The Electoral College Sucks

[Sullyute]

Per TMQ:

Yes, popular vote would make big cities more important than rural states -- but big cities are more important than rural states...

Sorry Cowboy and Landpoke, TMQ is just being honest.

[wuapinmon]

CBS has Romney with 1.5 million more votes right now.

[Moliere]

CBS has Romney with 1.5 million more votes right now.

California is not included.

[All-American]

Don't hate the game. Hate the player.

[wuapinmon]

California is not included.

I know. I'm sure that will give a walloping to that total.

[The Fourth Nephite]

I admit to being curious as to how this would change voter turnout. The article above (long enough I didn't want to quote it here) seems to indicate that the EC discourages voter turnout in places like New York and California.

Couldn't the same be said for places like Utah, Idaho, etc.?

Absolutely. I live in rural Utah and unless there's a local race or bond I feel strongly about, there's no point in voting. That's one reason I dislike the electoral college. I'd like for my vote to count.

[ERCougar]

I would have made an effort to vote early (I'm out of town today) if it weren't for the electoral college.

[BlueK]

What's the real reason the electoral college was instituted? Maybe not what is popularly believed today. According to this article, it was actually one of the compromises put in to hold the south together and give them disproportionate representation in it based on having slaves. The reasons articulated today for holding onto it are not arguments that were made by the framers.

So it's time to scrap it.

http://time.com/4558510/electoral-co...story-slavery/

"One Founding-era argument for the Electoral College stemmed from the fact that ordinary Americans across a vast continent would lack sufficient information to choose directly and intelligently among leading presidential candidates.

This objection rang true in the 1780s, when life was far more local. But the early emergence of national presidential parties rendered the objection obsolete by linking presidential candidates to slates of local candidates and national platforms, which explained to voters who stood for what."

---however, since the framers didn't account for the rise of political parties, the President and VP could come from different parties...

"Enter the 12th Amendment, which allowed each party to designate one candidate for president and a separate candidate for vice president. The amendment’s modifications of the electoral process transformed the Framers’ framework, enabling future presidential elections to be openly populist and partisan affairs featuring two competing tickets. It is the 12th Amendment’s Electoral College system, not the Philadelphia Framers’, that remains in place today. If the general citizenry’s lack of knowledge had been the real reason for the Electoral College, this problem was largely solved by 1800. So why wasn’t the entire Electoral College contraption scrapped at that point?

Standard civics-class accounts of the Electoral College rarely mention the real demon dooming direct national election in 1787 and 1803: slavery.

At the Philadelphia convention, the visionary Pennsylvanian James Wilson proposed direct national election of the president. But the savvy Virginian James Madison responded that such a system would prove unacceptable to the South: “The right of suffrage was much more diffusive [i.e., extensive] in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes.” In other words, in a direct election system, the North would outnumber the South, whose many slaves (more than half a million in all) of course could not vote. But the Electoral College—a prototype of which Madison proposed in this same speech—instead let each southern state count its slaves, albeit with a two-fifths discount, in computing its share of the overall count."

Southerner Thomas Jefferson, for example, won the election of 1800-01 against Northerner John Adams in a race where the slavery-skew of the electoral college was the decisive margin of victory: without the extra electoral college votes generated by slavery, the mostly southern states that supported Jefferson would not have sufficed to give him a majority. As pointed observers remarked at the time, Thomas Jefferson metaphorically rode into the executive mansion on the backs of slaves.

The 1796 contest between Adams and Jefferson had featured an even sharper division between northern states and southern states. Thus, at the time the Twelfth Amendment tinkered with the Electoral College system rather than tossing it, the system’s pro-slavery bias was hardly a secret. Indeed, in the floor debate over the amendment in late 1803, Massachusetts Congressman Samuel Thatcher complained that “The representation of slaves adds thirteen members to this House in the present Congress, and eighteen Electors of President and Vice President at the next election.” But Thatcher’s complaint went unredressed. Once again, the North caved to the South by refusing to insist on direct national election."

[BlueK]

And here is a way to change it.

https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/written-explanation

[All-American]

"One Founding-era argument for the Electoral College stemmed from the fact that ordinary Americans across a vast continent would lack sufficient information to choose directly and intelligently among leading presidential candidates."

230 years later . . . ordinary Americans across a vast continent still cannot choose directly and intelligently among leading presidential candidates.

[BlueK]

230 years later . . . ordinary Americans across a vast continent still cannot choose directly and intelligently among leading presidential candidates.

if true, it's an irrelevant argument because that's not why it was instituted nor does it solve that issue. Read the article.

[USUC]

if true, it's an irrelevant argument because that's not why it was instituted nor does it solve that issue. Read the article.

Without reading back in this thread much, are you in favor of a national popular vote?

[swampfrog]

if true, it's an irrelevant argument because that's not why it was instituted nor does it solve that issue. Read the article.

The law of unintended consequences is at work here. No highly complex social construction can be adequately modeled such that when a social policy is implemented that all consequences are predictable. The unintended consequences may be a net positive or negative independent of the original arguments for or against the policy. Knowing the original argument is obviously useful, as it should inform any future decisions on change to an enacted policy. However, a claim of irrelevancy on grounds of original arguments is invalid. In fact, the 230 year gap is of significant importance, the culture, technology, population, etc. has changed so drastically that the assumptions that would form the basis for original arguments are most likely untenable at this point.

Discussion and argumentation should primarily be about likely intended consequences given current societal norms and broadened understanding of the human psyche.

[Walter Sobchak]

I wonder what BlueK thinks of the Senate?

[Omaha 680]

I wonder what BlueK thinks of the Senate?

He hates all the gerrymandering.