I probably shouldn’t try to speak for Stranger, but here is one cite that makes a convincing case that the Electoral College really was just a compromise to heighten the political power of slave-holding states while denying slaves the right to vote.
The Connecticut Compromise (which resulted in the bicameral upper house having two senators representing and elected by each state regardless of size) was the main fop to smaller states to assure equal representation, particularly in matters involving interstate commerce, taxation, and agreements with foreign nations such as import tariffs. While the principle of the Electoral College (which harkens back to the decidedly undemocratic practice of monarchial electorates in the Holy Roman Empire) was to apportion similar balance of power between smaller and larger states in terms of executive power, it was seized upon as a way to assure that executive authority would not be used to restrict slave trade and James Madison–the primary author of the Constitution, and advocate of slave ownership–institutionalized the Three-Fifths Compromise (and wrote in advocacy of slavery in Federalist Paper #54) which gave the less populous Southern states a significant advantage in the electoral process to reassure that their tradition and largely agrarian economy of slave ownership would not be threatened by abolitionist sediments in the North. A cite?: “Electoral College is ‘vestige’ of slavery, say some Constitutional scholars.”
There was already a significant abolitionist movement in the North even (many of the New England states had already abolished trade in slaves or passed laws which made the children of slaves freeborn, and at the time of the Constitutional Convention the six states which had banned or were in the process of illegitimizing slavery were all in the North, while every Southern state had codified support for slave ownership and trade. The Northwest Ordnance of 1787 prohibited slave trade or new enslavement in the Northwest Territory which threatened to create an imbalance of abolitionism. A cite: The Constitutional Rights Foundation: “The Constitution and Slavery”.
There is this absurdist blindspot in US history about the institutions and affects of slavery that is comparable to the Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide or the Austrian complicity in the Anschluss, to deny that slavery was anything but a cultural affectation or economic necessity that the South dispensed with when it became too distasteful rather than an issue that had been broiling within the US for seventy-five years before resulting in a civil war in which more Americans were killed than died fighting in two world wars combined. Slavery was an intrinsic conflict and concession to which drove many compromises to the institutions of the United States that remain today.
Stranger
No, that is the advantage of the EC. We dont want a multi-party election. I dont see any value to it. It would always throw the vote into the House.
There is another small advantage. Let us say it came out in the next couple weeks, that the Russians fixed the Election for Trump. Well, technically the votes dont get counted until Dec 19th.
And of course the EC isnt going anywhere. It’s pretty much impossible to repeal it.
Blindspot? Maybe in the Deep South, but it’s widely discussed and agreed upon.
Under the current structure with direct election (either by electors or by popular vote) this is true. Although the sour grapes in the 2000 and 2016 elections was that the Electoral College apportioning of votes did not accord with the popular vote, in both cases the margins were small enough that it could have shifted to the opposite result. Which shows just how disenfranchised many voters feel in that neither party fields a candidate they even find acceptable enough to vote for, and no real way of providing any kind of effective coalition between interests that isn’t accepted at the high party level. That a radical socialist who has never traditionally been a Democrat and whose policy statements were just as much word salad as Trump’s nearly incoherent ramblings could even effectively pose a challenge to the pre-ordained DNC choice of Hillary Clinton should have been taken as a sign that things were not going to go well, and yet for ticket mate they picked a party faithful rather than a candidate who might appeal to the disaffected voters. The either/or choice limits volatility in general, but also can produce significant dissension within the ranks when the selected candidate does not widely represent the voters’ interests or is unappealing.
As of this morning, I’ve talked to four people who claimed to vote for Trump as some kind of bizarre protest, believing he could not be elected (no doubt based upon the polls which casually indicated that he was disfavored). While this didn’t impact the EC vote per se, I wonder just how many voters stepped into a booth not having decided who they would vote for, or voted in a protest that they thought wouldn’t actually impact the election. The people who think that their vote is immaterial, either because the result is already decided or because the outcome is irrelevant can very easily introduce high volatility or systemic bias (in the case that one candidate is not viewed as being politically more favored but esthetically undesirable) that will never be captured by polling just because the voters themselves are prone to changing their mind on a whim.
Oh yes, we all agree that slavery was bad, even in the Deep South (mostly). But most people will tell you that it’s just a part of history and doesn’t have lasting impact today on our political structure. In fact, slavery is literally built into how our fundamental governing principles, and we’ve had to navigate around it for over two hundred years, just as we have around various cabotage laws and trade protections crafted in the era of sailpower and railroads still hinder us economically today.
Stranger
Yes, but… if it’s a coalition, the collective of parties got the most seats. Again, like the EC, it’s possible the collective has a majority of seats but fewer votes, but generally, there is some correlation between votes and seat count. The worst case in Canada was Kim Campbell, who replaced wildly unpopular Brian Mulroney as leader of the Conservatives. In a multi-way race, her party got the second-most number of votes, but only two seats out of 308. Her remarks after the election: “My Toyota has more seats.”
An alternative is a “minority government” - more common in Canada than coalitions. The party with the most seats is given the first opportunity to form a government. First order of business is usually a confidence vote. If they don’t get more for than against, then the next largest party is asked… and so on. However, generally the largest party is government, the next largest is official opposition, and it falls to the smaller parties to “hold their nose” and support the government unless they simply in principle cannot. Otherwise, if parliament is unworkable, these third parties get blamed for an early election. The game them is to wait an appropriate amount of time - well over a year - and then find a politically appealing reason to vote down the government, once the polls look better. (This sort of horse-trading and coalitions are more evident after Israeli elections)
But yes, for precisely the reason the EC exists, parties can get a seat number wildly out of touch with their popular vote - most notably if they are regional or appeal to a certain group. The alternative is proportional representation, which, like the popular vote for president, brings its own dangers of smaller and single-issue parties and encourages pandering and intransigence.
Nitpick: Her party finished third in total votes. The Reform Party finished second.
The popular-vote-to-seat count was certainly weird, though.
It makes perfect sense, because there are much fewer rural people. There are enough urban people to completely override anything that the rural people want, and then some. Enough to even knock out the filibuster.
If rural interests are to be taken into account under the type of system we have, they have to have about equal power between them. And that means increasing the rural power.
Not that the EC really does anything remotely that good. It’s not designed to. It was designed to give states a little more power. Small states with small populations have the same power as large states with small populations, so it doesn’t really work. There’s a lot more rural living in Wyoming than in Delaware or Washington, DC.
Rural/urban divide is weird though, because when people are talking culturally a lot of “white rural cultural values” are also present in small towns (any tract > 2,500 is urban according to the census) and small cities, and a lot of States may only have one major metropolitan area but a lot of smaller cities. I’d argue Wisconsin is close to that.