Can you clarify your question? I’m not sure why you are asking that.
Yes, I agree that it doesn’t work. Where I disagree is that it’s a good idea for there to be some check on the votes of the people. Many of the Founders were, among other things, elitists who didn’t trust the common people to make good decisions. I think that was a bad reason to support the EC. YMMV. If you recall, we had a debate about this almost 2 years ago right after Trump won and the idea was floated that the EC should or might swing the election for Hillary. In fact, morethanone.
I’m skeptical that any progress will be made in 2018, or 19, or 20. Sometime down the road, maybe. I see no reason why what we come up with wouldn’t be an improvement, we have centuries of knowledge and experience that the founding fathers did not have in order to make something better. Why do you have such doubt in the capabilities of people of today that you have to bow to the wishes of people who died hundreds of years ago?
You said:
I disagree that it wasn’t to prevent someone like that from getting into power. The FF’s didn’t really trust the public not to be swayed by a populist demagogue, and wanted a check in order to prevent such a person from taking power. That is why there is no where in the constitution that makes an elector beholden to the vote.
You do not vote for the president. Ballots of old made this more clear, where it would actually list the slate of electors that you were voting for. You vote for a representative to go to the capitol and vote on your behalf on who they think would best serve in that office. Just because most ballots don’t say this anymore and word theselve in such a way that people think that they are actually voting for the president doesn’t make it so.
Do I agree with that as a final safety measure, meh, hard to say, in some ways, it’s a holdover from a different time, when people did things differently. In other ways, it could still be relevant. If the EC had blocked Trump from attaining office, then it would have served that purpose. As it was decided that the EC wouldn’t or couldn’t fulfill their final purpose, they have no further use. I’m actually for a more parliamentary form of government anyway, so yeah, having electors making their own best judgment as to the leader of the executive branch doesn’t bother me as much as it would bother someone who is against such a form of governance.
Is there any point in actually having electors who cast a vote if that vote is predertmined? Why not just tally it up and save them a trip?
I don’t know if you are reading that right. There may have been some that wanted the election overturned and swung to Hillary, but most were just wanting to avoid Trump. I supported the electors passing up Trump and electing Pence as the most reasonable compromise. Still not getting the party that I want to be in charge, still continues a political fight, but avoids a person who is fundamentally unqualified for the office.
That seems to be the biggest problem inn the USA. Most European countries have had at least one party to act as a third force and occasional coalition partner. That said, coalitions are not all that great as they tend to sink into paralysis (cf the Netherlands and Germany) but frankly that is better than a turn and turn around cartel.
The question as to what is a fair electoral system is vexed, to say the least. I have have even seen mathematical proofs that many systems result in the person who is everyone’s second choice gets elected. AFAIK, that is how Harding got in. The next issue is defining the electoral boundaries, and even with a neutral commission it is easy to either produce ultra-safe seats for one party or else ones that are permanently marginal. The answer? I don’t have one.
Part 2: many European countries do have a figurehead for the representative work. It seems to be a good idea.
You and all other sentient Americans are well aware that it is impossible, in the present political climate, for a Constitutional Amendment that might offer partisan advantage to be passed. Pretending otherwise (“Amend the Constitution if you don’t like it!”) is just another form of partisan gloating.
BUT, it is precisely because the use of intelligent informed Electors was replaced with rigid adherence to the babble of the ignorant masses (albeit with a peculiar arithmetic distortion that allowed a dolt to be elected with only 63 Million votes) that this disaster befell. What might have saved us here would have been a return to the Founders’ vision!
Just as an abstract point — not relevant to any Dopers here — it is precisely because a point is well understood that makes its mention temptingly delicious when the purpose is snide sarcasm.
Maybe I wasn’t clear about what I was getting at. The phrase “getting into power” is too broad for what the Founders were going after. There are many ways that a bad guy could “get into power”:
The people vote for him
The country is invaded, and someone is installed by a foreign government
The government is overthrown by a coup, and a dictator is put in place of the president.
Something else.
The EC was put there to address only #1. It can’t deal with anything other than #1. The phrase “getting into power” obscures the fact that it was meant to be a buffer between the voters and the selection of the president. To the extent that the EC an overrule the voters, I think that’s a bad reason for having it.
