rejected to the electoral college. And they claim this is _more_ democratic?
If you allocate electors by district gerrymandering will become even a bigger problem.
Under the Articles of CONFEDERATION (ratified 1781), the states kept INDIVIDUAL sovereignty and gave NO enforcement authority to the Confederation Congress. The system clearly did not work well and was replaced by the CONSTITUTION in 1788 which DIVIDED sovereignty in a Federal Republic and created three INDEPENDENT branches at the central level.
The Congress is DIRECTLY elected (Senate since 1913) by the citizens of the INDIVIDUAL states; The Executive is CHOSEN by the STATES through APPOINTED electors with each state's electors equal in number to the total Congressional representation of the state; The Judiciary is APPOINTED by the Executive with approval by the Senate.
States have individual sovereignty as to how their electors are appointed. Current inequities are the result of EVERY state being nearly homogenized into Extra-Constitutional PLURALITY WINNER-TAKE-ALL elections of PARTY-NOMINATED slates of Electors.
There is a non-partisan solution that does not subvert the Constitution nor require subversion of the Constitution:
ruclips.net/video/xE5vcuaqO90/видео.html
What so many people fail to understand or recognize is that the United States is just that, a federation of nominally sovereign states. It is the states that choose the chief executive of the federal government, not the people. If fact, for many years the legislatures of some states chose that state's electors and no popular vote was even held. Such are the details that made the Union of the states possible in the first place. Apparently the scholars at Harvard are no better informed about the basics of American history and civics than is the general population, or else they are willing to let their politics trump their academic integrity.
Correct. What the professors at Harvard and elsewhere seem to keep remembering is that the electorate sees itself in a different system with those annoying 21st century ideas about enfranchisement, and they keep highlighting the anachronisms.
How does this look like equality to you? Are you so intent on minority rule that you're willing to dismiss the idea of equality for all? One person, one vote. Anything that interferes with equality is anathema to this federal style of democracy of ours.
We are not a democracy, but a representative republic. If you really want to change it, you need to amend the constitution through the constitutional process.
*democratic republic
@@TheOneAndOnlyCatfish. Nope, representative republic.
@@TisiphonesShadow don't care. it's pretty lame. States don't vote, people vote. And the current system doesn't even work either. Just makes politicians go to a handful of swing states.
But then,too many 'Murricans start crying " but the Constitution!", whenever any type of changes are proposed. We're stuck with basically the same document from 1787. It's not 1787 anymore! Other countries update (and modernize) their national constitution,on average,every 20 years or so,and they turn out just fine- even in Europe,and most of them are doing better than us.
Hmmm... So why the USA blamed other countries (as Sovieta Union, as an example from other times) as "not democratic", if the USA itselves claim to be not a "democracy"?
As a former Presidential Elector for Hawaii. I believe that small or low population states would have littte or no power if we went to a stright voting system.
You are of course correct!
But each individual Hawaiian voter would have the same voice in choosing the president as a voter in any other state, and specific Hawaiian interests could e addressed by legislation. As things are now, a voter in Hawaii is in effect more of a citizen than the _same_ voter would be if he or she lived in California.
look at the Senate. There are a number of small states with two senators. They people whose vote is being down graded are those from big states.
If democrats are allowed to get away with a direct democracy, all it did take for democrats to win elections is to dump 20 Million migrants and give them amnesty.
Question: Now, how do we get rid of it?
You could make the same argument against the people who want the presidential elections changed from the electoral college and the "winner takes all" system, that a simple majority by popularity also disregards 49% of constituents in many elections. The focus of early American government foundations was the states and the representatives from those states. I constantly hear people complain about one institution or another, but those same people fail to understand the compromises that landed this system on those decisions and would be remis to go back on the compromises that were given on the issues they like and then reversed.
Its because it benefits republicans and it can’t be renovated without the consent of republicans
Kinda like how supreme court reform requires the consent of the supreme court to become less corrupt
It would have to be changed by the consent of the states, it is a constitutional matter.
@@raymondjensen4603You can’t ratify an amendment without the approval of 38 states. logistically speaking, it's nearly impossible with how many red states there are
Democrats only whine about the Electoral College when they are worried about losing. The ONLY thing that matters to them is power and control over others.
