Flagg wrote:
That alone should relegate it to the dustbin of history. But you also have an even bigger issue with roughly half a dozen "swing states" where the individual vote is on meth and the population of one of 2 states gets to decide the election. Which is, in a word, bullshit. And don't give me the "oh, but if we get rid of the EC the candidates will only go to high population states and campaign there". Aside from that pretty much being a load of bullshit, it just means they'll focus their campaigns in states with a lot of voters, not just Florida, Ohio, etc. Because that's what they do now.
Crazedwraith wrote:
I know very little about the American system. But... it sounds to me all this system is doing is switching over who the irrelevant, ignored people are.
Why is better these people are not ignored compared to the people who are being ignored now?
And why is it important that they have such an influence in the Presidential election? Shouldn't the people making sure these people are not forgotten be their Senators and Congresssmen? Who are elected to directly represent their state/region?
Let me address this together. Yes, the Senate is there in part to do just that. The Electoral College to my mind reinforces that. If it were flat out making disadvantaged minorities (or anyone else) irrelevant that would be a problem…but I don’t see that happening. We did just have eight years of a black president, after all.
I think I said this earlier, but let me reiterate: I don’t think the electoral college is a perfect system and if I was designing a political system from scratch I’d likely do something different. But we don’t have that option and when you have an existing institution that does (in my opinion) serve a purpose of insulating people from potential bad things you shouldn’t change it unless you’re damned sure that it would actively make things better.
And yes, I realize that ‘is more democratic’ sounds like a good reason and that it seems obvious that a direct numerical election is fairer. Lots of things seem obviously true but don’t hold up once you look at them. We
do have 200+ years of precedent saying that states representing their constituents is a form of democracy (with variations and changes on exactly what that means, yes), and precedent and tradition matter when you’re defining basic things like ‘what does democratic mean?’
And this leads into the next part, so…
Khaat wrote:
I'd like to pick on this one: law is written to adapt (addition, amendment, abolition to changing circumstances), or we'd still stone people for... well, most things. Politics also adapts (routine elections) over time to changing circumstances, or we'd all have our minds made up for us by our king-priests.
Here in the US, we decided we were not going to make a state religion, that free citizens would be our armed militia, and a few other "novel ideas" at the time. These were significant changes to law and politics, in reaction against tradition and precedence.
So "shaped"? Yes, but not always in a conforming way.
I'd say that "tradition" is a fallacy, a sub-set of "appeal to authority".
Yeah, obviously you don’t want to keep doing things just because they’re how things have always been done. That kind of appeal to tradition is a fallacy, no shit. But institutions take on a life and momentum of their own over time and that makes tradition a reason to keep doing something,
in the absence of a good reason not to. If the electoral college is actively causing more harm than changing it would cause that’s a reason to change it. But the argument here was that it’s undemocratic, and that I don’t buy. “The Electoral College is undemocratic because it violates everyone’s individual right to a direct vote on the president” doesn’t work because we don’t have that right and never have.
Also, I think people are over-estimating how much of a difference a popular vote election would have made in Trump and Bush’s elections. If the Electoral College didn’t exist they would both would have run very different campaigns, and saying how that would have affected the outcome is speculation at best.
Civil War Man wrote:He actually isn't all that far off, though he does do it in his very particular style (never change Flagg). The Electoral College has its roots in the 3/5th compromise. The number of votes a state gets is determined by its representation in Congress, and the 3/5th compromise was made over a dispute over whether slaves should count as part of the population when determining a state's representation. In actuality, one of the purposes of the Electoral College was not to increase the amount of influence small states have over the Presidential election, but to increase the amount of influence slave states have over the election. See, slave states got their representation boosted by having lots of slaves, which in turn gave them extra votes when determining the Presidency. Were the President picked by straight popular vote back then, slave states wouldn't get those extra votes, because slaves aren't allowed to vote.
That’s pretty disturbing, but I’d argue that the Electoral College has grown beyond that and does also have the effects I talked about. Many of our institutions grew from pretty shitty beginnings; a sizeable chunk of American law enforcement grew out of escaped slave patrols from what I understand, that doesn’t mean we should get rid of cops entirely.
Which as an aside brings me to one of my main criticisms of the Electoral College: it encourages voter suppression. States get the same number of votes regardless of how many people participate in the election, so it behooves the corrupt to make it so their opposition is unable to vote, since it increases the relative voting power of those that remain.
Not sure what your reasoning here is? Why would a Republican state government be less inclined to suppress votes against their party in a direct national popular vote? And how is this different from voter suppression in Congressional races?
Anyway, it's not a coincidence that 4 of the first 6 Presidents were wealthy Virginian slaveowners, and all of them were elected for 2 terms. Virginia was one of the most populous states in the country even before you started counting slaves, and it had more slaves than some states had free people. Virginia was the absolute opposite of a small state, but it benefited the most from the system people in this debate claim was created to help small states.
The 3/5th Compromise wasn’t a good thing and most of the people who agreed to it probably felt the same way. They say that’s the sign of a good compromise. It was way better than having slaves count as a full person for representation purposes (like convicts do now) or having the slave states go off and create the regal nation of Slavistan.
