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SmallSpoonBrigade
LegalEagle
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Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "How to Kill The Electoral College" video.
No, we need to leave the house alone. It's the most democratic part of the federal government right now. There's already so many congressmen that hardly anybody ever gets to talk during sessions as it stands Adding more seats would just mean that problem would get to be even larger. Expanding the size of the house would somewhat reduce the influence of tiny states, but the impact would be pretty small compared with fixing the Senate, Presidency or SCOTUS.
72
Arguably the biggest issues are that the parties are allowed to decide which nominees are put up for President and then the electoral college means that people in many states don't even get a say unless enough of the people in that state credibly threaten to throw the election. The state I live in hasn't voted GOP since Reagan and nobody bothers to try to earn our votes when running for President, even though they throw all sorts of money at the swing states trying to win.
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Only vote the other bits if you can be bothered to have some sort of informed opinion. You don't have to vote on things you're not comfortable voting on, and voting without having an opinion isn't doing anybody any favors.
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@youtubian2500 It's going to be screwed up. Neither Harris nor Trump should win, but that's the choice that most people are making. I had 8 other options on my ballot of people to vote for, but it'll be Trump or Harris, most likely Harris that carries the state despite having done absolutely nothing to earn the votes.
8
Rank-choice voting doesn't really solve anything. It allows people to vote for whomever they want, but that doesn't mean that things would change in any appreciable way, you'd still have only 2 parties and if it changes which 2 parties it is, things have already gone way off the rails.
6
Even in the US, it usually does, what's changed is statistical modelling software has vastly improved, there's been increasing polarization between the states and a bunch of bad court rulings that led to a flood of money going into the races.
3
Having 2 choices served us well for centuries, it's mostly the result of a series of bad SCOTUS rulings that led to a bunch of money flowing into politics, population shifting around to have more of a split between the political views of the states and the Democrats moving further to the right in their pursuit of bipartisanship and stealing votes from the other party rather than getting registered non-voters to show up to vote that caused this. The easiest fix would be to take away the small state bonus that results from each state getting an additional vote for each senator they have. That would have resulted in Gore winning in 2020 without even removing the electoral college.
3
@CassandraY Most states are that way, although the closer it is to competitive, the more likely there is to be any attention paid at all. And that's really not good whether it's a red or a blue state. I often wonder how different the candidates would be if they had to earn all the states they get rather than just a half dozen or so that are in play. Around here, the state and local races are independent of the party and the general election candidates are often times from the same party. It means that unlike in the past before the parties challenged the system, everybody's vote does count. If you're a Republican in a Democratic district, you can still vote for the less liberal candidate, and likewise when it's reversed. It's pushed the candidates to a more cooperative position with the most extreme candidates typically losing out to ones that are willing to take the other side's interests into account.
2
You can blame this on the Democrats. They could have finished off the GOP in 2016 and chose to force HRC on us allowing Trump to win. The GOP of right now is not the same GOP that existed prior to 2016. Having been whipped pretty good 2 elections in a row, the GOP was on the verge of admitting that what they were doing wasn't working, but rather than try to build a bigger coalition and allow the voters to choose Bernie, the DNC stepped in and rigged things for HRC who then spent nearly all the DNC money trying to prop up her losing campaign and made a point of punching the progressive voters in the face trying to replace those voters that were likely to vote for her with GOP voters that were more likely to not vote at all rather than vote for her.
1
@gilesluver That wouldn't be more representative. There would just be more representatives. We already have so many representatives that getting to somebody that actually cares about your vote and is on the appropriate committee can be a bit of a non-starter.
1