The Supreme Court Just Pointed Out the Absurdity of the Electoral College

[Brad_ATX 13,654]

2 hours ago, Mikey said:

I like the EC, and it's here to stay. A constitutional amendment requires 3/4 (currently 38) States to ratify before it becomes law. A whole lot of states would have to vote against their own self-interest to do away with the EC. Love it or hate it, barring a revolution the EC is here to stay.

You've obviously never heard of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.  Currently there are 15 states that have passed it into law, making up 196 votes.  If they ever get enough states to pass it into law to make up 270 electoral votes (number needed to win), then the laws goes into effect in each state.  States making up another 120 electoral votes are currently considering the idea as well. 

Law would dictate in those states that their electoral votes go to the candidate that wins the national popular vote.  It's essentially a way of getting around passing a Constitutional Amendment while ensuring the national popular vote winner wins.

And of course Republicans like the EC.  They've lost the popular vote in 6 of the last 7 Presidential elections.  Bush in 2004 was the only win of that bunch.  Without the EC, the Republican party would have to significantly moderate it's stances in order to ever win the White House.

[TexasTiger 12,801]

15 hours ago, wdefromtx said:

My opinion....keep the electoral college system. If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. 

But since it clearly is broke...

[TexasTiger 12,801]

15 hours ago, aubiefifty said:

because we are a bunch of dummies?

Because Reagan reversed the plan to do so. So, yes.

[Mikey 16,546]

7 hours ago, Brad_ATX said:

Without the EC, the Republican party would have to significantly moderate it's stances in order to ever win the White House.

All Hail The EC!

[Mikey 16,546]

7 hours ago, Brad_ATX said:

You've obviously never heard of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

I've learned enough about it to know that its legality is under serious question. In the unlikely event that enough states joined the thing, the Supreme Court would doubtless have the final say. Another of the many great reasons to Vote Trump in 2020.

[homersapien 11,352]

1 hour ago, Mikey said:

All Hail The EC!

Well at least you're unabashedly supportive over your patently unfair and anti-democratic position.   I am not surprised.

[aubiefifty 16,695]

8 hours ago, TexasTiger said:

Because Reagan reversed the plan to do so. So, yes.

i never got the love for ronnie. illegal wars behind congresss's back. cia bringing in drugs to flood the ghettos. and even the monkey  he worked with was a better actor.

[aubiefifty 16,695]

1 hour ago, Mikey said:

All Hail The EC!

you left off hitler with your hail which is close enough to heil............grins

[aubiefifty 16,695]

9 minutes ago, homersapien said:

Well at least your unabashedly supportive over your patently unfair and anti-democratic position.   I am not surprised.

i have come to the conclusion mikey is a narcissist. he never admits defeat even when he is getting his behind handed to him.

[aubiefifty 16,695]

the pubbies laugh and all that but they know what is what and they are scared.

[Mikey 16,546]

14 hours ago, homersapien said:

Well at least you're unabashedly supportive over your patently unfair and anti-democratic position.   I am not surprised.

We are not a democracy, we are a republic. Thanks to the Founding Fathers, mob rule does not prevail in these United States. Do you want the entire nation to be the mess that is California and New York? That's what we would have under mob rule.

[Mikey 16,546]

13 hours ago, aubiefifty said:

i have come to the conclusion mikey is a narcissist. he never admits defeat even when he is getting his behind handed to him.

One of the loser lefties here disagreeing with me and then two more of the same leaping in and shouting Yes Yes does not constitute anything being handed to me.

About Reagan: When he took over, the nation's mood was total despair. "Stagflation" was rampant, interest rates were pushing 20% and most people of a thinking age thought we were headed to ruin. For two years, the lefty media shouted nothing but Reganomicis is the death knell of the nation. Then, surprise, Reganomics turned things around. The Great Reagan won re-election with one simple slogan: "If you are better off now than you were four years ago, vote for me. If you're not better off, vote for the other guy". We were better off. The Berlin Wall fell, and along with it the threat of world wide communism. Reagan was clearly the best president of my lifetime.

[homersapien 11,352]

10 hours ago, Mikey said:

We are not a democracy, we are a republic. Thanks to the Founding Fathers, mob rule does not prevail in these United States. Do you want the entire nation to be the mess that is California and New York? That's what we would have under mob rule.

A republic is a type of democracy. Ours is clearly outmoded and organized to be anti-democratic as the past few years have proven.  It needs to be changed.

I would love for the entire nation to be more like California and New York in terms of diversity and progressive thinking.

You sound like some sort of backwoods elitist - "mob" rule.

 

[Mikey 16,546]

12 hours ago, homersapien said:

I would love for the entire nation to be more like California and New York in terms of diversity and progressive thinking.

Well, you can move to one of those places right now. Why wait? I suggest somewhere in New York City where His Honor de Blasio will keep you and yours safe and sound.

[homersapien 11,352]

11 hours ago, Mikey said:

Well, you can move to one of those places right now. Why wait? I suggest somewhere in New York City where His Honor de Blasio will keep you and yours safe and sound.

