I read it's due to the United States constitution and being almost impossible to change it, is it true or something else?
-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
If Trump wins re-election while losing by 5 million votes.
- Thread starter BackLogJoe
- Start date
Yup. You need 2/3rds in both the House of Representatives and the Senate to change it. Considering that one of two political parties benefits greatly from the electoral college, you'd need 2/3rds in both chambers for dems, which is impossible due to both the electoral college and house of representatives being gerrymandered.
Same thing would happen if he lost by 5 million as it did when he lost by 3 million...nothing. You can't amend the constitution without Republican votes, and they aren't going to move to a popular vote because they won't win Presidential elections without the EC. We are stuck with this trash system that allows minority rule. We should focus on court packing more than the EC and find candidates that can win the EC. That sadly is likely Biden this cycle.
Really harsh then, I wonder how the election could go if the US had another system?
Oh, I just saw the video on Vox about Gerrymandering. Interesting stuff (And wow that happening...) Also that video about the filibuster tactic :'v
Even without filibustering, a constitutional amendment would require sixty six votes in the senate and 2/3rds in the House. That's a separate thing.
The experts believed Trump was less likely to win. You can't dispute that.
And now you're adding an analysis of "heavy clouds" despite the original reasoning process being "they said it wouldn't happen last time and it did so since they're saying it won't happen again that means it will." There is no allowance for an analysis of odds anywhere in that statement.
Yeah, but really fucking stupid people think that means 'cannot win'. Also the polls didn't even reflect Comey's 'HEY WE FOUND NEW EMAILS ON WEINER'S LAPTOP' bullshit, which was literally bullshit because they were just identical emails.
The poll aggregates weren't even off. They were out of date and even then gave Trump a good chance to win.
Yeah, less likely. About 30% chance IIRC. And most of them were saying that his path to the white house was WI, PA, and MI, and chances are, if he flipped one, he'd flip the others.
That's what happened. It required a perfect storm and election interference, but it happened.
What did they get wrong, again?
The reference to the experts believing Trump was unlikely to win was only made to correct the mangled form of the analogy being used by the person I responded to. They tried to support their point about assuming Trump will win again by suggesting amateurs said last time he wouldn't, therefore ignoring those people this time and assuming the opposite will happen is reasonable.
The solution is changing the electoral votes in a state to be determined by the percentage of the popular vote. So if a state is 50/50 the votes are split 50/50. That doesn't require a new amendment and solves the problem of so many people's votes just not mattering in this country.
My god I hope you're not right. But I'm scared that you are.
This is a reasonable idea and it would indeed produce results that more closely match the electorate in each state (and make sure that there was a point in campaigning in most states). How would you round them though?
It might seem like a pedantic question but the presidency would potentially depend on it and you could end up with situations arguably worse than what exists now.
If you just do a purely proportionate split of electoral votes as if you can split them arbitrarily, if they'd been split by state, last time the result would have been 259.94 to Clinton, 253.74 to Trump, and Johnson and Stein splitting the rest of them between them, usually picking up fractional votes in each state. With no candidate having reached the majority of 270, the House would decide between the top three candidates. The pro-Republican House of early 2017 would have elected Trump as president despite him having a popular vote minority and an electoral vote minority.
Of course, you can't split up electoral college votes like that, they'd need to go one way or the other. So if you rounded them up or down, you'd get....a broken system, because with more than two candidates you get unroundable situations. Allocating 538 votes (with manual fine-tuning to avoid the rounding problems) would give you something like 264 to Clinton and 260 to Trump, and again, you'd have the House electing him president despite a popular vote minority and electoral vote minority.
Well...
You have to ask yourself some questions, in what you believe.
#1 Are we an actual, real country, or a patchwork of states?
#2 If we are a country, why wouldn't one man one vote be an actual real thing -in the 21st century- ?
#3 If we are a miserable pile of States, on what basis should smaller states votes count so much more (by insane ratios at this point) than votes from more populous states?
Just as a reminder for the sake of discussion, local votes already affect local politics, with state legislatures.
States also have district reps in the lower house, as well as (grossly imbalanced as well) State Senators in Congress.
Was listening to AL Frankens podcast and he was talking with a guy whos organization is finding a way to circumvent teh electoral college (states agree that popular winner gets all EC votes). It was nice yet sad to hear a (fomrer) politician admit most votes dont matter in our current system,
Most people like to spin that your vote matters! When really all it does is show how the popular winner doesnt always get the actual win. Doubly true if you a blue in a deep red state.
EC gotta go, One way or another
Most people like to spin that your vote matters! When really all it does is show how the popular winner doesnt always get the actual win. Doubly true if you a blue in a deep red state.
EC gotta go, One way or another
That still doesn't work because
A. The electoral college distribution is not proportional to population in the first place.
B. Your proposed method loses some information during the transformation. IE: How do you split the EVs for a state where the vote goes 80/10/10 with 1 EV? 2? 3? 4? 5? 6? 7? 8? 9? Etc.
I probably agree with you on all those points. Again, I was merely pointing out that having state elections rather than one national election is not what makes the EC unfair.
I mean there's absolutely a path to getting the NPVIC (the mechanism you're talking about), it just involves sustained Democratic gains through the 2020 and 2022 elections. The base collectively needs to keep their foot on the pedal, not patting themselves on the back if we win 2020 and do fuck-all for 2022.
If you assume a Democratic trifecta (governorship+state legislature all being Democratic) is what's required to pass this, we're pretty much maxed out - 15 states (plus DC) have already signed on, the only two that haven't are Nevada (governor vetoed it) and Maine (not sure what happened here, it passed both chambers but I guess the House took it back?). Virginia will have a D trifecta next year and could pass it then. That leaves Minnesota (R State Senate) and New Hampshire (R governor), both of which could flip to D trifectas in next year's elections, and that accounts for all of the Clinton states.
Even if those other five states joined on, that adds up to 232 electoral votes. The four best opportunities to flip Trump states into D trifectas are Pennsylvania (20 EVs), Michigan (18 EVs), North Carolina (15 EVs) and Arizona (11 EVs). Pennsylvania and North Carolina could both become trifectas after the 2020 elections in theory - Democrats would need to win majorities in each of their state legislatures as they already hold the governorships in those states. Those two, along with all of the Clinton states (including the ones that have yet to sign on), would still leave Democrats three short.
In Michigan, Democrats could flip the State House next year, but the next opportunity to flip the State Senate is in 2022. In Arizona, both the State House and Senate are up next year and could flip, but the governorship wouldn't be until 2022. Both of those states signing on along with all the Clinton states plus PA and NC would fulfill the requirements of the NPVIC before the 2024 election.
Like I said though, that all depends on Democrats (specifically our voters) keeping their shit together and turning out in the midterms, even if the president is also a Democrat (which would generally presage midterm losses, and making the kinds of gains we need unlikely). It'd also definitely be subject to some court challenges.