#abolish the electoral college

[liberalsarecool]

The Electoral College is a vestige of slavery. Getting rid of it would improve democracy.

One person, one vote.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Democratic Senators Schatz, Durbin, and Welch push Constitutional amendment process to abolish Electoral College

Alexander Bolton at The Hill:

Three Democratic senators unveiled a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College system Monday, just more than a month after President-elect Trump stunned the Democrats by sweeping all seven battleground states, knocking off three Senate Democratic incumbents in the process. Sens. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii,) Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Peter Welch (D-Vt.), three leading progressive Senate voices, say it’s time to “restore democracy” by allowing for the direct election of presidents through the popular vote alone. The senators are troubled that the Electoral College has twice elected a candidate who didn’t win the popular vote in the past 19 years. In both those instances, a Republican captured the White House — George W. Bush in the 2000 election and Trump in the 2016 election. “In an election, the person who gets the most votes should win. It’s that simple,” Schatz said. “No one’s vote should count for more based on where they live. The Electoral College is outdated and it’s undemocratic. It’s time to end it.” To be sure, Trump would have still won the 2024 election if it had been decided by popular vote. He collected 77,300,739 votes compared to Vice President Harris’s 75,014,534. But many Democrats think that they would have had a better chance to beat Trump if they had a reason to focus on running up the margin of Harris’s victory in populous Democratic strongholds such as California, Illinois and New York. Republicans, however, also have big, populous states squarely in their column, namely Florida and Texas.

Democratic Senators Schatz, Durbin, and Welch push Constitutional amendment process to abolish the antiquated disgrace known as the Electoral College. Presidencies should be decided purely by popular vote, and such a move would widen the battleground map, as it would force both parties to compete in states currently safe for their respective parties to get the vote out.

[starful-emporium]

in middle school when we were learning ab US gov my teacher introduced us to a flash game where you play as a presidential candidate. it was like 30 min for a whole campaign, used real data on which way states normally voted, you'd see poll results and then decide which states to hold rallies in/visit.

truly nothing could have been convincing that the electoral college needs to be abolished.

we'd all ignore california bc it was blue no matter what you did, ignored states with less than 10 votes, really only focused on the big swing states. there was an option to run third party but it was literally impossible to win.

[sorryiwasasleep]

[werewyrmcaecilian]

Among other things, we need to kill the electoral college (an explicitly racist relic of the slavery era that still does what it was designed to do today):

[celisconfused]

If a vote in California is a sneeze, a vote in Wyoming is an orgasm

[maespri]

there are no words to express how i feel about the fact that trump will win a presidential election for a second time. i am devastated thinking about the millions of palestinians, women, children, people of color, disabled people, and members of the LGBT community who will now die because we have that dumbfuck in office. the fact that he won has slaughtered any faith i had left in this country.

[whinewithmycheese]

I live in Indiana, the first state to have submitted its electoral college votes. Minutes after the polls closed, when only 10% of polling locations had their votes reported, Indiana's decision was already made.

When we say our votes don't matter, this is what we mean. It didn't matter if Indiana did end up blue, because the electoral college is what actually chooses the president. Our system is broken, because it's only up to seven states to decide the election, the "swing states," and the popular vote is really just a smoke screen to how the president is really elected.

538 people control the US election. 538 electoral college members, and no one can even name who they are. All the popular vote does is inform the electoral college who the people prefer, but they have no legal obligation to follow the popular vote.

I will vote until I die, but godammit is it difficult to have any faith in a system that actively lies to you about your participation in it.

[nando161mando]

Slave labor

[sharpasanaro]

As an American, thank you very much OP for putting into much kinder words what I would like to say to my fellow idiots Americans.

If we do not vote Democrat, there will be no protections left for anyone who isn’t a straight white non-queer Christian male. We CANNOT be complacent, we MUST vote and we must NOT vote for Trump. He cannot be allowed to be elected into office, and that means you have to vote for Joe Biden, or whoever else may end up as the Democratic nominee should Biden suddenly choose to step down.

