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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Pure democratic voting would be just as unfair for different reasons. People who wished to escape densely populated areas and live differently would be held to the whims of voters who happened to be in more populated areas.

I'm not sure what you mean by "pure democratic voting" or why you think it's unfair.

The Electoral College would be more fair if each state got a number of electors equal to it number of Representative, instead of that number plus two. There is no principled argument I'm seeing that it is more fair for people in smaller states to have their votes count more than people in bigger states.

A separate issue with the Electoral College, more inherent in its design, is that it privileges swing states, at the expense of states that lean hard to one party or another. A reliably Republican state like Wyoming or Utah will get ignored, relatively, in the Presidential election, as will reliably Democratic states like Hawaii or Vermont. The only people who think this is a good idea are the people who live in swing states and political journalists.

Pure democratic voting would allow NY and CA to dictate to the rest of the country.

Ah, the tyranny of the majority. Why is a tyranny of a minority somehow fairer?

There is no way to make it truly fair. As it is, a farmer in Wyoming holds disproportionate sway over a hipster in Brooklyn. Reversing it so the people who live around the hipster get to control the farmer is guess incrementally better, but you still have one crowd controlling another based on certain characteristics of location.

Now you've discovered the unfairness of living in a society with other people. If my wife and I decide to go to Tahoe for the weekend, and my son wants to go but my daughter doesn't, it's horribly unfair to her. I know this because I heard about it all weekend. But that doesn't mean we let her make the weekend plans for the rest of us, because that's an even worse outcome.

You're effectively just saying that people who choose to be more isolated shouldn't have as much say as those who choose to live together.

Only if there are fewer of them. Why do you hate democracy?

Of course you can argue that people in dense areas have the right to vote however they like and just happen to vote in ways very different than people from more isolated areas. But that's not what happens. People in dense areas tend to vote like a monolith because most are similarly situated and all want the same thing. (Sure, Park Avenue has a number of conservative voters, but most of NYC votes blue.) In every dense area you'll get a herding effect, and as a result, policies across the country will reflect the sensibilities of people living in dense areas.

You can imagine a world in which the system is rigged to disproportionately benefit cities. You can also imagine a world in which the opposite is true -- "Wisconsin," let's call it.

It'd be true to say that this is still preferable because in dense areas people tend to be more tolerant, so the people in more sparsely populated locales won't be precluded from doing what they want. But in terms of economic policy, this is rarely the case. Would Berkeley vote to ban fracking in Pennsylvania if it could? Certainly.

Now let's imagine a counterfactual where rural and suburban voters get lots of money spent on freeways, but urban mass transit is regularly shortchanged. Fun!

I don't think Presidential elections can ever be fair. But we can get around this by limiting executive power and giving more control to local governments.

Why do you think that the things that make Presidential elections unfair magically disappear in state and local elections?