The Electoral College

Note that my opponent copied his Slate source word-for-word, and Slate did not provide any sources or proof on many of its points. Neither did Sciencebuzz; it juts gave examples and no data. Also note that my opponent only used two websites as sources. I was limited to 10000 characters so had to take measures to not go over. 1. This is not even possible. You cannot give more power to every voter because the total power of all of the voters (control the election results) does not change. Here's a different proof. Your link says that because a candidate needs to win two states to win, they need two million votes. Voters are thought of as part of those two million getting their candidate to win. On the other hand, a popular vote voter is one in three million. The error is that in a popular vote, you need 1.5 million and one to win, so voters are actually one in 1.5 million, by that logic. In fact, the electoral college gives a lot of people less power. Here is the election forecast made by renowned statistician Nate Silver. If you scroll down, you will find a Voter Power Index, where he lists in which states your vote counts the most. You'll find some extreme imbalance. For example, a New Mexican voter is twice as important as a Floridian and five times as important as a South Dakotan. projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast 2. If Kennedy won by 0.2%, it shows that the public was very indecisive on whether he should be president, so the electoral college deciding isn't really saving the day, it's deciding the winner arbitrarily. It's like if you decided the winner of a tied race by flipping a coin. Anyway, let's just look at the data. In history, there have been just two elections where the popular vote was within 0.5%, which is usually a good bar for recounts. When? In 1880 and 1960, with Garfield and Kennedy. (Side note, both got assassinated). Maybe you can stretch that number to four if you include 2000, which was decided by 0.52%, and 1884, which was 0.57%. So anywhere from two to four elections would need a recount. How about electoral college recounts? These we'll consider when flipping a few states could have flipped the election, and that state (or states) was within 0.5%. So we have Florida in 2000, California in 1916, and South Carolina in 1876. Ohio and one more state does it in 1976, and Hawaii, Illinois, and Missouri does it in 1960. These were all within 0.6%. That is at least three and up to eight recounts under the electoral college. So as you can see, the electoral college by no means reduces the number of recounts we need. Recounts might not even be an issue at all, as most recounts find only minuscule changes in results. fivethirtyeight.com/features/recounts-rarely-reverse-election-results wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_elections_by_popular_vote_margin (also links to specific elections) 3. You phrased it "not to ignore the rural parts of states," which is ambiguous. I'll tackle both interpretations. In case 1, I would like to point out to you that the ten most rural states got a grand total of... four campaign events out of about 400. Almost all extremely rural states, like Mississippi, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska, Idaho, etc. are nearly completely ignored in presidential races. So that point is invalidated. priceonomics.com/the-most-urbanized-states-in-america You say that the electoral college would force candidates to pay attention to the rural part of a state, but keep in mind that on the state level, the election is by popular vote. So saying that on a state level, the electoral college protects rural areas is self-defeating, that's saying the popular vote protects rural areas, which is against your side. The popular vote does not mean that rural areas are ignored. Take the presidential election in Ohio, 2012. (Remember that the election in each state is run by the popular vote.) In The four biggest metro areas, accounting for 54% of its population, got 52% of Ohio's campaign events. Similarly, the seven smaller metro areas, accounting for 24% of Ohio's population, got 23% of the campaign events. The remaining rural areas, which were 22% of the population, got 25% of the campaign events. You'll also see that the distribution of campaign events by location was quite balanced; there are larger clusters around denser areas, but many events in the rural areas too, which is reflective of the population distribution. youtube.com/watch?v=_gbwv5hf2Ps 4. Minorities are concentrated in the ignored safe states like Mississippi, Texas, Hawaii, California, and New York. Here's proof with data: Republicans lose big with minorities, winning around 25%-30% of the non-black minorities and just 6% of the black vote. The same story goes with religion. Under a system where it's a good idea to care for minorities, you'd expect that the Democrats to have a big advantage, but they don't; twice in the past five elections the electoral college gave the white house to the Republicans. nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/politics/election-exit-polls.html?_r=0 projects. fivethirtyeight.com/2016-swing-the-election (When used again I'll call it "swing source") 5. The electoral college doesn't cause a two party system, the spoiler effect does, which is present in a plurality vote. You can tell as nearly all senators and governors are either red or blue, and those elections are run by a popular vote. wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler_effect 6. As we discussed before there have been 2-4 disputable popular vote verdicts, but 3-5 disputable electoral college verdicts. So the electoral college is not more likely to produce a certain verdict. This is complicated by the fact that there can be faithless electors; they may be able to sway an extremely close election like 1876, and the legitimacy of such an outcome would be disputed. Furthermore, the electoral college doesn't even always produce a winner. Candidates need 270 electoral votes, a majority to win. This means that if there is a tie, or third parties grab enough electoral votes that no candidate reaches 270 electoral votes, there is no winner and congress must decide the vice president and president using an extremely unfair system. (Not enough characters to elaborate) As an example, in 1824, Jackson won a plurality of the popular vote and electoral vote and yet lost, and the voters were furious. 7. No region alone will allow you to win the popular or electoral vote. However, with the electoral vote, you can gain 100% of the electoral vote from that region, whereas with the popular vote, you never will. Take the largest region, the South. Under the electoral college, you can win 36% of the electoral vote by winning all of the South. More likely is that you will win 33% of it, since Maryland and Delaware are solidly blue. Under the popular vote, 37% of the population lives in the South. However, you're not going to win 37% of the popular vote just from the South, or even 33% like in the electoral college. Let's be extremely generous and say you'll get 70% of the vote in the South, more than any candidate got in any state (not counting DC), let alone region, in 2016. That's just 26% of the popular vote. The electoral college encourages relying on a regional appeal, not the popular vote. wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_States wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_population Swing source 8. The point of democratic voting (including representative systems) is that everyone's vote is equal. So this point is advocating for disenfranchisement. Not only that, it's fundamentally wrong. The most thoughtful people tend to be the most well educated, regardless of what state they live in. Just because your vote doesn't count doesn't mean you don't pay attention to the race. We can, by your logic, say we should only let well educated people vote. Even if we should only let the most thoughtful vote, there are two more reasons this point doesn't work. For one, the most thoughtful people tend to live in cities, where people are more educated. The swing states are not particularly educated. The second is that if we use a popular vote, everyone's vote counts, so by your logic, a popular vote would also be decided by thoughtful voters. Swing source 9. This is more a rebuttal to my point. Anyway, you are conceding that it is unfair for some voters to get more power than others, as you are defending the electoral college by saying it does not give voters in small states more power. You then must also concede that it is unfair for voters in swing states to get more power. 10. The electoral college is worse than the popular vote in this respect. In those elections you mentioned, the electoral college did not elect a candidate with the majority of votes either. You cannot say that that doesn't matter since under the electoral college only electoral votes matter, because then you are saying criteria for a good voting system changes based on the system. Not only that, the electoral college does not require that you win a majority in a state to win it. In fact, no candidate won a majority of votes in 14 states this election. On the other hand, the popular vote is good at electing majority winners; in the 905 gubernatorial elections since WWII, 90% won with a majority, 99% with 40%, and all won with at least 35% of the vote. youtube.com/watch?v=X_IUIaf9egA A representative democracy doesn't strive to be perfectly democratic, it strives to fairly represent its citizens. The electoral college does not do this. Remember that representatives are directly elected using a popular vote, and these representatives then vote on issues. The president is a representative that can veto and enact these issues. I will post my rebuttal to the last part of your point in the comments, since I am out of characters.