Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2020 June 21

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June 21

Four Star Pizza

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Despite the lockdown in Northern Ireland, is Four Star Pizza doing deliveries? 81.104.74.28 (talk) 15:44, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

If there is a chain nearby, look up their phone number, call, and ask if they are doing deliveries.--WaltCip-(BLM!Resist The Orange One) 15:56, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

There's one at 205 Lisburn Rd, Belfast BT9 7EJ. Phone number: 028 9066 2999. 81.104.74.28 (talk) 16:00, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Electoral college winner-takes-all system

What are the arguments for the system in many states where the candidate with the most votes wins all electors from that state, as opposed to dividing the votes according to the proportion of votes for each candidate? Sjö (talk) 19:29, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

One would be that the people don't elect the president, the states do. It would be like having a governor election and one guy wins 60 percent of the vote, so instead of becoming the full-time governor, he can only be governor 60 percent of the time. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:40, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

It's up to the several states to set their own rules on this, so it really comes down to what the states see as in their interest. Most states have come to the conclusion that they would dilute their impact if they split their vote.

Which you can look at in various ways. In some ways non-swing states could get more attention paid to their needs under a different scheme. For example, barring something extraordinary, California's electoral votes will go to the Democratic candidate for the foreseeable future, so both major-party candidates mostly ignore the state, as there's nothing to be won or lost. If California were to use a proportional or Congressional-district-based scheme, that would change.

But it would also make it more likely that the Republican would win the general election, so the Democrats who control the legislature are probably not going to do that. I think that pretty well sums up the calculus in most states. If you're a state with a dominant party, you want winner-takes-all because it makes your party more likely to win the presidency. If you're in a swing state and are looking for more influence for the state, you want winner-take-all because it increases the value of the prize. --Trovatore (talk) 20:27, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

See also National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:12, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

Let's hypothesize that all 50 states (and DC, I guess?) move to the "proportional" system, and scrap the "winner-take-all" system. Wouldn't that -- in effect -- simply be an election by popular vote? And, hence, wouldn't that defeat the whole point and purpose of the electoral college (system)? Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 01:28, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

It wouldn't be an election by popular vote, because small states have a higher ratio of electoral votes to voters. Each state gets a number of electors equal to its Senators plus its Representatives. All states get two Senators, and at least one Representative, no matter how small the state. A lot of opponents of the Electoral College like to claim that the EC makes a vote in Wyoming worth whatever-factor-they-come-up-with times more than a vote in California, which is not really true because of winner-take-all. If the states went to a proportional system, that claim would be something close to true. --Trovatore (talk) 02:14, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

What is "the whole point and purpose" of the electoral college system?  --Lambiam 01:41, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

That's easy: it was to let the president be elected by people more sensible than the general public. (Oh.) --76.71.5.208 (talk) 02:17, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

Basically, yeah. I thought that "the whole point and purpose" of the electoral college system was exactly that ... to not have a popular-vote election. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 02:22, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

There's no one identifiable "point". Partly it was a compromise between large and small states (large states wanted apportionment by population; small states wanted each state to be equal). Partly it was an incentive to get slave states to sign on to the Constitution (they got "credit" for 3/5 of their slaves when figuring electoral votes, even though the slaves couldn't vote). And partly there's the theory that the electoral college could figure out who was best suited to be president (the so-called Hamilton elector idea). But all in all it was a compromise, not a scheme that any one side would have proposed in its ideal world. It was what managed to pass. That doesn't necessarily work out to a central idea to explain it. --Trovatore (talk) 02:34, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

Well, yes, what you say is 100% correct. It's a somewhat complicated notion. But -- if you had to boil it all down to one sentence -- the "whole point" would be to not have a popular-vote election. For the various reasons that you indicate. We are basically saying the same thing ... mine, just summed up into a brief sentence, attempting to simplify a complex concept. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 03:17, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

Without those compromises, the Constitution likely would not have been ratified. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:58, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

And yet people regularly complain that Candidate A won the popular vote and "should have become president" instead of Candidate B, but the stupid electoral college interfered. Well, that is the system; except, rather than calling it "interfering", I'd say it's doing its job as mandated by the constitution. Nowhere does it say that the popular vote matters a tinker's cuss to anything. Maybe that should be changed. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:51, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

And then there's the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, whose principal effect (I reckon) will be to make a successful challenge to the Biparty even more unlikely. Grump. —Tamfang (talk) 00:29, 23 June 2020 (UTC)

Yes, I mentioned it earlier. If the states "ratify" it (which I wouldn't count on), it would effectively nullify the electoral college. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:07, 23 June 2020 (UTC)

• The arguments for the Electoral College, and all aspects of it, can be found like anything else regarding the Constitution, in The Federalist Papers. They were written by the authors of the Constitution to explain why they did what they did, for what purpose that is, every aspect of the Constitution was written. It is quite literally a users manual of sorts for the Constitution, so if you want to know "Why does XXX happen in the U.S. Government", the first place to go is the Federalist Papers and search for XXX. In this case, the writers of the constitution were particularly concerned with tyranny of the majority and deliberately wrote in mechanisms which allow for deliberately anti-majoritarian mechanisms to prevent it when needed. Federalist No. 10 is a general explanation of the mentality for many such measures, including the Electoral College. For our purposes here, Federalist No. 68 is the most relevant in explaining why the Electoral College exists and why it is given the character it has. The idea was that the members of the Electoral College would not be bound to a particular candidate, but would be able to act as an independent body, able to select whomever they wished after meeting to discuss and vote without restrictions. Like so much of the original intent, the founders sought to limit the powers of organized political parties and prevent them for perverting the system for their own gain. Ironically, that's exactly what happened, and over time the Electoral College, through convention, has come to work as it has today, largely because of the very same political parties the founders sought to prevent. --Jayron32 18:41, 25 June 2020 (UTC)

Exactly. Except for one small correction: the so-called Electoral College could never be an independent body, because it never meets. (See Article II Section 1, and later, the 12th Amendment.) It was supposed to be 13 independent bodies, all meeting on the same day, one in each state. (And today, of course, there are 51 meetings, all on the same day.) --76.71.5.208 (talk) 06:53, 26 June 2020 (UTC)

• I'd always thought the main reason for the unit rule is to give a state more influence in national politics. While proportional representation is much fairer, a state would have little clout with a split vote: if a big state cast 11 votes for the Democratic candidate and 10 for the Republican, the effect would be no greater (+/-1) than if she had only one electoral vote. —— Shakescene (talk) 02:30, 28 June 2020 (UTC)

Om the other hand, if the Electoral College votes were split according to the votes in that state, then both sides would have incentives to appeal to the voters there. Sjö (talk) 08:24, 28 June 2020 (UTC)