It means the polls were wrong. Which means, you'd have to reconsider the state-polls in all the other states with that new information: that the country is slightly redder than polls today suggest.

If Trump wins Florida, then there's a "hidden vote", so to speak, that's pushing Trump's victory. Once you add that hypothetical hidden vote to the rest of the states, it becomes a closer race.

---------

The question is whether or not you think there's a hidden vote for Trump. For all we know, there's a hidden vote for Biden this year: but we won't know that until the polls close and the votes are tallied up.

In the absence of knowledge, the best we can do is find indications of cross-correlations and model those.

There was a lot of analysis after the 2016 election cycle about the "shy Trump voter" hypothesis, and it really didn't hold up, and continues to not hold up with under the data available from this election cycle. It is completely unreasonable to postulate that the effect would be drastically bigger this year, after four years of Trump actually being in power and normalizing his status.

The main reasons to disbelieve the shy Trump voter hypothesis are that there's not a big difference in responses to live phone polls vs online polls, and that polls missed Senate and Gubernatorial races in 2016 by about the same amount as they missed the Presidential race.

The "shy Trump voter" hypothesis is not that there are lots of people who won't answer polls, but that there's a bias in the response rate and truthfulness of the responses received, and that pollsters are not able to accurately correct for that bias. So whether or not you answer polls doesn't speak to the validity or plausibility of that hypothesis. What is relevant is only the bit you say "might plausibly lean toward Trump"; clearly, your a priori opinion of that hypothesis is also fairly low.

> We've had four years of the media relentlessly telling us how stupid, evil, and wrong Trump is, and how stupid and racist all his supporters are. We've seen the media twist the facts to support this narrative.

You're talking specifically about the media that Trump supporters largely avoid watching and do not give any credence to. There's plenty of other evidence that Trump voters aren't ashamed of publicly expressing their support, and not much reason to believe that they would be much more shy about it when answering polls than when going about their daily lives.

The LA Times poll was one of few polls that predicted a Trump victory in 2016, the link has some details on the methodology:

https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-polls-20161...

Basically, if you ask someone what they think about police brutality you might get ‘of course it’s wrong’, but veiling that question a bit into ‘how important are safe neighborhoods, strong law enforcement?’ will take you closer to the truth.

Not everyone is happy with the riots in America at all, they view it as crime and certainly don’t want that stuff anywhere near their neighborhoods. Or further, they might not want certain types in their neighborhoods. You see where I’m going? If you start to probe in this way, you’ll find your hidden Trump voter versus asking ‘Did Trump handle coronavirus well?’, which everyone well answer no to, but if the person doesn’t want black people in their neighborhoods as a hidden belief, your polls are going to be fucked (since that’s a closet Trump voter).

No one will ever say ‘social welfare is unfair because minorities leech off of it’, only your most shameless republicans will say it. But guess what, people believe this deep down. How can pollsters surface that belief without arousing suspicion?

Way too many states in the rust belt went red to act like some negligible dynamic was in play in 2016.

Just to note, I am a liberal, in case anyone thinks I harbor those beliefs. But how would you know? :p

There are plenty of polls.

The 2016 issue was that those polls were __correlated__. They were NOT independent polls, but somehow all the polls made the same mistake across the board.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-why-our...

> Assumption No. 4: State outcomes are highly correlated with one another, so polling errors in one state are likely to be replicated in other, similar states.

> Basically, this means that you shouldn’t count on states to behave independently of one another, especially if they’re demographically similar. If Clinton loses Pennsylvania despite having a big lead in the polls there, for instance, she might also have problems in Michigan, North Carolina and other swing states. What seems like an impregnable firewall in the Electoral College may begin to collapse.

--------

Note that this post was written well before the results of 2016 were known. This was Nate Silver challenging the poll's assumptions back then. It was clear that "correlation" needs to be accounted for in people's models. That's the #1 issue regards to modern polls.

Lo and behold: Pennsylvania swung right towards Trump, and all the polls that were predicting a Pennsylvania win for Clinton were wrong. But not only that, it proved a bunch of other polls wrong in other states.

