Freedom2 Explains the Advantages of the Electoral Collage

Over in the Why Are People in Cities Demos and People in the Country Repub? thread Freedom2 volunteered to expound on the superiority of the electoral collage over a popular vote. I would be interested in this lesson.
So please enlighten me, Freedom2.

What’s an electoral collage? Is that like taking photos of all the electors and then making a big picture with them?

(Sorry. Had to be said. Carry on.)

While you’re waiting, you could look at http://www.presidentelect.org . It’s an informative website that has a few articles on why the EC should be kept.

A thousand thank yous and salutations David B, the 1 True God ( Praise HIM with Great Praise ).

My odd spelling could be clarified.
The idea is that the EC is an amalgamation of the voting patterns of the various states ( and the District of Columbia ) or “snapshots” of the vote in each state. Here are some sample collages. The collage has some artistic merit perhaps, and there can be a visceral reaction to seeing the states change color on election night. I see no other benefit to it. It certainly isn’t the way to go about electing our leader.

The electoral college is an outdated institution. It comes from a time without political parties, with strong regional interests, and with five, six, or even eight presidential candidates, not two. (At least this is what the founders imagined; I realize that the situation was never anything like this.)

It’s one of those things that people defend only because the brilliant founding fathers thought it up, and because people are afraid of change. I don’t see too many people defending election of senators by state legislatures. Or the second place presidential candidate becoming v.p. This is because these things are now gone, and the systems that we’ve replaced them with work just fine. But if we were living a century or two earlier, you can bet that people would be defending them just as strongly as they are currently defending the electoral college.

I will be happy to explain why the EC was created, and why it’s no longer a good system, if anyone is interested.

Sheesh, some people have no sense of humor. :smiley:

I’ll take my stab at why the electoral college is better than outright majority vote.

As you might notice, many states are much more populated than others. In a popular vote, only a few states would need ot be won and the rest of the country could be ignored. This is obviously not what most people would consider fair. And thus we come to the electoral college, representative voting.

The elctoral college system was put in place to stop huge states from dominating the little guys. Thus, Rhode Island still has a voice. These states were given more say so than thei rpopulation warranted.

still, this election shows even that system has its flaws. GWB won almost the entire US, just not many of the heavily-populated areas. Gore won the biggies and a few others. Thus, he was way ahead in popular vote, but miserably behind territorily (sp?}. Still, even electorally, the vote is obviously very close.

In an era of such enlightenment where we give the minority a voice, our voting system had that implimented from a statists point of view a long time ago. Remember, the Federal government has more power over statesm and the states have more power over the people. Thus, Congress is population based voting and the presidency is not. From a governmental point of view, it is better to have more states choose the government head than to simply let majority rule.

My $.02

Actually, I think this year’s election is a strong argument in favor of the Electoral College.

In rough numbers, the difference between Gore and Bush is 350,000 votes out of 100 million votes cast. In other words a difference of 0.035%. Under Florida law, a difference of less than 0.05% was enough to trigger automatic recounts.

If the election were being decided on popular vote alone, it is close enough that we could be looking at massive hand recounts all over the nation. Can you imagine the chaos? Multiply Florida by 50, and you can get some idea.

What about the expense? The opportunity for fraud? Or at least widespread allegations of fraud? (The press couldn’t keep its eyes on all 50 states as well as it can keep its eyes on Florida.) How would we decide when to impose finality on the election? How would you reconcile the loser’s demand for nationwide recounts with the logistical nightmare and expense of conducting those recounts? Who would pay for the expense of such recounts? (This is to say nothing of the chad and ballot design disputes, which would be played out on a nationwide rather than a statewide scale.)

I’ll stick with the Electoral College, thanks. At least this way, the chaos is isolated in one state.

I’ll have a stab at this although I’ll admit my examples come whole cloth from a web site someone posted a few weeks ago where some guy did a mathematical analysis of this issue. I’ll try and dig it up if anyone’s interested since, as you might expect, it does a better and more thorough job than I’ll do here.

Remember that in a straight majority vote 50% +1 wins the election. If you can find enough people to add up to a win you can ignore the rest. An example I remember is the former Yugoslavia.

