That might make sense if the interests divided by bedroom so that giving extra voting power to minority sub interests gave them a seat at the table that they would not normally have. But that is not at all what happening in our political system in fact its quite the opposite. The extra power is being given to rural which states all of which share the same interests while removing power from the states that are actually diversified.
It would be akin to a large foster group home instead of just males and females we a further division into older children (F,M) and younger children (f.m) three of each, where it was decided that the older female children needed their own space.
So the 7 rooms were divided along the lines of
(m,M,m), (f,f,f), (M,m,M), (F), (F), (F)
The vote goes one each of m, M, f, with 3 votes for F, despite being only 25% of the population. Even if all of the non-F votes unified it would be at best a tie.
Well of course any time it is thought that pure number majorities will produce unfair results, some sort of rebalancing scheme will be proposed. The question is what vote groupings are thought overall fairer? In the circumstances of the late eighteenth century grouping votes by state was thought fairer.
Is the USA a collection of states or a collection of people? It’s both, but, for various reasons, we think of it as the latter rather than the former much more than people did in its early years.
Exactly. It made sense back then, but now it is a distorting anachronism which we would be best rid of but are stuck with until a desire for fairness prevails over nake self-interest, (i.e. around the time of the heat death of the universe).
I think we should have a national referendum on whether the US president should be elected by popular vote, but of course the smaller states would never allow that so we’re back to square one… sigh. There may be no practical way to fix this in our lifetime. The problem hasn’t happened often enough for, as Buck_Godot said, “a desire for fairness prevails over naked self-interest.”
I wish I could go back in time and warn the founders about how unfair the EC can be, but that’s about as likely as it ever being changed.
To the OP: It never happens because when generations go by without either party being screwed out of the White House, nobody makes it a priority.
And when one party does get screwed, the winning party thinks that it’s because the EC is fundamentally skewed in their favor, not just that they’ve happened to get lucky that particular election, so they won’t support changing it.
We’ll maybe get reform if both parties ever get screwed within a short period of time. It almost happened in 2004, when Kerry needed just a few more thousand votes in Ohio to win the EC despite losing the popular vote as badly as Trump did in 2016.
This view is most likely too extreme. Yes, there was some sense back in 1789 that the United States was a collection of thirteen sovereign states. But even in 1789 there was a stronger sense that the United States was a single country. That was the whole point of people wanting a new Constitution - which was then ratified by a series of popular votes.
It’s true that the Governors and State legislators in the thirteen state capitals wanted to maintain a system of loose confederation with a weak central government - that was where their vested interests lay. But the people as a whole seemed to have developed a sense of thinking of themselves as Americans. Even back in 1789, most people seemed to regard the country’s origins as a collection of separate states as a historical artifact.
Thank you for acknowledging what a dozen people in this thread have been saying. Three-quarters of the states are needed to approve a constitutional amendment. With half of people always satisfied by outcomes, that extra quarter makes all the difference.
I know that states and people are different metrics, so this analogy is not exact. (And two-thirds of the House and Senate must approve it first. Our weird ideas about majorities is written in the Constitution.) And, oddly, the numbers may yet be achieved. If, despite all expectations, losing with a majority of the popular vote becomes a frequent disruptor, a push may expand beyond the angry bases.
In the meantime, it works as a wonderful civics lesson that what is “fair” for the public never entered the minds of the founders.
I suppose the same question can be asked every year. But it’s as simple as those with power are very reluctant to give it up. Since you need a super majority of the states to amend the Constitution or to write a new one via a convention and on average more states would lose power it’s exceedingly unlikely to change.
Appeal to the concept of a pure democracy fails on many levels when governing bodies are composed of groups of people. Look at the UN as another example where there is disproportionate amount of power held by certain people.
Agree with all you say except that, as a Democrat, I would be willing to give up the EC if it favored Democrats. That could happen in the reasonably near future if, say, demographics in Texas change and the state goes blue.
End all bullshit advantages, say I: EC, gerrymandering, etc.
I think they did a pretty darn good job considering the time in which they were living and the circumstances they had to deal with, but I don’t think they did a great job in the absolute sense (i.e., by today’s standards): slavery was evil, and it a north-south divide that resulted in the Civil Warn and even persists today.
Under the original U.S. constitution, the Articles of Confederation, you had to get every state on board to adopt the constitution we now live under. Issues could be compromised, but there was a limit.