Such is the nature of Bayesian statistics: P(A, B) = P(A given B) * P(B).

P(A given B) should equal P(A) in an ideal world. But we live in a messy world with correlations: understanding B will change our understanding of other probabilities.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-real-story-of-2016/

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-are-all-right...

Politics is extremely broken, yes. But I don’t think the electoral college is the fault.

And now, instead of tyranny of the majority, we have tyranny of the minority. Due to capping the number of members of the House, those small-population states have disparate impact on federal issues.

The southern states benefited from emancipation, insofar as they gained seats in the house and electoral college (they got a 5/3 multiple on their prior proportions, which had only narrowly elected Lincoln pewar).

This redistribution of postwar power led to the disaster of 1877 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compromise_of_1877, something we're still grappling with to this day.

One motivation for Jim Crow laws was to keep the southern voting-sampled portion of the south white and segregationist (in spite of the true distribution of local sentiment), while simultaneously benefiting from the larger population in magnifying their representation in national politics.

...

If I were dictator for a day, I'd make the number of house and electoral college seats directly proportional to the last-n-election-cycle-average of number of participating voters (not population!).

This change would flip the voter suppression script, which I think has been one of the more troubling developments in the last 100 years of our republic. It would also rightfully suppress the influence of the regions in this country that wish it was still the 1830s, but give them a path to return to influence that's contingent on uniting their polities.

We'd see states competing to make voting more accessible in a nonpartisan manner, because every state wants to have more representation in the electoral college and the congress, regardless of which party is in power.

This would force parties to actually represent their neighbors, whom they can safely ignore and suppress today.

With this change as an example, I think the Electoral College could actually be leveraged to steer our system in more inclusive direction. I'd love to simulate this version of history.

I'd love to hear anybody poke holes in this idea. It's a recent one for me. I'm sure they exist, but I haven't come up with them yet.

Obviously, there's the incentive for fraudulent votes. But there's already an incentive for fraudulent votes, and it doesn't seem to cause much of a problem.

Also, it seems to disadvantage populations that have disproportionate bias towards non-voting. I’m thinking areas of lower socioeconomic status, even with as many pro-voting initiatives as can be, will still ultimately be undercounted.

I really like the idea, but I'll volunteer to offer the criticism you'll probably hear.

If a state can give itself more power by counting more votes, then state governments which are confident that their dominant party will win will have a lot of incentive to allow fraudulent votes, and potentially a lot to gain.

For example, if the state government knows that 70% of voters will vote for the Yellow Party, then they can risk encouraging 10% of the population to cast, say, 4 extra votes (for their deceased grandparents), without worrying that the dreaded Purple Party might exploit this laxness and give Purple the win.

Combine that with some selective enforcement (so Purple voters know that, in practice, only they are at risk of prosecution for voter fraud) and the state will be able to magnify its relative strength compared to states that are more scrupulous.

The calculus of voter fraud will definitely change. But I don't know. In order for an individual to commit voter fraud, they have to believe that the benefit is worth the risk them as an individual.

And, for the individual, voter fraud would only "work" to the extent that they think everyone else will do it too.

I intuitively feel that voter fraud is a much bigger bogeyman than people make it out to be.

I think the bigger fear is corruption of the election commission; such that they turn a blind eye to or even contribute to voter fraud.

Of course, no system is incorruptible, and the test for acceptance shouldn't be perfection, but improvement over the status quo (this idea of iteration is the cornerstone of our constitution).

That being said, I'm not convinced that the voter fraud risk makes this proposal more corrupt than the system we currently have. Voter fraud is an easier problem to solve than voter suppression, IMO.

Once there is even a suggestion that some state might be increasing its power by encouraging voter fraud, there will be an arms race of other states trying to "counteract" this by encouraging their own voter fraud.

So, if 80% of you 100-seat state votes, 80% voted X and 20% voted Y, you'd get 64 X's and 16 Y's.

This way, both parties are incentivized to vote. Instead of today.

In my opinion, it's harmful to our democracy that members of the "losing party" feel zero incentive to turn out on election day. It encourages disengagement and disillusionment, not to mention the polarization of the electorate.

