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The electoral college
(lemmy.nz)
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this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2026
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Cheese wins because we don't ignore small tables, as a simple majority system would do. I think small tables deserve to have a voice for their needs, even if there are fewer of them. It's not right to ignore an entire group of tables simply because fewer people sit at them.
Not necessarily.
Let's say you have 100 people. 60 want cheese, 40 want pepperoni.
You need to split this 100 people into 6 tables, each table will vote and submit their overall request. Whichever kind of pizza most of the tables request gets ordered.
You assign seating as follows:
Table 1- 10 pepperoni, 6 cheese
Table 2- 10 pepperoni, 7 cheese
Table 3- 10 pepperoni, 6 cheese
Table 4- 10 pepperoni, 7 cheese
Table 5- 17 cheese, no pepperoni
Table 6- 17 cheese, no pepperoni
There we go. I've just 'fairly, evenly' divided 100 people into 6 tables of 16-17 people each.
And thus with my 'simple and unimportant' job of assigning table seating, I've guaranteed that pepperoni will be ordered even though a majority of the people want cheese. Tables 1-4 will vote and pepperoni will win, tables 5-6 will unanimously agree on cheese, and when we ask the tables what they want 4 out of 6 tables will vote pepperoni. And thus the minority wins because the table seating was a scam.
If the tables were assigned randomly, or if a computer grouped the tables by similar interest, age, etc, we'd get something more like a fair vote.
Why do small tables deserve this special protection from being ignored? No other minority group is getting such protection. Minority races are ignored. Minority cultures are ignored. Minorities with special dietary needs - like vegetarians, the very minority you have used to justify inflating the voting power of the small tables - are ignored. What's so special about being seated in a smaller table that warrants silencing the majority just so that you - a minority - won't be ignored?
And yes, I understand that this is just an allegory, and in real life there can be reason to give this protection to small states, reasons that are not reflected when we think of them as tables. But please remember that the real reason in real life was to allow slavery states to utilize their slaves' voting powers without actually allowing them to vote.
Note that I said "in every single group", and I said you because you said "will ensure every group".
I should have emphasized it...
Another way to "get something more like a fair vote" is to count the votes by person and not by table. Actually, this is not just "something more like" a fair vote - it's the very idea (as in "Plato's Theory of Ideas") of a fair vote. This what we compare any drawing of district lines to determine how fair it is.
Great response. This is the sort of intelligent conversation Reddit used to have and I love it.
Because the office is made up of both introverts and extroverts, and both make major contributions to the company. Both ways of life should have a voice, ignoring either one in favor of the other harms the whole company.
Quantity wise there's more extroverted boisterous sales reps and middle managers (who sit at large tables) than there are introverted, socially awkward product engineers and IT people (who sit at small tables), but without those engineers and IT the company has no product to sell nor access to email. And without the sales people and their managers, the product is being developed but nobody will buy it. Both groups rely on each other, therefore both groups should have a roughly equal seat at the table.
That analogy holds up pretty well to the real world IMHO- without rural people we have no farms, no crops, no food, and (back before we sent it all to China to increase shareholder value) no manufacturing. Should we tell those who feed our nation that their voice doesn't matter because there's fewer of them spread out over a larger area?
No, I believe both ways of life- rural and urban- both make major contributions to society and to our nation. Ignoring either one in favor of the other harms us all.
And besides, there's the old 'do un to others'-- if the total rural population was greater than the urban population, would you want them imposing rules that make good sense out in the middle of Nebraska on a major city? Of course not. The reverse is also true- policies that make sense in cities often don't work in the countryside.
A perfect example here is guns. In a major city with police on every block and a drug problem, you might not want people walking around openly carrying pistols and rifles. At the same time in a rural area it might be extremely unwise to go for a hike without an readily accessible high caliber weapon, as the woods are full of bears and other predators that might consider a human a tasty snack and consider a few 9mm rounds motivation to eat quickly rather than any sort of real threat. Two different areas, different needs, neither one should get to impose policy on the other IMHO.
The beauty of the Constitution is how it formed as a compromise of interests. Yes, slave states were pushing for extra representation, but so were small states. And the result was a compromise of interests.
Of course we dun fucked it up. The problem isn't the strategy, the problem is how we execute it today: (from your link)
I don't think the Framers imagined, or would have wanted, anything like the two-party duopoly we have today. The reality is we have a party-run legislature, a party-run executive, and a permanent body (RNC / DNC) that ARE influenced by all kinds of interests, foreign and domestic.
Because those parties have become corrupt, and it's essentially impossible to get elected without them, the corruption is spread nationwide.
Going to the pizza analogy- let's say each table puts forward one representative to serve on the Lunch Committee, which decides on the menu and food vendor selection. This involves a lot of minor decisions, like it doesn't make sense to poll the entire company about which vendor should operate the cafeteria; it makes more sense to have a smaller committee that will review contract proposals and stand up for the needs of their table in vendor selection and menu creation.
However, 'tyranny of the majority' is a thing. Majority rule only works when something protects the legitimate interest of the minority. For example let's say the company is in Texas- you've got 98 people who love BBQ, one person who can't eat pork for religious reasons and one vegetarian. If you don't force their needs to be considered, lunch will be pulled pork every day and those two get disenfranchised.
Or do you suggest we just poll all 100 people 'what do you want for lunch' and go with the result of 'pulled pork every day'?
That is, of course, assuming we are still using the same analogy. If the analogy changes to "running the company" - then companies are not democracies. All departments are heard, but the CEO has the final saying. Voting does happens higher up, at the board, but there the representation is based on shares, which is supposed to represent their investment in the company. Under capitalism, that is - no one here on Lemmy is going to agree that these shares represent any kind of contribution whatsoever. But at the very least it's a principled way (even if you disagree with the principles) to distribute the voting power.
This is not an argument in favor of letting the minority decide on the majority. This is an argument in favor of shifting power to local government. In the analogy - letting the people of each table decide what they want to order for their table. Sheer madness.
But there are not "lots of minor decisions". The Electoral College makes one major decision - who will be the President. As simple as a ballot can get.
But even if you did need a committee - there are enough method to elect a committee that'll proportionally represent the populace. The methods that yield better representation require a more complex ballot (because they involve ranked voting), but even the simpler ones are better than intentionally skewing the representation.
The Electoral College is replacing a tyranny of the majority with good old tyranny of a minority - the minority who got the extra representation. Although I'd argue that the real power is held by the people who decide which minority gets extra representation.
There are much better ways to deal with the tyranny of the majority - ways that don't require picking a minority to be the tyrant instead, such as:
No method is perfect, and some of them raise farther question - e.g. how do you prevent the courts from becoming the new tyranny? But at least these are general fundamental questions, and not "which minority we want to be the upper caste that decides everything?" (a question that's always answered according to the current balance of power)