deepthaw wrote to All <=-

Here's my crazy idea to fix representation issues, the electoral
college, and all that:

(at least) triple the number of states in the us, which would
potentially result in many of the large cities becoming their own
states.

you no longer have one state government trying to represent wildly different interests between the city and rural areas. if red and blue could more easily govern in their own ways, maybe we wouldn't be at
each other's throats so much.

thoughts?

We already have things broken up like that with in the states: counties
(some states use a different term, but it's the same).

Right now, states portion their electors from the popular vote within the state. That mean that a few, relatively small, areas (i.e. cities) effectively control the vote.

A simple change to give each county only 1 vote would accomplish the same thing as your idea.

But they Dems would fight heavily against that. Because if that happens, they will never win an election ever again.


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A simple change to give each county only 1 vote would accomplish the same thing
as your idea.

I can see a reason not to give each county a vote... some states, like
Kentucky and Georgia, have a huge number of counties and, in Kentucky's
case anyway, that number of counties (120) is not proportional to our population.

California, OTOH, has fewer, but much larger, counties.

IIRC, Maine splits up their electoral votes so that one area (I am
guessing the largest, population wise) gets its own vote and the rest of
the state gets the other two. I think Nebraska does the same thing.

If all the states with more than one representative district broke their
votes up amongst their congressional districts, with the 2 votes they have (that account for their 2 senators) going for the whole state, that would be different. As far as I know, every state is free to split their votes up similar to the way Maine and Nebraska do.

If Kentucky did that, we'd have one vote that was always blue, one or two
that might be purple (but usually red), and the rest (4) would always be red. Biden would have received one more electoral college vote from us. OTOH,
if California or Illinois or Michigan did that, he would have lost several electoral college votes.


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Dumas Walker wrote to DR. WHAT <=-

I can see a reason not to give each county a vote... some states, like Kentucky and Georgia, have a huge number of counties and, in Kentucky's case anyway, that number of counties (120) is not proportional to our population.

If we continue with the idea of the Electoral College and that the person who is President is the ones with the
most wide-spread support, population matters less. The idea behind the Electoral system was to prevent very populated
states from effectively overriding everyone else's vote.

If all the states with more than one representative district broke
their votes up amongst their congressional districts, with the 2 votes they have (that account for their 2 senators) going for the whole
state, that would be different. As far as I know, every state is free
to split their votes up similar to the way Maine and Nebraska do.

Unfortunately, yes. That's good and bad. Should a candidate that gets 51% of the vote get all Electoral votes, or only half?

But even if we did that, we run into the Gerrymandering problem. It's much harder to change the borders of a county that's been there for 100+ years than to change the boundary of a political district that changes every 10 years.


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I can see a reason not to give each county a vote... some states, like Kentucky and Georgia, have a huge number of counties and, in Kentucky's case anyway, that number of counties (120) is not proportional to our population.

If we continue with the idea of the Electoral College and that the person who is President is the ones with the
most wide-spread support, population matters less. The idea behind the Electoral system was to prevent very populated
states from effectively overriding everyone else's vote.

Guess I was trying to point out that, in the case of states like Kentucky,
it would be be a very underpopulated state that could override everyone
else's vote if every county got a vote.


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Dumas Walker wrote to DR. WHAT <=-

Guess I was trying to point out that, in the case of states like
Kentucky, it would be be a very underpopulated state that could
override everyone else's vote if every county got a vote.

Ahh.. Sorry. I was thinking about keeping the Electoral system that we have, but within the states, each county would get 1 vote for president. That
would prevent highly populated areas (like big cities) from effectively overriding the rest of the state.

On reddit, someone posted a very nice picture of a gerry-mander (i.e.
a voting district in this case) that nicely split up the conservative
voters in that area. That's the kind of thing that I would like to see changed.
That would not only solve the Presidental voting problems, but state problems as well.


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