I wish I had seen this when it came out. It’s so frustrating how people do not understand the electoral college. It’s doing precisely what the founders meant - so that large cities cannot become a tyrannical majority, and protect the rights of the minority. It creates a situation where parties have to compromise….I agree to the points of having political parties, and that it would be better if they had not formed, but as Jefferson has always pointed out, you’ll never prevent people of like minds coalescing together. With that said, there is only one feature of the electoral college that is a severe problem. When it was created, populations of congressional districts were supposed to be of equal size. That has never been adhered to, and at one point early in the 20th century forever capped in the House. The idea was that people in rural states would have influence by two additional electoral votes being represented by their senators, and that’s how they could possibly overcome the difference in population gaps in larger states. Today it’s so lopsided, because you will have huge disparities in district size. If this was addressed, I believe people will feel better about the electoral college.
Pure poppycock. It works for those who oppose democracy. It does not work for the rest of us.
People such as the Harvard professor are mad at the electoral college because it has prevented democrats from winning.
As for the district size differences, that doesn’t affect the electoral college at all, because the number of districts each state gets is proportional to population.
At least as proportional as possible, given that no state can have a fraction of a district.
How does the EC stop a "tyrannical majority" of large cities? Today most Americans live in a large city or a suburb of one, which was not the case in 1789. If you add up the EVs of the 12 most populous states, all of which have populations dominated by large cities, that's a winning majority right there.
I have no idea how the EC creates a situation where parties have to compromise. Maybe if no party wins a majority of EVs in a three-way race and one party is able to get enough faithless electors to switch to backing them? I don't think that's ever happened in U.S. history and that's not even legal in many states.
How do you feel about quadrupling the size of the House, and using the Wyoming rule?
@@jamesfunk7614 i love that idea…fixes a lot of problems. People also don’t realize gerrymandering, which wasn’t as a sensitive topic as it is today, is only worsening because we haven’t addressed this.
If you drop the electoral college, states that want to should drop from the union. That's not what was signed up to.
An interesting idea. Lord knows there is enough federal overreach beyond the constitution already.
they can try. but since theyre so small, they are instantly slaughtered for treason
@@godemperorofmankind3.091you really think it would go that way? I'm guessing you wouldn't be doing the fighting yourself.
@@eq1373 only a selfish dick would try to shoot his fellow americans in the face just because a system that unfairly rigged voting in his favor, was taken from him in favor of a more fair and equal one.
Exactly!
Why should A small State have no say in A elections our votes just wouldn't count
It was an elitist move by the founding fathers who didn't trust "da peepul" (and initially thought the Senate should elect the president) - today amendments are hard to dump and the EC makes campaigns a whole lot easier, with candidates only having to concentrate on a handful of states!
@1Tomrider You got it backwards . The Popular vote would make it possible to win with just winning few large population centers. The EC makes it necessary to consider all the states
No, it's only necessary to consider the battleground states.@@christiansoldier77
Glad we "dumped" the utterly stupid and predictably doomed 18th Amendment by way of the 21st. Wish we could also dump the 16th and 17th. All three (16, 17 and 18) were mistakes enacted during the wonderful "Progressive" era.
The electoral college needs to be surgically removed. There are only two short articles that vaguely describe it 😊
The reason the Electoral College was created was to prevent a tyranny of the majority, meaning the large population centers riding roughshod over the rest of the country. A tyranny of the majority is an ever-present danger in a democracy, therefore it is wise to maintain the Electoral College.
Yes, eliminating tyranny of majority and in the process creating tyranny of minority, when smaller areas holding entire countries at hostage. EC is NONSENSE. It is no more than a tool of minority of some people (slaveowner) to control majority. US does not have the right to call itself democracy or representative republic as long as it has EC
Tyranny of the majority? That’s just called democracy.
Having a minority make descisons is far worse
Instead,we have financial tyranny,where those with the deepest pockets decide who the candidates are, who wins and rules over the rest of us,and it's their money that influences what laws are passed (laws which only apply to us and never them),along with the price of everything. It's not about red vs blue in this country. It's about the super-rich vs everybody else, regardless of party or demographic. Whoever is in the White House (Harris or Trump this year) may be President,but it's the corporate and billionaire class that is the boss
So, the system aims to preserve the tyrany of the minority?
