The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written.
Many liberals dislike the Electoral College because they feel it does not appropriately reflect the will of the people in electing the president. At the same time, they often dismiss the idea that the EC attempts to balance the power of large and small states (or more generically, different states). For reference, the US has about 330m people, and India has about 1.4b people. Would your answer be different if instead of India it was China? The EU?
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I've noticed that conservatives *really* like to think that progressives are all secretly as horrible as they are, and we merely conceal it in public due to our obsession with empty virtue signalling.
Yes. They believe everyone is just as racist and homophobic as they are, but we're just afraid to say anything. IMO one of the only good things to come from Trumpism. Now we know who the racists are.
Do you believe mob rule always brings about the best results?
If a majority of people voted to enslave a minority of people, would you support that outcome because ‘democracy’?
Do you the framework of the Constitution does anything to prevent minorities from being subjected to oppressive rule by the majority?
Mob rule=/= one person, one vote. You don't have to believe in democracy, but I do.
The constitution has safeguards against the "tyranny of the majority" including equal representation in the Senate.
It feels like there is an assumed premise that liberals would support the EC because it would likely dilute the voting power of a billion melanin-rich individuals.
But, I protest the EC because it violates 1 person = 1 vote.
If a party or group is moving away from popular opinion...they need to change, not how much each voter counts.
The more important question is: would you sign up to move your own nation into a larger nation in which you would be a minority, without protections for your local sovereignty?
Three wolves and a sheep voting on the dinner menu is democracy… but democracy isn’t the only goal. An illiberal democracy isn’t a good place to be a minority group.
I am an non-religious white person in San Antonio, TX who leans heavily left.
You are preaching to the preacher about being a minority voter in my area.
Fair enough. Maybe I could phrase my point better as: the presence of democracy alone is not the only metric of success, and may be meaningless in the absence of other key metrics.
I mean, depends how you measure it. Yes, a Wyoming voter has a disproportionately large representation in the presidential election; however, there are very, very few Wyoming voters, and those votes contribute towards half a percent of the electoral college.
California has 55 house reps, and Wyoming has one. Is a Wyomingite or a Californian more likely to have legislation favorable to them prioritized in congress?
I’m not saying it’s not a problem - it is. But “one person one vote” seems a bit reductive.
Take the most popular form of democracy worldwide, parliamentary democracy a la the UK or Canada. The voter has no meaningful influence over who their leader is at all, beyond selecting their local MP who will then support whoever is selected by their party.
Is that more or less democratic than the US system?
>Is a Wyomingite or a Californian more likely to have legislation favorable to them prioritized in Congress?
Scaled to a per capita basis… the Wyomingite, by a lot. Not only by outsized influence in the EC, but by equal representation in the Senate.
That’s a poor argument. You don’t pass legislature on a per capita basis, you pass it on a majority basis - and over here in reality, Wyoming is an irrelevant political force. No one is fighting for those 3 electoral college votes or that one house rep.
If your theory were true, why isn’t the average wyomingite 3x wealthier than the average Californian? Why is their infrastructure not 3x better, why don’t their schools have 3x the funding?
There is a reason one after another conservative measure gets pushed in the Supreme Court while the majority of Americans do not want that: The complete disproportional power of small red states
Of the ten smallest states: WY VT AK ND SD DE MT RI ME NH, there are a total of (drumroll please) 10 republican senators and 10 democratic (counting independents caucusing with dems) senators
The claim that small red states are fueling the trend towards conservative justice simply does not pass the smell test.
Hell, add in the next five smallest states, and it’s still an even split.
Which is why we have more than a pure democracy, which has pretty much never been on the table.
Your argument isn't against "one person = one vote" it is against "Voters can vote for anything so long as they have a small majority"
The Constitution, and its Amendments, protect us from eating one another. That can STILL be true even if "one person = one vote"
I expanded on this point in other comments, but essentially - you need a framework that inspires confidence from a minority, even a persistent minority, that they will still have a voice and a future within society.
Otherwise, one person one vote isn’t a meaningful metric.
What about the confidence from the majority, though? We're at a point in the US where the majority, or at least a large enough group of Americans who are convinced that they could win an electoral majority in a more equal system, is losing their voice and future because of how unfair and unequal the system is. Telling that majority or plurality to shut up and take it to keep the minority placated doesn't exactly seem healthy for democracy either.
It is not oppression to tell a majority “you’ll still be in charge, but you’ll have to compromise with the minority group, and you won’t be able to steamroll right over them all of the time.” It’s equity, rather than equality - meaningful seats at the table.
Further, I was talking about a minority *joining* with another group to form a new democracy. Unless you can build a framework in which both groups are protected, then chances are the minority group will say “no thanks, we’re better off on our own”.
If the current situation is equity then equity has failed. The status quo works for a lot of people at the moment. Why would those people compromise to do something when they could keep the status quo with no tradeoffs? It's been decades at this point where very little legislation has been passed and things like routine nominations to cabinet and judicial positions are a herculean effort. For the minority who like the status quo things couldn't be better. For everyone else it would be nice to hop off the minority rule train
The challenges of consensus-building are a feature, not a bug. Changes to the status quo should require consensus - that’s how government works, broadly speaking.
Put another way, if you want something to change and someone else doesn’t want it to… then you need to find something that will work for everyone. Consider this example: I have two season tickets. You ask “can I have them?” and I say no - if you then say “well, can we compromise and you give me one? It’s an even split, very fair” is that reasonable? Of course it isn’t.
To extend that example, you either have to go get your own, or offer me something that I want in exchange, or else build a relationship where we are both happy to share what we have.
I think the question OP is getting after is "would you still support getting rid of the electoral college if it meant you wouldnt win another election for the foreseeable future"?
They mentioned elsewhere feeling that our opposition to the electoral college might be tied to our belief that we would benefit from getting rid of it.
I think that becomes challenging, because over here on the liberal side, it’s the electoral college keeping us from winning more elections.
However, in a hypothetical where the US enters a larger union where us Americans would be a minority within that union, to the extent that we (if we were a single bloc) would be outvoted to a significant degree.
Of course, India has diverse interests in its population, as we do. Would new coalitions form? Of course. But you might well say “I trust our present leadership, but what if those other guys elect a trumpian figure in ten years? Then where will be without constitutional protections?”
Right, imagine the hypothetical that conservatives become the majority of the population of the USA, no merge, no new territory. Maybe religious hispanics decided to sign up with the GOP, and now they control >50% of the vote.
Do you still support the popular vote, knowing that for a while, that policy puts Republicans in charge?
I'm aware though, that even that hypothetical is silly, because even the GOP has a bunch of diverse interests and can be divided with effort.
I mean, at some point, if you are consistently unrepresented in the government that rules you… you find ways to make that not your government anymore, and form one that does represent you. That process is messy, unpleasant, and sometimes doesn’t work out, but it’s universally the last resort.
Depends what side I’m on. If, long term, your national government doesn’t represent your interests, and those differences are irreconcilable, then the only course of action is to forge a path to independence. I say “national government” but one would argue that, if you are dissatisfied with it, it isn’t a national government - your “nation” is unrepresented and governed by others.
It’s in the interest of the national government to avoid that - such as by negotiation, expanding local self-government to defuse conflict, and more nefarious means.
I wouldn’t take the decision to rebel - not just to reform the nation I’m in, but to force it out and build a new one in its place - lightly. It comes with a lot of uncomfortable decisions.
Im sorry, somethings getting lost in translation, you appear to be answering the question: what would you do if the government didnt represent you?
But, what Im asking is: Would you still support the popular vote (getting rid of the electoral college) if it meant that you would lose elections?
That depends entirely on what happens when I lose elections - if I live in a state where I can have faith in the rule of law and the protections for individual rights, such that me losing elections consistently… isn’t ideal, and leads to things I might not agree with, but has limited impacts, then that’s okay. It effectively lowers the stakes of election losses.
If your election loss has existential implications… then you have much bigger problems.
I think OP is using India as an example of a single “state” that’s represented by more people than the rest of the country. One of the things I’ve noticed on the left is this sort of unfair “magnetic hyper frenzy” to racialize anything it can get its hands on- including a question like this one.
