Exactly my point, and I live in Montana.
I blame them in hindsight only. They did a great job overall.
In the past 58 years, we’ve only had two new amendments ratified, neither of which were hugely controversial:
- 26th: lowered the voting age to 18 (1971)
- 27th: adjusted when pay raises for Congress take effect (1992, first proposed in 1789!)
Amending the Constitution is intentionally difficult, and the adversarial political climate in the U.S. in recent decades has made it even harder.
This would work.
Because people who have power don’t want to give it up - and it really doesn’t matter which side. If the electoral college favored the Democrats , the only difference would be which people wanted to get rid of it and which wanted to keep it. And the reason that compact hasn’t been signed by enough states is that states with smaller populations and swing states don’t want to give up their outsized influence. Sixteen states out of 50 and DC have agreed - and that accounts for 205 out of the 270 needed electoral votes. Nobody really campaigns in New York or Texas - but Pennsylvania doesn’t want to give up the attention.
I do not understand why some people think “majority rules” is less fair than “minority rules”.
It’s a fundamental flaw in the constitution. States shouldn’t elect presidents, people should elect them. If every person of voting age has one vote, why does it matter what state they live in?
Do people really think that only people from larger states would be elected president? People vote for the person they want to run the country, not from what state they come from. That’s a false argument made by people in low population states that we can overcome with simple logic. Donald Trump could be from my hometown and I still wouldn’t vote for him.
Generally it’s because they’re in the ruling minority.
So they know tyranny by the minority is indefensible, but they simply want to preserve power over the majority. No one truly believes this system is more fair than the popular vote.
Whether you agree with the electoral college or not ( and I don’t) the issue is not which state the president will come from. The issue is which states will determine who is president - California has more people than the bottom 20 or so states combined and 10 states account for half the US population. I don’t think all ten would ever go for the same candidate - but 7 or 8 is certainly possible in the future.
To answer the OP: Some people already addressed it earlier - you can’t reform a system when some people benefit from the system and really don’t want it to be reformed.
The Constitution is written in such a way that the Electoral College can’t be abolished unless some of the very states who benefit the most from it, such as Wyoming, agree to it. They won’t.
Let’s say your household growing up had 4 boys and 6 girls among the children. Your parents would offer the 10 of you a chance to vote for the next vacation you took as a family. The girls always voted for some place warm and sunny and the boys always voted for downhill skiing. Since the girls outnumbered the boys, you never went downhill skiing. Now, let’s say that the votes were based so that each bedroom got 1 vote. 3 Bedrooms were divided as such (2 boys), (2 boys, 2 girls), (4 girls). Now you have a better chance of going downhill skiing, since the room with (2 boys, 2 girls) has a chance of swinging the over-all vote. Not exactly the same as the EC (or even close…) but the premis is similar. The 1 bedroom/1 vote method evens things out for the family.
Ironic that a system meant to keep a despot out of office ended up putting a despot in office. Long before 2016 the EC had already been completely sundered from its original intent in any event. Not that having pretty much every elector in the country potentially be an Unfaithful one is remotely preferable to what we have now, of course.
Polls indicate that if the November general election were to occur today, or at almost any time in the past six months, what happened in 2016 would probably happen again – except that, this time, Trump would have a small popular vote plurality. This would not, to my mind, make the situation better.
In almost all other English speaking countries, the national leader is selected by members of an elected legislature. While every form of government has risks, it is rare that they elect a demagogue. As for whether Canada is less of a democracy because if this, I do not see it.
A popular vote for President would be an improvement, but not so much because the Republicans have an advantage. There is a real, if low, possibility that shifts in support will allow Biden to be the winner despite getting fewer popular votes than Trump. The worst problem with the current system may be that non-swing-states get ignored.
The problem is that the Electoral College works. The few exceptions in the 19th century didn’t refute that. Going more than 100 years from Harrison to Bush made it stick. The close elections did little more than put some breathless anticipation into Election Day.
Who says that it’s not working now other than, let’s say, whining losers? It seemed to work fine in 2008 and 2012, for half the country. And it worked well in 2000 and 2016, for half the country.
It will always work well for half the country. That’s not how the EC was designed; that’s a function of the way two political parties rose and crushed all competition.
So girls don’t like skiing as much as boys do? That’s not always the case, I’m a boy and I’d rather go some place warm, your argument doesn’t hold water. Plus parents decide where the family goes on vacation, not the kids by majority vote. A family is usually a two-person dictatorship, not a democracy.
Mr. Putin, Mr. Farrage, Mr. Orban, Mr. Erdogan, Mr. Khamenei, Mr. Maduro, Mr. Ortega, Mr. B. Johnson and then some would like a word with you. Or perhaps not, they like you being wrong.
But you are right concerning the anachonism of the Electoral College and that something should be done about it, IMO. But it is not so easy as you make it sound: One person, one vote, fair enough. And what if there are more than two candidates and none gets the absolute majority? Say there are four candidates and they get 40%, 30%, 20% and 10%. What then? Is 40% enough? Second round, with only the two (why not three?) placed first and second eligible? Or ranked voting from the start? There are other possibilities and all can be found lacking in one respect or another.
I don’t think skiing was the main thing you were supposed to take away from that post.
Yes, half the country wins, and half the country loses, but with EC you can have one candidate win while the loser got more votes. That can’t be fair, and certainly isn’t democratic. You may be alright with the EC, but many people find it distasteful, and disheartening.
According to this, in 2016, Clinton won the popular vote by by almost 2.9 million votes, with 65,844,954 (48.2%) to his 62,979,879 (46.1%), according to revised and certified final election results from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Clinton’s 2.1% margin ranks third among defeated candidates.
That’s wrong, and undemocratic, no matter how you try to justify it. If the reverse had happened to Trump, I would be saying exactly the same thing. Why bother voting for president if it doesn’t really matter how many votes your candidate gets?
There are rules for those cases. Many countries elect their presidents by popular vote. It’s not like it’s never been done before. It’s the EC that’s never been done by any other country, and maybe there’s a reason for that.