Sure, and counting slaves as 3/5ths of a person was a feature, not a bug at the time the Constitution was written. That doesn’t mean such “features” are eternal.
That makes no sense. Let’s say 1,500 people work on a large building, but one person puts on the finishing touch. That doesn’t negate the work of the other 1,499 people. Same with elections.
That first phrase is meaningless and only intended to make some citizens better than others. The second is untrue, as you are arguing that some voters should have 1.25 votes, and others 0.89 votes, based on whether they like city life or prefer country living. That’s absurd and indefensible.
So you DON’T believe in one person, one vote.
When the person with fewer votes gets into office twice within a single generation, that can’t be called strong or stable. That’s broken and fucked up.
“A few cities on both coasts” determining the outcome of an election is quite an overstatement. The flipside is to say that a few farmers in a giant field should have an advantage.
Cities. Yeah, lots of people live there. Stunning news.
What the ruling does is clarify/establish the fact that while the States have authority over the process by which the electors are elected/chosen, their actual participation in the Electoral College is a Federal exercise, and outside the authority of the States.
So basically they’re saying that the States can’t try to mandate how an elector will vote- they have no authority to interfere in the Federal Electoral College process like that.
The original intent of the Electoral College was that it would be some kind of august body of upstanding citizens, etc… elected to choose a president. Kind of like a one-time, one-purpose Congress with one thing to vote on, if you want to think about it that way.
But over time, this morphed into something different- rather than electing individual electors, most states have their citizens elect a “slate” of electors chosen by each party, and in some states, there are penalties on the books for electors who don’t vote according to what the “slate” is supposed to vote for.
This ruling is saying that no, the electors’ votes are not subject to penalties like that, as they’re part of a Federal process, and the States’ authority ends at the point when they’re elected.
It means that it’s a collection of states which have all the rights except those specifically given to the federal government. That’s the difference as it is used.
The 3/5 was to take power away from slaveowners and to actually make ONE country out of the colonies. It was a compromise.
Definitely, change the EC if it is not right, but the way it Works. IT was made specifically to give a greater proportional vote to smaller states.
One of them was the Lead Architect. Her contribution is much more important than Jane’s just pouring cement.
As I said, the made it with that express intention. That’s how they made smaller, less populous states, want to be part of the compact.
I, personally, sure I do.
The EC as it was set for the puropse it was set, not quite.
In the US electoral system, the total number of votes is irrelevant. There is no such thing, legally, as “popular vote.”
And, yes, a system with no coups, no interruptions of civil governemt, with the same constitution for 240 years, it is stable.
It’s abit too much to say like that, but sure. The whole puropse of the EC is an uneven distribution of votes and population so as to not turn states into meaningless part of the election. Should the US go to simple popular vote? Maybe, I don’t know. What’s clear is that, states should not by simple law overturn the clear intent of the constitution; even when said constitution is wrong.
Its a Republican Form of Democracy. Saying the USA is a republic and not a democracy is like saying a German shepherd is a dog, not a canid.
Certainly in recent time, the 2016 election is noted. However, in the past the Dems fixed elections also.
It’s just now the Dems have such a lead in numbers, the GOP needs to fix elections, i.e. it’s current run of Jim Crow laws. oh sorry, “Voter ID”. :rolleyes:
The Electoral College makes it more likely for an election to be swayed by a small number of people, not less. For instance, in 2000, the election was swayed by a few hundred people in Florida. That would not have been possible, without the Electoral College.
I’d also add that if a Constitution is squarely at odds with the values of the people it supposedly applies to, then you’ve got a crisis of political faith. And it’s not long before you have just a plain ol’ political crisis.
This. The closest election of modern times, the 1960 election, had a popular vote margin of 112,827 votes. It takes a lot more work to change nearly 113,000 votes than to change, say, the few thousand that were apparently redirected by Palm Beach County’s ‘butterfly ballot.’
Yeah, an unsuccessful coup is a historical nothingness.
Civil government was not interrupted in the majority of states. The world went on more or less as normal, especially far from the border - which was where the majority of the population lived.
An item on my bucket list is to write a big tome on The Years Left Out of the History Books. It would be a history of 1861-1865 ignoring the war as much as possible. You’d find out that civil government at all levels did as much and as many interesting, historically important things then as in any other four year period of the country. More, in fact, than from 1857-1860.
One fact that I find amazing is that more than a million people emigrated to the North during the Civil War, the majority of them young men. That’s undoubtedly the only time in history when a country in a major war saw a net increase in population. (Refugees might have made this happen at some point, but willing in-migration never.) The North in 1865 had a larger pool of bodies for the army than in 1861 despite all the casualties. I don’t think that has ever happened either. Yet another reason why the South had zero chance of winning the war without an abject surrender by the North.
Think about it. Who ARE the electors? A slate of people put forward by each party. So all the parties have to do is to make sure they choose people who are even MORE “faithful” than ever.
Instead of a retired county clerk whose years of service gets rewarded with an all-expenses paid trip to the state capitol, your new electors will be young rural school bus drivers, whose spouses work for the county highway department, and who are terrified that voting against the party line will get both the elector and spouse fired.
This gives a whole new meaning to “elections have consequences.” After all,Politics ain’t beanbag.
There’s no way a school bus driver would get fired, or if they did, they’d be instantly hired by the next district over. There’s way too much demand for school bus drivers.
In rural Missouri where the factories and the mines closed a generation ago, if you’re an otherwise unskilled worker, working for a public school is a damn highly sought after job. Same with working for the county highway department. Even if it’s only part-time, it pays better than the 10 hours a week you’ll be lucky to get at the local Wal-Mart that ran all the other retailers out.
Just ask my aunt. She drove a school bus for a rural district for 30 years.
So let me get this straight. A slate of very-loyal Democrat electors is offered a bribe to vote Pub and they go for it and not one reports it to the FBI? Seriously?