In Germany, the "crazy parties" get some seats, so their voices are heard. It has a pacification affect on the mainstream parties.

You've just taken all the complexity of counting people every 10 years and rejiggering the numbers, and now made it nightmarishly more complex given that you're transitioning into that system in the first place.

Furthermore, you're over emphasizing the structural elements (net representatives votes) instead of the important bit, that everyone has an ear to tug to get something listened to up high. You're entitled to an input. Not to skewing the structuring function to optimize for voter population density, neither directly via tinkering with the effective representation calculation, or indirectly via the change you suggested.

It's not a terrible idea to be honest, but there is a degree of simplicity to the way we do it now, and I have the feeling yours would be a hard sell to the average American, or even the above average ones without substantially more in detail analysis.

In theory, there is a (somewhat dated, given other evolutions in voting rights) remedy for that in Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment, though it can be hacked aroundt by selective criminalization (though that, in theory, is limited by Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment).

Unfortunately, neither of these has been very well enforced, especially Section 2.

Unfortunately, in the present political climate, any reasonable interpretation of these words that hurts the representation of states with regressive voting laws would be seen as an act of politics.

The nice thing about my proposed hack, is that it also incentivizes decriminalization, or at least allowing a broader class of humans in your state to vote. In this way, it doesn't matter if the 14th amendment is well-enforced, because it changes the goal posts.

So, while it might not give felons the vote (this would violate the 14th), it will encourage the dissolution of our current "justice" system that arbitrarily incarcerates people.

If your state incarcerates people for "driving while black", it is effectively diluting its representation in the congress and electoral college.

We've been misinterpreting words like "infringed" and "papers, and effects" for well over a century. The current climate while certainly non-helpful but I think there's a deeper root cause that keeps us from strongly enforcing the constitution.

There were two initial proposals for Congress: the New Jersey Plan and the Virginia Plan. (Virginia, of course, being the leading slave-owning state.) Under both plans, the President would have been elected by Congress. There were concerns that having Congress elect the President would jeopardize separation of powers. So the Electoral College was created, with one elector for each member of Congress. It had nothing to do with protecting the interests of slave-holding states, but instead was designed to make the Presidency more independent of Congress.

Indirect election of the executive is somewhat anti-majoritarian, but also extremely common. Justin Trudeau was not elected Prime Minister of Canada by the general population. He was elected by about 80,000 eligible members of the Liberal Party, and became Prime Minister when the people elected other members of his party to the Parliament. I will add that the leading proponent of direct election of the President and the Senate was Andrew Jackson, strongly opposed abolition and was generally a horrible person.

Now, the New Jersey Plan would have allocated one member of Congress to each state. It was also supported by New York, Delaware, and Connecticut. Of those, only Delaware had a significant enslaved population. The Virginia Plan created a two-chamber legislature with proportional representation based on population. Yes, slave-holding Virginia was the one that wanted proportional representation. The Connecticut Compromise that led to the current allocation really was about small versus large states, not slavery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1790_United_States_Census. Large states like Massachusetts and Pennsylvania had few to no enslaved persons, and small states like Georgia and Delaware had significant numbers of enslaved persons.

The 3/5 compromise was designed to reduce the interest of slave-holding states. The number originated in an amendment proposed to the Articles of Confederation, which proposed to set the tax obligation for each state to the federal government "in proportion to the number of inhabitants of every age, sex, and quality, except Indians not paying taxes." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-fifths_Compromise#Confed.... Virginia complained that this would count enslaved persons, thus increasing Virginia's tax obligations. Eventually, they settled on counting 3/5 the number of enslaved persons towards the state's tax obligation. That same compromise came up later in the apportionment context.

At the same time, don’t make the opposite mistake of assuming “everything your history teacher told you was a lie.” The New York Times made some bold assertions in the 1619 Project and has had to walk back some of the most fundamental assertions: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/09/opinion/nyt-1619-project-.... If you go through and strip out all the rhetoric based on factual premises that have been abandoned or debunked (even by the left, see: https://jacobinmag.com/2019/08/how-slavery-shaped-american-c...) what’s left is a really interesting take on aspects of history your AP US History curriculum doesn’t cover, but which doesn’t fundamentally contradict what you learned in school.

