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DEMOCRACY (USA)

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Flawed Democracy

EIU Index 18
- America’s position among other nations – it doesn’t even make the top ten
- Some reasons for this:
  - “Most of the major policy actions in 2018—including the escalation of the trade war with China; diplomatic engagement with North Korea; and extensive deregulation of the energy, mining, and automotive industries—have not required congressional approval. Moreover, [President Donald] Trump has repeatedly called into question the independence and competence of the U.S. judicial system with regard to the ongoing federal investigation, led by Robert Mueller, into potential ties between Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia, and various courts’ efforts to block some of his policy orders, particularly regarding immigration. Although we expect the U.S. system of checks and balances to remain intact, this internal conflict risks further undermining public confidence in institutions. As a result, the score for political culture declined in the 2018 index.”
https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~jnd260/cab/CAB2012%20-%20Page1.pdf
https://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/pcs_assets/2012/pewupgradingvoterregistrationpdf.pdf
- Ballots and the sort are pretty screwed rn
  - Approximately 24 million—one of every eight—voter registrations in the United States are no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate.
  - More than 1.8 million deceased individuals are listed as voters.
  - Approximately 2.75 million people have registrations in more than one state.
- Even though voter fraud in america isn’t a big deal, these flaws still expose it to voter fraud and need to be dealt with
[https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/aclu_voter_id_fact_sheet_-final.pdf](https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/aclu_voter_id_fact_sheet-_final.pdf)

Electoral College

The EC distorts the popular vote, discourages voters in non-swing states, and has maintained net unpopularity among Americans over time.

[VIDEO] The Trouble with the Electoral College by CGP Grey
- Even in a 2-party race, a presidential candidate can win the electoral college system with just 22% of the popular vote
- Electoral college does not shift candidates’ focus to smaller states, but rather to swing states (useful graphic for this point)
[Think Piece] Brookings: Nivola 05
- Electoral college discourages non-battleground state voters from going out to vote - “Overall, the percentage of voters who participated in last fall’s election was almost 5 percent higher than the turnout in 2000. Yet, most of the increase was limited to the battleground states. Because the electoral college has effectively narrowed elections like the last one to a quadrennial contest for the votes of a relatively small number of states, people elsewhere are likely to feel that their votes don’t matter.”
Polling compilation by nationalpopularvote.com
- In basically EVERY STATE during the Obama years, over 70% of people support a national popular vote system
- Broad support for a popular vote system has existed for decades
Pew Research Center
- Nationally, ~60% of Americans have consistently opposed the EC in favor for a popular vote system
- EC support among Republicans spiked in 2016 when a Republican won the presidency via EC but doesn’t get the popular vote, suggesting they care a lot about the power the EC grants their party
State borders are kind of arbitrary but have a big impact on election results https://khayeswilson.medium.com/the-best-maps-from-redraw-the-states-538861cc44ed
https://time.com/5863481/supreme-court-faithless-electors-electoral-college/
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Big-Ideas_West_Electoral-College.pdf

Common Myths Rebutted:

This webpage provides a far more detailed rebuttal to pro-EC points, so give it a look! A lot of points made here are also made on this other webpage, which you can go back to for easier reference.

1. “Without an electoral college system, candidates would just pander to the biggest cities and biggest states while completely ignoring smaller states and rural areas. With the EC, people in small, flyover states will not be disenfranchised and will have more of a say on the national stage.

If you entirely win over every single voter of the top 10 biggest cities, you’ve only won 8% of the popular vote - far from enough to win an election. Even adding on a 100% win for every single one of the next 90 biggest cities, you’ve still only reached 19% of the whole population - again, nowhere close enough to win an election. This means that if a candidate appealed ONLY to the interests of big cities, they would lose in a landslide every time to a candidate with the popular vote. (source)

Smaller states are already ignored with the EC, with the focus instead being on swing states. This isn’t surprising, either - in a system where some states are safely in the hands of a campaign while other states are up for grabs, campaigns gain more electoral votes by focusing on states which are easier to grab for themselves rather than trying to snatch a safe state from the hands of the opposing campaign. This bears out in the data, too - in 2004, the last 5 weeks of campaigning was spent in a select few swing states. Similar results came out of 2008, 2012, and in 2016 (some analysis of the 2016 data here).

