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Tough choice
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2024
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It's not a matter of opinion. You're misrepresenting how the EC works.
It isn't a good system, but it's also nothing like you characterized it.
Slates of electors are chosen to represent parties by the parties themselves, often in party conventions or primaries, and typically from a pool of people who are incredibly loyal to the party. That is even more true of smaller parties, as they tend to be more invested in their particular beliefs than the major parties.
Faithless electors are, so far, practically a non-factor in modern elections in the US. There are mechanisms in place in most cases that either invalidate their vote or outright remove and replace them. I can only cite one time in history that there was a significant impact, when the Virginia electors withheld their votes for Van Buren's VP Richard M. Johnson. He had to be elected by the Senate due to the 23 withheld votes keeping him from a majority in the EC. That was in 1836.
Then why have electors at all? Why not just get together and state "we have 10 electoral votes for Kamela". There's no actual need to have a person who's job is to literally walk to a place fill a bubble and put it in the envelope box.
I don't care how the system works to vote for president. All I know is that it's not my vote and I am a citizen. Can you say that's a misrepresented statement? "It's not my vote that elects a president" that is 100% true.
I'll point back to you saying this:
Which is, for lack of a better way to put it, simply bullshit.
I'll also point to you saying this:
Which sounds like willful ignorance about the election process. I don't think that's a position to be proud of.
You ask why we even have electors at all, as if that's some sort of big "gotcha" monent. I already clearly stated that I don't think it's a particularly good system, especially coupled with FPTP and winner-talke-all. What it is, though, is the system we have, so understanding it is pretty vital.
Technically speaking, no, you do not directly vote for a presidential candidate in the general election. In practice, your vote almost certainly will be represented by the electors you vote for if your chosen candidate wins your state or if you live in Nebraska or Maine. Certainly, the electors could be removed entirely from the process while electoral votes remain. That would remove one unnecessary part of the equation, but would it solve anything?
Here's the real fun: winner-take-all. It's more damaging than indirect election. Let's pretend you live in one of three districts that vote for (electors pledged to) Alice, one in a landslide and two hotly contested. But the other two districts in your state elect (electors pledged to) Bob. The statewide popular vote is close but slightly in favor of Bob. Congrats, all seven of your states EC votes go to Bob even though your district overwhelmingly supported Alice, and she won 60% of the districts. Who needs faithless electors when your vote can truly not count for anything? This is how WTA is worse for democracy than electors.
Okay now let's imagine we did have awesome candidates to choose from not just Kamela, the orange back of peanut Grease and the several others in the list that were never mentioned except for a couple of times when they explained why only Kamela and Trump were in the debates. If let's say we had two really strong republicans that could get democratic votes against two really strong democrats who could easily get republican votes...how could my vote as a Democrat count at all if I voted for one of the republicans but then I happened to be in a democratic state like Texas (lol. Let's pretend Texas had mostly democratic electors). Like you mentioned, the electoral vote would be winner takes whatever...all or some. My individual vote is either diluted via population and number of representatives per stated, or eaten up by Jerrymandering or whatever. I say fuck the electoral college, count all the damn votes and make the popular vote win.
Having some sort of mechanism that requires attention to be paid to areas other than high-population centers is probably a good thing. In the system we have now, it swings too far in the other direction by giving some disproportionate power to small pop red states and even more to battleground states. A shift away from WTA, along with replacing FPTP with STAR voting, would be more impactful than abolishing the EC. Even better would be adjusting the size of the House to better normalize the population of districts.
There have been hundreds of attempts to abolish or change the EC. It's really looking like our best options for real reform are STAR voting and proportional representation.