Ignoring the racist and patriarchal solution they came up with, it’s hard to disagree with their conclusion that average people don’t make for a reliable voting population.

"Average people" aren't voting.

Profile of Voters vs. Non-Voters

Whites, Christians, partisans, and the elderly are all over-represented in the official election day tally. Education level, wealth, suburban/rural populations, and married households are also disproportionately represented. And that's before you weight the ECs by state population. The state of Wyoming - population 587k - enjoys 3 ECs to California - population 40M - and its 54 ECs. That's 3.5x the weighted representation per citizen.

To say "the founders were right to structurally exclude 80% of public and then disproportionately represent the rural backwaters against the urban core because voters are dumb", you need some really funky understanding of what constitutes a functional elected bureaucracy.

It should further be noted that the Founding Fathers generation of Presidents and Legislators largely sucked. They were genocidal both with respect to their First Nation's neighbors and their ethnically homogeneous neighbors. They accelerated the slave trade directly into a civil war while telling themselves it was going to die out. They inflicted nightmarish ecological harms to their local agriculture via excessive tobacco farming. Their fiscal policy was a forty year long trainwreck, culminating in Andrew Jackson and a generation of cyclical depressions.

It seems that 1/3 of the population doesn’t give a shit about anything, 1/3 is certifiably insane, and 1/3 put in a reasonable amount of effort to understand the issues and proposed solutions.

None of that is true, though. It's just back-of-the-envelop vibes math.

What you have is serial nationalist indoctrination at the primary school level, mass media misinformation straight from secondary school to retirement, and a partisan political economy that thrives on pitting half the labor force against the other half through "wedge issue" campaigns.

"Oh, well, these people are just crazy" is the lazy man's analysis of someone with divergent priors and media diet. For the most part, they're using the same logical fundamentals as you are, they've just got different inputs. Similarly, "these people don't give a shit" is a casual off-the-cuff response aimed at a population that is chronically overworked, underpaid, and routinely rug-pulled.

Consider who is actually on the ballot in some of these races and you might understand why folks express apathy. When campaigns boil down to a bunch of personal attacks between two corporate hacks who hold all the same policy positions, what you're voting in is barely more than a vanity contest.

I don’t know how you can address it without creating a system just begging to be abused.

Systems beget abuse when they allow for power imbalances between haves and have-nots. This is particularly true when quality of life is predicated on being in the first group over the second.

At some point, the only system that is beyond abuse is one that holds the least person in it as an equal to everyone else. But it is very easy to agitate against such a model when you are able-bodied, property owning, and racially in-group, while the person you're profiteering off of is not.

Ranked choice helped Mamdani get elected. It doesn't have to favor moderate candidates if like-minded candidates form coalitions and campaign together, like Mamdani and Lander did.

It's surprising because in the big tent Democrat party there's a moderately sized group calling for RCV as well.

I’m a little confused about what’s confusing you. Unless you are just unfamiliar with the idea that the United States federal government was intended to be an experimental hybrid between national and federal interests. The original fear being that a purely federal system would give too much power to too few and allow the creation of a single party state. Not that that seems to be happening right now or anything…

You seem to be mostly pointing out the same thing that I was trying to point out except my point was more if we uncapped the house it would take some of that undo power away from the smaller states and states in general. Also fulfilling the obligation from over 100 years ago to give Indian nations voting members of Congress would also expand the electoral college.

My overall point was simply saying killing the electoral college wouldn’t do anything to remove federal power or create a more democratic nation. Because of the reasons you outlined, we need to do more, either to reinforce the hybridization or do away with the federalization altogether if the goal is direct democracy.

Not if your particular opinion Is that the United States federal government should be a direct democracy, In my experience, most of the people championing the end of the electoral college have that opinion.

Personally, I kind of feel like we need a bigger reforms than that, but that’s just me.

Yes, he won by 2.5M in 2024 - because 6.5M stayed home or otherwise didn't vote. He didn't win that election because he had magically grown more popular; he won because people literally DID NOT VOTE like they did in 2020.

If they enact it early it would be effectively dead in the water because it would still leave the decision up to swing states, and people would lose confidence in the movement. Holding off until it's a sure thing gives it a whole lot more power.

Either way, it's still a couple more years until the next general election cycle spins up, they may have it locked in by then.

Because without 270 votes, this could result in states that sign having even less impact, resulting in them not signing. As an example, imagine it goes into effect immediately. Now as a candidate, you have two options.

Option 1: Campaign and make promises in a state that signed and the only thing you get is more overall voters to win the popular vote and therefore the electors of states that signed. But winning the popular vote is not enough. You still need electors from other states.

Option 2: Campaign and make promises in states that did not sign. Convincing voters here not only gives you votes for the popular vote, but also for the states electors. So you gain votes both towards the electors of states that signed and this state that didn't.

Now where would you campaign and make promises?

If this was in effect Hillary Clinton would have won in 2016, Al Gore in 2000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_elections_in_which_the_winner_lost_the_popular_vote

Different states have different laws, but many have faithless elector protections.

A faithless elector is someone who, after being chosen for the electoral college, does not vote for the candidate that everyone expected. Since states have a wide latitude to select or reject electoral college representatives, they can pas laws saying "If you change your vote, we will cancel your vote and replace you". I would expect that this popular vote compact requires such protection.

Right, the key is that now the electoral college does not necessarily have the same result as the popular vote.

This agreement, if in effect, will ensure that the EC result matches the popular vote.