#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]

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.

[sorryiwasasleep]

[caecilian]

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):

[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.

[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.

[rdng1230]

truly for a moment I want you to imagine if the Democratic Party asked us to vote for an anti abortion candidate to make sure trump got defeated. Imagine if people said to the women of this country “you’re just being selfish, no candidate is perfect, you gotta protect this country from fascism even if the leader you’re being asked to vote for thinks you should have less rights than a corpse”

ok now remember there are 4 million Arab Americans and you are asking them and everyone else to be cool with their relatives being blown up, maimed, shot, kidnapped, starving to death, dying of thirst, dying of disease, dying of poverty from their livelihoods destroyed, you are asking them to accept extermination for the greater good.

the fact that you have the nerve to be angry at those individuals who refuse to vote for someone co-signing genocide and don’t have a goddamn word to say about the party leaders who made us have to make these decisions in the first place boils my blood.

[nando161mando]

Slave labor

[liberalsarecool]

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

Republicans are addicted to corruption.

[ausetkmt]

Common Dreams: Raskin Says Electoral College Is a 'Danger' to Democracy and Should Be Abandoned

Common Dreams: Raskin Says Electoral College Is a 'Danger'.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, soon to be the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said Sunday that the Electoral College is a "danger" to U.S. democracy and should be abandoned in favor of presidential elections decided by the popular vote.

"The Electoral College now, which has given us five popular vote losers as president in our history, twice in this century alone, has become a danger, not just to democracy, but to the American people," Raskin (D-Md.) said in an appearance on "Face the Nation" Sunday. "It was a danger on January 6. There are so many curving byways and nooks and crannies in the Electoral College that there are opportunities for a lot of strategic mischief."

"We should elect the president the way we elect governors, senators, mayors, representatives, everybody else: Whoever gets the most votes wins," added Raskin, who served on the House select committee that investigated the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Axiosreported earlier this year that some members of the January 6 panel wanted "big changes on voting rights—and even to abolish the Electoral College—while others are resisting proposals to overhaul the U.S. election system."

In its final report, the House committee stopped short of calling for the abolition of the Electoral College, something progressives have demanded for years.

The Maryland Democrat's comments came days after Congress approved reforms to the Electoral Count Act, an obscure 1887 law that governs the tallying of Electoral College votes.

"For years, legal scholars have worried the law was poorly written and in need of clarification, and former President Donald Trump and his allies targeted the law's ambiguities in their attempts to overturn the 2020 election," NPR noted last week. "In the time after voting ended in 2020and results were certified, Trump and his team argued that then-Vice President Mike Pence had the power to interfere with the counting of electoral votes because the law as it currently stands names the vice president as the presiding officer over the joint session of Congress where those votes are counted."

"The update passed by the Senate would clarify that the vice president's role in the proceedings is purely ceremonial," the outlet explained. "Importantly, the measure also would raise the bar for objecting to a state's slate of electors. As it stands now, it takes just one member of the House and one senator to challenge a state's electors and send both chambers into a potentially days-long debate period, even without legitimate concerns."

While welcoming the newly passed reforms, Raskin said Sunday that they won't "solve the fundamental problem."

"We know that the Electoral College doesn't fit anymore, which is why I'm a big supporter of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, where it's bubbling up from below," Raskin continued. "There are now 15 or 16 states and the District of Columbia who've said, 'We're going to cast our electors for the winner of the national vote once we get 270 electors in our coalition.'"

The compact—which has the goal of guaranteeing the presidency to "the candidate who receives the most popular votes across all 50 states and the District of Columbia"—has thus far been backed by 16 U.S. jurisdictions with a total of 195 electoral votes.

Last week, Florida State Rep. Michael Gottlieb—a Democrat—filed legislation that would make the Sunshine State the latest to join the compact. The bill is expected to face opposition from Republicans in the state, including Gov. Ron DeSantis—a possible 2024 presidential candidate.

[definitelynotpetedavidson]

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

[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?

[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