Say Serbia has 50.1% of the population. Croatia and Bosnia can be safely ignored in a majority vote. Simply tell all Serbians that you’ll give them free land in Croatia or Bosnia and you’re in. The Croats and Bosnians get screwed. The majority will ALWAYS win.

However, if you have our system in the former Yugoslavia the candidate must now win 2 of the 3 territories to win the election. The candidate can no longer safely ignore them and must take into account the needs of those people if he/she wishes to egt elected.

So, back to the US, let’s say (for the sake of argument) that gun owners and the religious right constitute 50.1% of the population. All a candidate need do is pander to their needs and he/she is in. Screw anyone else who has a different viewpoint. You don’t have to listen to them AT ALL!

Some might say the majority speaks so tough tooties to everyone else. Does that still work if you want to discriminate against blacks? The US is not a true democracy. We have this thing against ‘tyranny of the majority’. The Electoral College insists that candidates pay attention to MANY viewpoints and needs of the country and its citizens. That’s a good thing in my book.

Imagine what this country would look like today if we merely pandered to the majority throughout our young history (segregation pops to mind as an institution that might still be alive and kicking).

As far as I can see the Founding Fathers did the right thing in creating the Electoral College although I believe they did it for the wrong reasons (i.e. not really trusting the populace to make the choice by themselves).

One last thing, people keep getting wowed by the electoral map of the past election and go, “WOW! Look at all the land Dubya won! He should clearly be the winner!” (Or something like that.) Well, the last I looked it was people who voted, not trees and Algore got most of them (people) even if they do tend to group togetehr in smaller areas.

Am I the only one here who’s noticed neither Gore nor Bush has garnered 50% or more of the popular vote?

I don’t know if this is the one you’re talking about, but I posted this site a few weeks back, with a mathematical analysis of individual voting power in a popular vs electoral vote.

The EC was created to avoid the mob-rule situation that is birthed by pure democracy. I am completely in favor of its existence.

So wheres freedom?:slight_smile:

Mob rule (via popular vote) sounds a lot better than rule by lawyers and voter-intent analysts. In the current scenario, I can’t imagine Bush (the popular vote loser) being able to single out enough irregularities in multiple states to be able to mount a credible recount drive. And we can certainly do better inventing idiot-proof voting systems to minimize recount shenanigans.

I was under the impression that a few heavily populated states did get most of the attention in this race. I don’t recall either candidate spending much time in Montana, Idaho, North Dakota etc. Or even Rhode Island.

I’m coming…I’m coming…
I didn’t post the damn thread, so don’t rush me:)

Time to correct some errors.

This is true, but the original EC lasted only 4 years. In fact our current Electoral college is in the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, September of 1804. This was AFTER the debacle of the Jefferson-Burr presidential campaign and there were (at the time) two main parties, the Jeffersonians and the Federalists (IIRC)

There weren’t any “little guys”. By far most of the US population of 4 million (at the time) was on the East Coast. It was more to protect the Founding Fathers (i.e rich white guys) from losing control of “their” government.

It was created to concentrate the power into the hands of a few because they were afraid that each state would vote for a familiar stare figure, and then there would never be a majority (that was original reason before the EC was changed in 1804, after the advent of political parties)

I have no opinion on this subject. I believe it has it’s good points and bad. The good are pretty much summmed up by spoke-, the bad is that there can be an odd situation where the popular vote winner doesn’t get the election. That sucks, but I think I’d rather have the former than the latter…hey I guess I do have an opinion.

Check this article out. It goes into details about how when there are more than two choices in politics there is little chance that a majority will back any candidate.

aynrandlover:

The problem with the first statement is the semantics. In the EC you can win states but under a popular vote there are no states to win. Therefor the 2nd statement is misleading. It does seem unfair for a candidate to win most states and still lose. But that isn’t an argument against the popular vote because it could never happen. No candidate would win any state.

This quote is also misleading. Gore won 18 states not including Florida, Oregon, and New Mexico. He should pick up at least 2 of those three states plus he won the District of Columbia. I think that that is enough to disqualify the remaining states won by Bush from being characterized as “almost the entire US”. Perhaps you are being influenced by the county map. The EC is not a vote by county but a vote by state.
*

The giving of a voice to minorities is one thing; I feel that equality for all is an enlightened ideal. The EC doesn’t promote equality for people. It makes some voices more powerful than others.

