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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.
Pure democratic voting would allow NY and CA to dictate to the rest of the country.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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. If the federal laws were pared to allow dense areas to ignore the national policy edicts pushed by people in less populated areas, and vice versa, there could be detente.
The problem with this, as I see it, is the feds and states. The feds want to control the states with purse strings, and the states in turn use the same control on the locals. We need to give locals more power to ignore the states and the feds. Because, let's face it -- we're not a union. We are very different people based on geography and location, and we ought to be able to live as we want within our local communities and not be compelled to act otherwise by the feds or the states except in extreme circumstances.
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All this is just absurd. Pure democratic voting means each vote is equal, none is disproportionate. Once getting to 40% in NY counts for something, you'll see much more Republican focus on the state and its voters. And once getting to 40% in Louisiana counts for something, suddenly Democrats will focus more on Louisiana's real needs.
The strange set of states we have is a result of political machinations around the electoral college. The main reason California is one big densely populated state while the plains states and Rocky Mountain states got split up into smaller, sparsely populated states revolves around the preservation of slavery before the Civil War and ensuring the continued dominance of the Republican Party during the period after reconstruction. What this leads to are policies that really don't make sense nationally, like farm subsidy programs, that play to the states created in order to have disproportionate political influence but don't necessarily do so in a cost-effective, well thought out way. Or a coronavirus strategy that says, fuck the blue states, it doesn't matter if we let the virus rage in states that aren't going to give the sitting President electoral college votes, where he doesn't care about increasing his vote share by 10% or 15% (though, of course, virus don't care, virus now rages in red states because it wasn't snuffed out when we had the chance).
It's also been a never ending source of tension that played a big role in triggering the civil war and that contributes mightily to the polarization we see in the country today.
And it virtually ensures a two party rather than multi-party system. One the occasions multi-party systems have emerged, like just before the Civil War, they quickly consolidated into two parties mostly because of electoral college politics.
That said, the electoral college won't be eliminated until there is a moment in time when it is irrelevant, because one party dominates the Presidency and both houses, and has a strong enough dominance to get through a constitutional amendment.
