Let’s let the class decide what type of pizza to get.
Counting the votes, pepperoni wins.
Counting the votes at each table, then each counting the winner per table, pepperoni wins.
Arbitrarily dividing each table into “groups” of students, then adding those groups up to determine which choice won the table, then counting the tables… anchovies wins!
My second grade teacher did the Jane Elliot experiment in our class. I was in tears because I couldn’t talk to my best friend anymore.
Like, I don’t think I’ve ever been that upset in my life. This was like 35 years ago.
A shitty thing for a teacher to do to a second grader…but damn if it didn’t stick with me.
So, too, would something like this.
…same teacher, during the Great American Smokeout, called down to the office and told them we were going to do an “experiment” in the class. She lit up a cigarette in front of all of us, took a few deep drags, then put the cigarette on some plastic + foam model of the lungs, to show them getting soaked with tar.
The 90s were a wild time. Teachers smoking cigarettes and in class in front of 7yo’s and performing social experiments on casual racism. And people wonder why millennials need so much more mental healthcare than previous generations. We’re the last ones who sat on the rug, Indian Style.
Counting the votes- pepperoni wins.
There’s a lot of vegetarians but they don’t make up an absolute majority so their needs are ignored.
Counting the votes at each table- cheese wins, because even the two huge tables want pepperoni, many of the smaller tables are mostly vegetarians who don’t eat pepperoni.
This is why the electoral college is still relevant- to ensure that urban voters don’t bowl over suburban or rural voters who deserve to have a say in government too.
Dividing each table into groups then adding them together- that’s a scam by a pepperoni fan because they will ensure every group has 5 known pepperoni lovers and 2 others.
Okay, but cheese does not win in this system because pepperoni lovers can tolerate it while vegetarians cannot eat pepperoni. Nor does it win because minorities are getting more representation in general. Cheese wins here purely because you’ve arranged the voting system to give more power to the ones you wanted to win.
Dividing each table into groups then adding them together- that’s a scam by a pepperoni fan because they will ensure every group has 5 known pepperoni lovers and 2 others.
If it’s possible to ensure such majority of pepperoni lovers in every single group, then pepperoni lovers have an overall majority. They don’t need scams to win. In fact - you’d need scams to prevent them from winning.
Cheese wins because we don’t ignore small tables, as a simple majority system would do. I think small tables deserve to have a voice for their needs, even if there are fewer of them. It’s not right to ignore an entire group of tables simply because fewer people sit at them.
If it’s possible to ensure such majority of pepperoni lovers in every single group, then pepperoni lovers have an overall majority. They don’t need scams to win. In fact - you’d need scams to prevent them from winning.
Not necessarily.
Let’s say you have 100 people. 60 want cheese, 40 want pepperoni.
You need to split this 100 people into 6 tables, each table will vote and submit their overall request. Whichever kind of pizza most of the tables request gets ordered.
There we go. I’ve just ‘fairly, evenly’ divided 100 people into 6 tables of 16-17 people each.
And thus with my ‘simple and unimportant’ job of assigning table seating, I’ve guaranteed that pepperoni will be ordered even though a majority of the people want cheese. Tables 1-4 will vote and pepperoni will win, tables 5-6 will unanimously agree on cheese, and when we ask the tables what they want 4 out of 6 tables will vote pepperoni. And thus the minority wins because the table seating was a scam.
If the tables were assigned randomly, or if a computer grouped the tables by similar interest, age, etc, we’d get something more like a fair vote.
Cheese wins because we don’t ignore small tables, as a simple majority system would do
Why do small tables deserve this special protection from being ignored? No other minority group is getting such protection. Minority races are ignored. Minority cultures are ignored. Minorities with special dietary needs - like vegetarians, the very minority you have used to justify inflating the voting power of the small tables - are ignored. What’s so special about being seated in a smaller table that warrants silencing the majority just so that you - a minority - won’t be ignored?
Note that I said “in every single group”, and I said you because you said “will ensure every group”.
I should have emphasized it…
If the tables were assigned randomly, or if a computer grouped the tables by similar interest, age, etc, we’d get something more like a fair vote.