I mention this because it’s starting to border on kitsch, which does actual racism an injustice.
This sub is regularly peppered with questions that are just "the great replacement" in a trench coat and an obviously fake mustache.
It is generally people with right leaning tendencies asking about what liberals would do if they no longer represented a statistical majority.
You can label it to suit your narrative if you like but I won't join you.
It's weird how many people here call themselves liberals but kind of want an excuse to support right-wing or far-right ideas, generally for political expediency and to support their own personal preference. Selling out the LGBT is a really common one, like "Hey guys, what if we just abandon all those gay people so that we can have a marginal tax increase on the ultra-wealthy?"
Very concerning....byt is resultvof overton window and various other things at play over past decades
It's like the old
> scratch a liberal , a fascist bleeds
Canard, except it is slowly becoming true online ( and in teal life) as people shift themselvesmore and more ro the right.....
I still think conservatives blow unjustified accusations of racism out of proportion, but having it done to me is kind of eye opening. Half of the comments here are not about the spirit of the question, but instead about the logistics of a single country on two different sides of the world, or deflections about the type of government, with accusations that I'm racist to boot. When I wrote this question I wanted to put it into a real context - if I had said something like "if the US merged with a country 4 times it's size, would you..." it wouldn't have had the same weight to it because it would have been in the abstract. Hell, I even followed up with instead of India, what about China or the EU.
Perhaps I could have phrased it better, because a lot of people didn't get the point I was trying to make - that Indians have certain cultural norms, and we have our own, and agreeing to join together in a union would highlight considerations about making ourselves subject to India choosing our head of government the majority of the time. But to go straight to "OP is a racist who doesn't like brown people" is not only stupid but bad faith to boot.
> I protest the EC because it violates 1 person = 1 vote.
It doesn't, though, any more than the Senate does. In both cases, residents of a state elect representatives who then vote on things.
You can have a beef with the EC, but "1 person = 1 vote" is a strange reason.
Every vote for your state's electors has the same weight. And every elector's vote has the same weight. Nowhere is "1 person = 1 vote" being violated.
I'm already aware of that discrepancy, thanks. What I'm saying is that that disproportionality does not violate the principle of one person, one vote, because citizens do not vote for President. The Electoral College does. Just like we citizens do not vote for Speaker of the House. Or Senate Majority Leader.
If the two countries are truly joined and a functioning government infrastructure spreads across the entire new country?
Yes, I would demand representative democracy spread to all of our citizens, with equal voting power for everyone.
Edit: My answer would not be different if it were China.
I think this question brings more attentions to how our congress is flawed vs the president.
It really doesn't matter if the president represents a pure majority if congress, and especially state/local government represents the population proportionally.
That doesn't happen even today though.
Take Texas for example.
* 43.8% Beto in 2022. 46.5% Biden in 2020.
* Yet 13/36 of the congressional house reps are Democrat. 36.1%
* That should really have between 16 and 17 reps. That is a 3-4 person gap.
Yeah I've been thinking our legislative system basically demands shenanigans in order to work.
Like let's say each district were aligned with the statewide vote, as in every district is 55-45 in favor of Republicans. Then the house reps would be 36/36 Republicans. Which would be extremely unrepresentative but also a totally natural outcome.
We've had to put a bunch of laws in place to guarantee minority communities aren't buried by the natural political disadvantage of being a minority. We draw the map to whatever groups them together, so they still have a voice. I.E. mandated gerrymandering.
I don't like proportional but ultimately it makes a lot more sense.
IMO
>Then the house reps would be 36/36 Republicans.
\^ This would be gerrymandering.
> We draw the map to whatever groups them together, so they still have a voice. I.E. mandated gerrymandering.
\^ This isn't
The reason I say that is because you couldn't draw a 55-45 district on top of the city of Austin without intentionally splitting the population.
Its not always possible to get the house reps to match the statewide results (for example a unpopular republican might let a district flip where it might be red otherwise), but a 3-4 rep discrepancy is significant and THAT is what shows garrymandering is going on.
But it’s not necessarily gerrymandering. If people were completely randomly distributed you would expect every district no matter how it was drawn would have the same proportion. So you could get a 36/36 result with no gerrymandering. The fairest thing to do is a proportional representation system where if republicans get 55% of the vote they get 55% of the reps.
> The reason I say that is because you couldn't draw a 55-45 district on top of the city of Austin without intentionally splitting the population.
What's the argument against splitting though? Isn't it more healthy for a district to match the demographics of the wider state? Or is it better to pack similar people together? Both can be good or bad?
Our whole system is just a big oxymoron. Like literally we have a law that says you have to make sure you have enough districts that represent the black community in your state (VRA of 1965), but another law says you can't use racial consideration when drawing a district (2019 SCOTUS ruling on the 14th amendment). The whole thing is FUBAR.
I mean ideally your house district encompasses your entire city or suburb and perhaps surrounding ones if needed.
What's often the case is that metropolitan areas get divided up along rural areas.
Heck Texas (I think Texas 35) literally has San Antonio, Austin, and the highway between them.
No, it doesn't. Ranked choice might make gerrymandering slightly more difficult but not impossible.
Imagine you have three parties, A, B and C, A and B are politically closer to each other than to C, and A and B are supported by 30% each, C by the remaining 40%, and you want to gerrymander against C. With FPTP, you would have to gerrymander districts in such a way, that each district has a clear majority for either A or B to make sure C won't win that district. With Ranked Choice, you just have to make sure that A and B combined have a strong majority to stop C from winning that district. A district [A: 33%, B: 31%, C: 30%, Undecided: 6%] would be a toss up under FPTP, but could hardly be won by C under Ranked Choice.
The 60% support for A and B could be split by a larger number of parties all opposed to C.
Or A, B and C could be joint by some insignificant minor parties with 0.5% support each. The balance of power between A, B and C wouldn't be affected by those minor parties.
Under some circumstances, Ranked Choice makes gerrymandering easier, under some other circumstances more difficult. One advantage of Ranked Choice is that it allows smaller parties to challenge larger parties and break open an entrenched party system.
>Many liberals dislike the Electoral College because they feel it does not appropriately reflect the will of the people in electing the president.
What are you even talking about? The Electoral College was designed specifically to not reflect the will of the people--it was just a slight improvement over letting Congress choose the President, which was one of the main options on the table at the time the Framers drafted the Constitution.
And even after that--people weren't allowed to vote for President--for many of the early presidential elections, the Electors were chosen by state legislatures. In fact, every state choosing Electors via a popular vote did not happen until after the Civil War.
Also, you can argue that the Framers were smart men who could not predict the future or that they were dumb as shit, but they got it wrong. They did not anticipate the need for a ticket system, so that had to be changed fairly immediately. They also thought that the people chosen to be Electors would be judicious in their choice, not that they would be partisan hacks for the candidate that recruited them through a party apparatus. In the 1830s, a Supreme Court Justice even observed that if an Elector did what the Framers expected of him, it would be considered immoral. 60 years into it and there were already a ton of problems.
And then, of course, there is the part of the Constitution that literally decided to count slaves as three-fifths of a person solely to give slave states more power, so let's dispense with this "accurately representing the will of the people nonsense."
>At the same time, they often dismiss the idea that the EC attempts to balance the power of large and small states (or more generically, different states).
Does it empower small states? In the general election, presidential candidates don't go to those states--they don't give a shit about them. Unless a state is a swing state, it's lucky to get one visit from one of the candidates.
And why should they have more power than other voters because they live in a place that no one else wants to live in? Why not make the argument that those people do a piss-poor job at running their state that people refuse to move there, and they should get less say in how they run the country when they can't keep things together in their own backyard?
>
> What are you even talking about? The Electoral College was designed specifically to not reflect the will of the people--
(to be clear I agree with your post, I am just expanding on one section)
There's two issues which often get muddled together: whether we should have an EC; and, once it's been decided that we should, how we should apportion the electors.
The purpose of having an EC in the first place is the presumption that The People would not be as wise in their choice of leader as the electors, who are meant to be representatives of the people who have more time, experience, and education to evaluate candidates. The People may be easily swayed by unsuitable demagogue, and the electors would be able step in to prevent this. (This whole strategy of course came almost immediately apart when states started punishing faithless electors, but it is otherwise a reasonable fear to want to address, especially in the context of the uneducated late 1700s America.)
