that the Electoral College is now Affirmative Action for them

except on d2jsp of course where the majority of posters here love Cheetos

friendly reminder that the EC (and the Senate) are artifacts of a time when slave states needed enough political sway to protect the institution of slavery in order to be persuaded to be part of the union of states when it was formed

there have been countless narratives promoted to conceal this fact (big states shouldn't be able to elect the president all the time, candidates would never visit small states otherwise, blah blah blah) but they're all BS it was slavery

Wyoming has 144k voters per EC vote. The biggest states have well over 450k voters per EC vote. That means a Wyoming voter's vote is worth more than 3 times as much as someone in CA, TX, FL, NY, PA which is absurd

This post was edited by MildSambal on Aug 13 2024 05:15pm

yep

Posting in a bugman thread

+1 for me as well

After building the capitol building congress agreed to keep the number of house electors the same so congress wouldn't have to be rebuilt every so often.
Do you really want 5,000 congressmen?

The last federal election saw Republican candidates earn a net ~3 million more votes than their opponents, which is why the Republican party currently has a majority in Congress. And the Republican party has led the Democratic party in voter affiliation (including leaners) over the past few years. The GCB as of today is tied. They seem to be doing just fine.

The partisan split between slave and non-slave states in the early republic was minimal, and the largest state by population (Virginia) was itself a slave state. The smaller New England states (e.g. Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and later Vermont) all directly benefited from proportional representation in the Senate. The fact that the three-fifths compromise was considered necessary in the first place directly undermines the notion that the Senate was conceived of as a bulwark against free states. Furthermore, even were it true (which it is not) that the Senate was solely devised as a vehicle to protect slavery, it merely proves that states did (and do) have dramatically different economies, cultures, and interests. The argument that, as an example, New Hampshire should not have safeguards against larger, more populous states because slavery is bad is a non sequitur.

The EC is by design roughly proportional, albeit with an electoral floor. The counterpart to Wyoming is Vermont, the counterpart to Alaska is the District of Columbia, and so on. Of the top 5 states with the lowest representation per electoral vote, 3 are reliably Republican and 2 are Democratic. The simple reality is that there are trade-offs required when convincing very small neighbors to join with much larger ones, by definition they lose the most autonomy, and they need to be compensated accordingly. This conversation side-tracks away from the main purpose of the electoral college, which was to safeguard against demagoguery by entrusting the actual selection of the president to electors, who the founders presumed would be educated, rational men. This fell apart almost immediately with the advent of political parties and was never actually realized.

This post was edited by bogie160 on Aug 13 2024 11:10pm

The recent splits between popular vote and electoral college in presidential elections come down to the winner-takes-all system on the state level. In 2016, winning Texas and Florida by a combined 900k votes netted Trump more electoral votes than Hillary got for winning California by 4.4m votes. After the three largest states in the country - for whom the small-state skew is minimal - were counted, Trump was up 12 votes in the EC and down 3.5m in the popular vote. Trump actually won the popular vote in the remaining 47 states + DC.

Furthermore, it was shown by an analysis in the NYT in 2019 that a majority of Americans lived in precincts won by Trump - Hillary only won the popular vote because there were significantly more D+80 than R+80 precincts. So one can even argue that the EC ensured a MORE democratic outcome in 2016. It made sure that a few enclaves of extreme dislike couldn't stop the candidate preferred in places representing a majority of Americans from winning.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/21/upshot/america-political-divide-urban-rural.html

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It should be noted that the Constitution was ratified at a time when the vast majority of the population were illiterates and had barely any formal education. Putting the process in the hands of the few men who knew what they were doing made a lot of sense back then, irrespective from the slavery question.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Aug 14 2024 03:19am

Bogie with the 360 no scope.

The baseline for education is definitely higher, but sometimes you have to wonder by how much. Most people only really get exposed to politics and economics via the news, or tangentially through a high school history course they couldn't care less about. The news is written at a grade school level, generally by people who also possess a high school understanding of history, so that isn't saying much.

The winner take all debate is always interesting to me. It's a style choice at the end of the day, and reflects a system that wants to elect leaders instead of ideas. We're in such a polarized time now though such that it doesn't really hold true anymore. But if the country were to be ruled by majoritarian fiat out of NYC and California I wouldn't give the US more than 10 years.

How to try to sound smart when not understanding the EC.

Slavery never ended. It just has a different name. It's called working/jobs . Corporations love profit so much they importing slaves by the millions through the borders.

Here an example: https://forums.d2jsp.org/topic.php?t=104571172&f=119

You're an adult that been on this planet for long enough to understand all political parties are rotten to the core. There's no good politicians. They are all bought by the corporations and will defend them till the system collapse.

I dream of a day where adults are adults and not youngster in an adult body that live for their devices and their daily doses of slavery.

This post was edited by iLoveMyUsername on Aug 15 2024 11:20am