The Electoral College debate continued, literacy

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First, one of the reasons the Electoral College is increasingly biased toward the pro-government side of the calculation versus the pro-person side is that the Electoral College’s calculation of electoral votes based on population is limited (for the most part) to the 435 members of Congress is membership limit established by the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929. (The exception is that DC gets real electoral votes in addition to the 435, but only one non-voting member of Congress.) If we instead used the population of the smallest state as the denominator and about 330 million as the total U.S. population, that would be 436 (435 plus one for DC) equals approximately 578 (plus or minus rounding effect). The smallest state, Wyoming, would retain its single population-based voter, while the largest, California, would go from 52 population-based votes to around 69. (For the author who thinks this overly favors blue California, the second and third largest states are Texas and Florida, which would go from a total of 66 voters to about 89 in population. Then if you consider the 102 voters in states and DC, the total size of the Electoral College would increase from 538 to 680 (one-fifth abomination) had sought.

Second, to get even closer to the original intent, we could also call for apportionment of electors among states based on the apportionment of electoral votes in each state, which was originally the case in all states, rather than on the basis of one Winner takes all system. (You would have to do this using state totals, not congressional districts, since the two are no longer synchronized. However, this has the added benefit of not including gerrymandering in the calculation.) But we could also compromise on this and Population-based voters are split, while state and DC-based voters for each state are the winners.

Miles Anderson, Minneapolis

Every four years it’s time to argue about the Electoral College, and Tice has revisited his defense of the indefensible Electoral College – pausing his argument to praise Gov. Tim Walz, the “pedantic” former schoolteacher and “well-coiffed.” California Democrats to dwarf donors. Others have deftly rebutted his argument, but have not invited us to peer into the truly anti-democratic black hole at the heart of the Electoral College agreement. If no one wins a majority of electors (270), the House of Representatives elects the president, with each state casting a single vote – one vote for Wyoming, with its roughly 580,000 residents, one vote for California’s nearly 40 million residents (some of whom are “well are “coiffed”). “) people and so on. Given the current political alignment of the states, this is a virtual guarantee of Republican victory, regardless of the popular vote. Far-fetched? This did not appear to be the case in 1968, when avowed racist George Wallace faced a strong third-party candidacy, apparently hoping to bring the election to the House of Representatives, where he would have sufficient influence over like-minded members of Congress to win concessions achieve. The teetering on the edge of the black hole so worried both Democrats and Republicans that in 1969 the House of Representatives voted 338 to 70 to send an amendment to the Senate to dissolve the Electoral College. A recent poll showed that 80% of the population supported direct election of the president. But a group of southern senators killed the amendment with a filibuster.