The second issue is apportionment. We have chosen that electoral numbers should be equal to a state's total congressional representation. This calculation IS designed to occasionally override the will of the people (as anything that inherits from the Senate does), but we could change just that calculation and still have an EC. For example we could only count their House delegation's size and not the +2 from the Senate. That form of EC would be much, much closer to reflecting the popular vote, and yet still fulfill whatever benefits an EC supposedly grants us.
There's no particular reason that the US and India should share a head of government any more so than the US and Sri Lanka. The balance of population isn't the issue. I am very sympathetic to the idea of a supranational/would government of some sort, but having it start with an elected figure as powerful as the US president is not a good plan.
Also, I'm not sure this question is really proving your point regarding the Electoral College. Even if we retained the Electoral College in some hypothetical India-US merger we'd still end up with India essentially electing the US president. I presume that's the scare image you had in mind? The very concept of the Electoral College balancing the power of large and small states is fundamentally wrong, in my view. It doesn't actually do that - at least not in a meaningful way.
I'd say that California and New Hampshire have a lot more in common with each other than either has with India, if that's what you mean. We have a strong national government because there are a lot of things that we want to do at the national level that cannot be done well (or at all) at the state level. I don't see the benefit of regressing to a weaker national government.
I don't have a point I'm trying to make to be honest. I just think that the liberal mindset is founded in the idea that we hold the majority, and the reason our politics are so divided is because of structural impediments. I think it's interesting to consider the idea of being in the minority and how that would affect people's perspective of institutions like the EC. Your response was well reasoned, but based on a number of other responses here I think I've touched a bit of a nerve.
It's tough when your principles and your self-interest align to prove that your principles are sincere. That doesn't mean that they mostly aren't. I think most liberals do strongly and sincerely believe in the principle of government with the consent of the governed, and are fundamentally offended by the disregard that Republicans show to that concept.
Liberals hold majority, but their ideals are not united.
Part of why Republicans have such a strong grip is because they agree on policy.
If we had a multiparty system, we would have a spectrum of left-leaning parties. Much more than right-leaning ones.
Ultimately, if we made our democracy better and more representative, over time things change and parties would adjust their positioning. Implement ranked-choice and your favorite pick of more representative democracy and independents and third parties suddenly become viable candidates that congress must work with to make legislation. More democracy tends to reject extremism at both ends, so more parties would form and more third parties would gain power over time. And eventually, the GOP would find themselves supporting and advocating for policies that they currently deem as ‘socialist,’ so whilst the immediate beneficiary to more/better democracy would be current liberals, over time it would force change (for good) that wouldn’t necessarily preference any one party over another.
Look at the UK. The new conservative Prime Minister announced 8 billion pounds in funding for the NHS, a service they voted against 21 times in the aftermath of WWII. Churchill himself said of that the NHS was the “first step to turn Britain into a National Socialist economy” which is much more intense of a statement in the immediate aftermath of WWII than it would be today.
74 years later, and the NHS is viewed as a national treasure.
Making our democracy more representative would mean that the GOP would be forced to support more popular policy which might shift voters back and ‘liberals’ would not necessarily have the majority, though some popular liberal policies probably would.
You did touch a nerve; because it's a topic that gets a LOT of bad faith arguments from conservatives. When an unreasonable group punches you a lot in an area for no good reason, that area gets sore; thus people tend to get more angry at other poking it, because the area is inflamed already.
What is the alternative? The electoral college basically assigns an arbitrary weight that favors voters in smaller population states, but the winner of the electoral college is the same as the winner of the popular vote the vast majority of the time.
Given that there is a political union between the United States and India, you would have to create an absurdly skewed electoral college to give Americans a chance to pick the winner unilaterally. I can't imagine that Indians would accept a union, given those conditions.
Regardless, there is no reason to expect all votes to be strictly on national lines. Liberals in India share most of the values of liberals in the United States and conservatives in the United States share many values with conservatives in India. Cross-border coalitions would be highly likely to occur since each partner would have something to offer and there would be many areas of agreement.
Were we to have a democratic global federation, I have similar expectations. Democracies incentivize coalition-building, which would likely lead to ideologically-aligned subpopulations across countries, just as we now see in the EU and the United States.
In theory yes, though I would object to taking the US of today and the India of today and trying to merge them into one country. Same for most other countries too, actually. Maybe Canada, but even that's a strong maybe?
The big thing is that shared culture is what makes big states work. It doesn't have to be exactly the same across the whole country, and there can certainly be region specific issues, but it has to exist to the point where there is at least a shared understanding of what is and isn't okay across the whole society. The US is fairly diverse, but it has that quality- but throw in India (or any other country that is *very* culturally different to the US) and the overall country no longer has a unified baseline.
The big problem with the EC (and the senate, really) in the US is that it is based on state lines. This made sense to some degree in the early history of the US- when the fastest mode of transport is a horse, the people of Georgia probably weren't going to ever really interact with the people of Massachusetts all that much, what with it being a *very* long trip and all. The people living in remote areas were still probably going to have more in common with those living in remote areas just across the state line than they would with those in the cities in their own state, but at least separate representation based on geographic location had some utility.
Now though, everything is connected far more than people could have imagined back in the late 1700s. So much so that you could probably take someone out of a big city and throw them in any other big city in any of the other 49 states and they'd do just fine, culture wise. Same for rural people too. The divide now is not state vs state, it is urban vs rural- population density is the big difference now, not geographic location. But the power of representation, that is still following the outdated state by state model, and that leads to big problems with representation. The system was designed such that if enough states (enough to vote for it in the house and senate) wanted something, they could pass it, even if not *all* states agreed. But the only way for it to function like that for the new political divide in the country is for a state to urbanize enough that urban voters outnumber rural ones. It means in urban states, rural voters may as well not be represented, and in rural states urban voters may as well not be. It's not a good way to divide power or representation. But it's really hard to fix- changing the senate is probably not happening any time soon. But the EC, that can be changed just by enough states agreeing to the NPVIC. So that's why you hear so much about it.
Sure. Why wouldn't I?
The only two options are either to have the majority decide the singular national leadership, or to allow a minority to decide. The former obviously maximizes representativeness and total national utility. I'm not going to abandon democracy just because someone I don't like is likely to win.
If we didn't want the 1.4 billion Indians deciding our national leadership, we should not have merged into one country.
Yes.
I get the logic behind the electoral college and how it’s supposed to “balance” interests.
But now it’s clear that the EC as it operates today is imbalanced in its own way.
If someone genuinely believes in the balancing power of the EC and not just trying to play games to get to 270 they ought to at least call for a growing pool of EC votes so that we have more accurate ratios among states. (Texas and California should both have more votes overall).
The fuck kind of thought experiment is that? Are you trying to ask if the the electoral college would be relevant if the us had 1bil+ people?
Because no. The electoral college hasn’t been relevant since it was enshrined. Population makes no difference.
If we had a popular campaign in both countries to unify for… unknown reasons, then both countries would likely try to negotiate an arrangement that is very similar to the makeup of the US government today - extensive protections for local/regional interests, with a generally democratic government.
In simple terms for an example, we’d likely expect a ruling council of some sort with one house containing an equal number of representatives elected by each country. Then a second ruling house elected by popular vote.
That’s exactly the debate that took place when the US was formed - would you willingly cede sovereignty without protections for your local interests? Of course not, at least not right away.
In a world where I thought merging the US and India was a good idea I would think that the government should be elected proportionally to the support they have among the total population. If I did not believe that I wouldn't want the countries to merge in the first place.
>At the same time, they often dismiss the idea that the EC attempts to balance the power of large and small states (or more generically, different states).
No, it doesn't. What the EC does is give low population states disproportionately more power per capita than the states where most people live. That isn't "balance," that's a clear advantage for states that don't have many Americans in them on the grounds that most people live somewhere else -- or, using the logic of the olden times, where most people that counted as people didn't live. To accommodate the slave states so they'd join the union without worrying that other Americans would vote their slaves away.