This is essentially advocating for affirmative action for smaller states, which should be especially concerning to people who usually put out anti-affirmative action arguments: conservatives.

If you don’t want some people in California deciding life for Wyomingans that’s fine, that’s a reasonable position to have - but the EC doesn’t really fix this so much as it pushes the situation closer to being flipped - Wyoming’s chosen candidate deciding life for Californians. A better way to stop this cross-regional influence would be to localize most power, so that the local governments and state government of Wyoming has more say over its own policy than the federal government does.

2. “Democracy, aka mob rule, is bad. The EC is not based in democracy, though.”

The EC is still based on a democratic vote, the only real difference being that the EC skews the democratic vote based on what state you live in. By this point, it’s more likely that you have a problem with democratic voting than you do with specific implementations of it.

There are literally thousands of examples of democracy being successful within the US, primarily in the form of mayors, governors, and so on. If you extend that back historically, you’ll get hundreds of thousands of examples to choose from - and that’s just within the US. These local or state governments haven’t collapsed or been hindered by a popular vote being used there, as far as we can tell. By and large, we see the same play out across the overwhelming majority of countries in the world, which elect their head of state via national popular vote, rather than via an electoral college or equivalent. The countries that do have political, economic, etc unrest would likely not see their problems resolved by replacing their national popular vote system with an electoral college.

A bare majority still usually has an advantage in EC - usually the person with the most votes also wins the EC. If your intention is to prevent the mob of the majority from tyrannizing the minority, the EC is a horrible solution.

Keep in mind that this doesn’t invalidate the movement to remove the EC, though - the process by which a president is chosen is very important, and even one election in which the popular vote and EC diverge will still matter a lot for the country’s future. For example, Donald Trump’s court appointees will likely reshape federal courts for decades, despite him only being a one-term president. You could also argue that wrong winner elections aren’t as rare as you might think and will likely be more common as elections since the 1980s have been pretty close races.

3. “Without the EC, what you’re essentially left with is ‘two wolves and a lamb deciding what to eat for dinner’. Non-EC democracy makes it much easier to oppress the minority vote, while the EC prevents the majority from tyrannizing the minority.”

Knowing how the EC can allow the candidate with the most votes to lose, this metaphor applied to the EC could very well be ‘one wolf and two lambs deciding what to eat for dinner’ with the wolf, not the lambs, having the final say. The minority - in this case, the wolf - would have more of a say than the lambs. Even if you fully accept that there’s a problem with tyranny of the majority, you still have to admit that the electoral college sometimes replaces tyranny by majority with tyranny by minority (and that ‘sometimes’ is getting more likely to happen given because close elections have been more common as of late). As it turns out, the criticisms made of “tyranny of the majority” can usually be more strongly pushed against “tyranny of the minority”.

A bare majority still usually has an advantage in EC - usually the person with the most votes also wins the EC. If your intention is to prevent the majority from tyrannizing the minority, the EC is a horrible solution.

Keep in mind that this doesn’t invalidate the movement to remove the EC, though - the process by which a president is chosen is very important, and even one election in which the popular vote and EC diverge will still matter a lot for the country’s future. For example, Donald Trump’s court appointees will likely reshape federal courts for decades, despite him only being a one-term president. You could also argue that wrong winner elections aren’t as rare as you might think and will likely be more common as elections since the 1980s have been pretty close races.

Regarding racial discrimination/suppression:

The EC wasn’t implemented with the foresight of knowing where minorities would be located nowadays; its method of designating power does not keep racial, ethnic, class, etc. minorities in mind whatsoever. It’s simply blind to those aspects of the population’s makeup.
- Even if the EC was originally designed to protect a certain minority group, there’s no good reason for the designers to assume that it would still protect that certain minority group today. They can’t just predict the demographic makeup and geographic distribution of the US 350 years into the future.
The EC also doesn’t have any mechanism built into it which is able to specifically target candidates with bad or oppressive policies - all it really does is weigh your vote differently based on what state you live in. If a majority of electoral votes are cast in favor of someone with really bad and oppressive policies, that’s that.

4. “The EC system is fine because swing states change and they change often.”

The fact that swing states change shouldn’t be used to dismiss the broader populace in favor of those who happen to live in swing states in a particular year.

The correlation between expected swing states and voter turnout is rather strong, suggesting that voters who are not in swing states are still discouraged from voting as they feel that their vote counts less. This depression could be explained by other things which are also related to the electoral college, e.g. where campaigns choose to focus on getting the vote out.

