65% of U.S. adults say the way the president is elected should be changed so that the winner of the popular vote nationwide wins the presidency.
65% of U.S. adults say the way the president is elected should be changed so that the winner of the popular vote nationwide wins the presidency.
It makes sense from the perspective of early America, which initially wanted a confederate system.
It doesn’t make sense now that most people consider themselves American first and their state is just the place they currently live.
The EC can work but make it a contest for each electoral vote, and remove the states from the equation entirely. California being safe blue and Texas being safe red don’t matter, each district is counted for one electoral vote, and the states don’t get extra votes anymore.
That just seems like popular vote with extra steps. I’m not sure, but I feel like mathematically there would be no way in which the result of the EC would differ from the popular vote under such a system. I suppose it might still be possible to skew it far enough to shift the outcome using some extreme gerrymandering.
It is a popular vote with extra steps. That’s literally what it is.
The extra steps mean that politicians can’t purely focus on population centers, rural communities would count for the same vote. each district should be of similar population size, and every district counts for one.
This:
seems to run counter to this:
As an example, lets say you have a rural area with 1000 people in it, and you decide that each district should contain 1000 people, so that entire area is one gigantic district. Nearby you have a city with 10,000 people, so you split the city into 10 districts. That city still counts 10 times what that one giant rural area does. The only way I can see where you could make the rural area count for more is with extreme gerrymandering where you snake little bits of every rural area in to include a chunk of the city population thereby diluting the strength of the cities vote by smearing part of it over the rural areas.
I see absolutely no reason why we should adopt a system that exists solely for the purpose of making gerrymandering possible, and I see no reason why doing things this way would make any difference over just using the popular vote if you aren’t gerrymandering.