Electoral Reform

[Aesir]

Uh, we do vote for the electoral college members. That's what we're electing. The difference is that they only vote for the president and that's it. Technically the electoral college can vote whoever they want, but the party nominates for the college people that they know will vote along party lines.

But honestly, making it so that we have less of a choice is pretty terrible to me. We elect officials, and outside of the President we elect them directly, so why should the president be any different?

Lol about that...

In many states there is no law that says the electors have to vote for who the people want them to vote.

So it's possible for electors to go sour and just elect whoever they feel like. Luckily this has never happened, but it's still a possibility, unless every state passed a law that forced electors to vote the way they should.

 

[ArcPoint]

Alrighty, so, the current system is flawed (Particularly the winner-takes all system). Now, if we simply switched it to Allocate the number of points, would the problem be solved? These systems aren't without flaw. For example, in order to make each vote count equally you would need to proportion the points right. The votes are "more equal" than the current winner take all system, but they're still not entirely equal. This system could also be unfair to some parties based off of how many states adopt this system.

The best alternative so far looks like the Direct IRV, where every vote is counted with the IRV form. There aren't too many problems with that, it seems really promising.

 

[RDK]

Alrighty, so, the current system is flawed (Particularly the winner-takes all system). Now, if we simply switched it to Allocate the number of points, would the problem be solved? These systems aren't without flaw. For example, in order to make each vote count equally you would need to proportion the points right. The votes are "more equal" than the current winner take all system, but they're still not entirely equal. This system could also be unfair to some parties based off of how many states adopt this system.

The point is making sure all states adopt the system, or else it wouldn't work at all. That's basically like having half the nation using the electoral college and half using the IRV.

And proportioning the points is making them all equal. I don't see what your argument is.

After the Electoral College members have been voted into office, then we could have the presidential candidates campaign to the Electoral Collage to try and convince them of which one of them is the right candidate to become President. This would let us have more candidates for President, since it won't require the amount of money that it used to to campaign to the whole country.

Um, this is an awful idea, and is basically the exact opposite of the direction we need to go in. The only thing that would do is give more electing power to politicians and less to the actual people.

One of the biggest problems we have, which I addressed a while back but nobody really commented on, was the whole point weight system (which ties in with the "winner-take-all" spiel). I don't get why less-populated states get just as much representation as states with a greater population. It's counter-intuitive, and it makes it so not everyone's vote is equal.

 

[Aesir]

Well you have to kind of look at it from a colonial set of glasses. After the revolution states were very suspecting of each other, so they compromised which is why we have the electoral college. This is also why we have a two house congress, senate favors small states, house of reps favors large states.

Point based systems are pretty bad, as there's no way to really make it fair for everyone. Which is why I'm starting to think IRV with populous voting is the way to go.