I didn’t count the number of posters who wanted Hillary vs those who wanted someone else, but that’s not really the point I was trying to make. I think it would have been a bad idea for the EC to substitute anyone (Clinton, Pence, Ryan, Pelosi, anyone) for Trump in the last election. So be that as it may-- if posters were mostly saying the EC should have selected someone other that Trump or Hillary, I think that would have been a bad idea.
I get that, and that is a valid opinion. I am of a differing opinion that the EC was intended for the entire purpose of overruling the voters. Now, the reason for this was not entirely bening, but it was intended to keep people who were judged (by the EC themsevles) to be unfit for office from attaining office.
And we are only talking about #1, as that is the only one that is actually relevant to democratic shifts of power. The rest are non-democratic regime changes.
YMMV on this, but I disagree. I think that the entire point of the electors was to be a bulwark against someone like Trump. Now, when it was first set up, we had a bit of a different system overall. The VP didn’t run with the president, in fact the VP would often be the president’s biggest rival, so putting it on the EC to skip the head of the ticket and go to the second isn’t something that would be spelled out, but I think that that is the most palatable and democratic scenario. If for some reason, trump were deemed unfit, whether by 25th amendment impeachment, or resignation, Pence would be the one to take power, so it makes the most sense to me that the EC would find Trump unfit, and the presidency would go to the one who would get it under any other circumstances where the President has been found to be unable to execute the duties of office.
Them picking anyone else, IMHO, would have been a bad idea. But standing in the way of a populist demagogue is the entire point of their existence.
Can you explain why we have electors that go to the capitol to elect the president, if it is not that they are being given the authority to use their best judgment as to who should be the head of the executive branch? The constitution does not say anything about faithless electors, does not behold them to the vote of those who elected them.
The only way that it is not an archaic institution that no longer serves a purpose is if it actually serves a purpose, and it refused to serve that purpose. Why should we keep around something that no longer works? Are we hoarders of failed constitutional concepts?
Which voters were they intended to overrule? Nobody was voting for President and 5 of the original states didn’t even have votes for the electors. Your opinion could be defended if it was that the EC was meant to bypass the electorate. But it’s clear the EC’s entire purpose was to allow the individual states, weighing partially by population, to vote for President.
Its entire purpose was to allow individual states to send a delegation to the capitol to vote for the president.
As you said, no one was actually voting for the president, as I mentioned upthread when I said that it used to be that you actually had the electors on the ballot, rather than the president. We never have actually voted directly for the president, we have only ever gotten to vote for electors.
With some/most/all states these days not listing the electors anymore, and instead, just listing the presidential candidates, it seems some voters are confused, and think that they are actually voting for the president. This is not the case. They are only expressing their opinion, one which the electors who are elected by these voters can take into account, if they so wish.
That was not the entire purpose. As we have been discussing, some of the founders wanted a layer between the people’s votes and the selection of the president. The EC mimicked the make-up of Congress, as the original idea was to have Congress vote for the president.
Just to be clear, the electors met in their respective state capitols, not the nation’s capitol. And that’s still how it’s done. They send their results to DC, but the votes are done in the states. I’m not sure if you were implying that the election happened in DC, but your post could easily have been read that way.
That is simply more complicated way of saying they didn’t want a popular vote. The EC is a third layer, because the legislatures of the states were already a buffer between voters and the presidency.
Not really. There was never a time when all the states chose electors via the state legislatures. And some states switched between citizens voting and legislature voting (and vice versa). But more to the point, the Framers would not have known which or how many states would go the route of citizens voting and which or how many would go the route of state legislature voting.
At any rate, it’s simply not correct that “it’s clear the EC’s entire purpose was to allow the individual states, weighing partially by population, to vote for President.” That was one purpose. It might arguably have been the main purpose. But it was not the only purpose.
The electoral college, as it exists, is one of the reason why the presidency still swings between the two major parties.
I hope I never live to see a time when the electoral districts for a directly-elected president are set by the same system that governs electoral districts in the USA now.
Just as an abstract point — not relevant to any Dopers here — it is precisely because a point is well understood that makes its mention temptingly delicious when the purpose is snide sarcasm.