Most countries aren’t as prone to take issues to court as the United States is.
And direct election of the highest office holder isn’t all that common. The British people, for example, don’t elect their Prime Minister. He’s chosen by the members of the party which has a majority in Parliament (which means David Cameron was elected by a count of 306 votes).
One so seldom has the chance to use the term “mugwump”, and now you’ve gone and wasted it!
You don’t elect representatives directly in a direct democracy. There aren’t any representatives. The people themselves make the law. You elect representatives (directly or otherwise) in a representative democracy. That’s what we have. America is a representative democracy and a federal republic. If we moved from the Electoral College to a direct popular vote America would still be a representative democracy and a federal republic. Having undemocratic features does not mean a system can’t be a democracy. Having democractic features does not mean a system can’t be a republic. Bringing up the fundamental definition of our governmental structure is totally beside the point. Nothing is being proposed to change that.
Not liking it isn’t the same thing as not getting it.
You can’t just say, “That’s how things are,” to justify how things are. The disagreement here is over the very worth of the system we have now. It’s mere existance does nothing to show that it can’t be improved.
Because that wouldn’t eliminate the Electoral College? Is this a trick question?
No but so what? This is a legal question and not a mathematical one. If the law delineates limited circumstances for when and why you can challenge a count then that’s all there is to it, assuming the law is up to snuff constitutionally. If it’s not then we get a ruling and after that everything is settled.
… I understand that to be true, but it’s a crap reason not to undertake reform.
I do have a passing familiarity with parliamentary democracies. 
David Cameron was elected as Leader of the Conservative Party by it’s members with 134,446 votes (67.6%) in a third ballot in Dec 2005. Prior to that he won the right to be a contender in that election by winning the second ballot of the then 198 Conservative MPs.
l’ll stand corrected, but I don’t think anybody has actually voted for him to be Prime Minister. If a leadership spill was called, he wouldn’t win 306 votes.
Would you likewise say that Republicans who live in Charlie Rangel’s district have effectively no vote for anyone in Congress?
If so, I would disagree. Just because you live in a state where you are in the minority party, you haven’t been disenfranchised. You just haven’t convinced enough of your neighbors to vote the way you would like them to.
That is not a breakdown of the system when 70 percent of your neighbors don’t agree with you. It just means you lost.
Your explanation doesn’t fit the example. Rangel’s district is safe for Democrats not because there are more Democrats in New York State than Republicans but because it was drawn that way. Republicans living there don’t have a fair chance to convince their neighbors since the deck is deliberately stacked against them.
But lets ignore New York and return to Wyoming. In the case of that congressional district I would accept your reasoning as applied to Democrats living there. They are not disenfranchised congressionally. They face an uphill battle, to be sure, but not deliberately so. When they fail to combine with enough other voters to carry a congressional election they have no cause to complain.
Votes for president are different. (Or could be, at least.) They don’t just come from Wyoming. We could have a national system where Wyomingites could combine with likeminded Americans elsewhere to elect their preferred candidate even if that candidate is unpopular overall in Wyoming.
Honestly, most people don’t understand crap. Abolish the EC and those same people will eventually start grumbling about lack of political power and being governed from far away and in the far future (100+ years) they will likely start looking to go there own way.
I didn’t say secession but essentially the United States in its present form wouldn’t exist as the heartland will either go their own way or become occupied territory. Unlike the South after the civil war this won’t go away because the South recovered some of their political power within 100 years. This wouldn’t happen to the heartland if the EC is gone.
Also, unless things have changed, in the 80’s ND would have been the 3rd strongest military power in the world if they were on their own…they had tons and tons and tons of nukes. 
Hmm . . . does anyone know if the electors can vote for write-in candidates? It would be easier for me to bribe, blackmail, and brainwash a few hundred people than a few million.
Yes… the EC voters do get to write in names. This was done in 2004, where one elector voted for John Edwards for President and Vice-President, I believe.
It was in Minnesota that an elector voted for Edwards for both POTUS and VPOTUS. Afterwards Minnesota changed their laws to prevent Electors from voting for candidates other than those they are pledged to. Other states have these types of laws as well but they may well be unconstitutional.
It might depend on the state. New York’s ballots look pre-printed, but Minnesota’s have a blank space.
I think the Electoral College has got to go and the POTUS be elected directly by the population.
Yes, it’s true–the United States shares this feature with district-based Parliamentary systems: a party with fewer popular votes can defeat a party with more votes and gain control of the executive branch.
But, the Parliamentary countries do it for a reason: to make the executive answerable to the legislature.
The merits of parliamentary systems versus separation of powers have been debated in many threads, and need not be rehashed here. For our purposes, the key point is that there are at least some merits–primarily, that parliamentary systems avoid deadlocked government which frequently paralyzes the United States.
For a nation which chooses to adopt a district-based parliamentary system, the fact that a party with fewer votes can defeat a party with more votes is an unfortunate but necessary concommitant. It’s undesirable in its own right, but necessary to preserve the greater advantage of having the executive answerable to the legislature.
In the United States, we don’t have the advantage–the President is frequently at odds with Congress–but we retain the disadvantage, for no good reason. We elect the executive independently, but superimpose a ridiculous vote-counting mechanism (that’s all today’s EC is) which still allows a party with fewer votes to defeat a party with more votes.
If we’re going to elect the President independently, we should elect him, as we elect every other office–by letting the person with the most votes win.