Electoral College

[JOEBIALEK]

thanks.........some good points

[piece-it pete]

Excellent post, and great responses.

The biggest difference between our form of gov't and most of the other democracies in the world is the electoral system. The fact that we are called "States" shows the founders' basic commitment to local control - the feds' power was to be extremely limited. Keep in mind that the Constitution was a joint agreement entered into by Sovereign nations - each State being a seperate country at that point, answerable to nobody. (see that, nobody? you're more powerful than you thought lol)

They were very jealous of their power and control.

And it worked! We are by any reasonable measure a huge success.

So IMO changing our fundamentals should be looked at VERY carefully.

One statement I have not seen posted to this thread: there is no significant difference between proportional allocation of electoral votes VS a direct election. The result is much closer, very very close, to a popular election. Which gives the large population centers even more power than they already have over the rest of the country.

It will actually dilute weak States' influence even further.

And jacks' right, there is NO WAY two thirds of the States are going to give up their power willingly. Even a blue State like Colorado.

To my colleages on the other side of the aisle, I plead your greater understanding. Our system is more important than a win or loss or two. Bush won twice. Clinton won twice. Our system works - the compromise still stands.

Pete

[jack70]

The biggest difference between our form of gov't and most of the other democracies in the world is the electoral system. The fact that we are called "States" shows the founders' basic commitment to local control - the feds' power was to be extremely limited.
Pete

Our "republic" form of government has (unfortunately) been erroded more & more over time as the federal government now has it's hand in almost EVERY pocket & aspect of life. I often wonder what they'd think of the huge powerful monster Washington has evolved into, with so many working FOR government, taxes at nearly 60% (hidden included), and the growth of Government at 2-3 times the rate of inflation. I think they might call for another revolution... LOL.

To revisit one issue I raised... imagine a state where you have 5 reps and 2 senators (7 electoral votes). Imagine further that the popular vote is 50.01 to 49.99 (ie, a really close election of a few hundred or thousand votes). No matter what criteria a state used to divvy up the electoral vote in a "proportional way", it's going to slant to one side much more than the popular vote shows (which would be a 50-50 split). Likewise, if you had that state divvy those electoral votes by the plurality of counties instead, you might have 4 majorities (in counties) for one candidate, and another county for the other candidate, splitting the electoral vote to 4-1, which might give a total 6-1 split... even though the popular vote is nearly even.

There are MANY other aberration type scenarios possible, but no matter what way you (state's might decide to) divvy up their electoral votes, none cover all the possible responses in a totally "fair" way. In the end it's a lot like sports, or life -- it's often not completely fair. Often it clearly is... but certainly not always.

You know, we tend to have this utopian way of thinking today... we all hope (& expect) (deserve?) to live to be 100... we think we should ALL (deserve to) be given the same (natural) gifts (health, smarts, looks, wealth, etc). We whine & cry to lawyers at the most minor affront. But even the poor (here) today live better than 99.9% of people even a century ago, let alone a millennium. You might say we're spoiled... or at least, we're (historically) unrealistic about many things. Certainly we tend to be narcisstic, ungrateful and unthankfull. Not that being idealistic is bad... it's what drives us to be better. But we tend to forget how lucky we are just to live in this particular time and place... in the long perilous timeline of human history.

So we tend to focus on minutia like the electoral college... trying to make it "perfection," all the while tens of thousands die on our highways every few months... or millions remain under slavery around the globe... or a hundred other pretty important things.

Another issue here is the fact the country still has the "same" number of representatives & senators (with the addition of new states), yet the country only had a relatively small number of voters in the late 1700s... the population was only a few million... (and women, blacks, immigrants, and many white men could not vote). Today you have over 300 million... being represented by the same number in congress. As much as a congress of a few thousand would represent each of us "better"...you'd also lose some (representative) power if you expanded congress to make up for the growth of the country. I guess you could call this "representative inflation" .... and there's no satisfactory way to solve it without giving up something in the process. You could likewise change & expand our representation in government... but might end up with more confusion and dilution in Washington. On second thought, maybe MORE dilution in government wouldn't be such a bad thing.