The first past the post system (or winner takes all) is also fucking trash that most democracies don’t use it.
The_Conversation on
The article, by a political scientist who [studies democracy around the world](https://theconversation.com/no-country-still-uses-an-electoral-college-except-the-us-240281) points out that this institution dates back to the Holy Roman Empire, and was the result of compromise after weeks of debate at the US Constitutional Convention of 1787. Other countries adopted it after the US, and all have gotten rid of it.
bodnast on
Gotta love that we use popular vote in each state to determine who gets the electoral votes.
The only reason this election is even possibly close is the archaic electoral college. Dems have won the popular vote in 6/7 elections in my lifetime and will likely do it again, yet the election is going to be a nailbiter. So lame.
feral-pug on
I understand why it was a thing centuries ago but disagree with the notion that “the states” should elect the president as opposed to the people. If there’s thousands of square miles of mostly empty land with a few people scattered around, those people’s votes absolutely should be equal to the votes of individuals living in densely packed cities, but it’s irrelevant what “state” the individuals live in. If national politics represents people living in urban centers to a greater extent than people living in rural areas, so what? People, not land, have votes and the popular vote totals should be all that matters nationally.
The EC is a weird, flawed, anachronistic system that does nothing but invite corruption while disenfranchising voters.
NPVT on
The Republicans wouldn’t win without it
terrasig314 on
The EC is a dumbass relic of a time when appeasing slavers was what we had to do to keep a cohesive nation. Time to dump that shit.
Plus literally every other type of election we hold is about the popular vote. It makes the most sense and is the most convenient and it’s not even close. A third of our SCOTUS justices were appointed by a president in the term they lost the popular vote and Lord knows how many others at other levels.
caserock on
No other country has Republicans, it’s that simple
Nearby-Jelly-634 on
Undoing the EC would take a constitutional amendment which has absolutely zero chance in the political climate today. We can however removed the completely arbitrary cap in the number of representatives in the House. The constitution is explicit that the house is supposed to have proportional representation. It a rep in California is worth less than a rep in a state with 376 people like Wyoming that is not using any definition of the word proportional.
Morepastor on
Trump 2016 “The Electoral College can be rigged and the election should be decided by the popular vote”. Trump like most republicans lost the popular vote in 2016.
Trump 2020 “let’s rig the Electoral College” loses the popular vote and Electoral College
Walz 2024 “The Electoral isn’t the best system.” Likely wins the popular and Electoral but will face a legal challenge.
houstonrice on
India also uses First past the post system with a multitude of parties.
Stay_At_Home_Cat_Dad on
The EC is not needed in this modern age. The winner should be determined by the popular vote. It makes no sense that a candidate can get 2.9 million more votes than their opponent, but still lose the election.
Dense-Comfort6055 on
Never forget it was compromised measure to appease slave states
jackcrevalle on
It’s the Imperial measurements of elections.
PorgCT on
The fact that nations which the U.S. has “influenced” (Philippines, Germany, Japan, etc.) don’t have an Electoral College says all you need to know.
ioncloud9 on
Its an abstract layer setup so that people could be counted without suffrage. Ever heard of the 3/5ths Compromise? Where slaves counted as 3/5ths a person for the sake of determining state population and representation? Well they still mostly counted, but they couldn’t vote. So with an electoral college system, suddenly the slave states had double the voting power vs a straight popular vote.
prustage on
The US has to use it, its part of the package that comes with imperial units of measurement,110v electricity and the 12 hour clock.
CurrentlyLucid on
Without checking, I bet republicans are why we still have it.
pjflyr13 on
It’s pretty much flipped its purpose to the opposite of intended. Now effectively only four-five states decide the election.
Oceanbreeze871 on
The electoral college was created as a compromise with southern slave owner states who refused to ratify the constitution. slave owners, the billionaires of their day, demanded the ability to purchase significant voting power.
“But the savvy Virginian James Madison responded that such a system would prove unacceptable to the South: “The right of suffrage was much more diffusive [i.e., extensive] in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes.” In other words, in a direct election system, the North would outnumber the South, whose many slaves (more than half a million in all) of course could not vote. But the Electoral College—a prototype of which Madison proposed in this same speech—instead let each southern state count its slaves, albeit with a two-fifths discount, in computing its share of the overall count.
Virginia emerged as the big winner—the California of the Founding era—with 12 out of a total of 91 electoral votes allocated by the Philadelphia Constitution, more than a quarter of the 46 needed to win an election in the first round. After the 1800 census, Wilson’s free state of Pennsylvania had 10% more free persons than Virginia, but got 20% fewer electoral votes. Perversely, the more slaves Virginia (or any other slave state) bought or bred, the more electoral votes it would receive. Were a slave state to free any blacks who then moved North, the state could actually lose electoral votes.
If the system’s pro-slavery tilt was not overwhelmingly obvious when the Constitution was ratified, it quickly became so. For 32 of the Constitution’s first 36 years, a white slaveholding Virginian occupied the presidency.”
24 Comments
The first past the post system (or winner takes all) is also fucking trash that most democracies don’t use it.
The article, by a political scientist who [studies democracy around the world](https://theconversation.com/no-country-still-uses-an-electoral-college-except-the-us-240281) points out that this institution dates back to the Holy Roman Empire, and was the result of compromise after weeks of debate at the US Constitutional Convention of 1787. Other countries adopted it after the US, and all have gotten rid of it.
