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What Is the Electoral College and How Does the Vote Work?
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this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2024
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politics
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Faithless electors are not that common. Many states have laws against faithless electors which have been upheld by the Supreme Court. According to the ruling, states do not need a law to deal with faithless electors. They probably should still should make a law if they don't already have one.
https://www.npr.org/2020/07/06/885168480/supreme-court-rules-state-faithless-elector-laws-constitutional
The problem with the Electoral College is that it favors minority rule. The votes each state gets are comprised of both House of Representatives and Senate seats from each state. The Senate and the House both favor low population states. The Senate because it gives each state two seats and the House because it's capped at 435. Take a look at both graphs from 538.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/435-representatives/
Republicans tend to do well in low population states, so the electoral college favors Republicans, who won the popular vote once in the last six elections. So it's not the illusion of a vote that's the issue. We really do have a vote in this system.
The issue is that some people's votes are more equal than others. Low populations state votes, when normalized for the electoral college, are worth more. A lot of people will say that only certain swing states matter, but that assumes everyone in non-swing states keeps voting at similar levels as before. If enough people in California who would vote Democrat decide that their votes don't count and then don't vote, then California turns red. So Democrats need more people to vote everywhere to compensate for this bias that Republicans benefit from.
The electoral college is why not voting or voting third party disproportionately effects the Democrats, they need more votes, because they tend to appeal to high population states whose votes are worth less.
Also, our first-past-the-post system mathematically results in a two-party system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo