Instigator / Pro
7
1499
rating
13
debates
57.69%
won
Topic
#5687
An RCV Popular vote would be preferable to the current Electoral College in america
Status
Voting
The participant that receives the most points from the voters is declared a winner.
Voting will end in:
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Parameters
- Publication date
- Last updated date
- Type
- Rated
- Number of rounds
- 3
- Time for argument
- Three days
- Max argument characters
- 10,000
- Voting period
- One month
- Point system
- Multiple criterions
- Voting system
- Open
- Minimal rating
- None
Contender / Con
3
1500
rating
12
debates
37.5%
won
Description
RCV: Ranked Choice Voting, a system of electing officials where you can rank different candidates. For more details, defer to link in comments.
Electoral College: The current system by which America elects its president.
To clarify, the specific form of RCV I am arguing for is computer RCV. One form involves many manual recounts, in my version, the full details of the ballot are inputted into a computer and the computer automates the recounts.
Round 1
Thank you for accepting this debate Con. I think this will be a fun experience getting to debate someone new, and who isn’t BK for a change.
Why the Electoral College Sucks (IMO)
1. It’s Unrepresentative
My argument is pretty obvious starting out, so I won’t drag on too long.
The electoral college is unrepresentative. A candidate can, and has won with a minority of the vote. This has happened 5 times in history, with the most recent being 2016, but we all remember that.
Clinton won the popular vote, yet lost the electoral college, so Trump ended up as president. While this is a core part of my argument, it’s also important to recognize the margin by which Trump won.
Trump won on 304 electoral votes to Clinton’s 227. Sometimes it seems like the electoral college is only a little unfair because it has only elected an unpopular candidate 5 times, but if someone can have that big margin of victory while having a small loss in the popular vote, then the system is clearly very unfair. The system is swayed so that smaller states get more representation than bigger states, so naturally republicans have the advantage. Why should my vote, (as someone in a big state) count for less than someone’s in a small state?
Bonus Fun fact: it is possible to win the electoral college. with just under 22% of the popular vote. Sure, it is unlikely to happen, but we shouldn't have a system that allows it to happen anyways!
2. Politicians only pander to swing states.
Now, some people justify this unfairness by saying that the system makes it so that politicians have to focus on small states. The thought is that without the EC presidential candidates could jet from NYC to Chicago to LA and be good. But that is just not the statistical reality.
For starters, that’s not how population distribution works. Those three cities alone only make up 0.04% of the population. In fact, if you took the 100 biggest cities in America (right down to Spokane Washington) you would only get to a little under 20%. So you clearly cannot just focus on the big states already. You need to win the smaller ones too.
However, even if small states needed protection from the big ones, the EC would still fail at that job. Why? Swing states. Because of the EC politicians don’t end up caring about small states equal to big ones, they only care about the swing states. To prove it, here is a graph showing political ad spending and visits in the 2020 campaign by state.
You will see that the two states with the most visits are Florida and Pennsylvania (47&31 visits), hardly small states. Next up are North Carolina, Michigan, and Wisconsin with 25, 21, and 18 respectively. Noticing a pattern? They’re all swing states. This data is the same when you look at the ad dollars spent.
Clearly politicians only need the votes of people in swing states to win, not the votes of people in small states. So your vote doesn’t matter if you live in 40 to 45 of the states. 15% of the country ends up deciding a president who should represent 100% of us. This is not fair.
To conclude this segment, the electoral college is a system that can elect a president with a minority of the vote. It was established like this anyways because it had the purpose of making everyone’s vote count more equally. However, it fails at that by giving political power only to people in swing states, not small states as it suggests. It is a system that is founded under misguided ideas and then fails to achieve even that small bar.
Why RCV is better
The last time I did this kind of debate, my opponents main argument was that a First past the post election would suck, and to be honest, I agree. I don’t think it’s as bad as the EC, but I digress. This is why I included RCV in this debate.