We have to choose what is less bad, and Joe Biden is less bad. Biden may not be a saint, but compared to the Tangerine Tyrant he sure as fuck is.

I'm not even American but I need to vent.

I assure you Americans that elections and politics suck worldwide, and not just for you. Save from a few cases here and there, candidates are always either too old, too shady, or just too stupid.

But more than candidates, you are voting for their policies.

It's your duty to vote for the better or just the lesser evil policy among them.

The "two sides are equally awful" is seldom true and it's just a lie to excuse passivity.

You have a duty for your marginalized folks and yourself to make your society better or at least stop it from getting worse.

Biden has quite a interesting history of progressive policies done, while Donald Trump is just a convicted fellow, darling of white supremacy, and the god of religious freaks.

There's no place on Earth where these candidates are the same.

Even if your hate Biden based on his softness with the current Far-right government of Israel, Trump is cherished by Israel far-right, is deeply Islamophobic, and even use Palestinian as an insult. He will be even worse for Palestine.

You have to vote, you have to exercise your civic duties. The two parties aren't the same and saying that is just an excuse for passivity.

It won't fix the world I assure you. There will still be things to be one. You still will have to protest, to get involve with politics, to help good policy be made and set in motion. But just voting is the first, and most important step for it.

@ariel-seagull-wings @mask131 @thealmightyemprex @the-blue-fairie @princesssarisa

[liberalsarecool]

Fake elector scheme, GOP refusing to accept 2024 election results, and SCOTUS insurrection sympathizer. A basket of deplorables.

Republicans are addicted to corruption.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Robert Tait at The Guardian:

Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, has called for the electoral college system of electing US presidents to be abolished and replaced with a popular vote principle, as operates in most democracies. His comments – to an audience of party fundraisers – chime with the sentiments of a majority of American voters but risk destabilising the campaign of Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, who has not adopted a position on the matter, despite having previously voiced similar views. “I think all of us know, the electoral college needs to go,” Walz told donors at a gathering at the home of the California governor, Gavin Newsom. “We need a national popular vote. We need to be able to go into York, Pennsylvania, and win. We need to be in western Wisconsin and win. We need to be in Reno, Nevada, and win.” He had earlier made similar remarks at a separate event in Seattle, where he called himself “a national popular vote guy”, while qualifying it by saying, “that’s not the world we live in.” The statements refer to the apparent democratic anomaly whereby US presidential polls are decided not by who wins the most votes nationwide but instead by which candidate captures a majority of 538 electoral votes across the 50 states, plus Washington DC.

The votes are distributed broadly reflective of each state’s population size, so populous California, for example, has 54 electoral college votes, while tiny Rhode Island has just four. However, rare cases of US presidents winning the electoral college while losing the popular vote tally do happen, notably in recent times George W Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016. The concerns over the electoral college system crystallise the reality that next month’s contest between Harris and Trump, the Republican nominee, will come down to the outcomes in a small number of battleground states, where polls show them running neck-and-neck. Most surveys indicate Harris having a small but consistent nationwide lead. Yet even if these are borne out on polling day, Trump could still return to the White House by winning enough swing states to reach the 270 electoral votes needed.

That scenario is feared by Democrats since it would repeat the outcome of the 2016 election, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton thanks to the electoral college despite winning nearly 3m fewer votes across the nation. Walz’s comments are eye-catching because he was chosen as Harris’s running mate because his homely, plain-speaking style was judged as appealing to working-class voters in three of the most important battleground states, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. It is not the first time that Walz, the Minnesota governor, has advocated ditching the electoral college. Last year, he signed legislation that added Minnesota to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which would force states to award their electors to the national popular vote winner if enough of them agreed to do so.

Minnesota Gov. and VP candidate Tim Walz (D)’s call to abolish the Electoral College is so based.

[definitelynotpetedavidson]

REMINDER: COMMON AMERICAN VOTERS LITERALLY DO NOT PICK THE PRESIDENT. IT IS THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE!!!!!

