[Mathgod]

Originally Posted by GGG

One of the problems with today’s electoral process regardless of system is that the analytics are too strong. The dollars per electoral college seat are likely compared across a whole host of strategies. So in any system the parties will determine how to best spend and mobilize to minimize cost per vote.

A problem made much worse by the electoral college system. It ensures that a handful of swing states decide every election, and parties therefore only have to spend money in fewer than 10 states and pretty ignore the rest.

So the best you can do is to have a system to equalize that cost. I suspect if you tried to make the influence of each person cost the same amount of money you would end up in a very undemocratic system.

Strongly disagree. Each voter should have the same amount of say in regards to who becomes president, regardless of where the voter lives. Money in politics is a problem, but you're never going to truly eliminate money from politics. This is why I like Yang's idea of giving every citizen democracy dollars (even if you hate UBI, at least consider this idea separately).

One thing I would question is the result of Hillary losing to trump with 66 million votes to 63 million votes a perversion of Democracy? If the goal of democracy is to reflect the will of the people then all of the people who for whatever reason didn’t vote aren’t being measured. (I do think that non voters likely lean blue given age based voting patterns). We don’t even know who would win if everyone voted, We just had a very large non random poll. So before we worry about EC I think mandatory voting would be the first thing to change. This at least gets everyone vote to the table to be influenced.

Non-voters chose to let other people choose for them. I don't consider this to be a bad thing necessarily, since the last thing we want is people who aren't paying attention to politics making these decisions for us.

Of the people who actually cared enough about politics and its effects on their lives to fill out a ballot, 3 million more of those people voted for Hillary than voted for Trump. The EC therefore circumvented democracy.

Another thought I have had is is having states with relatively equal numbers of republicans and democrats deciding elections actually a good thing. My thought would be that purple states have lower levels of polarization then Red or Blue states (This could be completely incorrect though). So if the purple states are less polarized then campaigns have to be less polarized as well. This is better then designing your message to maximizing turnout in California and New York.

I would make the exact opposite argument. If a state votes such than 50.01% of the voters chose one party and 49.99% voted for the other, it makes absolutely no sense that the "winning" party gets 100% of the electors from that state; the state was a statistical tie, where the winning margin was statistical noise.

The states of California and NY, combined, consist of roughly 19% of the US population. 81% of the US population lives outside those 2 states. So if you don't have much success in those 2 states, you have 2 options, either 1) do well in the rest of the country, or 2) change your effing policies to become more appealing to voters in those states.

So despite not being direct democracy it might actually work okay. In the list of problems in the US that need to be fixed for democracy I’m not sure the EC makes it very high.

Things I would fix first:
Automatic voter registration
Allow felons to vote without condition
Equitable distribution of polling areas
More independence in redistricting
Change to combined Primaries where the top 2 candidates regardless of party affiliation are put on the ballot or mandate open primaries everywhere.
The Senate actually doing it’s job to check executive power
Turing over Citizens United

Just how likely is it that you are going to get any of these things done with republicans in power?

I would add to your list: Ranked-choice voting
I would subtract from your list: Felons voting during their sentences.