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Nebraska legislators buck Trump by blocking Electoral College vote change — for now (www.nbcnews.com)

submitted 7 months ago by return2ozma@lemmy.world to c/politics@lemmy.world

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[-] MossyFeathers@pawb.social 42 points 7 months ago

I have mixed feelings on the electoral college, but imo "winner-takes-all" voting should be unconstitutional. That particular implementation of the electoral college carries the potential to nullify 49% of the votes in our current two-party system, and it gets even worse when you have more than 2 parties. If there were 3 major parties, "winner-takes-all" has the potential to nullify 66% of the vote if it's split 33%-33%-34%, and becomes more egregious as the number of major parties increases.

[-] neptune@dmv.social 9 points 7 months ago

Gerrymandering would make the president like the House. 55% of voters select Democrats but then 52% of selected representatives are Republicans 🤔

[-] dunidane@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 7 months ago

Absolutely. Its taking an already flawed undemocratic system and making it even worse.

[-] chaogomu@kbin.social 2 points 7 months ago

My ideal election laws would have an electoral college type setup, but based on congressional district rather than by state. Now, here are the changes that make it workable.

First, the number of congressional districts needs to increase. Massively. There needs to be a fixed ratio of Representatives to state population. At least 1 rep per X people. Then that number needs to be set in stone.

Congress got into a pissing match 100 years ago over how to do apportionment, so now we're stuck with 435 Representatives when the population of the US has more than tripled and two new states have been added.

The next thing that needs to be set in stone is a way to draw districts. Shortest split-line is the method of choice here. Now, it can favor conservatives and rural areas a bit, but only if your number of districts is too low. With enough districts, the output starts to look a lot like actual population maps. If you squint.

I'd ditch the Senate. Or roll it into the House. Maybe say that each state gets an equal number of representatives who serve more than 2 years. So that there's a group of people who have institutional knowledge when the next congress forms.

This would be important for the next change I'd make. Term limits, or rather, consecutive term limits. You'd be able to serve two terms, but then to serve a third you'd have to take one full term off, actually living in your district. You must spend 25 of every 30 days living in the district for at least 2 years to qualify to represent that district.

The final, and most impactful, change would be the voting system itself. We desperately need to ditch FPtP, and Ordinal voting systems in general. Cardinal voting systems are the only way to have viable third parties, with actual, separate identities.

My current favorite system is STAR. It's the absolute best single winner election system out there. There may be better systems in the future, but for now, this is it.

So let's talk practicality of these fixes.

Increasing the size of Congress is a single law. That's it. If you want to push things a bit further, there's James Madison's Congressional Apportionment Amendment, which despite being introduced in the late 1700s, is still a viable amendment, and could theoretically finish the ratification process.

Fun fact, the 27th amendment, which was ratified within my lifetime, was introduced along with the congressional apportionment amendment.

Drawing districts is a State level thing, but Congress does have the power to set requirements on federal elections. They could require that federal districts be drawn via a certain way.

But still, an amendment is likely the only way that it would be implemented.

Term limits flat out need an amendment, same with ditching the senate.

And the final note, the voting system needs to either be done state by state, or via the ability to control federal elections. Possibly needs an amendment to actually apply to everyone,

[-] Zaktor@sopuli.xyz 2 points 6 months ago

Why do all this stuff and chunk at the district level rather than just using the popular vote?

[-] chaogomu@kbin.social 1 points 6 months ago

Honestly? Because a national popular vote (for president) would take an amendment, or every state joining the national interstate voting compact, but wouldn't actually fix the deeper issue of the dysfunction of Congress.

Also, the compact might be of questionable constitutionality.

But fixing congress... This link spells out the problem as well as a one time fix for a problem that's always going to exist.

A one time fix might be enough to fix things for a while...

But to truly fix things...

Set up something akin to Lemmy mixed with Wikipedia. Now, the only people who can post to this social media would be members of congress. Every single bill would have to be posted in its entirety to this platform for at least 30 days before a vote could be called. And then, members of congress could post in the comments, debating the bill. This would also give them ways to post links and research and shit,

Now, the important thing here, this platform would be open to anyone to view.

Hell, add in the ability to post video comments. Let these people play their popularity contests, but out in the open.

