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Tim Walz calls for scrapping of electoral college to decide US presidential race
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2024
483 points (97.6% liked)
United States | News & Politics
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The far easier plan is to simply increase the size of the House of Representatives. All it needs is a change, or repeal, of the Re-Apportionment Act of 1929. Replace it with something like the Wyoming Rule and done.
Not only does that fix Presidential Elections it would also fix or substantially ease a pile of other problems like Gerrymandering by giving the denser population areas the Representation they should have.
The HoR being fixed at only 435 seats is at the core of so many problems in this country.
Nah, even then the smaller populated states like mine have an outsized influence because it is senate (2) + house (population) number of votes per state. Our votes don't deserve to count more for the head executive (President) that represents everyone.
I think you're missing the bigger picture. Right now there is 535 votes, 100 from the Senate and 435 from the House.
If the House were expanded to 574 (Wyoming Rule, based on 2010 population data) there would be now be 675, which reduces the relative weight of the Senate's votes by nearly 1/3rd.
Nothing says it has to be the Wyoming Rule either, we could set a fixed ratio of Citizens to Representatives say 250,000 to 1. Now the HoR would have nearly 1,000 people in it and the Senate would be down to just 10% of the EC votes.
Frankly the HoR should be 1,000 seats or larger. A body of only 435 or even 574 is too small to accurately represent the interests of almost 340,000,000 people.
That would make the electoral college vote closer to proportional, but wouldn't solve the fundamental problem that small states will always have a disproportionate impact on the outcome as long as we use the electoral college system that is based on the sum of senate + house.
We should fix it as you note for the House to be truly representational of the population though.