Comments

1
Hey Megan, really don't disagree with much of the sentiment in your post (read: I completely fucking agree). I guess I'd only say that calling the Electoral College solely a "vestige of slavery" is possibly only including the uncharitable interpretation of the Electoral College as opposed to including the charitable reason behind it as well.

The simplest charitable explanation is that with such a geographically diverse country, there needs to be electoral controls in place to ensure that there isn't an oligarchy of population density. And based on what most of the presidential Electoral College maps have looked like in my 20 years of voting I'm not entirely sure that's an unreasonable concern.

But I still agree with your overall sentiment, and I'd encourage any of your readers who agree with the sentiment of your post to look at ranked-choice voting. It's actually been working extremely well for Australia for quite some time now.

It's also worth noting the Canada (geographically similar to the US, totes obvy) uses a popular vote system, namely the first-past-the-post system, which is about has straight up as a popular vote system you're going to find. This has actually led to a lot of dissatisfaction among rural provinces in Canada, in the feeling of dispossession as well as an inability to effect change in the voting system because of their dispossession. A number of political analysts feel this is what drove Stephen Harper's (Canada's Dubya) election in the first place.
2
Now, a presidential candidate could lose while winning 78%+ of the popular vote and 39 states.

With the current state-by-state winner-take-all system of awarding electoral votes (not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but later enacted by 48 states), it could only take winning a bare plurality of popular votes in only the 11 most populous states, containing 56% of the population of the United States, for a candidate to win the Presidency with less than 22% of the nation's votes!

3
The biggest cities are almost exactly balanced out by rural areas in terms of population and partisan composition.

16% of the U.S. population lives outside the nation's Metropolitan Statistical Areas. Rural America has voted 60% Republican. None of the 10 most rural states matter now.

16% of the U.S. population lives in the top 100 cities. They voted 63% Democratic in 2004.
The population of the top 50 cities (going as far down as Arlington, TX) is only 15% of the population of the United States.

Suburbs divide almost exactly equally between Republicans and Democrats.
4
A survey of Oregon voters showed 76% overall support for a national popular vote for President.

NationalPopularVote.com

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