Note the music...this has holes galore.
Because that's the system we have and changing it is never going to happen.
One thing that would fix the Electoral College is to end the cap on the members of the House of Representatives. If we could have a Congress that better represents the population, the Electoral College would too. Those of you claim the Electoral College is not representative or direct, just look at countries with a parliamentary system like the UK or Canada, We're the chief executive is elected by parliament instead of the people. That is less direct.
Well said and I have made this point elsewhere in this discussion. The 435-member limit on the size of the House is completely arbitrary; something that came about in the 1920s. Going back to each representative representing a certain number of people, no matter how large the House gets as a result, would also go a long way toward fixing the perceived problems with the EC.
There is one big reason you have not looked at. The electoral college gives smaller states a say. Typically big cities vote democratic. However the food belt, all of it, votes republican. How would the big cities like it if the farm belt got upset with the "popular vote and cut food off to the cities? One of the big issues of the revolutionary war was fought over taxation without representation. If the vote of a small state makes no difference why would they listen to anything that came out of Washington? A popular vote will further divide the country and the small states have the food.
California grows about half the produce in fruit, nuts and vegetables in the country and is not a small state. Many farms states mostly grow corn for ethanol fuel, animal feed and high fructose corn syrup. Corn gets federal subsidies for ethanol and crop insurance which shifted many states to focus on corn.
Smaller states tend to vote red. Do you really expect a Harvard type to admit that giving red states a vote is a good thing?
Imagine if the vote was close and we had to recount the entire nation.
Any polling place in The USA could be corrupted.
Thank you! I’ve been saying this since 2000.
So yes, much better to have a system that is systemically undemocratic than risk having to put something in place that reduces the risk. Amazing how other countries manage to hold democratic elections. But - you know - American Exceptionalism.
@@steveknight878 the USA isn’t a democracy it’s a constitutional or federal republic. The Founders did this intentionally because democracies are so unstable.
There are over 120 countries that manage to elect a president by popular vote without having that problem. Most of those are heads of state rather than head of government but the principle remains the same. Examples - Ireland, Germany, Poland, Austria, South Korea, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, Israel.
Lol, I love how you would rather have the one with fewer votes win, than have a nationwide recount to make sure the one with more votes won.
If you support the Electoral College why would you even care about having a nationwide recount? It's not like you care who won the most votes anyway.
The reason why we use the electoral college is for the time when you have 5 candidates running for president, and the most popular one get say 28% of the popular vote. The electoral college system ensures that the person, sitting in the Oval Office, was put there by a majority of votes (either by the electoral college, or Congress).
The only thing that I would change about the system is that if someone wins a majority (50%+1 vote) of the popular vote, then he/she should automatically be president, and not use the electoral college. To date, it's only happened once that someone won a majority of the popular vote, and lost the electoral college: 1876.
As the US Constitution allows states to determine delegates anyway they want, nothing is stopping states from applying Maine's, and Nebraska's system of assigning 2 delegates (1 for each senator) based on 1st place in the popular vote across the state, and 1 vote in each Congressional district that a candidate comes in 1st in.
But it’s almost unrealistic under current American politics. Yes there are parties like green party or libertarian party but none of them gets enough votes to even have a say in terms of electoral votes. The most successful 3rd party candidate I would say is Ross Perot who received about 20% of popular vote but received zero electoral vote because he didn’t win any states. Also you mentioned that “when you have 5 candidates running for president, and the most popular vote one get say 28% of the popular vote” . In 2016 presidential election there were officially 6 candidates (Jill Stein, Gary Johnson, Darrell Castle, Evan McMullin, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton). 94 % of voters voted for two major party candidates and thats even when both of the candidates were widely unpopular. The idea that most popular candidate getting 28 percent of the vote is theoretically possible but simply unrealistic given that there are only 2 established major parties and most don’t vote for 3rd party candidate.
Exactly - only Boomers remember the great days of 5-6 different parties running and then - the government changed us into a 2-party Nation by forcing candidates to BUY AIRTIME (NEVER ALLOWED) and allowing CORPORATIONS TO BUY CANDIDATES! Remember it was ILLEGAL for Corporations to donate more than $5000. This prevented CORPORATOCRACIES - which we have evolved into as BILLIONS BUY OUR ELECTED OFFICIALS!