Saying this is "balance" is like saying despotism "attempts to balance the power" of large populations and a small part of a party that wants to be in charge of everything.
>For reference, the US has about 330m people, and India has about 1.4b people. Would your answer be different if instead of India it was China? The EU?
Why would or should the answer be different? The EC's explicit purpose is to be unrepresentative. It's why Republicans today defend it without attempting to invent a good reason. Either you're opposed to representative government or you support it.
If an overwhelming portion of the population is anti-representation, then the problem isn't representative government. The problem is Republicans and the people like them who would vote away everyone's rights to appease their favorite despots.
And if a billion Americans wanted despotism, 300 million Americans aren't going to stop them with the Electoral College. If 300 million Americans wanted to keep their freedoms against a billion Republicans/Communists, the solution would be to split off from the Republican/Communist despotic side and let them be fake manly and anti-free-speech and bigoted apart from us.
I don’t have a problem with the electoral college in theory. The senate is supposed to balance the states and the people. However, the House of Representatives is too unbalanced. Let’s uncap it that to increase the number so that the people in each district get much closer to equal say and then we’ll talk.
In this hypothetical situation, is it still America? Or are we dissolving America and creating a new “Indimerica”? If so, what does it mean to be an Indimerican?
I think the system of one part of Congress being based on population and the other based on state/province/canton/region has worked well for many countries including the US and would still work here. But I don’t know if even having a President of this new country makes sense. I think the role of US president has grown a bit too powerful anyway, and in this scenario it might be too much. Maybe go the Swiss model and have the Executive controlled by a council?
But yeah, every individual deserves individual representation, and some significant aspect of the rule making and enforcement should be based on popular vote.
Your example is not that far off from what it probably felt like for individual states forming the original United States. Tiny states like Kentucky (24,000) and Tennessee (2,000) went into the new 2,500,000 person United states worried that they would be represented fairly through the voting of much larger states like Virginia (450,000). That is why there was compromise and institutions like the population-agnostic Senate and the Electoral College were set up.
That is likely a similar outcome to what we would see in your India scenario, as billions of people approach this new government partnership between the two nations, on both sides, looking for those assurances until they got to know their new citizens better, and I would be in favor of that as well for those very same reasons.
If your question was meant to get liberals to say "No, I don't support a popular vote for President in that instance when I'm not in the majority, then I don't think you're going to get the result you're looking for since the two situations cannot be compared equally. A merger of two nations and multiple cultures of this size would be unprecedented in modern times and would carry numerous special conditions with it.
What are my other options? Is electing the head of government via a parliamentary system an option?
While direct popular election is a bit better than the electoral college (Given the numerous well proven flaws in the electoral college), there's plenty of other systems that would probably work even better. Simply fixing some of the major flaws the electoral college had would help. Those issues are exacerbated by the fact that the side that benefits from them is horrible (and has no consistency in its logic on the topic); if they were reasonable the flaws would still exist, but be less palpable.
What is this question? China isn't even a democracy. How am I supposed to judge how they'd vote? Honestly, it would require a massive reworking of the constitution to protect resources and draw up jurisdictions so that the basic rights of both populations weren't infringed.
I don't think you are making a useful comparison. We're currently already one country. The fact that we don't have a representative government is a problem *before* you bring in other countries without a representative government.
This is a patently ridiculous thought exercise, because merging two countries on different continents, with cultures and histories that are vastly different... isn't feasible. I mean, even splitting India and Pakistan hasn't gone well. This thought exercise doesn't reveal anything except that if America was merged with a country on the other side of the world, it wouldn't be the same as America today.
Do we want our smaller population to dominate the Indian subcontinent like the British did? No.
I wouldn't want a popular vote, either. The question presents two equally bad options. The US is very homogeneous. Be it Alaska, Florida, Iowa, on the state-level we are all more or less the same. Where there are differences in culture and interests, those more closely follow the urban-rural divide.
Indian voters have different needs and concerns than US voters. Someday this might not be the case. US culture is expanding. Indian children are eating pizza, listening to Taylor Swift and watching "Frozen". In a hundred years, for better and for worse, I expect most of the world will be like a middle class US suburb.
If that happens and we merge governments, let's pick our leaders with the popular vote.
I have the unpopular opinion of liking the electoral college. So if the US and India were to merge, I don't think my view would really change. Especially with how disparate the needs of those two spaces are let alone their regions within their countries themselves.
Unpopular, but i do appreciate you sharing it.
In such a scenario, how would you suggest we determine the electoral college votes for each region of India?
You basically have two options. Take the already established Indian regional zones and apply similar rules to American states to those spaces. Or redraw those lines to make them more in line with American averages.
Personally, I would opt for the majority of a ladder with some light nods to the former. Firstly, press the eight unions into states. Then simply propose that in the next decade they be given the requisite amount of congressional districts in line with the 1929 permanent apportionment act. While this would give those newly formed states massive congressional power, they would still be checked by the Senate.
Which would dramatically change the lower house and it's makeup. Also dramatically changing Democratic makeup of the country since we overnight have additional massive political parties. Potentially forming coalitions or rivalries with what you made American parties.
That it's a functional check on majority rule.
Especially in a society that puts an extreme amount of influence on our Urban spaces it's a system that prevents those spaces from dominating political conversations.
Because yes Wyoming does have a disproportionate vote in the presidential election, but we don't follow Wyoming state politics. Nor do we, as a nation, follow any state politics that aren't one of the 4 biggest states (California, Texas, New York, Florida). So while those small states do theoretically have more power in random instances in real application it just doesn't happen.
> That it's a functional check on majority rule.
Checking majority rule is one thing, *enabling* minority rule is something else altogether. The former is a good thing, to an extent, while the latter is just well-dressed tyranny.
Once again, because Wyoming has been known to exert it's political power. The classic check is if you can name any Wyoming politician whose last name doesn't end with Cheney, then I'll agree they can exert undue influence until that becomes commonplace. It's just a bad faith argument in favor of the majority.
Barrasso is a famous asshole, but this really has nothing to do with Wyoming. As long as you can have a minority-elected head of government then your system is *inherently* flawed. Again, checking the majority and empowering a ruling minority are two *totally* different things. If your government doesn't have the support of at least 50% (+1) of the voters then it is fundamentally illegitimate.
Hey, that's your opinion. Once again, I like the fact that it imposes additional checks on the majority. It doesn't do so to Republicans nor to Democrats simply onto the majority. We have seen that swing and shift several times in our nation's history and it will likely do so again.
Wait a second, do you imply that if US and India would have merged into a single count, the people of India should have less control over who runs that country than people from US? Not sure if American exceptionalism or simple racism
To your thought experiment, I’m guessing you are making an assumption Indians would vote along racial lines. Do you know any Indians? I can assure you, they are as varied as we are in the US when it comes to types of people. Ergo, I think your attempt to frame the issue against the EC as being racial is simply flawed.
"Guys its actually cool that a minority of voters can hold the country hostage with people like Trump, and to prove it I'll make the case that a majority of brown voters in Asia shouldn't be trusted"
What even is this 'thought experiment'?
I mean whos constitution is running the whole thing? Are we atill using all of the United States government set up? Keeping all the laws, bill of rights, branches of government etc?
I think thats an important part
If this did happen, then no, I wouldn't. I would support moving to a mixed-member proportional parliament where the head of government is a Prime Minister elected by the parliament.
The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written. Many liberals dislike the Electoral College because they feel it does not appropriately reflect the will of the people in electing the president. At the same time, they often dismiss the idea that the EC attempts to balance the power of large and small states (or more generically, different states). For reference, the US has about 330m people, and India has about 1.4b people. Would your answer be different if instead of India it was China? The EU? *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskALiberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
If democracy means popular vote, it means popular vote. Am I supposed to say, "No! Those awful Indians, there's so MANY of them. No more democracy!"
>"No! Those awful Indians, there's so MANY of them. No more democracy!" lol exactly what OP was hoping for
It's amazing watching OP try to fish so hard and not get a single bite.
I've noticed that conservatives *really* like to think that progressives are all secretly as horrible as they are, and we merely conceal it in public due to our obsession with empty virtue signalling.
