cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/488620
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.
cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/488620
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.
If two or three states end up picking the president, you’re going to have a problem where some geographical regions have disproportionate choice over who runs the country.
A lot of the systems in the USA are set up to help prevent a national divorce caused by disproportionate power accumulating in a few states. The more you eliminate those systems the faster you expedite a national divorce.
Moving away from the electoral college to something like STAR/approval voting would move us away from geographically weighted votes, which means that no such thing would happen. All voters would have equal representation.
Instead we currently have a system where a disproportionate amount of power is given to a select few states with fewer people. Tyranny of the minority is not acceptable. All votes should be equal.
So would you abolish the senate as well, with its 2 seats per state to ensure that each state is represented equally?
If you’re going to have a few regions basically having total dominion over who controls the country, why would the other state want to remain in such a union? The reason for the way things are set up is that different regions in the US had to be convinced to join the union in the first place. The farmers were concerned that the cities would have all the power. Start stripping away stuff intended to prevent a couple geographical areas from totally dominating the discussion and you will end up getting a couple geographical areas from totally dominating the discussion. That might work for a bit, but you could very well see it eventually causes a revolt and the end of the union since there’s no point being involved with a thing like that.
The President is not the representative of the 10 largest cities in America, they’re a representative of all of America. With the current system, a presidential candidate needs to convince people from all around the country that they’re the person to be president. With a pure equal voting system, presidential candidates would never spend any time at all in most states, and wouldn’t have anything in their campaign to help most states.
I wouldn’t abolish it, I think the number of senators per state should reflect the population of a given state.
Why would big states want to remain in a union in which smaller states hold more power than they otherwise would in a system that holds all votes equal?
The system we have already incentivizes the dissolution of the union.
And the big states would not have total domination, because states don’t (or at least shouldn’t) vote, people do. You do realize that a significant number of people in these big states vote red, right? So there would be no domination.
Our current system has historically been terrible for avoiding revolt.
And the president still wouldn’t be under a system that holds all votes equal. Because cities are not the only thing that exist.
Your whole argument is basically “We can’t have tyranny of the majority, we must maintain our current system of tyranny of the minority!” all while ignoring that all votes being equal is in fact not a form of tyranny by the majority.
No they don’t. They just need to convince the swing states. And that’s all they do, spend time in swing states campaigning. They might go to stronghold states on occasion for funding, but other than that 90% of the time they’re in swing states.
I live in a swing state. EVERY election, both candidates visit my city. Do you know what they don’t do? They don’t ever visit the surrounding states. They don’t ever stop by the smaller towns in my state. It’s only ever my city and 1-2 others for the entire state, then they skip off on a jet to the next swing state, flying over other states in the process.
The current system has all of the problems you are concerned about an equal vote system having.
There’s multiple systems. The house of representatives is basically your democratic vote is a vote part of the government. The senate is the every state is an equal partner thing, and the executive is something where there’s some weighting by population but also some counterweighting for balance, and that’s in between.
Breaking up larger countries into different regional nations makes sense to me, btw. Then the blue states won’t need to worry about subsidizing the red states, they’ll all have to figure their thing out for themselves.
I am aware. The mechanics of these systems doesn’t change the fact that they are inherently bad design. No voter should have more of a voice than another.
Oddly, that exact move has been a disaster for Britain. We should not follow suit.
Britain has been a disaster for Britain. Their leadership is terrible. It would be weak as part of the EU as well. At least this way the bad decisions are their own, and they can pay the consequences for them, and perhaps change them at sometime in the future.
Contrast with Greece, which isn’t in good shape, but is stuck doing what other people from competing regions tell them to do.
Absolutely. Tbeir leadership is a joke. However the actual effect of them leaving the EU was what I was referring to. They have to pay way more for import/export, they no longer have the same freedom to travel, it’s fucked their economy, there is less competition for products so the items available to them are worse.
It’s not just the leadership, it’s the effects of leaving itself that are a huge part of the issue.
I’m not super familiar with Greece’s particular situation, but I think what we’ve seen from Brexit would make it pretty clear that it would be a disaster for Greece to leave as well. The economic hardships caused by increasing the barrier to entry for trade is disastrous. It would also make it significantly harder for them to compete, because anything to do with Greece would become more expensive.
And this is all ignoring one of the biggest reasons for the EU, which is to avoid war. The amount of bloodshed Europe had to go through to get to the current level of cooperation and stability was also disastrous. Taking a step towards that happening again is a terrible idea, and that applies here in the U.S. as well.
If each state was it’s own independent country, the incentive for war suddenly increases.
The Brits are just ahead of the curve, deglobalization is occurring.
Stuff like peace was caused by the hegemony of the American empire, but the American empire appears to be teetering and a new age of multipolar pluralism is imminent, which is already leading to wars because countries don’t think a weakened United states can stop them.
What we seem to be seeing now is war in europe and civil war in America. It isn’t unprecedented in history, world war 1 started in a other era when everyone thought all the entangling alliances would prevent another war.
Talk of civil war in America is sorta debatable but a lot of people are calling some of the big events of the past few years civil war-like. The polarization, mistrust, and escalation of violence and use of institutional power to harm political opponents doesn’t bode well.
Of course, my view isn’t the most likely one out there, and it’s all a matter of interpretation.