Again I think this is incorrect. Representation in Congress is not based on the population of the respective states. The House is based on population but each state recieves 2 Senators regardless of how many people live there. Perhaps I am misunderstanding your point here because I don’t understand your final conclusion:

I neither agree nor do I understand your reasoning behind this conclusion.

spoke-

You point out a valid problem but it is a problem that the EC doesn’t solve. It merely cordons the problem off into a smaller area. I recommend instead that we actually try to fix the problem. A 2% margin of error is unacceptable to me and I am liking the national runoff idea more and more.

Jeff_42:

This argument fails because a candidate who appealed to voters in all three “states” would still recieve those votes from his/her Serbian supporters. Presumably s/he would win all of the Croatian and Bosnian votes ( at least in a 2party or runoff election ) and so would only need to pick up .051% of the Serbian vote to win the election.

It is not the popular vote that concentrates the power of certain regions but rather the winner take all nature of a districted election such as the EC. Under a popular vote Gore wouldn’t have won all of California. He would have been credited with the 5,721,195 votes he recieved and Bush would have gotten his 4,437,557 votes. Instead, under the EC all California citizens essentially voted for Gore, even if they didn’t make it to the election booth.

I don’t understand how you are getting from the argument that the EC protects regional minorities to the argument that it protects minorities within and across those regions. Until you connect the 2 I can argue that under the same rationale as the above scenario a majority of the people living in only 11 states ( CA, IL, MI, NJ, NY, PA, GA, NC, OH, TX, and FL ) have the electoral power to say “Screw anyone else who has a different viewpoint.” I guarantee that this group is smaller 50.1% of the entire nation.

It depends on what you mean by “still”. Under our current system, the Electoral Collage, discrimination against blacks was permitted until recently.
Discrimination against gays continues to this day.

This statement is correct if you mean “true democracy” to refer to a simple, pure, or direct democracy, but to imply that a representative democracy is not truly a democracy is misleading and false. This point is essentially moot because no one is arguing for direct rule by the people; we are just squabbling about how to pick 2 of our representatives. I am pointing it out because I have been seeing some of that “The US is a Republic not a Democracy” crap around the board.
The terms are not mutually exclusive.

I have this thing about the “tyranny of the majority” argument. I disagree with the assumption that people are not bright enough to be trusted with an equal say in who governs them. It seems that you do as well so I find your support for the Electoral Collage incomprehensible.

**Joe_Cool **:

Again, the EC has nothing to do with pure democracy. None of the Founding Fathers were arguing that Congress shouldn’t exist. The EC defines how to select a couple of our representatives ( as in representative democracy ).

I believe that the words “pure”, “true”, and even “simple” have connotations that can confuse the meaning in conjunction with “democracy”.
I find that “direct democracy” best avoids unintended obfuscation.

Freedom2:

I realize that your offer was not directed at me.
Please feel free to take as much time as you need.

2sense:

Huh? I’ll admit my example was simplified but you lost me. Who is winning all of the Croatian and Bosnian votes and what does it matter? In a direct election say Candidate A wins all Serbian votes and Candidate B wins all Coratian and Bosnian votes. Serbs are 50.1% of the country so candidate A wins. Candidate A does not need to woo Croatian and Bosnian voters.

Yup. Unfair as it may seem it is this very feature of the EC that allows it to act as described. If states divided their EC votes on a percentage basis then you’re so close in effect to a direct majority vote that I wouldn’t see the point of the EC in that case.

You are correct IF you can correctly identify a unifying theme that will win you those 11 states to the exclusion of all others. Good luck.

In a direct election I do not need to identify anything more than a majority voting block. Pick 2, 3 or 4 issues that can reasonably be expected to carry 50.1% of the vote and you’re in. Now, try to imagine winning Illinois and Georgia or New Jersey and Texas by sitting solely on the same 2-4 issues. It simply won’t work.

Agreed but at least the problems slowly get addressed. As candidates scrounge for votes it’s in their interest to promise things to certain groups of voters. In your direct system a candidate could thumb their nose at the minority as long as they remained a minority. If one day candidate X wakes up to find the US is 50.1% homosexual s/he may be in trouble but frankly I doubt they are too worried about that possibility. They’ll get more votes by dumping on homosexuals than by supporting them. Under the EC you try to keep everyone happy and not piss anyone off too severly (ala Pat Buchanan).