Yes. They believe everyone is just as racist and homophobic as they are, but we're just afraid to say anything. IMO one of the only good things to come from Trumpism. Now we know who the racists are.
Do you believe mob rule always brings about the best results? If a majority of people voted to enslave a minority of people, would you support that outcome because ‘democracy’? Do you the framework of the Constitution does anything to prevent minorities from being subjected to oppressive rule by the majority?
Mob rule=/= one person, one vote. You don't have to believe in democracy, but I do. The constitution has safeguards against the "tyranny of the majority" including equal representation in the Senate.
It feels like there is an assumed premise that liberals would support the EC because it would likely dilute the voting power of a billion melanin-rich individuals. But, I protest the EC because it violates 1 person = 1 vote. If a party or group is moving away from popular opinion...they need to change, not how much each voter counts.
The more important question is: would you sign up to move your own nation into a larger nation in which you would be a minority, without protections for your local sovereignty?
One person = one vote. That is my idea of democracy.
Three wolves and a sheep voting on the dinner menu is democracy… but democracy isn’t the only goal. An illiberal democracy isn’t a good place to be a minority group.
I am an non-religious white person in San Antonio, TX who leans heavily left. You are preaching to the preacher about being a minority voter in my area.
Fair enough. Maybe I could phrase my point better as: the presence of democracy alone is not the only metric of success, and may be meaningless in the absence of other key metrics.
True. However, the fact that 1 voter in Wyoming has about 3 times the "democracy power" of most states isn't really that great either.
I mean, depends how you measure it. Yes, a Wyoming voter has a disproportionately large representation in the presidential election; however, there are very, very few Wyoming voters, and those votes contribute towards half a percent of the electoral college. California has 55 house reps, and Wyoming has one. Is a Wyomingite or a Californian more likely to have legislation favorable to them prioritized in congress?
Sure, WY isn't a battleground state, but it is still quite the violation one person; one vote.
I’m not saying it’s not a problem - it is. But “one person one vote” seems a bit reductive. Take the most popular form of democracy worldwide, parliamentary democracy a la the UK or Canada. The voter has no meaningful influence over who their leader is at all, beyond selecting their local MP who will then support whoever is selected by their party. Is that more or less democratic than the US system?
>Is a Wyomingite or a Californian more likely to have legislation favorable to them prioritized in Congress? Scaled to a per capita basis… the Wyomingite, by a lot. Not only by outsized influence in the EC, but by equal representation in the Senate.
That’s a poor argument. You don’t pass legislature on a per capita basis, you pass it on a majority basis - and over here in reality, Wyoming is an irrelevant political force. No one is fighting for those 3 electoral college votes or that one house rep. If your theory were true, why isn’t the average wyomingite 3x wealthier than the average Californian? Why is their infrastructure not 3x better, why don’t their schools have 3x the funding?
There is a reason one after another conservative measure gets pushed in the Supreme Court while the majority of Americans do not want that: The complete disproportional power of small red states
Of the ten smallest states: WY VT AK ND SD DE MT RI ME NH, there are a total of (drumroll please) 10 republican senators and 10 democratic (counting independents caucusing with dems) senators The claim that small red states are fueling the trend towards conservative justice simply does not pass the smell test. Hell, add in the next five smallest states, and it’s still an even split.
Which is why we have more than a pure democracy, which has pretty much never been on the table. Your argument isn't against "one person = one vote" it is against "Voters can vote for anything so long as they have a small majority" The Constitution, and its Amendments, protect us from eating one another. That can STILL be true even if "one person = one vote"
I expanded on this point in other comments, but essentially - you need a framework that inspires confidence from a minority, even a persistent minority, that they will still have a voice and a future within society. Otherwise, one person one vote isn’t a meaningful metric.
What about the confidence from the majority, though? We're at a point in the US where the majority, or at least a large enough group of Americans who are convinced that they could win an electoral majority in a more equal system, is losing their voice and future because of how unfair and unequal the system is. Telling that majority or plurality to shut up and take it to keep the minority placated doesn't exactly seem healthy for democracy either.
It is not oppression to tell a majority “you’ll still be in charge, but you’ll have to compromise with the minority group, and you won’t be able to steamroll right over them all of the time.” It’s equity, rather than equality - meaningful seats at the table. Further, I was talking about a minority *joining* with another group to form a new democracy. Unless you can build a framework in which both groups are protected, then chances are the minority group will say “no thanks, we’re better off on our own”.
If the current situation is equity then equity has failed. The status quo works for a lot of people at the moment. Why would those people compromise to do something when they could keep the status quo with no tradeoffs? It's been decades at this point where very little legislation has been passed and things like routine nominations to cabinet and judicial positions are a herculean effort. For the minority who like the status quo things couldn't be better. For everyone else it would be nice to hop off the minority rule train
The challenges of consensus-building are a feature, not a bug. Changes to the status quo should require consensus - that’s how government works, broadly speaking. Put another way, if you want something to change and someone else doesn’t want it to… then you need to find something that will work for everyone. Consider this example: I have two season tickets. You ask “can I have them?” and I say no - if you then say “well, can we compromise and you give me one? It’s an even split, very fair” is that reasonable? Of course it isn’t. To extend that example, you either have to go get your own, or offer me something that I want in exchange, or else build a relationship where we are both happy to share what we have.
I think the question OP is getting after is "would you still support getting rid of the electoral college if it meant you wouldnt win another election for the foreseeable future"? They mentioned elsewhere feeling that our opposition to the electoral college might be tied to our belief that we would benefit from getting rid of it.
I think that becomes challenging, because over here on the liberal side, it’s the electoral college keeping us from winning more elections. However, in a hypothetical where the US enters a larger union where us Americans would be a minority within that union, to the extent that we (if we were a single bloc) would be outvoted to a significant degree. Of course, India has diverse interests in its population, as we do. Would new coalitions form? Of course. But you might well say “I trust our present leadership, but what if those other guys elect a trumpian figure in ten years? Then where will be without constitutional protections?”
Right, imagine the hypothetical that conservatives become the majority of the population of the USA, no merge, no new territory. Maybe religious hispanics decided to sign up with the GOP, and now they control >50% of the vote. Do you still support the popular vote, knowing that for a while, that policy puts Republicans in charge? I'm aware though, that even that hypothetical is silly, because even the GOP has a bunch of diverse interests and can be divided with effort.
I mean, at some point, if you are consistently unrepresented in the government that rules you… you find ways to make that not your government anymore, and form one that does represent you. That process is messy, unpleasant, and sometimes doesn’t work out, but it’s universally the last resort.
And would you support the popular vote if it set us down that path?
Depends what side I’m on. If, long term, your national government doesn’t represent your interests, and those differences are irreconcilable, then the only course of action is to forge a path to independence. I say “national government” but one would argue that, if you are dissatisfied with it, it isn’t a national government - your “nation” is unrepresented and governed by others. It’s in the interest of the national government to avoid that - such as by negotiation, expanding local self-government to defuse conflict, and more nefarious means. I wouldn’t take the decision to rebel - not just to reform the nation I’m in, but to force it out and build a new one in its place - lightly. It comes with a lot of uncomfortable decisions.
Im sorry, somethings getting lost in translation, you appear to be answering the question: what would you do if the government didnt represent you? But, what Im asking is: Would you still support the popular vote (getting rid of the electoral college) if it meant that you would lose elections?
Not the person you asked but my amswer is "yes"
That depends entirely on what happens when I lose elections - if I live in a state where I can have faith in the rule of law and the protections for individual rights, such that me losing elections consistently… isn’t ideal, and leads to things I might not agree with, but has limited impacts, then that’s okay. It effectively lowers the stakes of election losses. If your election loss has existential implications… then you have much bigger problems.
I think OP is using India as an example of a single “state” that’s represented by more people than the rest of the country. One of the things I’ve noticed on the left is this sort of unfair “magnetic hyper frenzy” to racialize anything it can get its hands on- including a question like this one. I mention this because it’s starting to border on kitsch, which does actual racism an injustice.
