The EC was a compromise that, in part, gave small states a bigger representation in the Presidential election in order to help get the Constitution ratified. It’s the same reason that we have equal representation in the Senate and population based representation in the House. See here for one account:
That last point is debatable…
I’m sorry, but I fail to see where I said anything at all about better or worse. I only stated that it was designed that way for a reason. Trying to change or abolish something when you don’t know the original reasoning is usually a bad idea.
Again, the US was framed as a union of independent governments, not as one central government. It’s the difference between the EU of today versus the British or Roman empires of yesteryear. When one considers that only 15 states exceed the mean population (6.44 million per state in 2016) and 30 would be required to ratify a change, I’d say the small states would likely - for better or worse - kill it.
There’d be rioting on the streets! Burning cars! Broken windows!
Nah. A few republicans would be mumbling at the water cooler the next day and people would get back to work.
Ya win some, ya lose some. I personally would lay the blame squarely at the feet of the campaign for playing the game as if the popular vote mattered. I would absolutely excoriate the candidate if they virtually ignored a swing state thinking they had it in the bag.
So, about the same same. Unless you are guaranteeing that not a single republican anywhere on any message board would be talking about the benefits of maybe changing the system to better reflect the consent of the governed.
I would too, as it would be odd to, well, first, think about how we guide the future of our country as a “game”, as that is a rather infantile way of considering the responsibilities and obligations that come with such a high office, but also to not know that it is currently not based on popular vote, but rather, and aggregate of arbitrary states that mean that only a handful of states have a voice in the presidency.
I too would excoriate (though not so much that it would need italicizing) someone who ignored one of those handful of states that actually mattered in the presidential election. OTOH, I also would not respect someone who won who ignored the states that didn’t matter, even the states that they can’t win.
In the end, the president is the president of all the people of the United States, not just hate people that voted for him. Would you excoriate a candidate of yours who won and then forgot about that?
Hell, when it looked like Obama was going to win the popular vote, you’ve got Republicans warning of a thousand years of darkness. And you think that if Clinton had won the EC but lost the popular vote, we would’ve seen a muted reaction?
Yeah, no.
The Electoral College made more sense when we were a loose conglomeration of slavers and bankers and homesteaders who needed days to communicate with one another along muddy roads and coastal ship paths. But there’s nothing loose about the United States today; it’s easier for me to travel to the furthest part of our nation than it was for my eighteenth-century ancestors to travel across the state, and I can communicate with a friend in Alaska more easily than those ancestors could talk with their next-door neighbor. Back then, geography bounded one’s interests to a huge degree; nowadays I’ve got far more in common with public teachers across the nation than I have with the electrician one county over.
I know why our system was designed the way it was. As a solution for the problems of a particular set of not-very-good wealthy people a couple centuries ago, it was brilliant; as a solution for the problems of our modern citizenry, its main merit is inertia.
I wouldn’t have had a problem with the EC if Clinton won. That’s the rules, every voter should know them, process matters, and as I learned as a 4 year old the universe isn’t and will never be perfectly fair.
You didn’t qualify your statement. If Clinton had won the EC, but lost the popular…
Yes, ever voter knows them. How many times do we have to go over that everyone in the thread knows the rules, we aren’t confused in any way, and that sport metaphors are a poor analogy to explain, once again, that you are using a different system than the one that we are advocating.
Do you not understand this? It is very simple. We are advocating a different system. By advocating a different system, we obviously know that the system we currently have is not the system we are advocating for. To continue to remind us that the system we currently have is not the system that we are advocating for informs me that you are unwilling or unable to follow this most basic concept.
LOL, yes, all Repulicans agreed with Chuck Norris. They had to, or he’d roundhouse ALL of them with ONE kick. I could come up with a list a mile long of celebrities talking shit about Trump.
Let’s see, scary black man and secret Muslim born in Kenya, Barack Hussein Obama, that terrified ALL republicans, won twice in a row. Did we see anything like thishanging outside his house?
No? Then yeah. It’s going to be muted. At best you’ll have some losers with too much time on their hands bitching and moaning about something they have no control over. 38 states won’t ratify. You would literally need to light the Constitution on fire and start a civil war. That’s more likely than abolishing the EC. Why is that not an option on this poll?
Why are you so certain that 38 states won’t ratify an amendment that would give their voters an opportunity to participate in the presidential elections?
The states that wouldn’t ratify would be Ohio and Florida, as the may like all the attention that they get every 4 years. But, why would Utah, say, wish to stay irrelevant in the process of picking a president?
Kind of off topic, but maybe the Electoral College is not the problem. Why do we have a president in the first place? How is the office useful? In '93, Clinton walked in and swapped stuff around; in '01, W came in and swapped it all around; in '09, Obama flipped things around; in '17, this guy came in and overturned the tables; the next D in the WH will do a hard turn. Anybody think this regular-interval top-down spoils system situation might be doing us more harm than good?
What’s the alternative? Let the Speaker of the House run all those things? There would still be a massive shift in appointed officials and political direction of the government when control switched from one party to the other.
LOL, almost my whole family’s from Utah. I’m pretty sure most Utahn’s aren’t fretting about the EC that much. The thing about the EC is, at least you need to pay some lip service to Utah. Without it, you wouldn’t even need to do that. “Relevancy” is a point of view. When I vote in Delaware, and know the State is going Democrat, I may feel “irrelevant” as an individual when it comes to my presidential vote, but not as a Delawarean. If I really,* really* was upset about that, I, as an individual, would move 14 miles to Pennsylvania. That’s the nice thing about the U.S. You don’t like where you are, you can do like the Mormons did and move, with the nice modern convenience of not dying on the way. Just like I occasionally want to do when I can’t buy cool fireworks, or exotic reptiles without a permit. Will I do that? No, not likely. See, they have cool stuff here too, like no sales tax, which takes the edge off.
eschereal, if I understand your post correctly, you’re complaining that our government changes things up periodically. Personally, I think that’s one of it’s greatest strengths: the ability for the people, through elected officials, to steer it in a new direction. I don’t want a government that’s locked into its way of doing things and totally ignores what the citizenry wants.
I really don’t understand everyone who points back to the “original intent” when discussing the Electoral College. The original intent was not that states’ electoral votes would be given in block to one candidate or the other. Nor was it that each Congressional district would get one electoral vote (with a couple left over in each state). It is sometimes claimed that the original intent was that mass of people really wouldn’t know how to select a good President and that they would instead chose people they thought would do a good job at doing so.
But I believe the original intent was to help the South (to get them to agree to the Constitution). In a popular vote election, slaves would not have counted at all. But with the Electoral College, slaves effectively got 3/5 of a vote each – or in reality, the other residents in the state got to vote for them and have it count as 3/5. The Electoral College should be eliminated if for no other reason than its racist heritage.
That’s the problem we have now. Our current president doesn’t really think of himself as the president of all the people of the US but instead the people in the state that voted for him (i.e., the people who live in “real” America). That’s why, for example, Trump keeps throwing shade at California. The voters there overwhelmingly rejected him in 2016 and he knows his supporters in flyover country love it when he sticks it to those godless, America-hating, PC freaks from the Golden State. At least the presidents who won the electoral but lost the popular vote made an effort to be the leader of all the people who lived in all the states instead of adopting an attitude of “fuck 'em, they won’t vote for me anyway.” If there was no Electoral College or it was modified so votes were awarded according to the percentage of vote received rather than “winner take all”, a president would be more likely to govern for the benefit of the entire nation rather than just the states that voted for him or her.