Another way to “get something more like a fair vote” is to count the votes by person and not by table. Actually, this is not just “something more like” a fair vote - it’s the very idea (as in “Plato’s Theory of Ideas”) of a fair vote. This what we compare any drawing of district lines to determine how fair it is.
Great response. This is the sort of intelligent conversation Reddit used to have and I love it.
Why do small tables deserve this special protection from being ignored?
Because the office is made up of both introverts and extroverts, and both make major contributions to the company. Both ways of life should have a voice, ignoring either one in favor of the other harms the whole company.
Quantity wise there’s more extroverted boisterous sales reps and middle managers (who sit at large tables) than there are introverted, socially awkward product engineers and IT people (who sit at small tables), but without those engineers and IT the company has no product to sell nor access to email. And without the sales people and their managers, the product is being developed but nobody will buy it. Both groups rely on each other, therefore both groups should have a roughly equal seat at the table.
That analogy holds up pretty well to the real world IMHO- without rural people we have no farms, no crops, no food, and (back before we sent it all to China to increase shareholder value) no manufacturing. Should we tell those who feed our nation that their voice doesn’t matter because there’s fewer of them spread out over a larger area?
No, I believe both ways of life- rural and urban- both make major contributions to society and to our nation. Ignoring either one in favor of the other harms us all.
And besides, there’s the old ‘do un to others’-- if the total rural population was greater than the urban population, would you want them imposing rules that make good sense out in the middle of Nebraska on a major city? Of course not. The reverse is also true- policies that make sense in cities often don’t work in the countryside.
A perfect example here is guns. In a major city with police on every block and a drug problem, you might not want people walking around openly carrying pistols and rifles. At the same time in a rural area it might be extremely unwise to go for a hike without an readily accessible high caliber weapon, as the woods are full of bears and other predators that might consider a human a tasty snack and consider a few 9mm rounds motivation to eat quickly rather than any sort of real threat. Two different areas, different needs, neither one should get to impose policy on the other IMHO.
The beauty of the Constitution is how it formed as a compromise of interests. Yes, slave states were pushing for extra representation, but so were small states. And the result was a compromise of interests.
Of course we dun fucked it up. The problem isn’t the strategy, the problem is how we execute it today: (from your link)
Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 68, published on March 12, 1788, laid out what he believed were the key advantages to the Electoral College. The electors come directly from the people and them alone, for that purpose only, and for that time only. This avoided a party-run legislature or a permanent body that could be influenced by foreign interests before each election. Hamilton explained that the election was to take place among all the states, so no corruption in any state could taint “the great body of the people” in their selection.
I don’t think the Framers imagined, or would have wanted, anything like the two-party duopoly we have today. The reality is we have a party-run legislature, a party-run executive, and a permanent body (RNC / DNC) that ARE influenced by all kinds of interests, foreign and domestic.
Because those parties have become corrupt, and it’s essentially impossible to get elected without them, the corruption is spread nationwide.
Another way to “get something more like a fair vote” is to count the votes by person and not by table. Actually, this is not just “something more like” a fair vote - it’s the very idea (as in “Plato’s Theory of Ideas”) of a fair vote. This what we compare any drawing of district lines to determine how fair it is.
Going to the pizza analogy- let’s say each table puts forward one representative to serve on the Lunch Committee, which decides on the menu and food vendor selection. This involves a lot of minor decisions, like it doesn’t make sense to poll the entire company about which vendor should operate the cafeteria; it makes more sense to have a smaller committee that will review contract proposals and stand up for the needs of their table in vendor selection and menu creation.
However, ‘tyranny of the majority’ is a thing. Majority rule only works when something protects the legitimate interest of the minority. For example let’s say the company is in Texas- you’ve got 98 people who love BBQ, one person who can’t eat pork for religious reasons and one vegetarian. If you don’t force their needs to be considered, lunch will be pulled pork every day and those two get disenfranchised.
Or do you suggest we just poll all 100 people ‘what do you want for lunch’ and go with the result of ‘pulled pork every day’?
Because the office is made up of both introverts and extroverts, and both make major contributions to the company. Both ways of life should have a voice, ignoring either one in favor of the other harms the whole company.