In the 18th century, one town would let poor people vote, another would let a few Blacks vote, another would let women vote (but maybe just if not married), another would be liberal when it comes to children voting, and the next one, none of the above. Lots were fine with Catholics and Jews voting, and lots not. Evidence as to how old you were, and who was a citizen, was often lacking. Open up cans of worms like this, and you would not get a new constitution. To give one example, Connecticut, then a conservative state, would not have ratified the constitution if states where they often let minorities and women vote would then have more of a say in who was president.
Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionally very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.
That was written 36 years before the constitutional convention when he was a slaveholder. In 1787 he was an abolitionist. So at least some of his views had liberalized
But I wasn’t referring to Franklin’s opinion, but to Pennsylvania, by 1787, being well on the way, whether you agreed with it or not, to universal manhood suffrage.
He’d probably also have known that small towns could have looser, or no, rules about who could vote compared to in his city of Philadelphia, and he had enough imagination to recognize problems.
The Founders (who collectively drafted and debated the Constitution and Bill of Rights…it did not reflect a singular viewpoint or opinion on how government should work) were not interested in what you now term the “popular vote”, and in fact opinions were clear and largely consistent that it should be restricted to landowning males of Northern and Western European descent. The Electoral College was intended to reflect this as well as (in part) assuage the fears of mostly Southern slaveholders that their less popular states would not be overruled by the more urbanized Northern states or that human slavery would be abolished as the federal level.
We need to stop pretending that the Founders were geniuses, the Constitution is some kind of masterpiece of democratic thought, or that it reflected some great philosophical reflection on freedom for all. It was a document of its era, reflecting a desire to stitch together a bunch of former colonies-cum-sovereign states into a more powerful unified federation which could negotiate with and ward off powerful colonial empires of England, France, and Spain. The founders understood that technological and social progress would occur, although not with the same expectations; they did not expect political parties, vast industrial development, or the expansion of the United States to take over the more fertile and resource rich middle latitudes of the entire continent. They also did not intend upon or expect that the office of the Presidency would become as powerful and capable of making international agreements or committing the nation to war without Congressional approval; hence, the fairly ad hoc method of selecting a President (and even less thought out original means of selecting the Vice President as the runner up to the election expected to step up and support the winner).
The Electoral College is not “democratic” because it was never intended to be, and the Founders were certainly not interested in the notion of “one man, one vote”. Trying to get broad agreement to abolish it today in the face of existing power structures is akin to just re-writing the entire elections process, notwithstanding that people would probably feel different if Biden had won the EC but lost the popular vote, which is a very real possibility in the 2024 election.
That may be true, but that was 235 years ago, and the country has changed a lot since then. It was apparently a compromise made after a lot of haggling between founders from different states, but that doesn’t mean we are stuck with it forever.
At this point, it has only failed to deliver the expected result five times, but twice in the last 24 years, so one can argue it’s working well enough. However, if it continues to fail as often as it has recently, people may no longer bother to vote since whichever candidate obtains the most votes may not determine who wins the election. I certainly felt that way following the 2016 election.
Less populated states like the EC the way it is, and will probably never give it up, even if it makes things fairer and more democratic for the rest of us. It seems we are stuck with the EC until enough people, from across the country, decide it must be replaced, and that may not happen for another 200 years, if it ever happens at all.
Since the Republicans replaced the Whigs in 1856 leading to the modern two-party system, there have been 42 presidential elections. In 14 of them, neither candidate received a majority of the popular vote.
Think of it, one-third of the presidential elections did not end with a clear winner. Throw in a few more (1896,1900, 1976, 1980) where the electoral winner barely squeaked out a majority, and we’re damned lucky only two races ended up in a post-election snafu. Throw in accusations of voter fraud - not just in select states, but in every one of the 176,933 precincts in the U.S. and we’d never have a winner.
So what’s the alternative to an Electoral College? Most votes wins - even if the most votes turns out to be 42-44% (1912, 1968 and 1992)? Let the House of Representatives have the final say? Set up a special electoral commission? Endless recounts to figure out whether all the ballots in Bug Tussle made it to the county seat, and then challenges that Bug Tussle kept the polls open late? Coalition governments with third-parties? The only third party that was on every ballot in 2020 was the Libertarians. Would that make them the most influential political force in the U.S.?