Why the Elecotoral College

[Jim in CT]

Originally Posted by wdmso

Or that any candidate need not go to any other state other than swing state and appeal to this limited audience
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if only someone had bothered to tell Hilary that, maybe she wouldn’t have spent all her time getting hugged in CA and NY, and maybe she would have won.
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[wdmso]

Originally Posted by Jim in CT

if only someone had bothered to tell Hilary that, maybe she wouldn’t have spent all her time getting hugged in CA and NY, and maybe she would have won.
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I agree ,, but whats the fix? not looking to abolish anything clearly things need a tune up
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[scottw]

Originally Posted by wdmso

I agree ,, but whats the fix? not looking to abolish anything clearly things need a tune up
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Not really
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[Sea Dangles]

Originally Posted by wdmso

I agree ,, but whats the fix? not looking to abolish anything clearly things need a tune up
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Only half the country thinks it is broken.
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[Pete F.]

Some claim that the founding fathers chose the Electoral College over direct election in order to balance the interests of high-population and low-population states. But the deepest political divisions in America have always run not between big and small states, but between the north and the south, and between the coasts and the interior.

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.

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.
Virginia emerged as the big winner—the California of the Founding era—with 12 out of a total of 91 electoral votes allocated by the Philadelphia Constitution, more than a quarter of the 46 needed to win an election in the first round. After the 1800 census, Wilson’s free state of Pennsylvania had 10% more free persons than Virginia, but got 20% fewer electoral votes. Perversely, the more slaves Virginia (or any other slave state) bought or bred, the more electoral votes it would receive. Were a slave state to free any blacks who then moved North, the state could actually lose electoral votes.

If the system’s pro-slavery tilt was not overwhelmingly obvious when the Constitution was ratified, it quickly became so. For 32 of the Constitution’s first 36 years, a white slaveholding Virginian occupied the presidency.

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.

In light of this more complete (if less flattering) account of the electoral college in the late 18th and early 19th century, Americans should ask themselves whether we want to maintain this odd—dare I say peculiar?—institution in the 21st century.

[Jim in CT]

Originally Posted by wdmso

I agree ,, but whats the fix? not looking to abolish anything clearly things need a tune up
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a very fair question. my opinion, it’s working exactly how it was intended to work, votes in small states matter a bit more. here in my state of CT which is very blue, sometimes i feel
like my vote is meaningless.

No fix required in my opinion, candidates obviously need to be aware that they need to campaign there.
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[wdmso]

Originally Posted by Jim in CT

a very fair question. my opinion, it’s working exactly how it was intended to work, votes in small states matter a bit more. here in my state of CT which is very blue, sometimes i feel
like my vote is meaningless.

No fix required in my opinion, candidates obviously need to be aware that they need to campaign there.
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Wyoming) has as much as four times the voting power of California. not sure how thats overly Democratic

And here i thought the right didn't like welfare

Blue in a red state or red in a blue state has nothing to do with the electoral college or why we have it. But in mass we have a Rhino as governor if you talk to a Trump supporter

Funny in America we have changed dramatically in our history and have managed but many still dont want the Constitution to evolve to reflect modern day realities that our founders in all their wisdoms could never have foreseen. Change is needed .. leave the college allow a legitimate 3rd party to break the log jam. no isnt a defense
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[Jim in CT]

Originally Posted by wdmso

Wyoming) has as much as four times the voting power of California. not sure how thats overly Democratic

And here i thought the right didn't like welfare

Blue in a red state or red in a blue state has nothing to do with the electoral college or why we have it. But in mass we have a Rhino as governor if you talk to a Trump supporter

Funny in America we have changed dramatically in our history and have managed but many still dont want the Constitution to evolve to reflect modern day realities that our founders in all their wisdoms could never have foreseen. Change is needed .. leave the college allow a legitimate 3rd party to break the log jam. no isnt a defense
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you’d really, really benefit from civics 101. it’s not welfare. It's states rights. A state is a sovereign entity, and the founding fathers wanted that sovereignty to be meaningful. i think it was brilliant, and not just because it helped trump. if not for that, no candidate would ever visit the midwest.


You really need to listen with an open mind sometimes, to people
on the other side. that’s why i’m in favor of gay marriage and opposed to the death penalty. no one side is right 100% of the time.
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[wdmso]

Originally Posted by Jim in CT

you’d really, really benefit from civics 101. it’s not welfare. It's states rights. A state is a sovereign entity, and the founding fathers wanted that sovereignty to be meaningful. i think it was brilliant, and not just because it helped trump. if not for that, no candidate would ever visit the midwest.


You really need to listen with an open mind sometimes, to people
on the other side. that’s why i’m in favor of gay marriage and opposed to the death penalty. no one side is right 100% of the time.
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53% of American are in favor of a constitutional amendment to require a popular vote, compared to 43% who agree with maintaining the Electoral College

71%
The percentage of Americans who think global warming is happening,

survey finds that 89 percent of Americans favor expanded background checks for gun purchasers; 76 percent support "red flag" laws to identify dangerous persons and deny them guns, and 75 percent favor a voluntary buyback program in which the government would purchase firearms from current owners. Sixty-two percent of Americans favor a ban on the sale of semi-automatic weapons.

Talk to a Republican its a lie.. then they create alternative facts to support the lie..
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[detbuch]

Originally Posted by wdmso

53% of American are in favor of a constitutional amendment to require a popular vote, compared to 43% who agree with maintaining the Electoral College

71%
The percentage of Americans who think global warming is happening,

survey finds that 89 percent of Americans favor expanded background checks for gun purchasers; 76 percent support "red flag" laws to identify dangerous persons and deny them guns, and 75 percent favor a voluntary buyback program in which the government would purchase firearms from current owners. Sixty-two percent of Americans favor a ban on the sale of semi-automatic weapons.

Talk to a Republican its a lie.. then they create alternative facts to support the lie..
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Well now . . . this certainly shows that we do not need states, nor the electoral college. Just get things done by polls and surveys. Brilliant.

[Jim in CT]

Originally Posted by wdmso

53% of American are in favor of a constitutional amendment to require a popular vote, compared to 43% who agree with maintaining the Electoral College

71%
The percentage of Americans who think global warming is happening,

survey finds that 89 percent of Americans favor expanded background checks for gun purchasers; 76 percent support "red flag" laws to identify dangerous persons and deny them guns, and 75 percent favor a voluntary buyback program in which the government would purchase firearms from current owners. Sixty-two percent of Americans favor a ban on the sale of semi-automatic weapons.

Talk to a Republican its a lie.. then they create alternative facts to support the lie..
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i think climate change is happening. i’m in favor of more background checks for guns. I agree with you. fair enough?

You’re the one, not me, who can’t ever disagree with his side. Never, as far as I can tell.

I don’t doubt a majority of
people in CA and NY want the electoral college abandoned. Which is precisely why we need it. And it’s exactly why the founding fathers said that to amend the constitution, you need a minimum number of states to agree to it, not a minimum number of overall voters.

You want a pure democracy. The founding fathers sought specifically to avoid that, which is why we are a Republic instead. They wanted to avoid sectionalism, they wanted to
avoid the tyranny of the majority.

States are sovereign entities. In your vision, they’d be nothing but miniaturized versions of the federal government.
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