@MajorLeague In a manner of speaking, yes, I agree in principle, but the other parties existed, active, and were gaining members, back in the 60's as equal airtime was given - and given free of cost. No one was hindered in getting out their message and platform.
In an age of "reach" thru Television, & Radio, the other parties grew. That had to be quashed and so it was by changing campaign laws and allowing CORPORATIONS an increased donation total that the other parties faded.
Add the Special interest and lobbying "pays to play". Democracy is now only in word (in many respects) and we've become a CORPORATOCRACY, or one could argue, a Technocracy 😳 scary stuff!
This could have been done in a much better manner by simply doing a runoff.
@Maher - Why are you lying? In 2016, "We, the people" elected Mrs.Clinton to be prez by a margin of 3-million votes.
DJ Trump was GIVEN the presidency via the "welfare benefit" for terrorists(slavers) in the USA Constitution, the Electoral College.
In 2000, Al Gore was elected by "We, the people" to be prez, but GW Bush was GIVEN the presidency via the "terrorists' welfare benefit", the Electoral College.
Please stop lying and remove your head from QAnus!
Someone who studies so much and yet overlooks the obvious.
One of the major reasons the Electoral College still exists is because it would require a Constitutional Amendment to remove it. This would not have the support of the majority of the States, because it would then put far too much power into the coastal States while leaving the Midwestern States to be nothing more than a resource to be exploited to exhaustion.
For all its flaws, the Electoral College has the effect of distributing power rather than allowing it to become too concentrated. Someone seeking the Presidency can't just appeal to the elite and the desperate - they also need to gain the support of a reasonable number of Middle states, who can also band together to protect their own interests.
This protects the rights of the Midwest not to simply be a tool for the Coastal Elite. It's an imperfect system to be sure, but still better than the alternative.
So,why not separate? Even the smallest states,in terms of population,have GDP's that are comparable to,or greater than entire countries. Plus,we won't have to have this debate, and everyone will have the leadership they want. Texas doesn't want to be at the mercy of New York, and California doesn't want to be at the mercy of Florida,so it's a win-win. People would also flock to states which align with their personal values,creating an influx of revenue,jobs and growth. Look at how Texas (especially Austin and Houston), Tennessee (especially the area around Nashville on eastward) and Montana have grown,and how people still flock to places like the East Coast and Northern California
Is winner take all based on a majority of popular votes in each state, or a plurality of popular votes?
Plurality. That’s why it’s almost impossible for a third party to get any traction.
@@SonnyBubba But each state has the power to decide for itself whether it wishes to use a "winner take all" (as most states do) or a proportional system (as Maine does.)
@@therealniksongs Uh... so we shouldnt do that. Because that effectively gives a state to a party, which effectively doesn't represent it accurately. Now we have "red" or "blue" states, and "purple." This is a misnomer as this was caused by "winner takes all."
A democracy is the Big Bad Wolf, Wiley E Coyote, and the Easter Bunny voting on who will be dinner. That's why we have an Electoral College.
17th amendment. Good boy admitting that you hate America.
Majority comments are pro-republic, pro-electoral college. How is that for democracy 😁
??
So instead we just let the Big Bad Wolf have its vote count for more than all three of the little piggies.
@@michaelk4295 Thank you for your analogy.
Unless you live in a swing state your vote for president doesn't matter at all... that is the reason to abolish it.
In a national popular vote, there won’t be any swing states, only the overpopulated areas full of like minded idiots.
The founding fathers didn’t want a democracy and for good reason.
States change over time. Florida was once a swing state, and now it isn't. California used to be red and now it isn't.
Full disclosure: I am from Canada, but I have had an interest in U.S. history and politics for almost four decades, since I was in high school. The best answer that I have heard as to why the electoral college still exists is that (basically) it gives smaller states a slight "leg up" versus larger states in choosing the chief executive. I once heard an argument that if you had a pure popular vote system for picking the President, under the current (and projected) demographic situation, the winning candidate would essentially be decided by just California, New York, and America's 10 largest metropolitan areas outside of those states. Those constituencies are historically mostly Democratic, so that Republican voters in other states and outside of urban areas would feel like their vote hardly matters, and the Democratic candidate would win virtually every time. The Republicans wouldn't stand a chance. I realize that this is a somewhat partisan argument, but I think that a good point is raised. You don't want a situation where one party has an unfair adventage over the other.