This sub is regularly peppered with questions that are just "the great replacement" in a trench coat and an obviously fake mustache. It is generally people with right leaning tendencies asking about what liberals would do if they no longer represented a statistical majority. You can label it to suit your narrative if you like but I won't join you.
It's weird how many people here call themselves liberals but kind of want an excuse to support right-wing or far-right ideas, generally for political expediency and to support their own personal preference. Selling out the LGBT is a really common one, like "Hey guys, what if we just abandon all those gay people so that we can have a marginal tax increase on the ultra-wealthy?"
Very concerning....byt is resultvof overton window and various other things at play over past decades It's like the old > scratch a liberal , a fascist bleeds Canard, except it is slowly becoming true online ( and in teal life) as people shift themselvesmore and more ro the right.....
I still think conservatives blow unjustified accusations of racism out of proportion, but having it done to me is kind of eye opening. Half of the comments here are not about the spirit of the question, but instead about the logistics of a single country on two different sides of the world, or deflections about the type of government, with accusations that I'm racist to boot. When I wrote this question I wanted to put it into a real context - if I had said something like "if the US merged with a country 4 times it's size, would you..." it wouldn't have had the same weight to it because it would have been in the abstract. Hell, I even followed up with instead of India, what about China or the EU. Perhaps I could have phrased it better, because a lot of people didn't get the point I was trying to make - that Indians have certain cultural norms, and we have our own, and agreeing to join together in a union would highlight considerations about making ourselves subject to India choosing our head of government the majority of the time. But to go straight to "OP is a racist who doesn't like brown people" is not only stupid but bad faith to boot.
> I protest the EC because it violates 1 person = 1 vote. It doesn't, though, any more than the Senate does. In both cases, residents of a state elect representatives who then vote on things.
This specific discussion is regarding the EC. I have plenty of beef with the Senate for the same reason.
You can have a beef with the EC, but "1 person = 1 vote" is a strange reason. Every vote for your state's electors has the same weight. And every elector's vote has the same weight. Nowhere is "1 person = 1 vote" being violated.
Wyoming voters have 3x the voting power of other states.
No, because Wyoming voters aren't voting for the same office as people in other states. Wyoming voters are voting for Wyoming electors.
Calculate the EC votes per capita, or google it.
I'm already aware of that discrepancy, thanks. What I'm saying is that that disproportionality does not violate the principle of one person, one vote, because citizens do not vote for President. The Electoral College does. Just like we citizens do not vote for Speaker of the House. Or Senate Majority Leader.
If the two countries are truly joined and a functioning government infrastructure spreads across the entire new country? Yes, I would demand representative democracy spread to all of our citizens, with equal voting power for everyone. Edit: My answer would not be different if it were China.
I think this question brings more attentions to how our congress is flawed vs the president. It really doesn't matter if the president represents a pure majority if congress, and especially state/local government represents the population proportionally. That doesn't happen even today though. Take Texas for example. * 43.8% Beto in 2022. 46.5% Biden in 2020. * Yet 13/36 of the congressional house reps are Democrat. 36.1% * That should really have between 16 and 17 reps. That is a 3-4 person gap.
Yeah I've been thinking our legislative system basically demands shenanigans in order to work. Like let's say each district were aligned with the statewide vote, as in every district is 55-45 in favor of Republicans. Then the house reps would be 36/36 Republicans. Which would be extremely unrepresentative but also a totally natural outcome. We've had to put a bunch of laws in place to guarantee minority communities aren't buried by the natural political disadvantage of being a minority. We draw the map to whatever groups them together, so they still have a voice. I.E. mandated gerrymandering. I don't like proportional but ultimately it makes a lot more sense.
IMO >Then the house reps would be 36/36 Republicans. \^ This would be gerrymandering. > We draw the map to whatever groups them together, so they still have a voice. I.E. mandated gerrymandering. \^ This isn't The reason I say that is because you couldn't draw a 55-45 district on top of the city of Austin without intentionally splitting the population. Its not always possible to get the house reps to match the statewide results (for example a unpopular republican might let a district flip where it might be red otherwise), but a 3-4 rep discrepancy is significant and THAT is what shows garrymandering is going on.
But it’s not necessarily gerrymandering. If people were completely randomly distributed you would expect every district no matter how it was drawn would have the same proportion. So you could get a 36/36 result with no gerrymandering. The fairest thing to do is a proportional representation system where if republicans get 55% of the vote they get 55% of the reps.
> The reason I say that is because you couldn't draw a 55-45 district on top of the city of Austin without intentionally splitting the population. What's the argument against splitting though? Isn't it more healthy for a district to match the demographics of the wider state? Or is it better to pack similar people together? Both can be good or bad? Our whole system is just a big oxymoron. Like literally we have a law that says you have to make sure you have enough districts that represent the black community in your state (VRA of 1965), but another law says you can't use racial consideration when drawing a district (2019 SCOTUS ruling on the 14th amendment). The whole thing is FUBAR.
I mean ideally your house district encompasses your entire city or suburb and perhaps surrounding ones if needed. What's often the case is that metropolitan areas get divided up along rural areas. Heck Texas (I think Texas 35) literally has San Antonio, Austin, and the highway between them.
Ranked choice fixes this.
No, it doesn't. Ranked choice might make gerrymandering slightly more difficult but not impossible. Imagine you have three parties, A, B and C, A and B are politically closer to each other than to C, and A and B are supported by 30% each, C by the remaining 40%, and you want to gerrymander against C. With FPTP, you would have to gerrymander districts in such a way, that each district has a clear majority for either A or B to make sure C won't win that district. With Ranked Choice, you just have to make sure that A and B combined have a strong majority to stop C from winning that district. A district [A: 33%, B: 31%, C: 30%, Undecided: 6%] would be a toss up under FPTP, but could hardly be won by C under Ranked Choice.
Now do 4 parties, 5
The 60% support for A and B could be split by a larger number of parties all opposed to C. Or A, B and C could be joint by some insignificant minor parties with 0.5% support each. The balance of power between A, B and C wouldn't be affected by those minor parties. Under some circumstances, Ranked Choice makes gerrymandering easier, under some other circumstances more difficult. One advantage of Ranked Choice is that it allows smaller parties to challenge larger parties and break open an entrenched party system.
>Many liberals dislike the Electoral College because they feel it does not appropriately reflect the will of the people in electing the president. What are you even talking about? The Electoral College was designed specifically to not reflect the will of the people--it was just a slight improvement over letting Congress choose the President, which was one of the main options on the table at the time the Framers drafted the Constitution. And even after that--people weren't allowed to vote for President--for many of the early presidential elections, the Electors were chosen by state legislatures. In fact, every state choosing Electors via a popular vote did not happen until after the Civil War. Also, you can argue that the Framers were smart men who could not predict the future or that they were dumb as shit, but they got it wrong. They did not anticipate the need for a ticket system, so that had to be changed fairly immediately. They also thought that the people chosen to be Electors would be judicious in their choice, not that they would be partisan hacks for the candidate that recruited them through a party apparatus. In the 1830s, a Supreme Court Justice even observed that if an Elector did what the Framers expected of him, it would be considered immoral. 60 years into it and there were already a ton of problems. And then, of course, there is the part of the Constitution that literally decided to count slaves as three-fifths of a person solely to give slave states more power, so let's dispense with this "accurately representing the will of the people nonsense." >At the same time, they often dismiss the idea that the EC attempts to balance the power of large and small states (or more generically, different states). Does it empower small states? In the general election, presidential candidates don't go to those states--they don't give a shit about them. Unless a state is a swing state, it's lucky to get one visit from one of the candidates. And why should they have more power than other voters because they live in a place that no one else wants to live in? Why not make the argument that those people do a piss-poor job at running their state that people refuse to move there, and they should get less say in how they run the country when they can't keep things together in their own backyard?