With respect to this particular issue: the AP US History curriculum correctly taught what the 3/5 compromise was (and it was what it was). And it also correctly taught that the Connecticut Compromise was about small states versus big states, not slavery. It was a slave-owning southern state, Virginia, that proposed proportional representation in both houses. And the small states that benefited from the structure of the Senate included both northern states and southern states.

The connection is also a weird thing to bring up today, because most of the small states that benefit from the structure of the Senate today were free states. Several, like north and South Dakota, were split up when admitted to break the power of the slave states in the Senate. Midwestern states like Iowa and Minnesota made a huge contribution to beating the south. Iowa sent troops to fight before the union army was even ready to go to war; they sent the largest percentage of their population to war of any state; and they had the highest percentage of casualties: https://valleynewstoday.com/news/local/iowa-played-a-large-r....

As it happens, on my fraternal grandmother's side we had family that fought in the Civil War for the Union from Iowa. One day I'll look all that up and figure out what units they fought in and where they're buried.

I'm not trying to say that "the EC was about slavery" is a correct narrative or even more valid than "it was about states". The point I'm trying to make is unrelated to the specific question about the EC and slavery. The point I'm trying to make is that there are hundreds of narratives for almost every historical event. Motivations that range from the smallest microhistory to the largest historical narratives. And that "APUS said it was about X" is going to miss a whole lot of interesting scholarship.

Again, I'm not trying to make any statement about the EC. I'm trying to make a broader suggestion about the limitations of high school history classes.

https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/text-61-70

As well as the anti-Federalist Paper 72.

Also keep in mind the Framer's never intended or expected the formation of organized national conventions.

The Electoral College had zilch to do with slavery besides momentarily (in that time frame) possibly benefiting from how Southern States populations were calculated, but look how that turned out.

Also, if you specifically look at what was outlined in the Federalist Papers, a Faithless Elector was a feature, not a bug. Political parties have completely ruined it by orchestrating to try to legally compel voting via data rather than by conscience and good sense, which fundamentally undermines the proof against a crowd pleaser, but ultimately incompetent actor the Framer's were trying guard against.

I can understand being upset that the Electoral College doesn't seem to be working as promised, but it's the byproduct if taking the screwdriver that is the EC as designed and trying to use it to turn a nut. There is a level of not being applied as designed. You aren't going to fix that without revisiting some structural assumptions. Also, no, I squarely do not buy the Anti-Federalist tune that crowds are somehow free from being shaped and manipulated more than a small number of individuals relatively randomly selected put into a position of deliberation.

People are collectively pulled down in the fidelity of collective reasoning by the damping effects socialization and large numbers, prone to passionate but ineffectual reasoning, and represent a great indicator that something need be done, though amazing at constraining a problem space through Wisdom of the masses, but terrible at managing the gory details for all of the shouting going on.

A person is smart, capable of forethought, reasoned, and generally best equipped when given several options of being able to justify which is better, and developing a workable solution that balances against a wide variety if pre-existing weighting factors.

The entire intent of the structure of our political process was to filter the energy of the whole, into paths of effectively achievable actions to be carried by a few such that the Nation could be driven without an undue on everyone. If you hate Jury duty, imagine how bad life would be if you had to be polled constantly on every decision needing to be made whether you knew anything about it or not.

The systemic disenfranchisement of the majority of the American population--through the electoral college, senate, and supreme court--is precisely why so much of American politics is broken.

Forcing the the majority to live under the rules set by a minority that has a completely different way of life does not lead to good outcomes.

Other checks on the tyranny of the majority, like protecting the rights of individuals (in light of shared values) in the face of a majority decision to violate them is hard to characterize as tyranny at all.

Requiring legislation to pass two bodies with different weights is an interesting move which isn't precisely the former; it deserves a weakened version of the same criticism, and it is not entirely clear whether it pays dividends to make up for it. I agree with the implied premise that decisions are more likely to be good ones if they look good from more angles.