I briefly explained what ranked choice voting was in the description, but I’ll elaborate here. (BTW this is all covered in that video I linked if you want to skip this part). Say there were five candidates running for president. I really like candidate 5, I’m good with 4, I wouldn’t mind 3, but I really don’t like 1 or 2. Naturally, in a FPTP voting system I would just vote once for candidate 5 and be done. But what if the next election role around, and it turns out that candidate 5 only got 4% of the vote. I really like them, but I know they can’t win, so I strategically change my vote to candidate 4. Eventually, Candidate 5 drops out of future races because no one ends up voting for a candidate that can’t win. This is why so many democracies end up in two party system, and neither candidate represent you very well. This is called the “spoiler affect” and it’s why third party candidates always either fail, or become part of the new two party system in America. However, RCV solves this.
In an RCV election, I would put candidate 5 as my first choice, 4 as my second choice, and 3 as my third choice, and leave the rest of the ballot blank. When Election Day comes around, let’s say 5 still gets only 4% of the vote. Being the candidate with the lowest votes, 5 is dropped out of the race automatically. But here’s the key part.
Since I put 4 as my second choice, my vote goes to 4 instead. The process repeats with candidate 1 being dropped out of the race and his votes being redistributed. This repeats until somebody reaches a majority.
The reason this system works so well is that it doesn’t allow the spoiler affect. Take the 2000 election in Florida for example. Bush won in that state without a majority, so even though most people voted for someone other than bush, all the electoral votes of Florida went to him, and gave him the victory. This happened because of the Green Party candidate, Ralph Nader. Many Al Gore supporters voted for Nader instead, and unwittingly handed the presidency to Bush.
So now if a third party does get enough support to have a fighting chance, all they will end up doing is splitting the vote on one side. This way, everyone is too scared to vote 3rd party because they know their vote will go to waste, or end up hurting them. RCV solves this. Nader supporters Could have put Gore as their second choice, so when Nader ended up with the lowest total, their votes would go to Al Gore and he would have won. What end up happening is we elect a candidate that more of us are okay with, rather than somebody who has only a small amount of people who really like them.
The same thing works for our current election. I know RFK has dropped out, but when he was still in the running, many people preferred him to the primary candidates, and yet they couldn’t vote for him because they knew their vote would end up amounting to nothing.
Conclusion
The electoral college was established to protect small states, but it fails by only giving power to swing states. Because of this, 80% of the country doesn’t have their voice heard i government.
Ranked choice voting is much preferable to this system because it prevents the spoiler effect and make it so everyone’s voice is heard equally. People are free to vote for whichever candidate they want without being stuck in the two-party system.
Thank you again for accepting Con, I hope this will be a fun debate.
Forfeited
Round 2
Sorry if the 3 day time limit was too little. I prob should have made it a week.
You are welcome, and I thank you for setting it up. That said, let’s dive right in:
You started your argument with: "The Electoral College allows a candidate to win the presidency without a majority of the popular vote.“ This is obvious, and perhaps worthy of a deduction from legibility. This repetitiveness in your writing makes it unengaging, redundant, and wasteful of the reader’s time, making it feel yet more monotonous and harder to follow, diminishing the overall readability and impact of the content. Maybe in a Forum, this would be OK, but not in a Debate format.
I’d like to point out your perversion in words: "This discrepancy (losing the popular vote yet winning the electorates) highlights how the system gives more representation to smaller states, often skewing the outcome.” This is another infraction of legibility. Now I will explain why using the word “skewing” is wrong and also illegible.
The framers of the U.S. Constitution had several reasons for establishing this system.
- Balancing Power Between Large and Small States (not skewing, but rather equalizing, or at least giving them a fair playing field)
- Protection Against Direct Democracy (mob rule and the election of demagogic officials, leading to democratic tyranny. We can debate also if you like about how Direct Democracy leads to communism, which means demagogues will always be elected, thus why we have an electorate to minimize that.)
- Preservation of Federalism (dividing power between the national and state governments, also preventing communism and direct democratic tyranny)
SIDE NOTE: "it is theoretically possible to win the Electoral College with less than 22% of the popular vote, which underscores its potential to produce unrepresentative results.”
Now this is you ACTUALLY skewing numbers! No one wins with 22%.
