Bevendre

switch-up-snowfox:

bevendre:

switch-up-snowfox:

bevendre:

“The electoral college is necessary!  If the popular vote decided everything then it would always be liberal because urban areas trend liberal!”

Really?  You don’t say?  The areas with the highest population density tend to swing more liberal?  That’s weird.  It’s almost like being around other people makes people more sympathetic to others, and understanding that different people are still people.

It’s almost like conservative areas tend to be more isolated and insulated in their ways rather than allowing ideas to mix, since that could contradict their ideals.  How strange that those areas tend to vote one way regardless of sense because it’s as much or more tradition than it does reason.

Yeah, it really makes sense that the votes of thousands of urban dwellers should count equal to a single rural voter because of no apparent reason.

@bevendre

you may wanna watch this.

The video raises some good points, but it doesn’t discredit my point.  Yes the majority of the population lives in metropolitan areas, and those areas are predominantly liberal, and yes that in itself tips policy and campaigning towards appealing to those areas due to easier access to voters.  That’s how it is and that’s how it’s going to stay regardless of whether the electoral college is abolished or remains as is.

However, the video never tackles the point that I made, the absolute discrepancy of how votes are tallied through the electoral college.  The idea that one’s vote doesn’t matter comes to look more believable when 1 vote in my home state of Nebraska is equivalent to 3 votes from California despite California being MUCH more culturally and economically important to the country as a whole.  California made up about 11% of the US population, but in the electoral college they represent maybe 9% of all votes.

The electoral college wasn’t made to make it balanced between urban and rural areas, it was established to make the vote for president easier in the early days of the country.  It gave the vote for president to a number of electors equal to the number of representatives in Congress, which in itself is set by population.  That hasn’t changed, but now there are more people in America than there were in existence when the electoral college was established, and a cap was put on the amount of representatives any one state can possibly have.  With that affecting areas of higher population density, it tends to impact liberal leaning states more than it does conservative.

All of that aside, the video still doesn’t address my point: urban areas lean liberal because of a heavier mix of peoples and cultures, which tends to lead to an understanding that people are people and efforts to understand people other than oneself.  Meanwhile conservative areas tend to be more rural with people split up and separated, only mingling with people who share their ideals in perpetuity, thereby making it easier to look at things that are different as other and by extension wrong.

“urban areas lean liberal because of a heavier mix of peoples and cultures, which tends to lead to an understanding that people are people and efforts to understand people other than oneself.  Meanwhile conservative areas tend to be more rural with people split up and separated, only mingling with people who share their ideals in perpetuity, thereby making it easier to look at things that are different as other and by extension wrong.”

i think i’ll qoute JC denton and ask “do you have a single fact to back that up?”

i guess i should say that yeah, your right in that the video doesn’t debunk your point. but now that i look at it, your point is loaded and junk to begin with. it REEKS of ignorance, willful or not i don’t know, two major presuppositions, and your last point of “Yeah, it really makes sense that the votes of thousands of urban dwellers should count equal to a single rural voter because of no apparent reason.” is really fucking stupid when you take into account that the electoral college is to make sure that 3 or 4 cities don’t make all the voting decisions of 318.9 million people in 50 fucking states.

think of it this way bev, would you prefer the individual vote counting system if most the voting population in the big cities was conservative instead of liberal? would you want those cities deciding most, if not all of the voting decisions?

Considering the only major decision made by the electoral college is the presidency, yes, because it would still be representative of America as a whole with every vote counting equally.

If you want facts to back up the idea that urban areas lean liberal due to a mixing of ideology, culture, color, etc. and rural areas lean conservative due to separation and perpetuation of preestablished ideas look into the voting habits around not just location, but race, education, etc. and you’ll find that liberal voters tend to be more multi-cultural, more often educated beyond high school and more varied than their conservatively voting counterparts which fall into more clear cut demographics.

The electoral college isn’t meant to prevent a handful of cities from controlling all votes.  The electoral college was meant to ease the burden of electing a president by equating the votes allotted to each state to the number of representatives in Congress, which in itself isn’t accurate to the population of larger states now, though it may have been then.  If you think that 3 or 4 cities could dominate the popular vote as a whole, then check the 2015 census, where the top 16 most populous cities equate to around 10% of the total population.

The electoral college doesn’t protect the rural voter by better representing them, it merely offers an inaccurate estimate of the popular vote based off of congressional representation.  

(via switch-up-snowfox)