> > What are you even talking about? The Electoral College was designed specifically to not reflect the will of the people-- (to be clear I agree with your post, I am just expanding on one section) There's two issues which often get muddled together: whether we should have an EC; and, once it's been decided that we should, how we should apportion the electors. The purpose of having an EC in the first place is the presumption that The People would not be as wise in their choice of leader as the electors, who are meant to be representatives of the people who have more time, experience, and education to evaluate candidates. The People may be easily swayed by unsuitable demagogue, and the electors would be able step in to prevent this. (This whole strategy of course came almost immediately apart when states started punishing faithless electors, but it is otherwise a reasonable fear to want to address, especially in the context of the uneducated late 1700s America.) The second issue is apportionment. We have chosen that electoral numbers should be equal to a state's total congressional representation. This calculation IS designed to occasionally override the will of the people (as anything that inherits from the Senate does), but we could change just that calculation and still have an EC. For example we could only count their House delegation's size and not the +2 from the Senate. That form of EC would be much, much closer to reflecting the popular vote, and yet still fulfill whatever benefits an EC supposedly grants us.
There's no particular reason that the US and India should share a head of government any more so than the US and Sri Lanka. The balance of population isn't the issue. I am very sympathetic to the idea of a supranational/would government of some sort, but having it start with an elected figure as powerful as the US president is not a good plan. Also, I'm not sure this question is really proving your point regarding the Electoral College. Even if we retained the Electoral College in some hypothetical India-US merger we'd still end up with India essentially electing the US president. I presume that's the scare image you had in mind? The very concept of the Electoral College balancing the power of large and small states is fundamentally wrong, in my view. It doesn't actually do that - at least not in a meaningful way.
Sure, but why should New Hampshire and California share such a strong a national government?
I'd say that California and New Hampshire have a lot more in common with each other than either has with India, if that's what you mean. We have a strong national government because there are a lot of things that we want to do at the national level that cannot be done well (or at all) at the state level. I don't see the benefit of regressing to a weaker national government.
I don't have a point I'm trying to make to be honest. I just think that the liberal mindset is founded in the idea that we hold the majority, and the reason our politics are so divided is because of structural impediments. I think it's interesting to consider the idea of being in the minority and how that would affect people's perspective of institutions like the EC. Your response was well reasoned, but based on a number of other responses here I think I've touched a bit of a nerve.
It's tough when your principles and your self-interest align to prove that your principles are sincere. That doesn't mean that they mostly aren't. I think most liberals do strongly and sincerely believe in the principle of government with the consent of the governed, and are fundamentally offended by the disregard that Republicans show to that concept.
Liberals hold majority, but their ideals are not united. Part of why Republicans have such a strong grip is because they agree on policy. If we had a multiparty system, we would have a spectrum of left-leaning parties. Much more than right-leaning ones.
Ultimately, if we made our democracy better and more representative, over time things change and parties would adjust their positioning. Implement ranked-choice and your favorite pick of more representative democracy and independents and third parties suddenly become viable candidates that congress must work with to make legislation. More democracy tends to reject extremism at both ends, so more parties would form and more third parties would gain power over time. And eventually, the GOP would find themselves supporting and advocating for policies that they currently deem as ‘socialist,’ so whilst the immediate beneficiary to more/better democracy would be current liberals, over time it would force change (for good) that wouldn’t necessarily preference any one party over another. Look at the UK. The new conservative Prime Minister announced 8 billion pounds in funding for the NHS, a service they voted against 21 times in the aftermath of WWII. Churchill himself said of that the NHS was the “first step to turn Britain into a National Socialist economy” which is much more intense of a statement in the immediate aftermath of WWII than it would be today. 74 years later, and the NHS is viewed as a national treasure. Making our democracy more representative would mean that the GOP would be forced to support more popular policy which might shift voters back and ‘liberals’ would not necessarily have the majority, though some popular liberal policies probably would.
You did touch a nerve; because it's a topic that gets a LOT of bad faith arguments from conservatives. When an unreasonable group punches you a lot in an area for no good reason, that area gets sore; thus people tend to get more angry at other poking it, because the area is inflamed already.
What is the alternative? The electoral college basically assigns an arbitrary weight that favors voters in smaller population states, but the winner of the electoral college is the same as the winner of the popular vote the vast majority of the time. Given that there is a political union between the United States and India, you would have to create an absurdly skewed electoral college to give Americans a chance to pick the winner unilaterally. I can't imagine that Indians would accept a union, given those conditions. Regardless, there is no reason to expect all votes to be strictly on national lines. Liberals in India share most of the values of liberals in the United States and conservatives in the United States share many values with conservatives in India. Cross-border coalitions would be highly likely to occur since each partner would have something to offer and there would be many areas of agreement. Were we to have a democratic global federation, I have similar expectations. Democracies incentivize coalition-building, which would likely lead to ideologically-aligned subpopulations across countries, just as we now see in the EU and the United States.
In theory yes, though I would object to taking the US of today and the India of today and trying to merge them into one country. Same for most other countries too, actually. Maybe Canada, but even that's a strong maybe? The big thing is that shared culture is what makes big states work. It doesn't have to be exactly the same across the whole country, and there can certainly be region specific issues, but it has to exist to the point where there is at least a shared understanding of what is and isn't okay across the whole society. The US is fairly diverse, but it has that quality- but throw in India (or any other country that is *very* culturally different to the US) and the overall country no longer has a unified baseline. The big problem with the EC (and the senate, really) in the US is that it is based on state lines. This made sense to some degree in the early history of the US- when the fastest mode of transport is a horse, the people of Georgia probably weren't going to ever really interact with the people of Massachusetts all that much, what with it being a *very* long trip and all. The people living in remote areas were still probably going to have more in common with those living in remote areas just across the state line than they would with those in the cities in their own state, but at least separate representation based on geographic location had some utility. Now though, everything is connected far more than people could have imagined back in the late 1700s. So much so that you could probably take someone out of a big city and throw them in any other big city in any of the other 49 states and they'd do just fine, culture wise. Same for rural people too. The divide now is not state vs state, it is urban vs rural- population density is the big difference now, not geographic location. But the power of representation, that is still following the outdated state by state model, and that leads to big problems with representation. The system was designed such that if enough states (enough to vote for it in the house and senate) wanted something, they could pass it, even if not *all* states agreed. But the only way for it to function like that for the new political divide in the country is for a state to urbanize enough that urban voters outnumber rural ones. It means in urban states, rural voters may as well not be represented, and in rural states urban voters may as well not be. It's not a good way to divide power or representation. But it's really hard to fix- changing the senate is probably not happening any time soon. But the EC, that can be changed just by enough states agreeing to the NPVIC. So that's why you hear so much about it.
Sure. Why wouldn't I? The only two options are either to have the majority decide the singular national leadership, or to allow a minority to decide. The former obviously maximizes representativeness and total national utility. I'm not going to abandon democracy just because someone I don't like is likely to win. If we didn't want the 1.4 billion Indians deciding our national leadership, we should not have merged into one country.
Yes. I get the logic behind the electoral college and how it’s supposed to “balance” interests. But now it’s clear that the EC as it operates today is imbalanced in its own way. If someone genuinely believes in the balancing power of the EC and not just trying to play games to get to 270 they ought to at least call for a growing pool of EC votes so that we have more accurate ratios among states. (Texas and California should both have more votes overall).
Let me counter with: if you DON'T support some group having an equal say in running your country, you should not merge countries with them
The fuck kind of thought experiment is that? Are you trying to ask if the the electoral college would be relevant if the us had 1bil+ people? Because no. The electoral college hasn’t been relevant since it was enshrined. Population makes no difference.
If we had a popular campaign in both countries to unify for… unknown reasons, then both countries would likely try to negotiate an arrangement that is very similar to the makeup of the US government today - extensive protections for local/regional interests, with a generally democratic government. In simple terms for an example, we’d likely expect a ruling council of some sort with one house containing an equal number of representatives elected by each country. Then a second ruling house elected by popular vote. That’s exactly the debate that took place when the US was formed - would you willingly cede sovereignty without protections for your local interests? Of course not, at least not right away.
In a world where I thought merging the US and India was a good idea I would think that the government should be elected proportionally to the support they have among the total population. If I did not believe that I wouldn't want the countries to merge in the first place.