Second of all, just to be clear, I am not against RCV. I am only against RCV at the federal level because it leads to direct democracy, which leads to communism, due to the principle of mob rule and the elimination of federalism. Now, if we were to pass a 28th Amendment (which, by the way, is extremely unlikely) and institute an RCV vote, it should be at the state level. Wherein we would prevent communism and pass a fair version of the RCV. I think this is a fine compromise and solution.
However, I would like to offer another solution; I think that we should elect a President via the House of Representatives, a Vice President via the Senate, and the constituents elect the Representatives and the Senators. I'm fine with the electorate, I am also fine with a state, not federal RCV, but I think this would be the best option of the three. Since we, the people are electing the politicians in Congress, it prevents Direct Democracy/Communism.
Although any of these three, I am fine with:
1. Electoral College
2. State, not federal RCV
3. POTUS & VPOTUS electied via House and Senate respecitvely
So far, you have only expressed interest in a federal RCV, which is unconstitutional and demagogic.
Round 3
You started your argument with: "The Electoral College allows a candidate to win the presidency without a majority of the popular vote.“ This is obvious, and perhaps worthy of a deduction from legibility. This repetitiveness in your writing makes it unengaging, redundant, and wasteful of the reader’s time, making it feel yet more monotonous and harder to follow, diminishing the overall readability and impact of the content. Maybe in a Forum, this would be OK, but not in a Debate format.
Okay, first of all, where did you get that quote? I said things like that, but you put that in quotes. I don't mind you paraphrasing, but you have to say that you aren't directly quoting. As for the legibility point, I would like to call your attention to the DART voting guide "Awarded as a penalty for excessive abuse committed by the other side, wherein sections of the debate become illegible or at least comparatively burdensome to decipher."
I like to be thorough in my debate, so I think it's pretty clear that this does not merit an "excessive abuse" or really any in my opinion.
I’d like to point out your perversion in words: "This discrepancy (losing the popular vote yet winning the electorates) highlights how the system gives more representation to smaller states, often skewing the outcome.” This is another infraction of legibility. Now I will explain why using the word “skewing” is wrong and also illegible.
Again, that's not a quote I made. Please be sure to mention when you are not directly quoting because it's very confusing when you put this stuff in bold quotations.
The framers of the U.S. Constitution had several reasons for establishing this system.
- Balancing Power Between Large and Small States (not skewing, but rather equalizing, or at least giving them a fair playing field)
Yeah, I already provided a rebuttal to this in my opening statement. While the purpose seems noble, it actually ends up failing at its job. Instead of pandering to small states equally, politicians end up only needing to focus on swing states (see argument 1 sources). I do take issue with the idea of trying to give small states more power, but it doesn't matter, because small states don't end up with more power, only swing states have power.
2. Protection Against Direct Democracy (mob rule and the election of demagogic officials, leading to democratic tyranny. We can debate also if you like about how Direct Democracy leads to communism, which means demagogues will always be elected, thus why we have an electorate to minimize that.)
I think I'm not too far off in calling this out as a slippery slope argument. First of all, Demagogues can already be elected in the current system, case in point Trump :P. You haven't demonstrated how RCV would lead to tyranny and how the EC prevents it. I would say that a Tyrant has a better chance of coming to power under the current system, because they don't actually need the popular vote. This is still a slippery slope argument because you haven't proven the link between direct democracy and communism.
3. Preservation of Federalism (dividing power between the national and state governments, also preventing communism and direct democratic tyranny)
I can't really see a difference between this point and the last one. The definition of Federalism you gave about preventing communism doesn't seem different from the last point, but the first part of your definition seems more familiar. I honestly cannot see how an RCV popular vote will undermine the authority of the federal government as opposed to state governments? You haven't even demonstrated this link, let alone proven it, so unless you do this one is also a slippery slope.
SIDE NOTE: "it is theoretically possible to win the Electoral College with less than 22% of the popular vote, which underscores its potential to produce unrepresentative results.”Now this is you ACTUALLY skewing numbers! No one wins with 22%.
Once again, not a direct quote. Don't mind you paraphrasing but you need to say when you do that. I did say something very close to that though, so I don't take too much of an issue about this.
As for the second part, yes it is possible. This video explains it better than I could (skip to 4:18) www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wC42HgLA4k&t=187s. You accomplish this by focusing on the states with artificially more votes than others. So it is possible, don't make claims like this without doing your research.