You wouldn’t find it incomprehensible if you didn’t draw the wrong conclusions. I agree that the notion behind of the EC of people not quite being trusted to directly elect their president is flawed. I DO, however, like how the EC forces candidates to appeal to a minority as well as a majority. You may believe that mere majority rule is the right way to go but that all to easily turns into mob rule.

“James Madison, chief architect of our nation’s electoral college, wanted to protect each citizen against the most insidious tyranny that arises in democracies: the massed power of fellow citizens banded together in a dominant bloc. As Madison explained in The Federalist Papers (Number X), “a well-constructed Union” must, above all else, “break and control the violence of faction,” especially “the superior force of an . . . overbearing majority.” In any democracy, a majority’s power threatens minorities. It threatens their rights, their property, and sometimes their lives.”
Source: http://www.avagara.com/e_c/reference/00012001.htm (thanks Joe_Cool…that was the article I was thinking of)

Ok…Here is why I like the Electoral College much more than a straight popular vote.

My understanding is that our country is based on personal freedom and self-government. When the colonies agreed to sign the Constitution, they were all seperate countries. They agreed to give up certain rights and responsibilites, pool certain resources and co-operate in a limited fashion. But they reserved many rights for themselves.
They feared a concentration of power. The way I read the Constitution, the whole point of it is to spread out the power. They wanted to do anything to slow down Federalism.
Enter the US Congress. When the whole thing was laid out, the House of Representatives were picked by the people, and the Senators were appointed by the States. The House was to pay attention to individual rights, while the Senate was looking out for the States.

Why? The Founding fathers saw it much more desirable for New York and New Jersey to have many seperate laws regulating whatever the local citizens wanted, and in a manner they were comfortable with. These guys had just kicked England’s ass, they didn’t want some guy faaaaaaar away laying out how they had to live their lives, they wanted local control.
So enter the Electoral college. It’s a balance of state’s rights and individual rights. The State’s have a right to exist, and to have a voice. That right has been balanced by population. If you are a populous state, then you get a whole bunch of Electoral votes. If you are Deleware, you only get a few. However, this election has shown how every state counts. If even ONE of the Bush States had gone the other way, we wouldn’t be having this discussion right now.

No system is perfect. I know there are problems in the Electoral College, but it is still the least of all evils. The Founding Fathers did their best to hamstring the government. They wanted indivuals to have the freedom to do whatever they wanted. They recognized that government was a neccesary evil. So they struck a compromise. When things need to get done and their is a consensus in the country, things gfet done. When there is a major split, things slow to gridlock and nothing really happens.

That is why I like the Electoral College. Go ahead and pick it apart:)

2sense:
A vitally important item that you’re missing is that our nation is not just a huge sea of people. It is a Union of 50 States.

I don’t know if I’m the only one who never thought about this, but until recently I had imagined the 50 States as just political subdivisions of the U.S., something akin to the way each State is subdivided into Counties. But that’s not the way it works. Each State is a separate political entity in and of itself. The United States are just that: 50 independent States, or Countries if you will, that joined together in a binding but loose Union.

The underlying premise behind the Union is that the States are basically self-sufficient, and State governments were meant to be strong with a weak Federal government, as opposed to the situation we have now: A strong and overbearing Federal government with States reduced to “counties” of the Nation–precisely the situation that was feared at the drafting of the Constitution.

Individual rights are being stripped away or just plain ignored at an alarming rate, but just as scary is the fact that Amendment X is ignored and usurped just as regularly. Any powers that are not granted to the Federal government and prohibited to the States, belong to the states and the people. Period.

Going to a majority rule, straight popular vote would be in direct violation of not only Article II, Section 1, but also of Amendment X in that the power that belongs to the States would be taken away and given to a mob.

As a federation of States, each State has a voice. Those voices are weighted by population, so that a State with more people has more say. Each State holds an election to decide which candidate that State will endorse. Then the States cast their votes and the winner of those votes wins the election. It’s a simple result of the way the Union is constructed. A nice side benefit is that California and New York don’t get to dictate what Alaska and Wyoming get to do with their own land.

I honestly don’t see why it’s so confusing.