A national effort to circumvent the Electoral College has gained another state.
Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed a bill Monday that adds the state to the National Popular Vote Compact, an agreement among states to award their presidential electoral votes to the nationwide popular vote winner.
With Virginia, the total number of states signed on to the interstate compact is now 18, plus the District of Columbia, for a total of 222 electoral votes.
The compact doesn’t go into effect, though, until there are enough states signed up to reach the required 270 electoral votes to elect a president.
Ignoring the racist and patriarchal solution they came up with, it’s hard to disagree with their conclusion that average people don’t make for a reliable voting population. It seems that 1/3 of the population doesn’t give a shit about anything, 1/3 is certifiably insane, and 1/3 put in a reasonable amount of effort to understand the issues and proposed solutions. Statistically speaking, that makes straight up democracy sound like a terrible idea.
There’s probably a better solution to that particular problem than we’ve tried, but I don’t know how you can address it without creating a system just begging to be abused.
“Average people” aren’t voting.
Profile of Voters vs. Non-Voters
Whites, Christians, partisans, and the elderly are all over-represented in the official election day tally. Education level, wealth, suburban/rural populations, and married households are also disproportionately represented. And that’s before you weight the ECs by state population. The state of Wyoming - population 587k - enjoys 3 ECs to California - population 40M - and its 54 ECs. That’s 3.5x the weighted representation per citizen.
To say “the founders were right to structurally exclude 80% of public and then disproportionately represent the rural backwaters against the urban core because voters are dumb”, you need some really funky understanding of what constitutes a functional elected bureaucracy.
It should further be noted that the Founding Fathers generation of Presidents and Legislators largely sucked. They were genocidal both with respect to their First Nation’s neighbors and their ethnically homogeneous neighbors. They accelerated the slave trade directly into a civil war while telling themselves it was going to die out. They inflicted nightmarish ecological harms to their local agriculture via excessive tobacco farming. Their fiscal policy was a forty year long trainwreck, culminating in Andrew Jackson and a generation of cyclical depressions.
None of that is true, though. It’s just back-of-the-envelop vibes math.
What you have is serial nationalist indoctrination at the primary school level, mass media misinformation straight from secondary school to retirement, and a partisan political economy that thrives on pitting half the labor force against the other half through “wedge issue” campaigns.
“Oh, well, these people are just crazy” is the lazy man’s analysis of someone with divergent priors and media diet. For the most part, they’re using the same logical fundamentals as you are, they’ve just got different inputs. Similarly, “these people don’t give a shit” is a casual off-the-cuff response aimed at a population that is chronically overworked, underpaid, and routinely rug-pulled.
Consider who is actually on the ballot in some of these races and you might understand why folks express apathy. When campaigns boil down to a bunch of personal attacks between two corporate hacks who hold all the same policy positions, what you’re voting in is barely more than a vanity contest.
Systems beget abuse when they allow for power imbalances between haves and have-nots. This is particularly true when quality of life is predicated on being in the first group over the second.
At some point, the only system that is beyond abuse is one that holds the least person in it as an equal to everyone else. But it is very easy to agitate against such a model when you are able-bodied, property owning, and racially in-group, while the person you’re profiteering off of is not.