Ah, the old "love it or leave it argument".  Brilliant!

I have a mission to counter-balance fools like you here in the South. 

It's a Sisyphean task but I am committed.

[Mikey 16,546]

13 hours ago, homersapien said:

Ah, the old "love it or leave it argument".  Brilliant!

I have a mission to counter-balance fools like you here in the South. 

It's a Sisyphean task but I am committed.

You are missing out. New York has just cut the police force, handcuffed those who are left and shootings are already up 200%. Chicago would be a good, solid Democrat stronghold for you. Go for a Sunday walk and dodge some bullets in Obama's old neighborhood. Seattle has a mayor who shares your political views and they tell me Minneapolis is lovely through both weeks of summer there. Go in haste, join your fellow Dems in the model cities they have created.

[SaturdayGT 719]

13 hours ago, homersapien said:

It's a Sisyphean task but I am committed

Just say pointless lol. You definitely try to hard sound like your talking down to people. Talk about narcissism lol....

[DKW 86 7,410]

I get those that favor the EC. I mean I understand that without the EC they have been told that California, maybe even Los Angeles alone would overrule 25 states or more. That is just not so. Time for cold hard facts my friends. 

Market Watch gets it right IMHO: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-biggest-argument-for-keeping-the-electoral-college-relies-on-a-myth-2019-09-10

Please note the DATE OF THIS ARTICLE: 9-10-2019 written and published when we were not in the throes of an election. Sanity, Peace, Rationality are good things.

Quote

Some critics claim that under direct election of the president, big states would select the president, no matter which candidate those living in the other states preferred. Thus, they argue, the Electoral College protects rural states against the dominance of large states and big cities.

This belief is a myth. In fact, the opposite is more likely — the big states can dominate the Electoral College. (Winner Takes All EC Rules).

Let’s look at the results of recent elections. They show that big states, or even just big cities, don’t decide presidential elections. It’s true that if 100% of the voters in the big states voted for the same candidate under a system of direct election, they would determine the outcome of the election. There is no chance of this happening, however.

First, big states typically don’t award candidates one-sided victories in the popular vote. No big state has delivered more than 62% of its popular vote to any candidate in any of the five presidential elections in this century, as this table shows. The mean winning percentage in the large states was 55%.

In addition, the total votes for the 11 largest states don’t skew greatly in one direction, as this next table shows. No candidate has won more than 51% of the vote in the largest states in this century. The average difference between the candidates is only 4 percentage points. (Once COMBINED, the TOTAL Effect of the 11 Largest States is... The Average.)

In 2004, John Kerry beat George W. Bush in the 11 largest states by 506,874 votes—less than 1% of the votes cast for the two candidates in those states. Bush easily overcame Kerry’s lead in the biggest states to win the popular vote by a margin of more than 3 million votes.

It is also not the case that the big states are Democratic bastions. A majority of the larger states, including Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Georgia, and North Carolina, are highly competitive in presidential elections. Of the two largest states, California is Democratic while Texas is Republican. Florida has more voters than New York. (Those defending the EC usually cite just CA & NY, FOR A REASON. They are ignoring TX and FL as counterbalancers, on purpose it would seem.) 

Indeed, it was the electoral votes of the big states that made Donald Trump president, against the wishes of a plurality of the national electorate. Seven of the 11 largest states voted for Trump, awarding him 152 electoral votes versus the 118 electoral votes Hillary Clinton won from the remaining large states.

Thus, there is no danger of large states determining the election outcome by themselves under direct election of the president.

The story is different under the Electoral College, however. In the current system of selecting the president, a candidate could win the presidency by winning only 50% plus 1 vote of the popular vote in the 11 biggest states. That is, under the Electoral College system, about a quarter of the nationwide popular vote (one-half of one-half) could elect the president. Moreover, obtaining 50% plus one vote in 11 states is a far more likely scenario than winning 100% of the vote from these same states.

Actually, the electoral college permits even a smaller percentage of the voters to elect a president. According to calculations made by MIT Professor Alexander S. Belenky using actual voter turnout data, candidates theoretically could have won an Electoral College majority with between 16% and 22% of the national popular vote in the 15 elections between 1948 and 2004.

What about large cities? Does the electoral college protect the country from their domination of presidential elections? No. Big cities cannot even control the states in which they are located, much less the nation. (You see, when you use rationality and reason, things come to light based on facts, not emotions.)

Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland haven't supported the Republican governors of California (including Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger) in the past two generations. If Los Angeles cannot control statewide elections in its own state, it can hardly control a nationwide election.

Texas has six of the 20 largest cities in the United States. Many of them vote Democratic in a state that at present has no statewide elected Democrats.

The principal reason for cities’ lack of sway is their size. They are simply too small to wield control of politics. The combined population of the 20 largest cities in the U.S. in 2016 was 34.1 million out of a total population of 323.1 million, representing only 11% of the population. (Facts once again raise their head and debunk mythology.)

