| Shadow1980 said: Adjusting the number of electors to make things more proportional would require changing the number of seats in the House. Since each state gets two bonus EC votes, that creates a huge disparity in individual vote power between someone in a state like Wyoming or Vermont and someone in a state like New York or Texas. Currently, the House of Representatives is locked by law at 435 seats thanks to the Apportionment Act of 1911. Had the number of seats grew at a rate of 10% per post-census reapportionment, we'd be at over 1000 Representatives right now. There is nothing in the Constitution that says we have to have a fixed number of seats, though it does implicitly allow for doing such a thing. If we had at least twice as many House members as we do now, that would ease some of the disproportionality of the EC. For ease of math, say we had 870 House seats and every state had exactly twice the seats as what they have today. Add in two Senators per state, and you'd have 920 EC votes. California would have 108 EC votes while Wyoming would have 4. That would give California about 362k people per electoral vote, while Wyoming would have over 146k per EC vote. That would give Wyoming voters nearly 2-½ times the voting power as California voters, still very disproportionate, but nowhere near as disproportionate as the current disparity is over 3-½ times. To make things even more proportional, the House would have to swell even greater in size. Had the the Congressional Apportionment Amendment (the so-called "Article the First", the first of the original twelve amendments to the Constitution proposed) passed, we would have over 6400 Representatives in the House. The Capitol building would have needed some serious remodeling over the years, but it would close the gap a lot. But even with a whopping 6400 Representatives, which would give Wyoming about 14 EC votes and California about 782 EC votes, that would still give Wyoming voters about 21% more voting power than a California voter. That shows how much those two bonus votes each states gets for each Senator skews the balance of individual voting power. Best to just abandon the EC and move straight to a national popular vote, thus perfectly adhering to the "one person, one vote" rule. We are the only democratic nation with a full presidential system to select the president with an electoral college rather than a national popular vote, and there's probably a very good reason why nobody else uses the system. It's an affront to democracy. That might have been the intent, but the political realities of the 1780s, which are what got us the EC to being with, are not the same realities we face today. It's an archaic and unrepresentative system that should be abolished. And I spent way too much time writing that. I need to go make dinner and go to bed. I have to be up for work in 8 hours. |
I advocate for progressive change: split votes, proportional votes, then increasing votes proportionally. Bearing such significant changes in mind, I think we should decuple electors from from House seats. Let the legislative branch remain internally checked unto itself, but not at the expense of a misrepresentative executive branch.
TL;DR: you're preaching to the choir.
