You’re not wrong, but many people don’t see it that way.
Trying to explain that our system was set up as much as a way to represent the States as it was the People usually falls on deaf ears.
For example, the Senate was set up expressly to give States equal representation. And people get pissy because Wyoming has 500k people, more or less, and California has 50 million, and they cry bitter tears because of how unequal it is. But it’s not; Wyoming and California as states have equal representation in the Senate, as the system was designed.
However, the Electoral College was definitely a weird workaround/compromise referencing the 3/5ths Compromise to give Southern States a larger say in presidential elections than their voting population would otherwise have given them. It also was intended to serve as a buffer against demagogues and popular enthusiasms, although that role was pretty much stripped out early on.
That’s because the nation started as a bunch of independent colonies. Their first experiment was a confederation of states but it didn’t work, so the next attempt included a centralized federal government and more unity between the states, but the states still were given a lot of importance.
250 years later, those compromises don’t seem relevant anymore, and our election system has shifted more and more into giving everyone equal representation. Letting minorities vote, letting women vote, letting a popular election determine senatorial races, etc. Within this cultural shift, it just makes sense to abandon the electoral college.
It’s a weird fallacy to insist that just because the founding fathers intended things to work a certain way that we’re forever locked into that. That has never been true, and our system was designed to allow for change.
The 25 most populous states would benefit by ratifying that. The other 25 have no incentive to. We can forget about the bottom 12 ever ratifying. The hitch is the second quarter from the bottom. The 13 states needed to ratify against their own interests are Kentucky, Oregon, Oklahoma, Connecticut, Utah, Iowa, Nevada, Arkansas, Mississippi, Kansas, New Mexico, Nebraska, Idaho. The farther down that list, the less likely it gets. What’s the plan to bring those 13 states around?
abolishing slavery was not the aim (at least initially) of the Civil War. It was preventing secession.
and yet you nevertheless thought it would make a good analogy to the electoral college
the problem is that the Constitution reflected a lot of different ideals, some of them in direct conflict. The electoral college preserved the importance and authority of the states and was a key concession to the concept of federalism. It does not coexist comfortably with our modern concept of equality of votes for citizens.
All that being said, I agree that it is probably time to do away with the electoral college. As someone mentioned above, I think the proper way to do this would be an amendment to the Constitution, rather than some half assed attempt at a workaround while keeping the electoral college nominally in place. An amendment would reflect the fundamental shift such a change would entail to our form of government.
The NPVIC does not have a partisan bias. It is more or less happenstance that in the two most recent elections in which the EC favored the candidate with fewer popular votes the Republican won.
The NPVIC is intended only to give every voter an equal say in the presidential election, not weight certain voters more heavily, as the EC has for the last 150+ years.
A YouTube commentator I saw last night pointed out that the surest way to get the Republicans to support the NPVIC would be for a Democrat to become president with a lower popular vote.
Well it has favored Democrats before. It has only resulted in a different EC than popular vote result for the R side.
Does anyone seriously think that Democrats in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, or Nevada would risk their own re-election chances by pushing this through?
Right now they are THE states that matter. The swing state votes that decide the election of President.
Should we elect by state, let alone by a slave era EC? Nah . But it is not going to change.
I’m in agreement with you, ultimately. Without an amendment, the electoral college will continue to exist and be the official method of electing the president. But I see the compact as a way to show what it would be like, and signal that the country is ready for the change. I think if the compact were to happen, when it came time to attempt an amendment, by that point it would be less controversial, and maybe you could even get some bipartisan support. It certainly wouldn’t be a fix or a totally viable alternative to an amendment.
I don’t think this is at all clear. My Presidential vote in CT, for example is almost meaningless. CT is going to go Democratic unless there is a huge nationwide swing to the right. Many of those states are similarly almost locked into the Republican side of the EC. Consequently Presidential Candidates seldom talk to people on those sates and hear their concerns.
The issue is the unfair boost in voting power given to smaller states. The way campaigns are conducted depends on the electoral setup. To abolish the EC would generate a whole new set of rules. Also, I can’t quite tell what your point is. You described the current situation. We’re speculating about change.