5. “The EC makes it harder to steal elections. In EC, votes have to be stolen in certain places at certain times, whereas the popular vote system makes them stealable no matter where you are.”

By using this argument, you kind of accidentally admit that your vote only really matters if it’s cast in a swing state. Your argument would assume that fraud doesn’t matter if it’s cast in a safe state but that it would matter in a swing state.

Under the EC, it usually takes fewer votes to flip a few strategic states than it takes to flip the popular vote - the outcome of a state election hinging on 10,000 votes is around 4% vs 0.1% in a national popular election - and keep in mind that 4% applies to each state individually, rather than the national election as a whole. In this way, the EC actually makes voter fraud more dangerous than it would be under the NPV.

In recent times, the margins needed to flip individual states (and thus the election) have been pretty close. Every single time, it comes in contrast with the much larger margin that would be needed to flip the national popular vote.

In 2000, it would have taken 537 votes in Florida to flip the whole election’s result, as opposed to several hundred thousand votes which would have been needed to flip the national popular vote.
In 2004, you would have had to flip around 50,000 votes in the single state of Ohio to change the result of the entire 2004 election in favor of John Kerry, who lost the popular vote by over 3 million votes. Note that in this particular instance, the EC would have benefitted a democrat, not a republican.
In 2016, it would have taken less than 100,000 votes distributed across PA, WI, and MI to change the election outcome, rather than nearly 3 million votes to change the popular vote count.

This assumes that voter fraud is a big issue in the first place, which it isn’t really at this point. And no, the EC is not the reason why voter fraud is no big deal.

6. “The founding fathers were wary of pure democracy, and didn’t want to see it in America. The founding fathers are very smart and wise, so it’s best that we keep with their original system and avoid making changes.”

If we’re using the standards set by the founding fathers as the ultimate guide for our country simply because the founding fathers proposed it, we should also embrace stuff like disenfranchising women and minorities, slavery should maybe be legalized, and we should have only property-owning white men vote. However, our country has evolved and moved more towards fulfilling beliefs of equality and democracy over time, and in the process we’ve worked towards the abolition of slavery, the granting of more rights to women, and overall a more egalitarian society. Sure, the founding fathers set up a good system to start with, but their word is by no means the final say on the subject (again, it wasn’t and still isn’t a static system).

Keep in mind that treating the founding fathers as some sort of monolith in their beliefs is dumb, especially considering that there’s nuance even to the beliefs of individual founders. This is true for issues like slavery for instance, where many of them (not all) owned slaves and took few meaningful steps to end the practice, yet most of these people (not all) still opposed the practice. You can’t just take this info as an indication that the founding fathers as a whole liked or disliked slavery - there’s too much nuance for that. For stuff regarding the founding fathers as a whole group, there’s way more nuance than people like to admit, especially when they want to use it for a talking point about how “this important group supported [thing I like].”

Also, the EC, as well as America’s voting system in general, has not been a static system - even when the founding fathers were still alive and had considerable influence. This means that the founding fathers themselves recognized that the original system wasn’t perfect and that changes would sometimes be needed. To name a few examples of changes that happened:

For over half a century in the US, many states simply did not hold a vote for the general populace and instead just had their electors cast electoral votes. In the 1788-9 presidential election only Pennsylvania and Maryland had a vote, most states didn’t have a vote until 1824, and a couple states like South Carolina went on without a vote for even longer. Modern proponents of the EC don’t advocate for getting rid of statewide-votes, even though the country started out with very few state-wide votes.
In 1870, the original Three-fifths Compromise was abandoned in favor of granting black people full suffrage via the 15th Amendment. Modern proponents of the EC don’t advocate for going back to the original system in this regard, even though it was a system reached by the founding fathers themselves.
After the 1800 election (just 4 elections into the country’s history), the 12th Amendment was passed which directly altered the way that electors were able to cast their votes. This forced electors to cast one vote for president and one for vice president, rather than be able to cast both votes for just president or just vice president. More context about the 12th amendment is provided here.

Farmland isn’t just a small state thing - many big states like California and Illinois have a lot of farmland, yet are both large states. Why should Illinois and California, which have a lot of farmland and a sizable rural population, have to suffer because other states are the same except smaller?

