It doesn't reassure me that we give much more weight to a minority of voters just because they live in less densely populated areas. That's completely arbitrary.
It could be argued that 100 people living in 3 counties have a greater diversity of concerns and opinions than 100 people sharing an apartment complex.
Is "diversity of concerns" a primary goal of democracy? Obviously for issues that directly affect a local region, I do think those should be handled by a local government. The people in the apartment complex probably ought to have different rules than people in rural counties, each reflecting the concerns of the local population.
But there's only one President for the whole country, for better or for worse. It doesn't make sense to me to apply this idea here.
From your description it sounds like thats the only time it makes sense, to me at least. Ie, the President should hopefully be working for the whole country, not just the most dense areas.
I guess another way to look at it is that the president is responsible for such a large area, that population is far less of a concern (in my view). S/he should know not to set laws that focus on a locality, because the states can do a far better job at that.
I don't want the president to set laws for me (just an example) focusing on people in downtown LA or NYC - i don't live there, my world is very different. I want my president to consider the whole country, and let the states/counties handle raw locality.
> From your description it sounds like thats the only time it makes sense, to me at least. Ie, the President should hopefully be working for the whole country, not just the most dense areas.
But that's not the alternative proposed. The alternative proposed is that a human in a sparsely populated area gets MORE influence than a human in a densely populated area. If you go with the national popular vote idea, the President should be the candidate who got the most votes by humans without regard for the population density where they live.
> I guess another way to look at it is that the president is responsible for such a large area, that population is far less of a concern (in my view).
Population density is an extremely meaningless demographic to adjust for. Seriously, why does that matter? Sure, you can show a map of the US and see that most land area went Republican even when the Democratic candidate wins, but if you think about it for a moment, why does land area matter? Surely no one would go so far as to suggest that every unit of land area should have the same influence on the election (i.e. you get to vote once for every acre of land you own).
> I don't want the president to set laws for me (just an example) focusing on people in downtown LA or NYC - i don't live there, my world is very different. I want my president to consider the whole country, and let the states/counties handle raw locality.
That's a reasonable desire, but how does giving people in sparsely populated areas MORE influence help this? It may help you if you live in a sparsely populated area, but it doesn't help the goal of having the president consider the entire country.
The U.S. should move to a political system where coastal city-dwelling individuals have 4x the voting power of people who live inland and in rural areas.
It's not arbitrary, or about whose votes matter more or population density at all. It's because the United States is actually a union of what was, before the founding of the country as we know it, relatively sovereign states. By joining the union they were giving up much of that sovereignty. It was good for the union that more states joined, so the great compromise was to allow states who were fearful of being dominated by foreign opinions to be granted additional votes just for being 1 state. So Rhode Island residents don't just vote as individuals - they get some votes proportionally and some votes for being a member state of the union. How do so many people educated in the United States not know about that compromise?
I know the reasons the electoral college was chosen. I still don't think it's necessarily a good idea, especially given the modern role of the President.
It doesn't reassure me that we give much more weight to a minority of voters just because they live in less densely populated areas. That's completely arbitrary.