[originalleftist]

This right here.

This is why the narrative that the Electoral College is good because it keeps small (implicitly rural, usually more conservative) states from being dominated by a few big (implicitly more urban, liberal) states is actually mostly false.

The Electoral College doesn't protect the power of small states so much as it protects the power of swing states. Which is usually about half a dozen mid-sized states that are not necessarily very representative of the country.

Get rid of the EC, and EVERY vote would carry equal weight- and be equally worth campaigning for, regardless of whether it was in a "blue" or "red" or "swing" state, or a big or little state.

There would probably still be an incentive to campaign more in big cities simply for logistical reasons- more people can attend one rally, more people will view an add on one local station, etc. But as mass communication ties our society more and more closely together no matter where you live, even that is going to be eroded, I suspect.

I want to talk about the biggest problem with the Electoral College: the way it erases the political minorities within states.

As you may or may not be aware, nearly all states (48 of them!) have a “Winner Take All” system for their electoral points. That means that if a candidate wins with 100% of the vote or with 50.0000001% of the vote, they get 100% of the electoral points regardless. 

So, for example, look at this breakdown of votes in Alabama in 2016:

Trump won 62.9% of the vote, but got all 9 Electoral points. 

The  718,084 Hillary voters,  43,869 Johnson voters, and 9,287 Stein voters? They could have stayed home COMPLETELY, given Trump 100% of the votes in Alabama, and he still would have gotten those 9 electoral points. In just one state, that’s 771,240 votes that were effectively erased at the state level. 

What about Alaska?

That’s 116,173 votes erased. 

California?

Nearly 1/3 of the state wanted Trump! Trump should have gotten about 18 of those Electoral points, but he didn’t, because it’s Winner Takes All. California, in total, had 4,589,827 votes erased.

How about famous Swing State- Florida?

Doesn’t matter that Hillary got within 2% of the support that Trump did- Trump took 100% of those electoral points. What should have essentially been a 50/50 split (Maybe give 1 point to Johnson?), all of it went to Trump. More than 4 million votes erased. 

Same story in Virginia:

What should have been a near even split, 6 points a piece, with maybe 1 going to Johnson- Hillary took 100% of the votes. Nearly 2 million voters could have just stayed home and gotten the same outcome. 

NO state had a candidate take more than 70% of the vote (unless you count DC, which isn’t a state but does get 3 Electoral points). Literally. Wyoming had the highest percentage of vote go to a single candidate at 70%, while every other state had closer elections than that. 

This is an even bigger deal that the distribution of points being disproportionate. This is the fundamental problem with the system. ONLY Maine and Nebraska split electoral votes among the candidates. This is why candidates only campaign in swing states- all the other states are considered “safe.” What does it MATTER if 43% of Texans voted for Hillary? (Nearly 4 million votes.) Trump still got 100% of the electoral votes there. What does it MATTER is 37% of New York votes for Trump (2.6 MILLION votes.) Hillary still got 100% of those Electoral points. 

Candidates don’t need to “waste time” listening to and trying to win over any states that isn’t within a few percentage points of a 50/50 split. 

THIS is the problem that erases millions upon millions upon millions of votes. THIS is what actually allows losers to take the election. This doesn’t help small states get heard. This doesn’t help “rural people.” This just fucks up our presidential elections to an incredible degree. 

(Also, keep in mind that 46 states have an urban majority. So IF we pretend that rural and urban populations vote in total blocks, which they don’t, guess which one would ALWAYS get erased? RURAL VOTERS. But, as a Texas voter, 85% of the state population is urban, about as urban as New York state. So that doesn’t explain the political differences. Politics is a lot more complicated than rural vs urban.) 

[raphexim]

they're 3 million votes apart (so far), less than 1% of the US population. Somehow, that counts for a 100+ point difference in the electoral college somehow???

[personal-blog243]

Remember when abolishing the electoral college was a mainstream position in the Democratic Party? Especially after Hillary lost in 2016? Why is the media and most conservatives acting like this is a scandal for him to say this?