This is US focused but the principle of being involved in local issues is universal to all democracies.
Can I rant for a minute?
Why does every thread about voting devolve into bitching about the flaws of the Electoral College?
Fun fact: the Electoral College only pertains to the Presidency and there’s almost nothing you can do about that directly.
Think local, that’s where you can make a difference. Your local school board has the power to either support students or drive them to suicide. Local races frequently turn on a handful of votes.
So go ahead, sit out the election because the choices for president stink. I humbly submit that your superior moral stance may not be based on very firm principles. That trans kid down the block didn’t need your help anyway. /s
I don’t think there’s ever a case where the electoral college itself has ever been the problem. The problem is the same one that plagues local elections but in a different form: there isn’t proportional voting.
At the national level, states allocate all of their electors to the candidate that wins the popular vote in that state. If a candidate wins 51% of the state’s votes they get 100% of the electors. That has historically been the reason presidents win despite losing the popular vote, not because of the college itself. Even without the college, if states allocated their voting power that way, you’d have the exact same problem.
At the local level the problem is more confined in that an individual can only put all of their influence behind a single candidate. This forces one to choose the least bad option.
The solution at all levels is proportional voting. States should allocate their electors according to the proportion of votes candidate receive. This needs some thought to do because it’s impossible to allocate exactly proportionally, but it’s a simple problem to address. At least two states do this. For every election I’m aware of where the president won despite losing the popular vote, this would have prevented that.
At all levels, something like ranked choice voting (there are other possibilities) allows voters to support multiple candidates, letting them give the most support for the candidate they genuinely prefer, but giving a hedge to support a candidate they do t love but that’s better than their worst candidate. This could be applied on top of a state’s system for allocating electors.
This is probably a top 3 priority for creating a workable government instead of this shit show we have now. It’s gaining significant reactions with several states using some sort of proportional system, but there’s heavy opposition from the current policitians. They know if it gets through, they’ll lose their elections, and won’t be able to jerk around their constituents. If you’re sick of one shit party vs another shit party, do everything you can to support proportional voting at all levels, and to get your state to allocate electors proportionally (not like the NPV pact does).
And how do we move from FPTP and electoral college madness to one of the various proportional strategies?
We have to engage now with the system as it is. Wanking on Lemmy is only so effective.
There are plenty, including myself, that feel the Electoral College is indeed the problem. Proportional allocation would be a step in the right direction, true, but it doesn’t address the larger issue that the number of electoral votes a state gets is not equally proportional to its population. This is a big problem.
By the way, not all states are winner take all. Maine and Nebraska use systems of allocation that can split their electoral votes between candidates.
Edit to add: Here is the real solution to the Electoral College issue. The Interstate National Vote Compact Agreement. Once enough states have passed this law to add up to 270 Electoral votes, then all of those states will allocate all their votes to the winner of the national popular vote.
I certainly cannot disagree with you. I guess I’m making an argument about how an individual should spend their precious and limited time and emotional energy.
How would you suggest a person get their state to sign the compact?
I think voters should petition their local officials to change their local election systems to use some sort of proportional voting. Then we’ll get better local officials and we can keep pushing this system to higher levels.
I don’t like NPV. I wrote about that in response to someone else, but in short, it’s the same mentality as allocating all electors to someone who wins only a portion of the vote, which is inherently flawed. It’s better than what we have now, but it’s a hard sell because people never want their vote to go to a candidate they didn’t support, so there will always be states that rightly don’t support it.
Excellent idea. That is more likely to be effective than waiting for it to happen nationwide first.
Are you aware of any local efforts to do that? I’d love to hear of them.