I understand what you're saying, but you know what that unfairness is called, it's called democracy, one man one vote, The electoral college was set up to favor slave holding states, the old Confederacy, the damn thing has to go!!
That’s a good reason for why half the country would want to keep it, but dones’t go into how or why it was created in the first place.
@@SonnyBubba it was created to give former slave holding states a bigger say in how to run the country, my response to that is f*ck them, they just got their asses kicked in the civil war, they don't deserve a say for treason against the United States.
Oh my, that was sweet...the EC gave us Bush and Trump. Enough said. Abolish it before it does the country in. Oh, and attempted fake electorates in our 2020 presidential conformation process...Oh, and Jan 6th. Yeah. Stick to your Canadian politics.
WAKE UP! Texas and Florida have larger populations than New York. Voters, not delegates should decide the presidency. A president should be elected by the majority of voters. Think about this. If a candidate wins the 11 most populated states by just 1 vote, and doesn't get any votes in the remaining 39 states, he or she wins. A voter shout;d count the same regardless of what state it was cats in. The electoral college can elect a candidate who loses the majority vote by an incredible margin and still get elected! The truth be told, the electoral college is disgraceful!
Was there a time early in the country’s history when the people were voting for the electors, and not really knowing much about the actual candidates?
No, but throughout our nation's history there have been plenty of people voting for electors, not knowing they were not voting for the candidates.
I think we are missing the larger point of why a national popular vote is not appropriate for our form of government. We are the United States of America. The President is not elected by one national campaign for the popular vote but by building coalitions within 50 separate states. A president must be able to speak the the wants and needs of very diverse groups across all 50 states. By having only 1 national vote candidates could largely ignore states with small populations and focus on the relatively few states with large populations. Also candidates would almost be forced to ignore rural areas and focus on urban and suburban areas. Donald Trump won by focusing on rural areas in key states to overcome his disadvantage in urban centers. In a national vote he could not do that and rural communities would become largely ignored in Presidential elections.
The electoral college works because it forces candidates to listen to diverse groups that represent the entirety of our nation and penalizes those that don't.
Well said
There has not been much clarity or common sense found in these comments. Thank you for adding some.
Imagine a parent- teacher association (PTA) where the families with more kids get to decide the policies for families with only one child.
Now imagine a country where California and New York decide everything for the other 48 states because they have more population.
There are 333 million people living in the US as of now, NY and CA only have 20 Million and 39 Million respectfully, that ads up to 59 million. If you do simple math you can see that they hold less than 1/5 of the whole population of the country, meaning if you even had 4 NY-CA agglomirations added into US they still can be outvoted.
USA dosen't need electoral college, let the PEOPLE vote, not states.
@@kolakyr1671🙌🙌👏👏👏👏
The Electoral College system decentralizes the process, so that states can withstand corruption from the federal government. Currently, states are allowed to decide most of their own election rules. With a "national popular vote," the courts would eventually hand over election rule-making to Congress in the name of "equal protection." Election centralization tends to lead to corruption and consolidation of power under the ruling party.
I place much more importance on individual equality than I do for states' rights. We are a federalist democracy (as opposed to a parliamentary one, for example), and in a democracy, one person's vote must carry exactly the same weight as any other. Anything that stands in the way of equality is anathema to any democracy including our federalist democracy.
@@daveburrows9876 The United States is not a federalist democracy. It is a democratic republic. States send representatives to the Senate and House to vote on our behalf. We, the people, don't vote on federal legislation. Similarly, states send electors to represent the collective will of each State in a vote of the States for U.S. President. We, the people, don't vote for President. We vote to decide what our State (electors) will do. The genius of the EC is that it protects smaller states from tyranny of the majority (e.g., Los Angeles County forever drowning out voices of several small states in mountain, midwest, or southern regions who have completely different needs than a high-density urban area). In a pure democracy, two wolves and a sheep vote on what's for dinner. The EC also forces candidates to campaign in more of the country than just major coastal cities. So as Alexander Hamilton said, the Electoral College is if “not perfect, it is at least excellent." Best to you.