There is much ink spilled in apologia of the current system around how the needs and experiences of those in cities are very different than those of people in rural communities, and the system needs to avoid being blind to either. I don't think that's entirely misguided but it smells a bit of special pleading; there are other ways we can slice the electorate that would likely lead to comparable (or larger) differences in needs and experiences, and we don't change the weights in light of that.

Arguably this inherently favors conservatism as passing no new legislation will keep things the way they are. Progressives will, in most cases, need to get legislation or referendums through to make meaningful changes to the current system.

Florida seems to have figured this out. This election there is a referendum to require voters to approve all new referendums twice to try to decrease the number of successful referendums.

The entire principle of popular sovereignty, as exercised through representative democracy, is that leaders are selected according to the wishes of the the majority of the people. Minority rule--no matter how it is codified or how long it has been in effect--is incompatible with this principle.

America can be either a country ruled by a Republican party answerable accountable only to rural interests or it can be a democracy. It cannot be both.

That's clearly not the case as many systems (not just the US) seek to avoid "tyranny of the majority" and to protect the interests of minorities. Canada's senate does not use proportional representation either - that avoids the country being run by Ontario and Quebec at the expense of the other 8 provinces and 3 territories.

The designs you argue against were specifically implemented to provide a system of checks and balances to avoid a simply majority from unchecked rule. And this is doubly true in the US, where it's a "union of states", not just one massive country. A lot of those rules were put into place in order to get the states to join the US because otherwise they would have had zero say in the affairs of the country.

Those checks you want to remove are not a bug but a feature.

You're probably thinking of the senate. While very small states do have an advantage in the electoral college, it's not very big at all. The electoral college is largely an artifact of a time when the electors were directed by state governments, not state populations.

The brokenness of the electoral college is more about the winner-takes-all allocation of electors that is (usually) practiced. This makes the votes of people who live in divided states far more relevant than those of people who live in states where most people vote the same way.

As it stands today winner takes all makes big states like California and small states like Wyoming equally uncompetitive since there’s a snowball’s chance in hell they will ever flip majority the other direction. Proportionally allocating a state’s electoral votes would level the state by state playing field and align with popular vote, but you’d need either every state to agree or an amendment.

What's really annoying is how close we came to abolishing the electoral college, that 3 segregationists were able to halt almost univeral consensus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_abolition_am...

What you could do is do something like national popular vote weighted by electoral college delegates, because then you could get everyone but the swing states, and that would represent a majority. And then you're not disenfranchising half of both California and Texas.

Twice in the past two decades, the Electoral College has gone red when the popular vote would have gone blue, by a nontrivial margin. That leaves an avenue open whereby some state's legislators fall on their swords to fix that problem.

Whether it would stick is an open question -- they'd almost certainly face an angry campaign against them, and the swing back could undo it. So it's unlikely. But there is a route by which it could happen, since the state's benefit from the EC is mitigated by the distortion it causes.

There is considerable debate about that.

> States are not allowed to make agreements with each other parallel to the system.

Yes, they are. In certain circumstances, such agreements require affirmative Congressional consent, though its questionable if the National Popular Vote "Interstate Compact" would meet the standards for requiring such consent, whether it would require only negative consent, or whether it would be outside of Congress' authority because of the assignment of the power of choosing electors.

> if you can get that many states to agree to it, then you could have just done a constitutional amendment

No, that's not at all necessarily even approximately true. For it to be effective, you need jurisdictions with a bare majority of electoral votes to implement it. For a constitutional amendment, you need 3/4 of states.

The minimum number of states to hit a majority of EVs is 16, as opposed to 38 for a constitutional amendment.

> since all you need for that is for the states to agree, and the senate to agree.

You don't need the Senate to agree to a Constitutional Amendment. You need 3/4 of state legislatures to agree. You can propose a constitutional amendment with 2/3 of both houses of Congress, or call a Constitutional Convention on the application of 2/3 of states.

Both proposal and ratification (presuming senators vote in line with their states, regardless of the House) have a higher minimum threshold than would be otherwise required for states representing a majority of EVs to assign electors in line with the national popular vote and determine Presidential elections that way.

