I was wondering when we’d get our first crybaby thread about the EC.
The winning position is that you make it to where the President-elect would have to win both the majority of EV and the plurality of the PV. We can’t get rid of the EC all together because people would only campaign in the large cities. Congressional districts would also be a stupid idea given how the media is dominant over a region. However, in this day and age of being able to tally votes within days if not hours…it makes no sense to ignore the popular vote any longer.
It's crazy because the EC already favors them. They have multiple states that are just empty land, but still get the minimum 3 EV's even though their population doesn't warrant it.
If it was a national popular vote, small states might as well not even vote. A City like Baltimore would displace the whole of the northern plains states. No fairness in that at all...
This is supposed to be a republic not a shit eating democracy.
Under National Popular Vote, every voter, everywhere, would be politically relevant and equal in every presidential election. Every vote would matter in the state counts and national count.
With the current state-by-state winner-take-all system of awarding electoral votes (not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but later enacted by 48 states), it could only take winning a bare plurality of popular votes in the 11 most populous states, containing 56% of the population of the United States, for a candidate to win the Presidency with less than 22% of the nation's votes!
A presidential candidate could lose with 78%+ of the popular vote and 39 states.
Most Americans don't ultimately care whether their presidential candidate wins or loses in their state or district . . . they care whether he/she wins the White House. Voters want to know, that no matter where they live, even if they were on the losing side, their vote actually was equally counted and mattered to their candidate. Most Americans think it is wrong that the candidate with the most popular votes can lose. We don't allow this in any other election in our representative republic.
In the 25 smallest states in 2008, the Democratic and Republican popular vote was almost tied (9.9 million versus 9.8 million), as was the electoral vote (57 versus 58).
The 25 smallest states have been almost equally noncompetitive. They voted Republican or Democratic 12-13 in 2008 and 2012.
In 2012, 24 of the nation's 27 smallest states received no attention at all from presidential campaigns after the conventions after Mitt Romney became the presumptive Republican nominee on April 11. They were ignored despite their supposed numerical advantage in the Electoral College. In fact, the 8.6 million eligible voters in Ohio received more campaign ads and campaign visits from the major party campaigns than the 42 million eligible voters in those 27 smallest states combined.
Voters in states, of all sizes, that are reliably red or blue don't matter. Candidates ignore those states and the issues they care about most.
Kerry won more electoral votes than Bush (21 versus 19) in the 12 least-populous non-battleground states, despite the fact that Bush won 650,421 popular votes compared to Kerry’s 444,115 votes. The reason is that the red states are redder than the blue states are blue. If the boundaries of the 13 least-populous states had been drawn recently, there would be accusations that they were a Democratic gerrymander.
Support for a national popular vote is strong in every smallest state surveyed in recent polls among Republicans, Democrats, and Independent voters, as well as every demographic group
Among the 13 lowest population states, the National Popular Vote bill has passed in 9 state legislative chambers, and been enacted by 4 jurisdictions.
Now, minority party voters in each state don't matter to their candidate.
In 2012, 56,256,178 (44%) of the 128,954,498 voters had their vote diverted by the winner-take-all rule to a candidate they opposed (namely, their state’s first-place candidate).
And now votes, beyond the one needed to get the most votes in the state, for winning in a state, are wasted and don't matter to presidential candidates.
Utah (5 electoral votes) alone generated a margin of 385,000 "wasted" votes for Bush in 2004.
Oklahoma (7 electoral votes) alone generated a margin of 455,000 "wasted" votes for Bush in 2004 -- larger than the margin generated by the 9th and 10th largest states, namely New Jersey and North Carolina (each with 15 electoral votes).
8 small western states, with less than a third of California’s population, provided Bush with a bigger margin (1,283,076) than California provided Kerry (1,235,659).
In a successful nationwide election for President candidates could not afford campaigning only in metropolitan areas, while ignoring rural areas.
With National Popular Vote, big cities would not get all of candidates’ attention, much less control the outcome.
The biggest cities are almost exactly balanced out by rural areas in terms of population and partisan composition.
16% of the U.S. population lives outside the nation's Metropolitan Statistical Areas. Rural America has voted 60% Republican. None of the 10 most rural states matter now.
16% of the U.S. population lives in the top 100 cities. They voted 63% Democratic in 2004.
The population of the top five cities (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Philadelphia) is only 6% of the population of the United States and the population of the top 50 cities (going as far down as Arlington, TX) is only 15% of the population of the United States.
Suburbs divide almost exactly equally between Republicans and Democrats.
