Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I get that a one-person/one-vote system is unfair to rural areas, every election winner would be who London or NY/California voters wanted.
I've heard this before from Americans who were supporting their electoral college system, whereby someone in Wyoming has far more influence in choosing the next president than someone in California, and I don't understand it at all. If the latter has 70 times the population of the former, shouldn't the collective will of its voters count for 70 times as much?

Saying "one person, one vote is unfair" is implying that some people's votes should count for more than others just because they live in a sparsely populated area. Why should they have that privilege?

(This is leaving aside the insanity of the winner-takes-all nature - in all but two states, I think - of the EC vote allocation.)
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I've heard this before from Americans who were supporting their electoral college system, whereby someone in Wyoming has far more influence in choosing the next president than someone in California, and I don't understand it at all. If the latter has 70 times the population of the former, shouldn't the collective will of its voters count for 70 times as much?

Yeah I'm never totally convinced by this one. Especially cos in the senate each state has the same number of seats doesn't it? So that hugely overweights the small states there, does it need to be done artificially when choosing the president too?

Saying "one person, one vote is unfair" is implying that some people's votes should count for more than others just because they live in a sparsely populated area. Why should they have that privilege?

(This is leaving aside the insanity of the winner-takes-all nature - in all but two states, I think - of the EC vote allocation.)

Yeah it's weird isn't it cos in the UK, you could have two constituencies, one won by 100 percent Labour and one with 51 percent Tory and they would both count as one seat for the respective parties which doesn't seem right. In the US you have a number of Electors per state which seems designed to rectify this as it would allow you to allocate the Electors in proportion to the votes... but then they choose not to do this.
 

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
I've heard this before from Americans who were supporting their electoral college system, whereby someone in Wyoming has far more influence in choosing the next president than someone in California, and I don't understand it at all. If the latter has 70 times the population of the former, shouldn't the collective will of its voters count for 70 times as much?

Saying "one person, one vote is unfair" is implying that some people's votes should count for more than others just because they live in a sparsely populated area. Why should they have that privilege?

(This is leaving aside the insanity of the winner-takes-all nature - in all but two states, I think - of the EC vote allocation.)
Imagine that there are two states populated in the ratio 3:2 but which, by inevitable circumstance - by their mere location, for instance - need a resource in the ratio 1:10 etc.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Imagine that there are two states populated in the ratio 3:2 but which, by inevitable circumstance - by their mere location, for instance - need a resource in the ratio 1:10 etc.
That's got nothing to do with how much weight should be attached to each person's vote when it comes to selecting the president - or, ideally, the makeup of the Senate. But then each state getting two senators, regardless of population, seems nuts to me, as well.

I don't see how anything could be fairer, when it comes to a choice as uncomplicated as which of several (in practice, two) candidates should be president, than a straightforward popular vote. In fact any election methodology that allows an outcome that differs from the outcome of the popular vote seems manifestly unfair.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
What frustrates me with the electoral college is that it seems someone decided that there were a load of problems with a straight-forward one-person-one-vote type thing and introduced all these clever checks and balances... but then they messed it up and introduced at least as many problems as they addressed. Some of the decisions they made seem almost wilfully perverse. And so now you look at it and you think well I could change this and that and maybe... and it gets to the point where you think "fuck this we should probably start again from scratch".
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Yeah it's weird isn't it cos in the UK, you could have two constituencies, one won by 100 percent Labour and one with 51 percent Tory and they would both count as one seat for the respective parties which doesn't seem right.
FPTP is obviously pretty far from "fair", in that a party can have a huge majority in the Commons despite getting much less than half the popular vote - and yes, of course this isn't an inherently "pro-Tory" feature, as it benefited Labour when they won elections, too - since, as you say, the margin by which each seat is won counts for nothing. However, it does seem less daft than the American system, both because they allot two Senate seats to every state, regardless of size, and because it's "winner takes all" for each state, and because there are only 50 states (plus DC) in a country with 330 million inhabitants, whereas at least in the UK there are 650 parliamentary constituencies for a population of 68 million, and they also don't vary in size anything like as much as the states do.

So the idea of a party in the UK winning an election despite coming second in the popular vote seems pretty far-fetched, although it has happened three times, I think (although the last time it happened was in 1951).

Then again, at least the Senate is made up of elected politicians, unlike the House of Lords. It seems completely nuts to me that we have people in the House of Lords whose only qualification is to have been born the son, or very occasionally the daughter, of someone else with that qualification. And I think the UK is the only country other than Iran in which religious leaders have an automatic right to sit in the national parliament...
 

Leo

Well-known member
Maybe I phrased that wrong. I meant one person/one vote will likely result in policies that favor some regions over others. If NY/LA have inordinate voting influence due to their populations, then laws and programs would end up being more geared to dealing with urban issues. For example, I can totally see NYers opposing agricultural programs, farm bills, etc., because it's not in their back yard.
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
What frustrates me with the electoral college is that it seems someone decided that there were a load of problems with a straight-forward one-person-one-vote type thing and introduced all these clever checks and balances... but then they messed it up and introduced at least as many problems as they addressed. Some of the decisions they made seem almost wilfully perverse. And so now you look at it and you think well I could change this and that and maybe... and it gets to the point where you think "fuck this we should probably start again from scratch".
Indeed, it seems a complete mess and the only possible objection that I could see someone raising, if they were being honest, is "We should keep things the way they are because I'm a Republican and the current setup benefits the Republican party and Republican presidential candidates."
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Maybe I phrased that wrong. I meant one person/one vote will likely result in policies that favor some regions over others. If NY/LA have inordinate voting influence due to their populations, then laws and programs would end up being geared to dealing with more urban issues. For example, I can totally see NYers opposing agricultural programs, farm bills, etc., because it's not in their back yard.
I guess, but my argument is that seeing that NY, LA and the other big cities have much bigger populations than the smaller farming states, that's not "inordinate voting influence".
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
FPTP is obviously pretty far from "fair", in that a party can have a huge majority in the Commons despite getting much less than half the popular vote - and yes, of course this isn't an inherently "pro-Tory" feature, as it benefited Labour when they won elections, too - since, as you say, the margin by which each seat is won counts for nothing. However, it does seem less daft than the American system, both because they allot two Senate seats to every state, regardless of size, and because it's "winner takes all" for each state, and because there are only 50 states (plus DC) in a country with 330 million inhabitants, whereas at least in the UK there are 650 parliamentary constituencies for a population of 68 million, and they also don't vary in size anything like as much as the states do.

