Now do the US Senate.
this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2026
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Ed: Where should we eat? I say pizza.
Ann: Pizza!
Ty: Pizza!
Liz: Pizza!
Ed: Alright, pizza it is! Oh, right, I forgot we have to figure out what the voters will eat. I guess they can have this old shoe. Now, back to pizza!
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The Senate was never designed to be proportionate to a state's population. The House was.
It's fine to be against the idea of the Senate, but you should at least make sure you understand why it was created in the first place. That is, to create a union of states where each one has a certain level of autonomy.
The Senate is meant to represent each state's individual interests in a national legislature.
Sometimes the interests of a local municipality don't perfectly align with the interests of a state writ large. Which is why we have two houses: one to represent each state, and one that's proportionate to population and represents the districts within a state.
The real issue, in my opinion, is the Reapportionment Act of 1929 that put a hard cap on the number of members of the House of Representatives at 435 seats.
It was created because the founders didn’t trust democracy. Shay’s Rebellion had them nervous about too much democracy taking wealth from the ruling class.
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you should at least make sure you understand why it was created in the first place. That is, to create a union of states where each one has a certain level of autonomy.
The Senate is meant to represent each state's individual interests in a national legislature.
...
The real issue, in my opinion, is the Reapportionment Act of 1929 that put a hard cap on the number of members of the House of Representatives at 435 seats.
IMO the real reason the Senate is broken is the 17th Amendment (having Senators be directly elected by popular vote instead of chosen by state legislatures). That's the point when it ceased to be fit for its original purpose (representing the State as its own entity in a way materially different from the House, maximising separation of powers) and should've just been abolished entirely instead.
I agree with you that the House is broken by the Reapportionment Act because there are just too damn many constituents per legislator, but that issue is separate from what's wrong with the Senate.
but that issue is separate from what's wrong with the Senate.
I'm not sure that it is. We have a bicameral legislature, you can't really separate them completely. Together they are "Congress".
I think the Senate would be fine as it is if we actually had a proportionate House of Reps.
And maybe the Senate shouldn't be the "upper house" as I think "The People's House" (in this scenario, actually proportionate) should be considered more important.
But I think calling for the abolishment of the Senate entirely is misguided. I like the idea of a federation of states, each with a degree of autonomy. And given the nature of the US being a nation of immigrants (and it's sheer size), I think it fits our culture very well.
The Senate made more sense when the US was less centralized and different states were like different countries and there weren't a bunch of states populated by 100 cows for every person.
In the modern era, it's a simple tyranny of the minority. Wyoming has like 500,000 people, but those 500,000 have the exact same power in the more important chamber of Congress than do the 40,000,000 of California or the 30,000,000 of Texas.
If we take it to an extreme, imagine if there were only two states in the Union. Hawaii and the entire Continental US. Would we share equal power with Hawaii? Of course not.
If we're really married to the idea, there should be a requirement for roughly equal population by state, and let's be honest, we have that with House districts and they gerrymander it. (We should also move to proportional representation to fix that.)
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Nah, the senate represents the state. That's the problem, always has been.
We need the electoral college because without it the ignorant masses might elect an dangerously unqualified reactionary demagogue they saw on a reality TV show.
Thank goodness that will never happen
That sounds like the plot of Idiocracy.
That'd be insane if it actually happened. Could you imagine!?
Don't worry, there are more than sufficient checks and balances in place to make sure that kind of situation could never occur!
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Well maybe it'd happen once. but certainly not twice. Right?
🤣
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I bet Liz from Wyoming votes to eat the shoe at like 90% of meals, but argues that she's totally different from all the other shoe eaters.
Hold on now, Liz only wants everyone else to eat shoes - she still wants pizza for herself! That's what she's gonna get, right? ...Right?
She already has pizza before they even asked the question.
Let's let the class decide what type of pizza to get.
Counting the votes, pepperoni wins.
Counting the votes at each table, then each counting the winner per table, pepperoni wins.