I am only against RCV at the federal level because it leads to direct democracy, which leads to communism, due to the principle of mob rule and the elimination of federalism.
Once again, you have not proven this link. People can easily vote against communism.
Now, you also mentioned "Mob Rule". The problem with this phrase is it's just a buzzword used to demonize democracy. The minority can be just as corrupt as the "mob", so giving power to less people doesn't actually solve anything. If 8 of your friends want to go get pizza for dinner, and 2 of them want to get burgers, the majority isn't wrong, or corrupt just because there are more of them. Direct democracy just prioritizes the wants of the many of the wants of the few.
Conclusion/ Appeal to Voters
Conduct:
My opponent has forfeited a round which merits a conduct point in my favor. He has also misquoted me on many occasions.
Legibility:
My opponent tried to argue that he warrants this point because I stated the obvious in my opening. If being through and open to all levels of knowledge about the topic at hand is illegible, then by all means, give him this point. However, I believe this point should go to nobody.
Sources:
My opponent has not Cited a single source, and his arguments desperately need it, specifically the slippery slope ones. I have Cited multiple. My opponent also denied one of my claims, which I then refuted with a source. I believe I have earned this point.
Argument:
My opponent has relied on a slippery slope argument that has not been backed up by a single source. I have provided many different reasons for my stance. Another one of their arguments was about how it is necessary to equalize the playing field by empowering small states. I had previously anticipated this point and refuted it, but my opponent made it anyways, and I refuted it again by showing how the system doesn't give power to small states, only swing states. Because of this and the misquoting, I believe my opponent has not read my argument very thoroughly, or not much at all.
Thank you for accepting Con, I had a fun time!
Sure, it’s a paraphrase. But you were still highly illegible, factually speaking.
“small states don't end up with more power, only swing states have power.”
When you accumulate them they do make up a decent portion of the electorate. And swing states can become solidified states and vice versa. We saw this when Kentucky used to be blue and then went red for Trump. Or now that Florida has become more red and less purple. Or when California went from Red for Reagan. States can switch affiliations, and the electorate balances the power between the states. So you have not actually rebutted the points I made.
“ Demagogues can already be elected in the current system, case in point Trump”
Trump is not a demagogue. If anything, Biden, Kamala and Tampon Timmy are the demagogues. But let's stay apolitical just for this argument. (this digression of yours is another infraction of legibility btw)
“You haven't demonstrated how RCV would lead to tyranny and how the EC prevents it.”
Yes, I have. Just to reiterate, it is because of the principle of Mob rule and how it eliminates our founding principles of federalism. A federal RCV to eliminate the EC is strictly unconstitutional and against our founding principles.
“I honestly cannot see how an RCV popular vote will undermine the authority of the federal government as opposed to state governments?”
Because you are vouching for a federal RCV, a ban on state electorates, which is anti-federalism, and pro-direct democracy, which, as I said before, is unconstitutional.
“People can easily vote against communism.”
As the saying goes, “You can vote your way into communism, but you can’t vote your way out” Just look at what has happened to Venezuela. They, via your idea of a federal RCV vote, elect Maduro. Then, inflation goes up 200% and his socialist policies ruin their lives and their families. He was down 35% in exit polls and won by about 10%, a 45% shift. That is how Communism works and why it needs to be avoided.
“Now, you also mentioned "Mob Rule". The problem with this phrase is it's just a buzzword used to demonize democracy.”
I support mob rule in the SCOTUS or in Congress, just not in Presidential Elections. The point of drafting a constitution is to follow it. This is how a civilized society runs.
I don't have time although I do fear that my side doesn't get heard enough so you'll likely have some sort of influence on day and legitimately think you are doing something good by pushing this.
I do see an angle which doesn't require as much work from me, but I don't know if I feel like using that angle.
Yeah, I like to learn from my mistakes. You're welcome to accept again if you want.
I can see you crafted this one to avoid the arguments I made last time. This would definitely be tougher to attack because it relies on fewer arguments by con but I think con's arguments are powerful
Aw common, you know Trump cant win the popular vote. This is unfair for MAGA citizens who want win.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE