This is from 2007. Didn't mean anything then, doesn't mean anything now.

Well, damn. Gotta check those dates more carefully.

Referencing Governor O'Malley was the giveaway, he left office in 2015. Also the article mentions Governor Schwarzenegger, who ended his run in 2011.

Every "explanation" of the electoral college i.e. why it was created and why it's deemed as important still doesn't change the fact that it's a nice and polite way of saying individual votes don't matter when it comes to who becomes president.

We don't need civics lessons. We need amendments.

North Dakota, South Dakota, and Alaska combined have less than 3 million people and have 9 electoral votes combined.
Florida has approximately 20M people and 29 electoral votes.
California has approximately 40M people and 55 electoral votes.

Disclaimers: Florida resident who voted for Hillary.

The true solution is that if you want your vote to count, maybe you need to move from a comfortably Blue (or red) state into a state that doesn't lean with you (yet.). Despite the abhorrence of what I consider the worst person ever elected to the office, I still see the Electoral college results as a feature, not a bug of our system.

Democracy works best when it is leavened with a weight on the minority rights as well. In a pure democracyit's too easy for sudden swings.

Of course, Trump will ultimatly solve this for us on accident. He'll let the sea levels rise and everyone from the coastal cities will end up moving to the midwest anyway, and that will even out the votes.

(sarcasm. I deadly hope.)

Deadly yes, hope... well...

Newsroom Climate change


(Granted this is alarmist, but not entirely off point. We can still salvage something, but with Trump at the helm? I am pretty sure we are fucked.)

While I can understand the sentiment, and even being a Maryland resident, I'm not sure I agree with it. The members of the electoral college are supposed to represent their state, not the nation as a whole. It was very specifically laid out that way in the Federalist Papers so that corruption in any given state would not have undue influence over the entire nation.

I would rather see a system of electors that more accurately represents the will of the people, rather than the very approximate system we have now where the popular and electoral vote have a pretty wide margin where they may disagree, or simply switch to a true democratic vote.

How about dividing the electoral votes in some sort of fair manner by congressional districts than by state - similar to what Maine and Nebraska has done?

That's one of the options that would make a significant difference.

That just perpetuates the problem at a smaller scale. The problem with the electoral college is that it gives too much power to low population states. Now, that's the intent, but it's clearly skewed too far in that direction at this point. We have the exact same problem with congressional districts right now -- the low populated districts have too much power relative to the more populated districts. Again, this is the intent, and again, the balance of power is way too far to one side.

The Electoral College is actually pretty fairly proportioned by population, state-wise. The proportion problem, as with Congress, is more within the states, between densely populated urban areas and sparsely populated rural ones.

I agree that the bulk of the problem is with districting. However, when you have 2 elections in 16 years where the winner doesn't get the popular vote, I'd say that's evidence of at least a slight imbalance.

The electoral college was Hamilton's plan to place wise and respected white men in charge of voting for our President, each following his own conscience. Hamilton was dismayed (read as outraged) that electors realized that if they coordinated their state's voting, their candidate would have a better chance of winning. The US is the first and so far the last democratic republic to have electors. The ones who've followed use The Vote. In other words, what we call the Popular Vote. Another reason the electoral college was created was to allow at least 3 votes per state, regardless of population. With 13 states then, and 90% of Americans living in rural areas involved with farming, that meant a fairness principle was being enacted. Nowadays, this means that the rural area voters have much more weight in deciding who our next President is.

Sure, I'd argue that the problem isn't the way the electors are proportioned, it's with the elector system itself.