Gotta love that we use popular vote in each state to determine who gets the electoral votes.
The only reason this election is even possibly close is the archaic electoral college. Dems have won the popular vote in 6/7 elections in my lifetime and will likely do it again, yet the election is going to be a nailbiter. So lame.
I understand why it was a thing centuries ago but disagree with the notion that “the states” should elect the president as opposed to the people. If there’s thousands of square miles of mostly empty land with a few people scattered around, those people’s votes absolutely should be equal to the votes of individuals living in densely packed cities, but it’s irrelevant what “state” the individuals live in. If national politics represents people living in urban centers to a greater extent than people living in rural areas, so what? People, not land, have votes and the popular vote totals should be all that matters nationally.
The EC is a weird, flawed, anachronistic system that does nothing but invite corruption while disenfranchising voters.
The Republicans wouldn’t win without it
The EC is a dumbass relic of a time when appeasing slavers was what we had to do to keep a cohesive nation. Time to dump that shit.
Plug for the [National Popular Vote Interstate Compact](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact)
Because Republicans know that they’d never win without it.
The only valid reasons I’ve ever heard of why we should keep it, _we, the GOP, can’t win without it_, perfectly explains why we need to get rid of it.
I’m sorry, but if your policies are so unpopular that they can’t win a popular vote, then that is a policy problem, not how we vote problem.
This country gives way too much of a fuck about what the FoUnDiNg fAtHeRs wanted
There’s no reason
Republicans will cite that if not for the electoral college that “presidential candidates would only focus on more populated areas” [In reality the majority of Americans were not even living in urban areas until 1920](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_States#:~:text=The%20urbanization%20of%20the%20United%20States%20occurred%20over%20a%20period,as%20the%20Midwestern%20United%20States.) . And besides, a few states truly decide which is why [a reported 79% of campaign ad money has gone into just 7 states since Kamala entered the race](https://digiday.com/media-buying/political-ad-spending-piles-up-in-key-states-less-than-a-month-until-election-day/)
Plus literally every other type of election we hold is about the popular vote. It makes the most sense and is the most convenient and it’s not even close. A third of our SCOTUS justices were appointed by a president in the term they lost the popular vote and Lord knows how many others at other levels.
No other country has Republicans, it’s that simple
Undoing the EC would take a constitutional amendment which has absolutely zero chance in the political climate today. We can however removed the completely arbitrary cap in the number of representatives in the House. The constitution is explicit that the house is supposed to have proportional representation. It a rep in California is worth less than a rep in a state with 376 people like Wyoming that is not using any definition of the word proportional.
Trump 2016 “The Electoral College can be rigged and the election should be decided by the popular vote”. Trump like most republicans lost the popular vote in 2016.
Trump 2020 “let’s rig the Electoral College” loses the popular vote and Electoral College
Walz 2024 “The Electoral isn’t the best system.” Likely wins the popular and Electoral but will face a legal challenge.
India also uses First past the post system with a multitude of parties.
The EC is not needed in this modern age. The winner should be determined by the popular vote. It makes no sense that a candidate can get 2.9 million more votes than their opponent, but still lose the election.
Never forget it was compromised measure to appease slave states
It’s the Imperial measurements of elections.
The fact that nations which the U.S. has “influenced” (Philippines, Germany, Japan, etc.) don’t have an Electoral College says all you need to know.
Its an abstract layer setup so that people could be counted without suffrage. Ever heard of the 3/5ths Compromise? Where slaves counted as 3/5ths a person for the sake of determining state population and representation? Well they still mostly counted, but they couldn’t vote. So with an electoral college system, suddenly the slave states had double the voting power vs a straight popular vote.
The US has to use it, its part of the package that comes with imperial units of measurement,110v electricity and the 12 hour clock.
Without checking, I bet republicans are why we still have it.
It’s pretty much flipped its purpose to the opposite of intended. Now effectively only four-five states decide the election.
The electoral college was created as a compromise with southern slave owner states who refused to ratify the constitution. slave owners, the billionaires of their day, demanded the ability to purchase significant voting power.
“But the savvy Virginian James Madison responded that such a system would prove unacceptable to the South: “The right of suffrage was much more diffusive [i.e., extensive] in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes.” In other words, in a direct election system, the North would outnumber the South, whose many slaves (more than half a million in all) of course could not vote. But the Electoral College—a prototype of which Madison proposed in this same speech—instead let each southern state count its slaves, albeit with a two-fifths discount, in computing its share of the overall count.
Virginia emerged as the big winner—the California of the Founding era—with 12 out of a total of 91 electoral votes allocated by the Philadelphia Constitution, more than a quarter of the 46 needed to win an election in the first round. After the 1800 census, Wilson’s free state of Pennsylvania had 10% more free persons than Virginia, but got 20% fewer electoral votes. Perversely, the more slaves Virginia (or any other slave state) bought or bred, the more electoral votes it would receive. Were a slave state to free any blacks who then moved North, the state could actually lose electoral votes.
If the system’s pro-slavery tilt was not overwhelmingly obvious when the Constitution was ratified, it quickly became so. For 32 of the Constitution’s first 36 years, a white slaveholding Virginian occupied the presidency.”
https://time.com/4558510/electoral-college-history-slavery/