Thread: The Electoral College

Originally Posted by Atmosfear

The point is that California can only count for X percentage of the total outcome. If all 36 million California voters turned out in an election that totaled 50 million votes, they could elect a candidate who serves only their own agenda. As it is now, even if the voters from a single state total a majority of the overall election, their influence on the outcome is limited by their actual size. Fortunately, we don't usually see a major skew in voter turnout (most states have roughly the same turnout as a percentage of registered voters), but it could happen and the system shouldn't be exploitable by that.

I actually disagree with this. In principle, yes, it would be great to have the system be immune to any sort of exploitation, but since the practical upshot of defending against this particular exploitation is that some votes count more than others, I think the cure is worse than the disease--especially since the disease is probably never going to actually be a problem. I don't think we should be distorting the value of the vote in order to guard against a form of exploitation that is frankly unrealistic and implausible. I would rather have a system a system that gives equal value to all votes but can theoretically be exploited by unrealistic state-to-state voter turnout disparities, than a system that can't be exploited in this way but means that a Californian's vote only matters half as much as a Montanan's vote.

EDIT: Actually, we could address both these problems by retaining the electoral college, but changing the system by which states are given electors; instead of a state having a number of electors equal to it's combined number of senators and reps, they would only have electors equal to their number of reps, and therefore based on population. This would require amending the Constitution, though.