Oh yeah, if the bill is amended, then the 30-day timer restarts. Also, no more breaks. Congress is always officially in session. Then allow voting via the platform. Allow votes to be cast beforehand, but they finalize on the 30th day. If the bill does not get enough votes to pass, it's dead, but can be resubmitted, or kicked back to committee. (a sub-lemmy for particular topics)

Maybe add in hired transcribers whose only job is to post transcribed text of any meeting or such.

Then make the software open, and get states to use it, and city councils. Basically all government should be done in text and in the open. With time for those making the laws to actually read them, and for the public to be able to know exactly what's going on in government.

The benefit of my idea here is that it can support quite a bit of expansion, while still allowing a fairly local feeling representation. Because congress could easily work from home most of the time.

[-] FlowVoid@lemmy.world 2 points 6 months ago

A losing vote is not "nullified". It is simply a losing vote.

Regardless of the voting system, when voting for President there are going to be people who vote for a losing candidate.

[-] Soulg@sh.itjust.works 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Which completely deprives them of representation. Even if they only got 10%, that 10% of people will have no voice.

It needs to be more like Nebraskas current method but in every state, along with ranked choice voting. Winner takes all, let alone FPTP and the EC as a whole, are horribly stupid.

[-] FlowVoid@lemmy.world 3 points 6 months ago

It doesn't matter how you change the voting system. Only one person can be president. And once a president is chosen, by whatever means, anyone who wanted someone else "has no voice" by your definition.

[-] zbyte64@social.rootaccess.org 4 points 6 months ago

@FlowVoid @Soulg true, but then it won't be the *majority* of people who didn't "have a voice" which is a stark improvement over the current situation

[-] FlowVoid@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago

The president almost always gets a majority of the popular vote.

Of course I think the president should always, not almost always, get a majority. But that just requires switching to a national popular vote, not one of the various other schemes under discussion.

[-] Enkrod@feddit.de 3 points 6 months ago

Republicans won both 2000 and 2016 despite losing the popular vote.

[-] FlowVoid@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago

Right, which is why I said almost always instead of always. Out of 57 contested elections, the popular vote winner won 52.

[-] Eldritch@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago

While we're changing things that should be one of the things we change as well. There should not be a unitary executive with ability to override the will of the people. There should be a council or something similar where a group of views are represented and a decision come to. Making things more democratic is always a worthy goal.

[-] FlowVoid@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

We have that too, it's called Congress

[-] Eldritch@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago

False. The Senate is anti-democratic in intent. Meant to block the will of the people. And the house has been artificially capped for the last 100ish years. Becoming largely unrepresentative and horribly gerrymandered. It should be representative, democratic, and not over-ruleable by a single person or non speaking filibuster.

[-] autotldr@lemmings.world 7 points 7 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Nebraska legislators on Wednesday night blocked a late effort to change how the state allocates its Electoral College votes, despite public pressure from former President Donald Trump to shift to a winner-take-all system that would likely benefit him in the fall.

Wednesday night's failed attempt to change the law to award all the state’s Electoral College votes to the statewide winner leaves the fate of the proposal in doubt with a few days left in the legislative session.

State Sen. Loren Lippincott, who introduced the original winner-take-all bill, told the Nebraska Examiner that he’d make one final attempt to bring the measure up for a vote before the legislative session ends April 18.

Lippincott introduced the latest legislative proposal last year; it received little attention until this week when GOP personality Charlie Kirk raised the issue on his podcast.

Absent another shot at a vote, it’s also possible that Pillen, who has been a vocal supporter of changing to a winner-take-all system, could call a special legislative session to address the issue.

“By dividing its electoral votes, Nebraska forces candidates to engage with constituents across the state, listening to their concerns and crafting policies that resonate with a broader spectrum of the population.

The original article contains 1,034 words, the summary contains 203 words. Saved 80%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[-] OldWoodFrame@lemm.ee 1 points 6 months ago

Theoretically, the individual-electoral-vote model gets your state more attention and ad dollars. You would think like Ohio who used to get a ton of ad spend as a swing state would switch to individual electoral votes instead of let everyone abandon advertising in the state because everyone knows its voting for the Republican.

Or even like New York. There are like "New York Republicans" that are more moderate traditionally, so splitting the electoral votes could help push NY-favored Republicans instead of the MAGA crowd (or whatever the far right fringe is called at any given time).

this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2024

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