So the idea of a party in the UK winning an election despite coming second in the popular vote seems pretty far-fetched, although it has happened three times, I think (although the last time it happened was in 1951).

Then again, at least the Senate is made up of elected politicians, unlike the House of Lords. It seems completely nuts to me that we have people in the House of Lords whose only qualification is to have been born the son, or very occasionally the daughter, of someone else with that qualification. And I think the UK is the only country other than Iran in which religious leaders have an automatic right to sit in the national parliament...
But the thing is we have FPTP in each constituency, which means that we don't have an overall FPTP in the country which is a weird contradiction.
There are just so many problems with the system - the thing about a few marginals deciding the election is one of them of course. Just to pick another at random, one of the ideas of having seats like this is that the MP for, whatever, Berkshire East (to make one up) say, is someone who won a local election and is thus supposed to be connected to their region and to be their MP looking out for their interests. But if your MP is promoted to chancellor or something then that becomes their job and it feels as though that area no longer has someone doing the job of being their MP. A very small point but another to chuck on the pile.
 

Leo

Well-known member
I guess, but my argument is that seeing that NY, LA and the other big cities have much bigger populations than the smaller farming states, that's not "inordinate voting influence".

becomes a bit of an issue for those very same NY/LA voters (and everyone else) when rural farms start to go out of business and we can't get food to markets nationally.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Indeed, it seems a complete mess and the only possible objection that I could see someone raising, if they were being honest, is "We should keep things the way they are because I'm a Republican and the current setup benefits the Republican party and Republican presidential candidates."
JRM said in parliament the other day something like "I'd want to change the rules too if I lost under the present ones" completely ignoring the totally valid arguments about fairness etc
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Maybe I phrased that wrong. I meant one person/one vote will likely result in policies that favor some regions over others. If NY/LA have inordinate voting influence due to their populations, then laws and programs would end up being more geared to dealing with urban issues. For example, I can totally see NYers opposing agricultural programs, farm bills, etc., because it's not in their back yard.
This is an inherent problem of democracy isn't it? The tyranny of the majority. If most of the people vote to kill a minority then it won't be democracy that stops it. But I'm not sure that fudging the majorities is the way to fix this. I'm not sure what is of course, I'm not sure that there is a really good way.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
becomes a bit of an issue for those very same NY/LA voters (and everyone else) when rural farms start to go out of business and we can't get food to markets nationally.
Well hopefully voters in NY, LA etc. understand that they need food, and that it's better for that food to be affordable, produced in their own country etc., and wouldn't vote for a (hypothetical) party that was standing on a platform of policies that would make that impossible.

I don't think farmers have gone bust en masse every time there's been a Democratic president, have they? Maybe some farmers haven't received as much in the way of subsidies as they'd have liked, or have been pissed off about not being allowed to use some extremely effective but appallingly toxic pesticide or whatever, but that's a different matter.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
One problem of course is that systems like this are hard to change, especially the massive changes that we are talking about. And they should be of course, we can't have a situation where the leader can easily change the rules so that it's easier for them to win.

What's frustrating is that in the UK in 2010 there was the glimmer of a chance of change when the Lib Dems agreed to prop up the Tories in exchange for a referendum on voting reform. The problem was that the suggested reform was a half-way house fudge that wouldn't have pleased anyone - and also the LDs ran a terrible campaign that was thrashed out of sight and ended up booting reform off the agenda for the foreseeable future.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Yeah, and while there seems to be quite a lot of public support for PR or something like it, a lot of people who want this (and I'm going mainly on what I see on Twitter here) apparently assume this will just naturally follow if all the parties other than the Conservatives, DUP and UKIP-or-whatever-they're-called-now-Brexit-has-actually-happened formed like Voltron into a super Tory-defeating machine.

But this presupposes that all the other parties have more in common than divides them, which isn't necessarily the case, especially when you consider that the third-largest party in the Commons, and by a big margin, is the SNP. It's hard to imagine them wanting to form an informal opposition coalition, let alone an actual coalition Westminster government, with the pro-Union Labour party (or even with Labour plus the Lib Dems, who are also pro-Union). And they're the last party that's going to support any move away from FPTP, since they do far better out of it than any other party - in fact they have almost twice as many MPs as they "should" have (or would have, under PR).
 

john eden

male pale and stale
What's frustrating is that in the UK in 2010 there was the glimmer of a chance of change when the Lib Dems agreed to prop up the Tories in exchange for a referendum on voting reform. The problem was that the suggested reform was a half-way house fudge that wouldn't have pleased anyone - and also the LDs ran a terrible campaign that was thrashed out of sight and ended up booting reform off the agenda for the foreseeable future.
That didn't just happen, though Rich. The LibDems got played.

In my view they got played because the Tories have hundreds of years of experience of fucking people over to maintain their power and because the LibDems are essentially wet Tories anyway.
 
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