As is typical in defenses of the Electoral College, those claiming that it protects rural voters against the dominance of states and cities with large populations have built their assertions on faulty premises. Big states and cities wouldn’t dominate presidential elections under a system of direct election of the president. Indeed, they are more likely to determine the outcome under the Electoral College—the opposite of its defenders’ arguments.

America’s Founders had a wide range of motivations in creating the Electoral College, ranging from fear of democracy and the power of a popularly elected president to concerns about the legislature selecting the executive as in a parliamentary system. Protecting against big-state domination was not one of them, however. Moreover, rural states already have greatly disproportionate power in the Senate, where two senators represent each state regardless of size, and neither need nor receive additional protection from the Electoral College. (The 'Small-staters' will still hold power in the Senate. It is the counterbalance to population control of the government, as it was designed to do.)

In the 21st century, it is appropriate to design a system of presidential selection that reflects the wishes of the American people.

 

 

[I_M4_AU 7,762]

The EC was initiated when there were more then just two parties and it made sense and to me it still makes sense.  It would be nice to have a third party, but that would require a third way of thinking and that will be hard to do with our mind set at this time.  We, as the public, are hard wired to *you believe what I say or you are total wrong and the enemy* type of identity politics.  It is sad.

[DKW 86 7,410]

40 minutes ago, I_M4_AU said:

The EC was initiated when there were more then just two parties and it made sense and to me it still makes sense.  It would be nice to have a third party, but that would require a third way of thinking and that will be hard to do with our mind set at this time.  We, as the public, are hard wired to *you believe what I say or you are total wrong and the enemy* type of identity politics.  It is sad.

Indeed it is...

[AUDub 11,131]

On 7/8/2020 at 10:48 AM, wdefromtx said:

If it isn't broke don't fix it. LOL 

 

 

But we did use metric for that. They simply converted units for display.

Metric is very good for not screwing it up on very precise stuff, and easier to learn initially, to boot, since everything is derived from 10. Unit conversions are also a breeze since everything is universally ties together.

In my field, medical, nearly everything is metric now when extreme precision is a must. On some of the stuff where less precision is needed, I still use imperial though. (I need to torque this bolt to X lb/ft rather than Newton/Meters, this flow here is in X GPM rather than LPM). 

[SLAG-91 1,483]

57 minutes ago, I_M4_AU said:

The EC was initiated when there were more then just two parties and it made sense and to me it still makes sense.  It would be nice to have a third party, but that would require a third way of thinking and that will be hard to do with our mind set at this time.  We, as the public, are hard wired to *you believe what I say or you are total wrong and the enemy* type of identity politics.  It is sad.

I am a pragmatist for the most part and live in the land of "what is" vs. "what should be", but something that has always annoyed me is the notion of a vote for anything other than one of the two major party candidates is a wasted vote, or that "A vote for the Green/Libertarian/Whatever Party is really a vote for (pick a Dem or Rep)."

Nope.

A vote for the Libertarian candidate is a vote for the Libertarian candidate. If people want to apply whatever sort of pretzel logic to try to figure out which major party candidate that vote is supposedly for, then have at it. That effort and $3 will buy the Sunday paper.

If neither of the two major party candidates line up well with what my views are, then neither of them get my vote.

I like the idea of ranked choice voting, but would need to read up more on it. 

 

[Brad_ATX 13,654]

On 7/9/2020 at 11:28 PM, Mikey said:

We are not a democracy, we are a republic. Thanks to the Founding Fathers, mob rule does not prevail in these United States. Do you want the entire nation to be the mess that is California and New York? That's what we would have under mob rule.

You mean the two states that produce a large chunk of our wealth as a country?  Yeah, I'm OK with that.

California, if it were a country, would be the 5th largest GDP in the world.   New York would be 11th if it were its own country.

[Brad_ATX 13,654]

On 7/10/2020 at 10:54 PM, Mikey said:

Well, you can move to one of those places right now. Why wait? I suggest somewhere in New York City where His Honor de Blasio will keep you and yours safe and sound.

I've been to NYC a ton.  Spend a week each month there for work.  I feel safer walking the streets of NYC than I do in Montgomery or Birmingham.  Montgomery is still the only place I've ever had a gun pointed at me. 

But please, tell me more about how well you understand the differences between the places based on your extensive travel.

[wdefromtx 3,159]

1 hour ago, AUDub said:

But we did use metric for that. They simply converted units for display.

Metric is very good for not screwing it up on very precise stuff, and easier to learn initially, to boot, since everything is derived from 10. Unit conversions are also a breeze since everything is universally ties together.

In my field, medical, nearly everything is metric now when extreme precision is a must. On some of the stuff where less precision is needed, I still use imperial though. (I need to torque this bolt to X lb/ft rather than Newton/Meters, this flow here is in X GPM rather than LPM). 

I’m in oil and gas and we use both almost equally. Hell some of the subsea stuff has both metric and imperial on the same drawings. 

Who wouldn’t want to deal with units like this....lol