I can understand why you’d want to give extra representation to minorities with special dietary requirements, but not how said people find themselves in the smaller tables.
I can understand how introverts find themselves in the smaller tables, but not why you’d want to give them extra representation when it comes to picking the pizza.
That is, of course, assuming we are still using the same analogy. If the analogy changes to “running the company” - then companies are not democracies. All departments are heard, but the CEO has the final saying. Voting does happens higher up, at the board, but there the representation is based on shares, which is supposed to represent their investment in the company. Under capitalism, that is - no one here on Lemmy is going to agree that these shares represent any kind of contribution whatsoever. But at the very least it’s a principled way (even if you disagree with the principles) to distribute the voting power.
And besides, there’s the old ‘do un to others’-- if the total rural population was greater than the urban population, would you want them imposing rules that make good sense out in the middle of Nebraska on a major city? Of course not. The reverse is also true- policies that make sense in cities often don’t work in the countryside.
This is not an argument in favor of letting the minority decide on the majority. This is an argument in favor of shifting power to local government. In the analogy - letting the people of each table decide what they want to order for their table. Sheer madness.
Going to the pizza analogy- let’s say each table puts forward one representative to serve on the Lunch Committee, which decides on the menu and food vendor selection. This involves a lot of minor decisions, like it doesn’t make sense to poll the entire company about which vendor should operate the cafeteria; it makes more sense to have a smaller committee that will review contract proposals and stand up for the needs of their table in vendor selection and menu creation.
But there are not “lots of minor decisions”. The Electoral College makes one major decision - who will be the President. As simple as a ballot can get.
But even if you did need a committee - there are enough method to elect a committee that’ll proportionally represent the populace. The methods that yield better representation require a more complex ballot (because they involve ranked voting), but even the simpler ones are better than intentionally skewing the representation.
However, ‘tyranny of the majority’ is a thing. Majority rule only works when something protects the legitimate interest of the minority. For example let’s say the company is in Texas- you’ve got 98 people who love BBQ, one person who can’t eat pork for religious reasons and one vegetarian. If you don’t force their needs to be considered, lunch will be pulled pork every day and those two get disenfranchised.
The Electoral College is replacing a tyranny of the majority with good old tyranny of a minority - the minority who got the extra representation. Although I’d argue that the real power is held by the people who decide which minority gets extra representation.
There are much better ways to deal with the tyranny of the majority - ways that don’t require picking a minority to be the tyrant instead, such as:
Institutions that protect humans and civil rights - e.g. courts.
Shifting power to local governance, allowing said minorities to decide on themselves.
The right to secede - if the minority is abused, they can start their own country.
No method is perfect, and some of them raise farther question - e.g. how do you prevent the courts from becoming the new tyranny? But at least these are general fundamental questions, and not “which minority we want to be the upper caste that decides everything?” (a question that’s always answered according to the current balance of power)
Vegetarians need more campaign skills. Really gotta convince the pepperoni people that their meat is played out.
Like, really, what’s so great about meat on a pizza? Especially pepperoni. Pepperoni is so played out. I could see like, maybe Buffalo chicken, or barbecue chicken, or sausage + peppers…but pepperoni? We gonna go to Starbucks after and get a PSL?
Not to mention, we had pepperoni last time and we all got sick, remember? We were stuck at home for like a whole year.
Anyways as a vegetarian, my vote would be for the Mediterranean pizza anyways. With the feta, spinach, kamalata olives…this place even puts on a balsamic drizzle. Way more interesting and flavorful.
That’s a good pizza. Variety of flavors. Pretends to be healthy and exotic. Not available at Chuck E. Cheese.
See, this way, not only did I pitch the preferred pizza, I also introduced additional contenders on the other side of the aisle. This will hopefully serve to split the vote enough to force a run-off. It’d probably still be between Pepperoni and Mediterranean, but now, hopefully enough of the Never-Peppers will realize that Pepperoni is the basic-bitch of meats, and if they can’t have buffalo then why even have meat?