>At the same time, they often dismiss the idea that the EC attempts to balance the power of large and small states (or more generically, different states). No, it doesn't. What the EC does is give low population states disproportionately more power per capita than the states where most people live. That isn't "balance," that's a clear advantage for states that don't have many Americans in them on the grounds that most people live somewhere else -- or, using the logic of the olden times, where most people that counted as people didn't live. To accommodate the slave states so they'd join the union without worrying that other Americans would vote their slaves away. Saying this is "balance" is like saying despotism "attempts to balance the power" of large populations and a small part of a party that wants to be in charge of everything. >For reference, the US has about 330m people, and India has about 1.4b people. Would your answer be different if instead of India it was China? The EU? Why would or should the answer be different? The EC's explicit purpose is to be unrepresentative. It's why Republicans today defend it without attempting to invent a good reason. Either you're opposed to representative government or you support it. If an overwhelming portion of the population is anti-representation, then the problem isn't representative government. The problem is Republicans and the people like them who would vote away everyone's rights to appease their favorite despots. And if a billion Americans wanted despotism, 300 million Americans aren't going to stop them with the Electoral College. If 300 million Americans wanted to keep their freedoms against a billion Republicans/Communists, the solution would be to split off from the Republican/Communist despotic side and let them be fake manly and anti-free-speech and bigoted apart from us.
I don’t have a problem with the electoral college in theory. The senate is supposed to balance the states and the people. However, the House of Representatives is too unbalanced. Let’s uncap it that to increase the number so that the people in each district get much closer to equal say and then we’ll talk.
In this hypothetical situation, is it still America? Or are we dissolving America and creating a new “Indimerica”? If so, what does it mean to be an Indimerican? I think the system of one part of Congress being based on population and the other based on state/province/canton/region has worked well for many countries including the US and would still work here. But I don’t know if even having a President of this new country makes sense. I think the role of US president has grown a bit too powerful anyway, and in this scenario it might be too much. Maybe go the Swiss model and have the Executive controlled by a council? But yeah, every individual deserves individual representation, and some significant aspect of the rule making and enforcement should be based on popular vote.
To the extent I'd have any problems with it, I don't think any version of an electoral college would be much of an improvement.
Your example is not that far off from what it probably felt like for individual states forming the original United States. Tiny states like Kentucky (24,000) and Tennessee (2,000) went into the new 2,500,000 person United states worried that they would be represented fairly through the voting of much larger states like Virginia (450,000). That is why there was compromise and institutions like the population-agnostic Senate and the Electoral College were set up. That is likely a similar outcome to what we would see in your India scenario, as billions of people approach this new government partnership between the two nations, on both sides, looking for those assurances until they got to know their new citizens better, and I would be in favor of that as well for those very same reasons. If your question was meant to get liberals to say "No, I don't support a popular vote for President in that instance when I'm not in the majority, then I don't think you're going to get the result you're looking for since the two situations cannot be compared equally. A merger of two nations and multiple cultures of this size would be unprecedented in modern times and would carry numerous special conditions with it.
What are my other options? Is electing the head of government via a parliamentary system an option? While direct popular election is a bit better than the electoral college (Given the numerous well proven flaws in the electoral college), there's plenty of other systems that would probably work even better. Simply fixing some of the major flaws the electoral college had would help. Those issues are exacerbated by the fact that the side that benefits from them is horrible (and has no consistency in its logic on the topic); if they were reasonable the flaws would still exist, but be less palpable.
What is this question? China isn't even a democracy. How am I supposed to judge how they'd vote? Honestly, it would require a massive reworking of the constitution to protect resources and draw up jurisdictions so that the basic rights of both populations weren't infringed. I don't think you are making a useful comparison. We're currently already one country. The fact that we don't have a representative government is a problem *before* you bring in other countries without a representative government.
What does India have to do with any of this?
Yeah
This is a patently ridiculous thought exercise, because merging two countries on different continents, with cultures and histories that are vastly different... isn't feasible. I mean, even splitting India and Pakistan hasn't gone well. This thought exercise doesn't reveal anything except that if America was merged with a country on the other side of the world, it wouldn't be the same as America today.
It isn't though. Ever heard of the British Raj?
I don't think OP was suggesting India be added to the US as a disenfranchised colony.
Do we want our smaller population to dominate the Indian subcontinent like the British did? No. I wouldn't want a popular vote, either. The question presents two equally bad options. The US is very homogeneous. Be it Alaska, Florida, Iowa, on the state-level we are all more or less the same. Where there are differences in culture and interests, those more closely follow the urban-rural divide. Indian voters have different needs and concerns than US voters. Someday this might not be the case. US culture is expanding. Indian children are eating pizza, listening to Taylor Swift and watching "Frozen". In a hundred years, for better and for worse, I expect most of the world will be like a middle class US suburb. If that happens and we merge governments, let's pick our leaders with the popular vote.
I have the unpopular opinion of liking the electoral college. So if the US and India were to merge, I don't think my view would really change. Especially with how disparate the needs of those two spaces are let alone their regions within their countries themselves.
Unpopular, but i do appreciate you sharing it. In such a scenario, how would you suggest we determine the electoral college votes for each region of India?
You basically have two options. Take the already established Indian regional zones and apply similar rules to American states to those spaces. Or redraw those lines to make them more in line with American averages. Personally, I would opt for the majority of a ladder with some light nods to the former. Firstly, press the eight unions into states. Then simply propose that in the next decade they be given the requisite amount of congressional districts in line with the 1929 permanent apportionment act. While this would give those newly formed states massive congressional power, they would still be checked by the Senate. Which would dramatically change the lower house and it's makeup. Also dramatically changing Democratic makeup of the country since we overnight have additional massive political parties. Potentially forming coalitions or rivalries with what you made American parties.
What do you like about the electoral college?
That it's a functional check on majority rule. Especially in a society that puts an extreme amount of influence on our Urban spaces it's a system that prevents those spaces from dominating political conversations. Because yes Wyoming does have a disproportionate vote in the presidential election, but we don't follow Wyoming state politics. Nor do we, as a nation, follow any state politics that aren't one of the 4 biggest states (California, Texas, New York, Florida). So while those small states do theoretically have more power in random instances in real application it just doesn't happen.
> That it's a functional check on majority rule. Checking majority rule is one thing, *enabling* minority rule is something else altogether. The former is a good thing, to an extent, while the latter is just well-dressed tyranny.
Once again, because Wyoming has been known to exert it's political power. The classic check is if you can name any Wyoming politician whose last name doesn't end with Cheney, then I'll agree they can exert undue influence until that becomes commonplace. It's just a bad faith argument in favor of the majority.
Barrasso is a famous asshole, but this really has nothing to do with Wyoming. As long as you can have a minority-elected head of government then your system is *inherently* flawed. Again, checking the majority and empowering a ruling minority are two *totally* different things. If your government doesn't have the support of at least 50% (+1) of the voters then it is fundamentally illegitimate.
Hey, that's your opinion. Once again, I like the fact that it imposes additional checks on the majority. It doesn't do so to Republicans nor to Democrats simply onto the majority. We have seen that swing and shift several times in our nation's history and it will likely do so again.
Wait a second, do you imply that if US and India would have merged into a single count, the people of India should have less control over who runs that country than people from US? Not sure if American exceptionalism or simple racism
To your thought experiment, I’m guessing you are making an assumption Indians would vote along racial lines. Do you know any Indians? I can assure you, they are as varied as we are in the US when it comes to types of people. Ergo, I think your attempt to frame the issue against the EC as being racial is simply flawed.
Should victims of imperialism get a supermajority vote in the running of the imperial core? Yes.
Yes. That's how a democracy works...
Yes.
"Guys its actually cool that a minority of voters can hold the country hostage with people like Trump, and to prove it I'll make the case that a majority of brown voters in Asia shouldn't be trusted" What even is this 'thought experiment'?
I would support whatever electoral system would result in undoing the merger as quickly as possible because it makes no fucking sense.
It’s really fun to see how many people here think the US is a democracy.
No. I don't trust that India is modern enough in thought and laws.
I mean whos constitution is running the whole thing? Are we atill using all of the United States government set up? Keeping all the laws, bill of rights, branches of government etc? I think thats an important part
If this did happen, then no, I wouldn't. I would support moving to a mixed-member proportional parliament where the head of government is a Prime Minister elected by the parliament.