@@daveburrows9876 The U.S. is a republic
For all of its flaws the electoral college forces candidates towards the center instead of their extremes. With a hard look at California you can see what a straight popular vote would do to this country. The real question is are we better off with the Presidency changing party every 4 to 8 years or one party always in power with zero reason to consider what the other half of the country thinks and feels?
I live in a swing state and my small hometown has been visited by two different setting Presidents. The only thing being in a swing state gets its residents is more election ads than you can stand. Our local and state elected officials hitch to the coattails of their party presidential candidate and largely get a pass on their local record. I am no fan of the electoral college but it does it's job by stifling single party rule. Every country that is controlled by a single party oppress their citizens. When looking at the results I can not see a more balanced way
@Chris Jones I don't believe that the electoral college is why we don't have single party rule??? If it had not been for the electoral college we would have had 28 years of Democratic rule. Gore and Hillary would have been president and that is why you all are pushing for a straight popular vote which will force the country to the far left. Current system fairly balanced power keeping ideology more or less centered by allowing power to change hands in every decade. Popular vote 49% of the country will be alienated and futher divided. When one half of a country is powerless they are either killed or they cause a revolution.
@Chris Jones If you look at the Democratic platform call it centrist while saying the Republicans shifted to the extreme right we must not be living in the same country. Especially considering I was a registered Democrat until 10 years ago. I supported blue dog dems and pulled for Joe Lieberman. I didn't leave the Dems they left me. You are going to get your wish and we will be worse off for it. The only two polices I do not agree with is immigration and abortion but when the dems run to the left of course the repubs run right. The far left liberals flushed their party of their centrist candidates and independents like me with them.
@Chris Jones One of the biggest issues I've always been bothered by is the idea of a living constitution because it gives legislative power to an authority that is unaccountable to the voters.
Critical Race Theory I have listened to several lectures from its proponents and their conclusion is we are in one of groups the oppressor and the oppressed. This idea goes against everything Doctor MLK worked towards. I want something that gets us past all of the racial divides instead of making them deeper Unfortunately no one is working for it.
The Green New Deal and the Paris Accord on Climate Change The overarching idea sounds good but the details will drag our economy down. The GND will destroy businesses and they will run to places like China because they wouldn't have to match our standards for over a decade in the Paris Agreement. The Democratic idea on climate change is the stick when the conservative idea is the carrot. Instead of forcing people\businesses to pursue green ideas reward them if they willingly do it. If global warming is the most dire problem facing the planet then do not stand in the way of nuclear energy. The nuclear energy debate is painting the barn door when the barn is on fire.
Taxes Every tax break I have ever had came in an Republican administration every increase came under Clinton and Obama.
This post is just off of the top of my head but I don't like how Trump will not shut up so I was holding out to see who and what faction of the democratic party was running before I decided. When I saw it was the far left woke liberals that sealed the deal. The idea that because I have some center right conservative ideas I should be shut\shouted down. I can not support phony virtue signaling. I want to hear all sides and I don't see people on the right protesting peoples first amendment rights. All and all the woke virtue signaling was the last straw for me
@@claudehall7889 We need to be forced to the far left.
Until 2001 it never mattered. That was the very first time that the person winning the popular vote didn't win the electoral college. If you want every American to believe that every vote counts then get rid of the electoral college. Are we by the people and for the people or are we a government for some people?
'Until 2001 it never mattered. That was the very first time that the person winning the popular vote didn't win the electoral college."
Actually ...it had happened three times before the 2000 election. 1824, 1876, and 1888. You can (and probably should have) look it up.
@twhmmh I don't really care about those smarty pants. I meant any election that anyone still alive would remember. You got me. You are so smart.
Without a doubt, you make the electoral college proportional and you drastically improve the system.
You'd no longer be fighting thin margins in the current swing states, but pretty much everywhere else. As a Republican, campaigning in California, Washington, Illinois, MA is no longer a loonie thing to do. Democrats could campaign in Texas, Montana, Missouri, the Dakotas or states that have a good solid blue center they may be able to help take one vote from (that's right: *small states* that "dOnT mAtTeR" with the popular vote).
Make /every/ electoral vote count. And by design the smaller states STILL get their advantage.