Unfortunately, the vegan is like “Fuck all ya’ll, all of these options are supporting animal genocide, how could I vote for any of these?” and abstains, and manages to convince another Never-Pepper stand alone choosing salads for everyone. And then the rest of us all end up with Pepperoni. Again. And everyone gets heartburn, while me and the vegan starve. And the pigs still get slaughtered, and the cows still get raped, and we end up supporting the animal genocide even more. And the following year, the salad has cyclospora.
That’s the whole point of the House-Senate split- that the more populous urban areas get more representation in the House, but proportionately less in the Senate.
That said- gerrymandering has fucked that up hardcore. The solution though is to stop gerrymandering, not to give urban areas universal control over the Presidency.
If you make the Presidency a popular vote only, then candidates will campaign in every major city and won’t give a fuck what rural areas want.
If you make the Presidency a popular vote only, then candidates will campaign in every major city and won’t give a fuck what rural areas want.
You may not be wrong but with the current system candidates pretty much only campaign in swing states. If you’re in a reliably red or blue state you likely arent getting a visit from a candidate.
Okay you hit on a much bigger issue- swing states. IMHO the fact that ‘swing states’ are a thing is a problem that we should fix. Why isn’t EVERY state a ‘swing state’? Why is the voting outcome of certain states essentially prewritten? THAT is a problem. EVERY state should be in play.
Some of that blame rests with lazy voters who will blindly vote red or blue without consideration of the actual candidates.
A bigger blame though rests much deeper in our electoral system. It’s not the electoral college that takes blame, it’s first-past-the-post voting (IE simple majority).
FPTP voting heavily rewards coalitions who rally behind a single candidate. So for example if fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, and libertarians all say ‘let’s elect the Republican’ while liberals (for example, hypothetical) split up into the Democrats and the Greens, the Republican will win EVERY time.
This is a problem because it means more often than not you’re not voting FOR someone, you’re voting AGAINST someone.
Recent DNC nominees have been a perfect example. Look at Kamala- she was polling at 2% before she got nominated, but she still got a huge % of the vote simply because she wasn’t Trump. DNC could have put forth a keg of stale beer as their candidate and it’d have gotten 30% of the popular vote because those people were voting AGAINST Trump, not FOR the DNC. And THAT’s a problem, because it’s forcing people to vote for someone they don’t actually support.
The solution is dump FPTP and switch to something like Instant Runoff Voting. In most suggested flavors of IRV, you don’t have a primary- you have a large ballot with everyone who gained enough signatures to be on the ballot. Ideally there’d be 8-10 candidates. You then vote for as many or as few as you like in order of priority. Thus you can vote FOR the guy you actually want, without losing your vote AGAINST the guy you don’t want.
To count the votes, all the #1 votes are added up and you see if a candiate got 50%. If none did, you find whoever voted for the least popular candidate, tear off all their #1 votes and reallocate their ballots based on the #2 votes. Again you look for 50%. Repeat as many times as necessary until you have a winner.
There are better ways to achieve local representation while still respecting the nationwide percentages. See Germany’s federal voting system for example.
Let’s let the class decide what type of pizza to get.
Counting the votes, pepperoni wins.
Counting the votes at each table, then each counting the winner per table, pepperoni wins.
Arbitrarily dividing each table into “groups” of students, then adding those groups up to determine which choice won the table, then counting the tables… anchovies wins!
https://www.webtoons.com/en/canvas/aj-magnus/ice-cream-vs-quiz/viewer?title_no=93296&episode_no=694&readingLanguageCode=en
My second grade teacher did the Jane Elliot experiment in our class. I was in tears because I couldn’t talk to my best friend anymore.
Like, I don’t think I’ve ever been that upset in my life. This was like 35 years ago.
A shitty thing for a teacher to do to a second grader…but damn if it didn’t stick with me.
So, too, would something like this.
…same teacher, during the Great American Smokeout, called down to the office and told them we were going to do an “experiment” in the class. She lit up a cigarette in front of all of us, took a few deep drags, then put the cigarette on some plastic + foam model of the lungs, to show them getting soaked with tar.
The 90s were a wild time. Teachers smoking cigarettes and in class in front of 7yo’s and performing social experiments on casual racism. And people wonder why millennials need so much more mental healthcare than previous generations. We’re the last ones who sat on the rug, Indian Style.
