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The dumb part is that your vote only matters if you live in certain places. Trump and Bush should never have become Presidents in the first place.
If you're a Republican in rural California, it doesn't matter. Nor if you're a young Gem Z Democrat in California who voted after your favorite candidate was already guaranteed. Your vote doesn't help offset a vote in Alabama or Wyoming or whatever for the opposite candidate. Your vote would matter more if you moved to a red or purple state.
We can pretend it's democratic, but for "the land of the free" always talking about trying to spread democracy everywhere, the US is actually a pretty sucky and underwhelming system.
Gore never became President. Did you maybe mean Bush?
I have a lot of problems with the Electoral College, but voting absolutely still has impact and the number of states that have become "battlegrounds" is increasing, rather than decreasing, as more people vote.
Beyond that, local elections absolutely matter, as book bans, trans legislation etc very clearly shows.
But again, yes, the EC is absolutely ridiculous and stupid.
I meant, Bush lol. Corrected. If only we had Gore.
And yes, I think people should still vote. But I understand people who get disillusioned with our system, too. It's a dumb system designed to squash their voice. The Founders said so.
On the other hand, that doesn't mean they should do nothing. It means they should vote local, like you said, or get educated and organize in other ways.
The whole point of the Electoral College was to be undemocratic iirc. They wanted the "elite" to vote and never envisioned a world like today. The senate is similar, California and Wyoming have the same amount of votes in the Senate even though there are a lot more people in California than Wyoming.
The house even capped their members at one point, I think big populated states like NY and CA should dwarf smaller states but we can't go above a certain number of House Reps.
Just all over our government it tries to be "fair" to states, ignoring actual people. I don't know how to fix it though. I don't think direct democracy with 300+ million people is gonna work and even though the GOP is rotten and immoral and awful, it wouldn't exactly be fair that ~40 million Californians stomped on everything 500k Wyomese wanted at the federal level.
Thats what the fucking senate is for, why the hell is the house capped? /ranting
Did a little reading on this, here's what I found:
The house has been "capped" or at least limited in size the whole time actually!
Now that we count everyone and not just white people, that'd be a max somewhere in the range of 11000 representatives without a constitutional amendment.
11000 is probably too many people to try and assemble in one room and come to any sort of consensus, so you'd have to artificially lower the number somehow.
It turns out that the legislature is allowed to set it's own size, but both the House and the Senate have to agree. The current size of 435 members comes from the Reapportionment Act of 1929, so it's been established for a while.
I think my favorite option is the "Wyoming Rule" and it works like this: smallest state gets one representative, and everyone else gets representatives based on how many times their population is more than that of the smallest state. Under that rule the house would have 574 members, which still feels like a relatively reasonable amount of people
e: herp derp,you never had to own land to be counted
There was never a time in US history where only landowners could vote. The idea was discussed and discraded as unworkable. What did happen was states were allowed to put that restriction in place. Few states did and eventually the law was changed to ban that
You know, if I had looked at the paragraph before the one I quoted I'd have gotten it right the first time. Edited to fix
What you're describing actually removed the limited ability for both women and blacks to vote In outlying cases. States that tied voting rights to property ownership alone were, in my opinion, the ones actually taking the high road at the time...
"Discarded as unworkable" indeed...
The ones that did that were concentrated in slave states. As was brought up during the Continental Congress debates New Englanders owned little to no land compared to the South.
The point of the EC was to preserve slavery. Which it did for decades.