Arbitrarily dividing each table into "groups" of students, then adding those groups up to determine which choice won the table, then counting the tables... anchovies wins!
Where
pizza
shoe
Me, off-camera: these people are idiots
This has been the electoral college
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TIL pizza is a where.
Implies the restaurant names were Pizza, and This Old Shoe.
Yes the Electoral college sucks but popular vote isn't a utopia either without some adjustments.
CGP Grey's "The Voting System That's Actually Too Good for Politicians to Allow" -
I feel like rank choice is the way
Ranked choice. Rank choice would just smell bad.
There's a part of that I don't quite understand. So it said white tiger got 65% of the vote. It doesn't need 65 it only needs 33 so anything over 33 was taken off and their second choice got picked instead. But how is that done exactly? I mean did all 65% that voted for white tiger have the exact same ballot? Every last one of them picked the other tiger second? What if some of them hadn't? What if some of them picked the Silverback Gorilla second? How do we choose which of those 65% go to another person? That's the part I don't understand.
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Not a single person answered the question, which is WHERE they should eat, not what.
You're assuming that there isn't a pizza store called "Pizza!" and a restaurant called this old shoe that serves shoes.
as a senator she would have alot more voting power in congress.
The United States is and always has been a federal hybrid not a true direct democracy. I don’t like it any more than you do but the president is elected by the states and not by the people and this was intentional in the design of the government. The “grand experiment” is the compromise between federal and democratic systems. Unfortunately the democratic side has lost ground like with the capping of the House. If we want to turn our government into a direct democracy then we need to do more than do away with the electoral college.
The United States is and always has been a federal hybrid not a true direct democracy
Technically, it was briefly a confederation between 1781 and 1789, but that just supports your real point even more.
The electoral college is a weird vestige of an earlier time. Each state gets apportioned a vote equal to the number of senators and congressmen they get; so the least populous states get an outsized voice in appointing a President.
When the law to cap the size of the US house to 435 representatives was passed in the very early 1900s - the US population was only ~90m. If instead the size of the elected body was allowed to grow in line with population, the US would have something closer to ~1,600 representatives currently, and as a result the electoral college would be much more equitable.
Please tell me votes from certain states aren't worth more than votes from other states in America...
Not in a straightforward manner, no. One vote is just one vote. Most states are winner takes all, so the simple majority winner of, say, California takes all the electoral votes in California. It just so happens that California has less electoral votes per capita than states like Wyoming.
Well the senate is composed of 2 legislators from each state, so technically and in practice smaller states can band together effectively and distort policy that a majority of the people would be for. Theres a strong argument that my vote in Maine carries more political weight than a vote in california when it comes to the senate. This has allowed the southern states to drag their feet on policy over the years, and caused a lot of questions about representation in the country. So moving down the line, our presidential elections use an electoral college where house seats (which are restricted and tied to the population + senate seats = EC votes) So when it comes to electing presidents a state like maine with 1M people is punching way above its representation weight compared to california. Most of the EC votes are winner takes all which is the reason why california votes blue and alabama votes red for the president. Its also the reason why Nebraska and maine split their votes to offer people fair represenation in their districts.
TLDR: Yes and its mathematically supported
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votes from certain states aren’t worth more than votes from other states in America
There you go. Though, for the record: votes from certain states are worth more than votes from other states in America.
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if the baseline for district size was the population of the least populated state (wyoming), and the house of representatives and electoral college were increased in size as needed to accommodate...
the outcome of every presidential election since the house was capped at 435 would remain unchanged, with the possible and singular exception of 2000--but there were other 'circumstances' involved then that gave that election away.
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Could a voting bloc of Democrats move to Wyoming pretending to be Republican and then swing the vote before the RNC has any idea what happened. If they are so sparsely populated it can't be that hard to outvoted them.
Sure but who the fuck wants to move to Wyoming?
Well almost 200k people would need to move there. Making Puerto Rico a state would probably be easier.
It would have been nice if work from home inspired a blue wave to move to red states and flipped the electoral maps during COVID.
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