A better analogy
Counting the votes- pepperoni wins.
There’s a lot of vegetarians but they don’t make up an absolute majority so their needs are ignored.
Counting the votes at each table- cheese wins, because even the two huge tables want pepperoni, many of the smaller tables are mostly vegetarians who don’t eat pepperoni.
This is why the electoral college is still relevant- to ensure that urban voters don’t bowl over suburban or rural voters who deserve to have a say in government too.
Dividing each table into groups then adding them together- that’s a scam by a pepperoni fan because they will ensure every group has 5 known pepperoni lovers and 2 others.
Okay, but cheese does not win in this system because pepperoni lovers can tolerate it while vegetarians cannot eat pepperoni. Nor does it win because minorities are getting more representation in general. Cheese wins here purely because you’ve arranged the voting system to give more power to the ones you wanted to win.
If it’s possible to ensure such majority of pepperoni lovers in every single group, then pepperoni lovers have an overall majority. They don’t need scams to win. In fact - you’d need scams to prevent them from winning.
Cheese wins because we don’t ignore small tables, as a simple majority system would do. I think small tables deserve to have a voice for their needs, even if there are fewer of them. It’s not right to ignore an entire group of tables simply because fewer people sit at them.
Not necessarily.
Let’s say you have 100 people. 60 want cheese, 40 want pepperoni.
You need to split this 100 people into 6 tables, each table will vote and submit their overall request. Whichever kind of pizza most of the tables request gets ordered.
You assign seating as follows:
Table 1- 10 pepperoni, 6 cheese
Table 2- 10 pepperoni, 7 cheese
Table 3- 10 pepperoni, 6 cheese
Table 4- 10 pepperoni, 7 cheese
Table 5- 17 cheese, no pepperoni
Table 6- 17 cheese, no pepperoni
There we go. I’ve just ‘fairly, evenly’ divided 100 people into 6 tables of 16-17 people each.
And thus with my ‘simple and unimportant’ job of assigning table seating, I’ve guaranteed that pepperoni will be ordered even though a majority of the people want cheese. Tables 1-4 will vote and pepperoni will win, tables 5-6 will unanimously agree on cheese, and when we ask the tables what they want 4 out of 6 tables will vote pepperoni. And thus the minority wins because the table seating was a scam.
If the tables were assigned randomly, or if a computer grouped the tables by similar interest, age, etc, we’d get something more like a fair vote.
Why do small tables deserve this special protection from being ignored? No other minority group is getting such protection. Minority races are ignored. Minority cultures are ignored. Minorities with special dietary needs - like vegetarians, the very minority you have used to justify inflating the voting power of the small tables - are ignored. What’s so special about being seated in a smaller table that warrants silencing the majority just so that you - a minority - won’t be ignored?
And yes, I understand that this is just an allegory, and in real life there can be reason to give this protection to small states, reasons that are not reflected when we think of them as tables. But please remember that the real reason in real life was to allow slavery states to utilize their slaves’ voting powers without actually allowing them to vote.
Note that I said “in every single group”, and I said you because you said “will ensure every group”.
I should have emphasized it…
Another way to “get something more like a fair vote” is to count the votes by person and not by table. Actually, this is not just “something more like” a fair vote - it’s the very idea (as in “Plato’s Theory of Ideas”) of a fair vote. This what we compare any drawing of district lines to determine how fair it is.
Great response. This is the sort of intelligent conversation Reddit used to have and I love it.
Because the office is made up of both introverts and extroverts, and both make major contributions to the company. Both ways of life should have a voice, ignoring either one in favor of the other harms the whole company.
Quantity wise there’s more extroverted boisterous sales reps and middle managers (who sit at large tables) than there are introverted, socially awkward product engineers and IT people (who sit at small tables), but without those engineers and IT the company has no product to sell nor access to email. And without the sales people and their managers, the product is being developed but nobody will buy it. Both groups rely on each other, therefore both groups should have a roughly equal seat at the table.