There’s a number of indicators that show small, rural counties fare worse economically. For example, big and urban places tend to pay more into the federal government than they take out while smaller, more rural places are the opposite. More urban, Biden-voting counties make up a solid majority of the country’s economic output even though Trump won more counties overall - including most small, rural counties. However, nobody uses stuff like this to argue that people in small, rural counties should have a disproportionately small say in elections.

Most states are a mix of farmland and cities - SC, PA, NC, OH, AL, TN, NY, KS, NE, and so on. Some of these states are big (OH, NY, NC) and some are small (KS, NE). The idea that most states are either “all urban” or “all rural”, which is somewhat implied with the claim, is just false.

Gerrymandering

Committee for Economic Development 18
- “An analysis of districting plans conducted by Professor Simon Jackman of Stanford University, which encompassed 786 state legislative elections in 41 states in the period from 1972–2014, found that the maps approved in the most recent redistricting cycle exhibited some of the worst partisan asymmetries at both the congressional and state level in the past 40 years.”
  - For instance, despite Republicans only winning 48.6% of the votes in the 2012 Wisconsin elections, they were still able to win 60 out of 99 state legislature seats because of the redistricting plan they implemented.
- “According to an analysis of the 2016 US House races by the Associated Press, the Republicans gained as many as 22 additional US House seats as compared to the average vote share in congressional districts due to the partisan advantage achieved through the districting process.”
Legal Defense and Education Fund 18
- “Prison-based gerrymandering” occurs where state and local governments count the number of incarcerated citizens to inflate the population count to receive more districts, despite the incarcerated citizens not being able to vote; such a practice violates the notion of “one person, once vote”
- Disproportionately harms communities of color, as African-Americans represent 41.3% of our prison population
- Rural communities also use their incarcerated population to increase their political influence, as they only make up 20% of the U.S. population, but host 40% of all incarcerated persons. Additionally, states with predominantly rural areas are more likely to deny incarcerated persons voting rights.

Felon Disenfranchisement

Sentencing Project 2016
- 6.1 million Americans cannot vote because of a felony conviction
Uggen and Manza 2002
- Expanding suffrage to felons would have reversed the results of as many as seven senate races and at least one presidential election.
  - “Assuming that Democrats who might have been elected in the absence of felon disenfranchisement had held their seats as long as the Republicans who narrowly defeated them, we estimate that the Democratic Party would have gained parity in 1984 and held majority control of the U.S. Senate from 1986 to [2002].”
  - Bush’s victory in 2000 against Al Gore would have been reversed as well
  - “Disenfranchised felons and ex-felons currently make up 2.28 percent of the voting-age population”; “because the margin of victory in 3 of the last 10 presidential elections has been 1.1 percent of the voting-age population or less, felon disenfranchisement could be a decisive factor in future presidential races.”

Voter Fraud

https://scholars.org/sites/scholars/files/ssn_key_findings_minnite_on_the_myth_of_voter_fraud.pdf
https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/2019-08/Report_Truth-About-Voter-Fraud.pdf
2012 national election: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/elj.2013.0231
Trump’s claims of millions of illegal votes in 2016 was dismissed by strong trump supporters like lindsey graham: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/315895-wh-trump-believes-millions-voted-illegally
Trump’s voter fraud commission failed to find widespread voter fraud in 2016 election: https://apnews.com/f5f6a73b2af546ee97816bb35e82c18d/Report:-Trump-commission-did-not-find-widespread-voter-fraud
- Kinda weak point because the commission only met twice and got bombarded with lawsuits
https://votingrights.news21.com/interactive/election-fraud-database/index.html
- Big analysis of voter fraud from 2000-2012, didn’t find a lot of it
https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/analysis/Briefing_Memo_Debunking_Voter_Fraud_Myth.pdf big compilation of sources basically saying “voter fraud is miniscule lol”
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1324435797374808066.html big twitter thread responding to some of the more common myths about 2020 voter fraud, irregularities, etc

Reforms to Democracy

This doc includes much more on the subject and is definitely worth a look.

Compulsory voting

Authoritarianism

Despite common belief, authoritarian and autocratic states fare poorly on economic indicators

Rizio et al. 19 (cited)
- Analyzed the governments of 133 countries between 1858 to 2010
- Found that autocrats were either damaging or inconsequential for the economy of their countries.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w20004.pdf
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0022002795039001001