There’s a huge reason. One party has designed itself to appeal to the minority of people who live in states that have a majority of electoral college votes.
It’s not a good reason. But it’s the reason why people won’t change the system.
The problem is these people are ignoring history. Any regime where a minority tries to lock in a political system where gives them control against the will of the majority has inevitably fallen. The majority eventually loses faith with the political system that isn’t representing them and seeks to replace it.
No, it can be done with a constitutional amendment.
It is a fallacy to argue that because something is a certain way, it should remain that way. Nor does it make sense to say that if something else is a problem, then we shouldn’t address a known problem.
At the end of the day, if you can’t give a objective reason for why the electoral college should remain, then you’re admitting your position has no rationale other than nonsensical arguments.
I said “as a practical matter it can’t be changed”. I am well aware a Constitutional amendment could change it. That’s kind of the definition of a Constitutional amendment.
Nope, we’re supposed to be a democratic republic composed of individual semi-autonomous states. If we were supposed to be a democracy, we’d just get rid of all federal, state, and local elected representatives and have each citizen vote on all matters across the country. Sounds fun.
You elect your state government. Your state government elects the president, in a manner they so choose.
Your president is supposed to be the president of all 50 states, and yet still responsible for every citizen, so the manner in which the executive is elected was a designed to be compromise between a majority of all the states (y’know, the whole United ‘States’ thing), and a majority of all the citizens, hence why smaller states receive a greater proportion of electors (and congressional representatives) per citizen. Your state agreed to these rules.
Don’t like it? Convince your state government to assign its electors differently. Don’t like the amount of electors your state has? convince a majority of the house, senate, and president to change the apportionment method.
I can never tell if people who say “Don’t like it? Get the constitution amended” are in favor of the EC or not. They’re stating the obvious but should I infer from that that they wouldn’t support an amendment intended to do just that? I want to know if I have to convince you to eliminate it or not, I already know I have to get the fucking constitution amended.
No, the interstate popular vote compact would work and not need a Constitutional amendment.
I dug a little further back wrt my above trivia. Carter and Kennedy are the only two winners who lost in states carried, with two ties (Garfield 1880 & Taylor 1848, both of whom barely won the popular vote)
As a practical matter abolishing the EC would be difficult in the extreme because it would require that at least some states that benefit from the current arrangement ratifying an amendment simply because it’s the right thing to do.
That’s the nice thing about the status quo, you don’t need to justify it. You have to justify changing it.
France is the only Western democracy that directly elects a meaningful President. What actual on the ground difference does it make? Justify your position. Are they generally happier about their President? Is the French president more beholden to the electorate in some tangible way once in office?
Well, by asking if it’s unconstitutional or not, OP seems to be in favor of a solution to where we just throw out several hundred years of electoral history and disenfranchise all the voters that put in place the duly elected congress and executive based on some sort of tenuous hypothetical interpretation of 5/9 of the Supreme Court justices because of some combination of “no fair!” and “I didn’t get the results that I wanted!”. I’m certainly against that, even if it would result in changes in the political makeup of government that I want to see.
I think historical weight should matter a great deal before constitutional changes are considered, and I think the electoral college is more or less working as intended. To be honest, I think we’d get better results if we went back to letting the political parties decide the candidates in smoke-filled rooms, and the state legislatures assigning presidential electors directly. But I’d prefer a constitutional amendment upcapping the house of representatives from 435(via something like the Wyoming Rule), over just abolishing the EC altogether. Even though the Wyoming Rule doesn’t actually require a constitutional amendment to implement, I’d prefer that it get’s passed as one, to ensure that small states have their say too. And thus it’ll never happen.
IOW, you can’t actually justify it. You can only assert it. Might as well stick with the status quo if there’s no tangible benefit to a whole bunch of effort to change it.
The constitution has a whole bunch of limits on what duly elected legislators can make laws about. That’s anti-democratic but we accept it because we know the dangers of the tyranny of the majority. The EC system just takes that to the next level, stopping the most populous states pushing around the less populated.
I’m going to assume you’re not an American, which would explain your limited knowledge of how the American government works.
The President is not part of any state government, much less all fifty of them. He’s the leader of a country not of any state. Governors are the leaders of the states.
State government can’t rewrite the Constitution.
And the majority of the House, the Senate, and the President can’t rewrite the Constitution either.
I’m going to assume you’re not American because the states don’t need to change the Constitution to change the way they select their electors and Congress can certainly rewrite the Constitution, they just need it ratified by the states.
I think people here need to answer a very specific question:
Exactly what is voting for president meant to accomplish? Because your answer to that is going to be directly related to whether you think a given voting system is good.
If the answer is “the person elected should, as closely as possible, resemble what the populace wants” then both the EC and the popular vote aren’t great. IRV, condorcet voting, and other methods satisfy various guarantees much better. They all have their own problems of course, but there are strong theoretical guarantees that under most circumstances they’re better than the “obvious” solution of using majoritarian democracy to select the person in office.
If the answer is “the person elected should, as closely as possible, protect interests of groups of people, instead of a simple majority of all people” (this is clumsily phrased but I hope it gets the gist) then the EC might be what you want. In specific, the EC protects the interests of people by specific legislative regions (states). It’s not obvious this is the right way to do it. For instance, you could posit an EC-inspired system that say, allots electoral votes to white people, black people, gay people, trans people, factory workers, computer programmers, people with low income, or whatever other group may have a vested interest in the election and each one of those groups (of which you may belong to multiple) casts their electoral votes for president. I’m not sure it’s a good idea, but you could easily envision an EC that protects other interests.
I feel like, if you support the EC, you need to motivate exactly what interests, in your view, the current iteration of the EC is protecting and why protecting those specific interests is important over other things a voting system could be protecting (such as representing the will of the most people possible, or reaching consensus, thwarting certain attempts to subvert the system, or any other guarantees you can make)
Justify it? What, and next I have to prove that water is wet?
And yet, by your own math, the EC system makes no difference 95% of the time; and you can’t come up with a reason why that shouldn’t be that the EC is rendered irrelevant 100% of the time.
ETA: and let me add this: while that is the intent of the EC, I think it’s pretty clear that we can chalk this up to another stupid concern of the Framers. They came up with a lot of nonsensical things for “reasons,” like how Blacks were worth 3/5th of a person, there was no popular vote for the Senate, people in the capital were wholly disenfranchised, etc. We have done away with many of those egregious mistakes. Repeating the fiction that everything in the Constitution is a delicate balance that cannot possibly be changed doesn’t actually constitute a justification of the errant principle espoused.
Even a harsher system of one state-one vote would hardly have made a difference. So why don’t we switch to that system?
Eta: I’m not saying it would be an affront to all that is holy if the President was directly elected but you’ve got to come up with better reasons than “water is wet”.