That analogy holds up pretty well to the real world IMHO- without rural people we have no farms, no crops, no food, and (back before we sent it all to China to increase shareholder value) no manufacturing. Should we tell those who feed our nation that their voice doesn’t matter because there’s fewer of them spread out over a larger area?
No, I believe both ways of life- rural and urban- both make major contributions to society and to our nation. Ignoring either one in favor of the other harms us all.
And besides, there’s the old ‘do un to others’-- if the total rural population was greater than the urban population, would you want them imposing rules that make good sense out in the middle of Nebraska on a major city? Of course not. The reverse is also true- policies that make sense in cities often don’t work in the countryside.
A perfect example here is guns. In a major city with police on every block and a drug problem, you might not want people walking around openly carrying pistols and rifles. At the same time in a rural area it might be extremely unwise to go for a hike without an readily accessible high caliber weapon, as the woods are full of bears and other predators that might consider a human a tasty snack and consider a few 9mm rounds motivation to eat quickly rather than any sort of real threat. Two different areas, different needs, neither one should get to impose policy on the other IMHO.
The beauty of the Constitution is how it formed as a compromise of interests. Yes, slave states were pushing for extra representation, but so were small states. And the result was a compromise of interests.
Of course we dun fucked it up. The problem isn’t the strategy, the problem is how we execute it today: (from your link)
I don’t think the Framers imagined, or would have wanted, anything like the two-party duopoly we have today. The reality is we have a party-run legislature, a party-run executive, and a permanent body (RNC / DNC) that ARE influenced by all kinds of interests, foreign and domestic.
Because those parties have become corrupt, and it’s essentially impossible to get elected without them, the corruption is spread nationwide.
Going to the pizza analogy- let’s say each table puts forward one representative to serve on the Lunch Committee, which decides on the menu and food vendor selection. This involves a lot of minor decisions, like it doesn’t make sense to poll the entire company about which vendor should operate the cafeteria; it makes more sense to have a smaller committee that will review contract proposals and stand up for the needs of their table in vendor selection and menu creation.
However, ‘tyranny of the majority’ is a thing. Majority rule only works when something protects the legitimate interest of the minority. For example let’s say the company is in Texas- you’ve got 98 people who love BBQ, one person who can’t eat pork for religious reasons and one vegetarian. If you don’t force their needs to be considered, lunch will be pulled pork every day and those two get disenfranchised.
Or do you suggest we just poll all 100 people ‘what do you want for lunch’ and go with the result of ‘pulled pork every day’?
That is, of course, assuming we are still using the same analogy. If the analogy changes to “running the company” - then companies are not democracies. All departments are heard, but the CEO has the final saying. Voting does happens higher up, at the board, but there the representation is based on shares, which is supposed to represent their investment in the company. Under capitalism, that is - no one here on Lemmy is going to agree that these shares represent any kind of contribution whatsoever. But at the very least it’s a principled way (even if you disagree with the principles) to distribute the voting power.
This is not an argument in favor of letting the minority decide on the majority. This is an argument in favor of shifting power to local government. In the analogy - letting the people of each table decide what they want to order for their table. Sheer madness.
But there are not “lots of minor decisions”. The Electoral College makes one major decision - who will be the President. As simple as a ballot can get.
But even if you did need a committee - there are enough method to elect a committee that’ll proportionally represent the populace. The methods that yield better representation require a more complex ballot (because they involve ranked voting), but even the simpler ones are better than intentionally skewing the representation.
The Electoral College is replacing a tyranny of the majority with good old tyranny of a minority - the minority who got the extra representation. Although I’d argue that the real power is held by the people who decide which minority gets extra representation.
There are much better ways to deal with the tyranny of the majority - ways that don’t require picking a minority to be the tyrant instead, such as:
No method is perfect, and some of them raise farther question - e.g. how do you prevent the courts from becoming the new tyranny? But at least these are general fundamental questions, and not “which minority we want to be the upper caste that decides everything?” (a question that’s always answered according to the current balance of power)
Vegetarians need more campaign skills. Really gotta convince the pepperoni people that their meat is played out.
