End the Electoral College?

[chimp3]

I think it is high time we change the system and end the electoral college. Popular vote any one?

[Lucanus]

Yep you guys definitely should

[brewer]

Nope. I like it. Just change it away from winner takes all.

[Tiberius]

Nope. I like it. Just change it away from winner takes all.

Why do you like it? People in smaller states get more voting power. That's inherently unfair.

[vorlon13]

whichever party has most recently benefitted from winning the EC despite losing the popular vote will always impeded any efforts to change it

[brewer]

Nope. I like it. Just change it away from winner takes all.

Why do you like it? People in smaller states get more voting power. That's inherently unfair.

Not smaller states, states with smaller populations. Take it away and you've just made another minority even greater than the minority than we already are. We might as well not exist in the federal arena. 

Then the Senate is unfair also. Why should tiny NE get the same two votes that CA gets? NE's population is so small that they shouldn't count.

[Crossless2.0]

I favor revising it so that each state's electoral votes are awarded to candidates in proportion to their share of the state's popular vote outcome.

[Aegon]

While I do feel the electoral college is rather undemocratic, I don't think getting rid of it is a good idea either.

Clinton won about 60% of California. California's population is roughly 37 million (using total pop vs voting pop for simplicity). That means Clinton would get a little more than 22 million and Trump would get 15 million. Trump would have to win nearly 100% of the 8 least populated states to make up for that. That would give big, populated states a lot of power. Although the EC system favors smaller states it allows them to have a say in the system that would be impossible in a popular system.

I think states should be able to split their electoral votes, like Nebraska and Maine already can.

[brewer]

I favor revising it so that each state's electoral votes are awarded to candidates in proportion to their share of the state's popular vote outcome.

In other words, get rid of the "winner takes all" electoral votes in that state. Tie it to the votes within the congressional districts. The districts get redrawn as the population shifts within them. It would then mirror the popular vote.

[Crossless2.0]

I favor revising it so that each state's electoral votes are awarded to candidates in proportion to their share of the state's popular vote outcome.

In other words, get rid of the "winner takes all" electoral votes in that state. Tie it to the votes within the congressional districts. The districts get redrawn as the population shifts within them. It would then mirror the popular vote.

As I imagine it, the congressional districts would only be meaningful for selecting representatives to the House. For the presidential election, I would propose simply taking the total vote tally in each state and then apportioning the state's electoral votes to the candidates according to their performance. For example, if a state has 18 electoral votes and candidate A gets 60% of the popular vote, then -- rounding up -- that candidate would get 11 of the 18 electoral votes with the others being distributed accordingly to the other candidate(s).

Of course, whether one rounds up or down can be significant in terms of final electoral votes. It's not a perfect solution and there would need to be some mechanism in place that everyone agrees on to ensure there are no drawn-out pissing matches over the results. And I'm not clear on how that is supposed to work in, for instance, a state like North Dakota with hardly any electoral votes and wide margins in the popular vote.

But winner-take-all is asinine and any revision to it would be better than what we now have.