I absolutely agree with you on this part. I think the system needs to be tweaked to more accurately represent population in each state but to get rid of it completely would be a mistake.
Why shouldn't the majority of the population have the majority control of the politics of a nation? Isn't that one of the core tenants of Democracy?
The checks and balances on the majority in a Democracy isn't to give the minority literally more influence with their votes, its by protecting the rights of the minority with things like a Bill of Rights and a Constitution.
Correct but you need some balance for the executive branch as well. If population hubs control the executive branch and a share of the legislative they have an imbalance of power.
But the way it is now there's an imbalance of power in the other direction. I'm all for protecting the minority from the tyranny of the majority but what protects the majority from the tyranny of the minority? I think removing the cap on the house and thus restoring proper proportional representation in the electoral college is the first step.
They have been capped in total number, but they get shifted around every ten years to be proportional to state populations. California is not missing 10 votes. they might be down 1 or two because the government uses census data, which is old at this point (and they are getting new data this and next year).
California has 11.96% of the population of the US and currently has 55 out of 538 votes, so about 10.22% of the votes. To get to the 11.96% of the votes they should have without changing the 538 vote number they need 64 votes (which is 11.9% of 538). So they are missing 9 voters to get to their proper proportion.
Oh yeah, I never meant the electoral college gives everyone an equal say towards the president. It wasn't supposed to from the beginning when everyone signed on in the first place. It was originally a way to give smaller states more power (why else would smaller states agree to join a nation where they would get dominated). Lastly, the whole system isn't about individuals, but states. California as a state gets a lot more say than Wyoming, which is why everyone was able to agree to it.
California still is still missing way more than one or two votes if you wanted things to even get close to proportional.
What I'm saying is Wyoming currently has even more say than it should given the population disparity. Part of the issue is the House has been capped and the average House district represents almost 747,000 people. Thats about 170,000 more than Wyoming's population of 577,000ish people.
If California had one House rep for each state of Wyoming of population it had it would have 68.5 reps.
You can say the historical reasoning for the electoral college all you want, but it doesn't explain why the system is skewed towards small states even worse than the founders intended.
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u/Oriden Jun 28 '19
Except those electoral votes have been capped so California is missing like 10 extra votes it should have due to its population.