Uh, no. 38 states have to ratify an amendment in order for it to take effect. You can easily eclipse 270 electoral votes without getting the support of 38 states.

Specifically:

>No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, ... , enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State

In this case, since such a deal is changing how the president is elected, and changing the balance of power between states and the fed, it could probably be seen as encroaching on federal power. So simply getting congress to pass a resolution approving it (which in theory would solve the "consent of congress") wouldn't fly like it would with an interstate compact dealing with something more mundane and less political like water rights, or mutual deal on air pollution between several neighboring states.

Disclaimer: IANAL, this is not legal advice etc.

2) the part that says no interstate compacts without express approval of congress

Neither of those is actually necessary because the states decide on their own how their electoral college votes are allocated. In principle Texas or California could allocate their delegates proportional to the popular vote of the people in that state.

Which might be in the interests of the people in that state, because then candidates would actually bother to solicit votes there. But you'd have to convince a local government controlled by one party to give about a third of the state's electoral college delegates to the other party.

If two states with 10 electoral votes each are both currently winner takes all, but one votes green and one votes purple; and if only the green state changes to proportional allocation, you move from a scenario where both parties got 10 votes each to a scenario where the green state went 6/4 for green and the purple state is still all 10 votes purple, basically kneecapping the green party.

Moreover, both of the parties are a product of the election map. If the map changes, it doesn't destroy one of the parties, it changes both of them, to get the balance back. If Republicans started getting 20 of California's delegates, Democrats would change their policies until they were getting those 20 back somewhere else. They'd stop pussyfooting around on climate change so they can save Florida from ending up underwater and put those 29 in the solid blue column, or dump a big jobs program in Ohio and get those, or start paying attention to the plight of the rural poor.

Or the Republicans would realize they could stand to lose some votes they currently have to get, stop being so inconsistent about at the same time claiming to want smaller government while never actually making it smaller, and actually gore somebody's ox.

You need 270 to win. 300 means you gave somebody something you didn't have to. 240 means you didn't give somebody something you did have to.

> If Republicans started getting 20 of California's delegates, Democrats would change their policies until they were getting those 20 back somewhere else.

So what you're saying is they'd change tack to not pay as much attention to California, which is supposedly going to benefit Californians.

But that doesn't matter because the specific individuals who would have to enact is are just as much if not more beholden to their party than to the the people.

I agree with what you said about changing the parties policies though.

The supreme court has said (over-simplifying here) that the right to delegate this legislative power to a popular vote is only constitutional when it adheres to 1 person, 1 vote weighting.

Taking into account votes external to that state likely violates this.

> Taking into account votes external to that state likely violates this.

I don't see anything approximating an argument that National Popular Vote violates any rule that has been applied to Presidential elections (“one person, one vote” is a districting rule, which doesn't really apply to elections per se, and arrangements which do not treat all voters in the state equally—such as the 2 for the statewide winner plus one for the winner of each CD method of assigning electors, which more heavily weights votes in Congressional districts with lower turnout in assigning state electors—survive under current law, and NPV doesn't even have that flaw.)

What the supreme court has said, is that if any decision is delegated to a vote, then that vote must meet constitutional muster.

Using votes cast in another state to determine the results of what is a state election likely violates rights of voters within that state.

And those rights are not wholely the legislature's to delegate away.

It's essentially extrajudicial gerrymandering.

Separately, and coming from another angle- it likely violates the constitution's guarantee of a republican form of government.

Anything any government in the US does must meet Constitutional muster. I'd like you to cite the specific decision you think indicates that a decision to assign electors based on the national popular vote would not meet such muster.

> Using votes cast in another state to determine the results of what is a state election likely violates rights of voters within that state.

Based on...what? I mean, except that it has survived so far, I can see an argument to the bare Constitution that giving unequal voting power to different voters within the state, which the two to the statewide winner plus one to the winner in each Congressional district method clearly does, violates the 14th Amendment Equal Protection rights of the voters so disadvantaged. But I don't even see a Constitutional argument, much less actual voting rights precedent, that negatively impacts on NPV.

