Why local elections matter more than the presidency
Why local elections matter more than the presidency
This is US focused but the principle of being involved in local issues is universal to all democracies.
Can I rant for a minute?
Why does every thread about voting devolve into bitching about the flaws of the Electoral College?
Fun fact: the Electoral College only pertains to the Presidency and there’s almost nothing you can do about that directly.
Think local, that’s where you can make a difference. Your local school board has the power to either support students or drive them to suicide. Local races frequently turn on a handful of votes.
So go ahead, sit out the election because the choices for president stink. I humbly submit that your superior moral stance may not be based on very firm principles. That trans kid down the block didn’t need your help anyway. /s
You're viewing a single thread.
I don't think there's ever a case where the electoral college itself has ever been the problem. The problem is the same one that plagues local elections but in a different form: there isn't proportional voting.
At the national level, states allocate all of their electors to the candidate that wins the popular vote in that state. If a candidate wins 51% of the state's votes they get 100% of the electors. That has historically been the reason presidents win despite losing the popular vote, not because of the college itself. Even without the college, if states allocated their voting power that way, you'd have the exact same problem.
At the local level the problem is more confined in that an individual can only put all of their influence behind a single candidate. This forces one to choose the least bad option.
The solution at all levels is proportional voting. States should allocate their electors according to the proportion of votes candidate receive. This needs some thought to do because it's impossible to allocate exactly proportionally, but it's a simple problem to address. At least two states do this. For every election I'm aware of where the president won despite losing the popular vote, this would have prevented that.
At all levels, something like ranked choice voting (there are other possibilities) allows voters to support multiple candidates, letting them give the most support for the candidate they genuinely prefer, but giving a hedge to support a candidate they do t love but that's better than their worst candidate. This could be applied on top of a state's system for allocating electors.
This is probably a top 3 priority for creating a workable government instead of this shit show we have now. It's gaining significant reactions with several states using some sort of proportional system, but there's heavy opposition from the current policitians. They know if it gets through, they'll lose their elections, and won't be able to jerk around their constituents. If you're sick of one shit party vs another shit party, do everything you can to support proportional voting at all levels, and to get your state to allocate electors proportionally (not like the NPV pact does).
There are plenty, including myself, that feel the Electoral College is indeed the problem. Proportional allocation would be a step in the right direction, true, but it doesn't address the larger issue that the number of electoral votes a state gets is not equally proportional to its population. This is a big problem.
In 2016, Wyoming cast 255,849 popular votes and California cast 14,181,595. Wyoming has three electoral votes and California has fifty-five votes, meaning Wyoming cast one electoral vote for every 85,283 voters while California cast one electoral vote for every 257,847 voters. In other words, a voter in Wyoming is over three times more influential than a voter in California. It’s worth noting that this statistic considers actual votes cast in 2016, rather than all registered voters. Many voters in large states such as California are dissuaded from voting, as the Electoral College dilutes their votes.
By the way, not all states are winner take all. Maine and Nebraska use systems of allocation that can split their electoral votes between candidates.
Edit to add: Here is the real solution to the Electoral College issue. The Interstate National Vote Compact Agreement. Once enough states have passed this law to add up to 270 Electoral votes, then all of those states will allocate all their votes to the winner of the national popular vote.
Under the National Popular Vote law, no voter will have their vote cancelled out at the state-level because their choice differed from majority sentiment in their state. Instead, every voter’s vote will be added directly into the national count for the candidate of their choice. This will ensure that every voter, in every state, will be politically relevant in every presidential election—regardless of where they live.
The National Popular Vote law is a constitutionally conservative, state-based approach that retains the power of the states to control how the President is elected and retains the Electoral College. National Popular Vote has been enacted by 16 states and the District of Columbia, including 4 small states (DE, HI, RI, VT), 9 medium-sized states (CO, CT, MD, MA, MN, NJ, NM, OR, WA), and 3 big states (CA, IL, NY). These jurisdictions have 205 of the 270 electoral votes needed to activate the law.
The bill has also passed one legislative chamber in 8 states with 78 electoral votes (AR, AZ, ME, MI, NC, NV, OK, VA), including the Republican-controlled Arizona House and Oklahoma Senate. It has passed both houses of Maine and Nevada at various times, and is endorsed by 3,705 state legislators.
I certainly cannot disagree with you. I guess I'm making an argument about how an individual should spend their precious and limited time and emotional energy.
How would you suggest a person get their state to sign the compact?
Call and write your state legislatures. Try to get friends and family to do the same. If you know anyone in local TV, radio, or print media, you can try to get them to report on it. You could also write a letter to the editor of local papers. Join local social media groups and post about.
I think voters should petition their local officials to change their local election systems to use some sort of proportional voting. Then we'll get better local officials and we can keep pushing this system to higher levels.
I don't like NPV. I wrote about that in response to someone else, but in short, it's the same mentality as allocating all electors to someone who wins only a portion of the vote, which is inherently flawed. It's better than what we have now, but it's a hard sell because people never want their vote to go to a candidate they didn't support, so there will always be states that rightly don't support it.
Excellent idea. That is more likely to be effective than waiting for it to happen nationwide first.
Are you aware of any local efforts to do that? I’d love to hear of them.
Part of the problem seems to be that no one seems to know what the electrical college is. The difference in voting power you describe above is not the electoral college. That's that fact that states have disproportionate voting power. The college reflects that, but it's not due to the college. You could have that without the college. Also, that disproportionate power is something to disagree with, but it has not resulted in a president winning an election despite losing the popular vote. You could keep disproportionate power and the college, and if states allocated proportionally, none of the times the US has elected a president who lost the popular vote would have occured. Conversely, if you removed disproportionate power but kept allocating all votes to the pop vote winner in the state, not a single election outcome would have been different. The problem is that states don't allocate proportionally. That's it.
I already said that two states allocate proportionally....
NPV is minor improvement and a terrible approach. States don't have an incentive to allocate their electors to a candidate that wasn't popular in the state. That makes it hard to adopt, and certainly some states will never adopt it. It has gained ground, and maybe it will take effect in the states where it's passed, but I guarantee that as soon as a some states are allocating electors to a candidate that wasn't popular there, they'll repeal it. Conversely, everyone is incentived for their vote to go toward the candidate they actually voted for. Getting states to do that doesn't require buy in from a dozen states like NPV does. It's a state level incentive that achieves everything NPV hopes to achieve, that's far easier to implement, and has the added bonus of not further supporting the shitty two party system.
And how do we move from FPTP and electoral college madness to one of the various proportional strategies?
We have to engage now with the system as it is. Wanking on Lemmy is only so effective.