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Democrats Could Nuke the Electoral College - TPM – Talking Points Memo (talkingpointsmemo.com)
submitted 2 days ago by to c/politics@lemmy.world
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With their new trifectas in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin and Nevada, Democrats could sign onto the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, in which states give their electoral votes to whoever wins the nationwide popular vote. All five of those states haven’t yet signed; the 19 that have possess 222 of the 270 votes needed to win the presidency. The additional states would activate the Compact. Some states might decline, bellyaching over losing their place of prominence in picking the president, but that would be irritatingly myopic: of the five presidents who won while losing the popular vote, four were Republicans.

Talk about historic.

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[–] 14 points 2 days ago (6 children)

Just fix permanent apportionment.

Rural states have the Senate as their check.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    This is mixing up two related but distinct ideas.

    The electoral college system leads to a winner-take-all for the electoral votes of any given state, with the exception of Nebraska. Passing a Wyoming rule or something similar to expand the size of the House, and increasing the number of electoral votes from 538 to 900 or whatever won't change that basic dynamic.

    Yeah, yeah, Wyoming has a house seat elected by a population of 590,000, a little bit smaller than the national average house district population of 780,000, but that's not nearly as big of a source of voting power discrepancy compared to the existence of the Senate, or the winner-take-all phenomenon that happens in the Electoral College.

    So yes, I agree that the Apportionment Act needs to be repealed/modified, but don't agree it should be as high a priority as electoral college reform.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    The electoral college is quite literally based on the apportionment of Congress.

    The average congressional seat accounts for 760k people.

    In 1930 (first Congress after this was law), the average was 280k.

    Even using Wyoming as a basis (590k/rep), that would give California ~71 electoral votes (69 house seats) if there was equal representation. And this would also drastically improve the balance of power in the House.

    So my contention is that even without fixing the electoral college as a concept, we can fix it with appropriate apportionment.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago

    The electoral college is quite literally based on the apportionment of Congress.

    Yes, but the disproportionality between electoral votes per voter comes more from the existence of the Senate than it does with the slightly different population sizes of the House districts. Wyoming has almost 4 times the electoral votes per voter than Ohio, whereas right now the widest ratio in House district populations is Delaware's 980k having 80% higher population compared to Montana's 542k.

    And the genuine unfairness of the electoral college is the winner take all nature of it. Even if the electoral college itself were divided exactly proportionally to the population of the states, there would still be divergence between the national popular vote and the electoral college winner when one candidate wins a disproportionate number of very close states. Apportionment is a separate problem from the electoral college, and both independently need to be fixed.

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