RocksInMyHead
God is innocent; Noah built on a floodplain!
- May 12, 2011
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What is the point? You said that Wyoming wouldn't see any presidential campaigning if we got rid of the EC, but they don't see any with the EC, so nothing would change in that respect - assuming that you're correct.Well, that is the point here.
Wyoming is always used as an example of the imbalance of the EC system because it has the lowest ratio of residents to EC votes - meaning that a single vote in Wyoming is worth more than it would be in any other state. Vermont, Alaska, and North Dakota are all valid alternatives if you want a different state though.Wyoming was chosen by the other poster, not me, to be the example. It always is.
Interestingly, California is the normal counterpoint, but they're actually relatively balanced in terms of their population to EC vote ratio. Florida, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania are the worst off in that respect.
No, that's not a "well-known reality". While you could, in theory, win an election by popular vote by only getting votes from a half dozen states (actually more like 9-10, given the voting numbers from 2020), that would require getting 100% of the vote in those states, which would never happen. If you look at the popular vote totals from 2020, Biden doesn't pass Trump's total until 32 states worth of votes are counted, and he doesn't hit 50% of the popular votes cast in the election until 39 states are counted.But it is a well-known reality that the result of making the proposed change would be that the campaign would be waged in only about a half-dozen states, because that is all that would be needed for the win.
The actual, objective reality is that under the EC system, only about a dozen states see any campaigning - and over 50% is concentrated in just 2-3 states - because the others are more or less foregone conclusions. It doesn't matter how much effort a Democrat puts into Wyoming, or a Republican puts into Vermont (#2 in the population/representation rankings after Wyoming), they will never get those EC votes, and the popular votes that they might gain are meaningless to the result.
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