Like, really, what’s so great about meat on a pizza? Especially pepperoni. Pepperoni is so played out. I could see like, maybe Buffalo chicken, or barbecue chicken, or sausage + peppers…but pepperoni? We gonna go to Starbucks after and get a PSL?
Not to mention, we had pepperoni last time and we all got sick, remember? We were stuck at home for like a whole year.
Anyways as a vegetarian, my vote would be for the Mediterranean pizza anyways. With the feta, spinach, kamalata olives…this place even puts on a balsamic drizzle. Way more interesting and flavorful.
That’s a good pizza. Variety of flavors. Pretends to be healthy and exotic. Not available at Chuck E. Cheese.
See, this way, not only did I pitch the preferred pizza, I also introduced additional contenders on the other side of the aisle. This will hopefully serve to split the vote enough to force a run-off. It’d probably still be between Pepperoni and Mediterranean, but now, hopefully enough of the Never-Peppers will realize that Pepperoni is the basic-bitch of meats, and if they can’t have buffalo then why even have meat?
Unfortunately, the vegan is like “Fuck all ya’ll, all of these options are supporting animal genocide, how could I vote for any of these?” and abstains, and manages to convince another Never-Pepper stand alone choosing salads for everyone. And then the rest of us all end up with Pepperoni. Again. And everyone gets heartburn, while me and the vegan starve. And the pigs still get slaughtered, and the cows still get raped, and we end up supporting the animal genocide even more. And the following year, the salad has cyclospora.
Happens all the damn time.
Isn’t the House and the Senate already skewed in rural areas favor? Do urban voters really need to be kneecapped all across government?
That’s the whole point of the House-Senate split- that the more populous urban areas get more representation in the House, but proportionately less in the Senate.
That said- gerrymandering has fucked that up hardcore. The solution though is to stop gerrymandering, not to give urban areas universal control over the Presidency.
If you make the Presidency a popular vote only, then candidates will campaign in every major city and won’t give a fuck what rural areas want.
You may not be wrong but with the current system candidates pretty much only campaign in swing states. If you’re in a reliably red or blue state you likely arent getting a visit from a candidate.
Okay you hit on a much bigger issue- swing states. IMHO the fact that ‘swing states’ are a thing is a problem that we should fix. Why isn’t EVERY state a ‘swing state’? Why is the voting outcome of certain states essentially prewritten? THAT is a problem. EVERY state should be in play.
Some of that blame rests with lazy voters who will blindly vote red or blue without consideration of the actual candidates.
A bigger blame though rests much deeper in our electoral system. It’s not the electoral college that takes blame, it’s first-past-the-post voting (IE simple majority).
FPTP voting heavily rewards coalitions who rally behind a single candidate. So for example if fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, and libertarians all say ‘let’s elect the Republican’ while liberals (for example, hypothetical) split up into the Democrats and the Greens, the Republican will win EVERY time.
This is a problem because it means more often than not you’re not voting FOR someone, you’re voting AGAINST someone.
Recent DNC nominees have been a perfect example. Look at Kamala- she was polling at 2% before she got nominated, but she still got a huge % of the vote simply because she wasn’t Trump. DNC could have put forth a keg of stale beer as their candidate and it’d have gotten 30% of the popular vote because those people were voting AGAINST Trump, not FOR the DNC. And THAT’s a problem, because it’s forcing people to vote for someone they don’t actually support.
The solution is dump FPTP and switch to something like Instant Runoff Voting. In most suggested flavors of IRV, you don’t have a primary- you have a large ballot with everyone who gained enough signatures to be on the ballot. Ideally there’d be 8-10 candidates. You then vote for as many or as few as you like in order of priority. Thus you can vote FOR the guy you actually want, without losing your vote AGAINST the guy you don’t want.
To count the votes, all the #1 votes are added up and you see if a candiate got 50%. If none did, you find whoever voted for the least popular candidate, tear off all their #1 votes and reallocate their ballots based on the #2 votes. Again you look for 50%. Repeat as many times as necessary until you have a winner.
The senate sure is. The house get reapportioned after every census to stay more or less proportional to population differences.
There are better ways to achieve local representation while still respecting the nationwide percentages. See Germany’s federal voting system for example.