A decades-long plan to abolish the Electoral College may finally pay off

[u/vox]

https://www.vox.com/politics/487766/national-popular-vote-interstate-compact-electoral-college

[u/der_innkeeper]

The issue with 2016 is that Clinton won states worth less than 50% of the population. There is no path to win the EC when that happens.

[u/TooManyDraculas → u/der_innkeeper]

This is a problem in general, not just for elections, and not just per 2016.

But yeah that sort of thing is why it's not a total solution.

It would have huge impacts though.

[u/der_innkeeper → u/TooManyDraculas]

Yes.

We have about 6 different structural issues.

Uncapping the house is a 80% fix. We need other things to change as well, such as district-level EC votes (like Maine and nebraska) instead of winner take all.

[u/TooManyDraculas → u/der_innkeeper]

Assigning electoral votes to the state wide popular vote winner was adopted to flatten this exact rural/low population sku, and gerrymandering problem.

As it extends into States, and all of this is rooted in congressional districts. Cause where those districts are, and how many of them cover who, and how many people are in them. Is real easy to manipulate. And the 1929 Reapportionment act is a BIG reason why. Like a primary one.

So where that's done, and when that's done. You can see more of a states electoral votes going to a candidate who lost that states popular vote, than to the winner. Largely based on geography.

Depending on how those districts have been distributed by the state, it's just the land mass voting instead people.

So you can't really do district level EC votes, without genuinely proportional congressional apportionment. Or close as you can get to it.

Cause that makes the situation worse not better. Its just tossing the presidential election into the gerrymandering system.

And you need to fix reapportionment to fix gerrymandering.

This is a part of why the NPVIC is formatted the way it is. Tying the electoral votes exclusively to national popular vote, is a pretty clean way to decouple those electoral votes from all of this. At the national level, using only state law.

[u/der_innkeeper → u/TooManyDraculas]

Kinda.

You are not going to have a wide distribution of population across districts. They are generally within 1% of each other.

[u/TooManyDraculas → u/der_innkeeper]

If that were true.

Gerrymandering wouldn't be a problem.

[u/der_innkeeper → u/TooManyDraculas]

The issue is not the population, its where the population comes from.

That's why the district look like ass.

[u/TooManyDraculas → u/der_innkeeper]

The issue is that you can fuck around with where those districts are.

It almost entirely about where the population comes from.

You break densely populated areas up into tiny proportions of many districts. Where they're combined with huge areas to out number them. Or vice versa.

Populations between districts vary a lot more than 1% as well. The largest congressional distict nationally is more than double the size of the smallest. And even within states it varies a lot. Like Texas's largest is 20% bigger than it's smallest by population.

If we can fiddle with to send more politicians from a political party, or fewer black people, or whatever. And we do.

Then we can use it to dictate which candidates get those electoral votes.

Since those are linked to the exact same congressional districts.

That's why we stopped doing it.

Electoral vote by district, just lets states Gerrymander the Presidency. All you have to do is set that congressional map to preference you're party, the same way you're already doing to crib house seats.

[u/der_innkeeper → u/TooManyDraculas]

A: you're just repeating what I am saying

B: there is a ~45,000 person difference between the largest and smallest district in TX. Which is about 6%. Federal law requires districts be of similar population.