> It's essentially extrajudicial gerrymandering.

Gerrymandering is drawing legislative districts, which is normally “extrajudicial” (since federal districting is expressly a power of state legislatures, and state-level districting is usually also a power of the state legislature, not the judiciary.) And gerrymandering is often legal and in many cases not even subject to federal review. Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U.S. ___ (2019).

So saying it's “extradjudicial gerrymandering” is all of false, adding meaningless qualifiers to make it sound significant, and not supporting your argument that it is unconstitutional.

> Separately, and coming from another angle- it likely violates the constitution's guarantee of a republican form of government.

How? Based on what argument and applicable precedent?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/09/10/winner-tak...

Neither that per-district system, nor my original popular vote proportional system, would require a parliamentary style of government. Indeed, under a parliamentary system, the executive would be chosen by parliament itself and there would be no need for the electoral college or even the presidential vote at all.

Not the people.

(Hopefully that's a less controversial statement than Romney's famous line).

No, what is broken is indirect election with voting power distributed by state (no matter how you allocate the electoral votes based on the popular vote in the state, whether its winner-take-all, by-congressional-district with winner-take-the-extra-two, or proportional allocation), since the basic model, irrespective of allocation, creates a intense systemic incentive for voter disenfranchisement within states, since by disenfranchising people in your state that aren't likely to vote like you, you not only nullify their vote (but reduce your states overall vote) as you would with direct election, but seize their voting power for yourself (well, at least, redistribute it among those you do not disenfranchise within your state.)

This is, of course, the intended effect of the EC and 3/5 compromise, with the original focal disenfranchisement being chattel slavery. But it works even more powerfully without chattel slavery, because then you don't have the voting power from the disenfranchised population deweighted the way the 3/5 compromise did.

Distributing electors by state wasn’t the “intended effect” of the EC. Nobody proposed direct election of the President. The choices were between having Congress elect the President, and having a separate Electoral College. It arises out of the fact that the framers viewed us as a collection of separate states and so it made sense to do everything at the granularity of the state. The executive branch of the European Union is indirectly selected for the same reason.

As to the intended effect of the 3/5 compromise—what would have produced the result that some people want is for slaveholding Virginia to have won that debate, because it was the one that wanted proportional representation in both houses.

They're all ways of making a decision. In the end the votes are tallied somehow, to some goal. We used to have different goals 100 years ago.

Not really. The college disenfranchises Wyoming Democrats and California Republicans a similar amount.

It's the Senate that protects smaller states, since each state gets two senators.

No, the States of California and Wisconsin do that; the Constitution and the design of the electoral college do not mandate winner-take-all allocation, and not all states choose to do that.

(The EC structurally incentivizes it, perhaps, in the same way that it definitely incentivizes doing everything that the rest of the Constitutiona and laws let you get away with to more literally disenfranchise people by preventing them from being eligible or practically able to vote at all, but it doesn't actually do either of those things, it leaves it to the states to choose to do them or not.)

Under the electoral college system, states actually come into play. There could be a case where a state grows large enough in population to get 51% of the electoral votes. If that state had a winner take all system, then that state would choose every president. It would 100% dominate, non of the other states would matter.

The electoral college is truly a terrible system, unless the founders wanted Florida to decide every election.

"James Madison made the following comment about the Senate:

    In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The Senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, the people ought to have permanency and stability.

    — Notes of the Secret Debates of the Federal Convention of 1787"

I’m reminded of Churchill’s famous aphorism that Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others which have been tried. Yes, it can go badly but it’s still the least bad choice.

Possibly the systemic cause is the excessive influence of the presidency.

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact would turn the mechanism of the electoral college into a result equivalent to a national popular vote.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...

The wikipedia article doesn't go into details about resolving issue around disenfranchised voters and vote counting, such as hanging chads or uncounted mail-in ballots. In other words, the compact states are binding themselves to a popular vote count that non-compact states have no incentive to get accurate.

Only if one prefers that the election always be decided by a margin of votes in a few rural swing states, rendering most voting irrelevant.

A system where all of the votes in all of the states mattered would be infinitely preferable.