United States Electoral college on the state level?

[bullethead]

Here's a pretty interesting idea from Razorfist:


Basically, this would depend on having formalized county borders and giving each county a number of votes in the state legislature (I think? Razorfist isn't exactly clear on this), which would help rebalance the priorities of state governments from the major cities that tend to have an excessive level of influence.

How would you set up such a system and do you think it would do anything to solve the problems caused by cities having too much power?

 

[lordmcdeath]

The problem is that the electoral college is entirely a focus of electing the executive and even if you had an electoral college for governor and lt. Governor, that would only act as a check on a legislative that is largely dictated by those same cities simple because those are where the people are.

The founders wanted to protect against large states discriminating againet small ones, but they weren't worried about cities because at the time cities where still mortality sinks. People died in them faster than they were born. More over, while a large percentage of wealth had always been a party of city industry and specialized labor, a much greater percentage was focused on resource creation or extraction.

Neither is the case anymore. And that throws any scheme like this into a problematic tale spin. Because when one side has the money and the people, you run into issues reducing their representation.

And that doesn't get into how suburbs are essentially parasitic.

 

[Bacle]

I think this would be a good way to break the hold large Metro's have in thier states.

However I also expect the national level electoral college to get undone before anything could happen on the state level.

 

[prinCZess]

How would you set up such a system

In most simplistic fashion, Congress could/should pass a law overturning Reynolds v. Sims. State senate districts (like their federal counterpart) should be openly and freely unequal in population if the state so chooses to district in that way (although, to prevent new-era powerseeking, returning to state's pre-ruling statuses and districting organization would be preferable unless the state gets a big impetus to change that to something else). Every critic of the decision was right in how much it drove state senates into becoming little more than echoes of their lower houses, with power concentrating into metropolitan areas inside those states that then (and since) have diverged drastically from the concerns and issues of the broader state (Seattle versus Washington, Chicago versus Illinois, Portland versus Oregon, etc.)

The more extreme fashion is to redraw state boundaries entirely into better-fitting geographic/cultural regions following ecology or watersheds--the latter I think that was a proposal/thought floating about of I think the head of the new-formed Forest Service in the nineteen-teens.

Spoiler

Goal being (and I'm skeptical of how much following watersheds accomplished such) to make states relatively more well-fitting to populations, with the discord and animosity concentrated into the national government (which, theoretically, has less power and sway over the day-to-day).

Of course, in theory state senates are supposed to exist as the balance of cities v. rural, but those have been gutted--if not by the impact of Reynolds v. Sims then by the impact of ~half-century of partisan warfare in redistricting and everything else designed to secure one party or another's place in a state's power structure (see California or Utah)

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Doesn't matter what rules you set up. The left doesn't play by the rules. When Bush won the election, the Left kept trying to "recount the votes" in Florida, and adding more and more votes for Biden, until eventually the government had to step and say "no more fudging the numbers, you have to get on with it". They deposed Republicans out of office in California by rigging ballot boxes. They got abortion legalized through the Supreme Court. If you put abortion to a popular vote, it would lose. California didn't vote to legalize gay marriage; most people hate it. It was legalized through the courts. If you put it to a popular vote, it would lose, and the left knows that. That's why they are trying to change people's attitudes through ideas, but until an idea becomes popular, they must fight through underhanded tactics.

California used to be a hard republican state, but the unchecked influx of illegal immigrants has led to it becoming a blue state. Legally only citizens are supposed to vote, but the police don't check. Someone did the math: if it wasn't for the illegal immigrants voting, Donald Trump would have won California. That is how red California is. The blue is only really in the cesspits that are San Francisco, Hollywood, and Los Angeles. They are in the minority, like the democrats in Texas. If you step out of those three cities, you enter into a normal country. Even the Mexicans like Trump. Even the hippies who smoke pot like Trump. California is like Texas except it just has enough illegal immigrants to make it blue. In order for California to turn red again, you would have to exclude the illegals somehow... except they're already supposed to be excluded. They aren't because the Left are the ones who run the show, even when the Republicans are supposed to be in charge. During the Trump administration, the US military engaged in war in Syria against the President's orders.

The legal system you're taught in school doesn't work. It hasn't for many, many years, and it won't ever work again.