The bullshit that is the electoral college

Like I said, I'm not political at all so feel free to call me a dumbfuck or retard and pick apart what I've just posted, or explain how there is more to it than that.

Because our politicians don't trust the people to make decisions for themselves.

There is a little more to it. The system does help give a voice to smaller states who may have been ignored in elections. But the system is outdated and no longer needed with the vast media and strength of the Federal Government.

Why do you think the Democrats have super delegates?

if you read below it would be very rare for an elector to vote for the other guy.


Nomination of electors
Candidates for elector are nominated by their state political parties in the months prior to Election Day. The U.S. Constitution delegates to each state the authority for nominating and choosing its electors. In some states, the electors are nominated in primaries, the same way that other candidates are nominated. Other states, such as Oklahoma, Virginia, and North Carolina nominate electors in party conventions. In Pennsylvania, the campaign committees of each candidate name their candidates for presidential elector (an attempt to discourage faithless electors). All states require the names of all electors to be filed with the state's Secretary of State (or equivalent) at least a month prior to Election Day.

I have said for a long time that the electoral college needs to be done away with. The presidential election should be just like every other election we have. The guy with the most votes wins.

The federal government should have little power so it really should not matter. However, if you go to most votes win we would have Cali, NY and Texas picking all the presidents. Not a very good idea.

It amazes me how little Americans usually know about their country.

The three states you mentioned, taken together, represent slightly over a quarter of the entire population of the US. In fact, the population of all of the states with over 10 million inhabitants taken together still represents less than half of the total population.

The electoral college does nothing whatsoever to make sure the smaller states get heard. All it does is make sure that presidential candidates spend most of their time campaigning in swing states and states where they are likely to win and need to get out the vote.

Basically, the electoral college makes sure that Obama won't be paying much attention to Texas. If you go with the most votes, candidates would have to try and get voters from all states, instead.

You could remove the particular problem by removing the electors and just going with the electoral votes themselves. Would require a contitutional change though. So 10 times in history (out of about 21,000 electors in history) an elector has not voted with the majority from their state.

Don't really care myself whether we have the electoral system or not. i don't find a strict popular vote to be either more or less fair than the current system.

Democracy can work in many ways. How about Canada? They don't even vote directly for their prime minister.

Should be by popular vote.

Without the electoral college the election would pretty much be decided by large population areas New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, etc... which largely vote democratic.

That's simply not true. Gore beat Bush in the popular vote. The last time before that, that someone won the election without winning the popular vote, was in 1888.

It amazes me that NY is on that list.

Meaning 10 single votes in history?

Bring back Malevolent Dictatorships....

oop, we did that already.

All those nasty consitutional rules were such a bother!

I have to disagree with you. Let's look at the last election in 2004. Here is how those three state broke down.
Cali:
54.6% -Kerry
44.3% -Bush

NY
57.8% - Kerry
40.5% - Bush

TX
38.3% - Kerry
61.2% - Bush

So it was close in Cali, a big win for Kerry in NY and a landslide for Bush in TX. When you add all the total votes for those three states it works out like this
Kerry - around 13.8 million
Bush - around 13.0 million.

There were 122 million votes cast in that election so nothing was decided by those three states.

So contrary to popular belief if there were no electoral college a person would have to win almost 100% of the vote in these big states in order to just win those states and win the election. That is never going to happen. We are too diverse a country for that to occur. However, a person can just win 13 states by 1 vote each, lose the popular vote by 30+million and still win using the electoral college system.

If we go back and compare you could look at these three states and if one guy wins all three by just one vote using a popular vote he would be ahead by 3 votes. Using the electoral college he would be ahead 120-0.

Using the electoral college puts too much emphasis on any one state. The last two elections came down to Florida and Ohio. Whoever won those states won the election. Both states ended up having many instances where something fishy went on. Having a system where the importance of individual states is greatly emphasized leads to there being more temptation for corruption. I'm not saying having a popular vote only wouldn't lead to corruption, but I think it would cause there to be less. Why bend and break rules to eek out an extra few hundred votes in Ohio when you can just go to other states, campaign and get those votes in a legit way.

The electoral college also encourages people to not participate. In the last 2 elections if you are a democrat and you have happen to live in Texas or Oklahoma why bother voting? You know your guy doesn't have a prayer. He has hardly stepped foot into your state because he knows he doesn't have a prayer. The same can be said if you are a republican and you live in Vermont of Massachusetts. Your vote really doesn't matter because your guy is going to lose big in those states and the popular vote doesn't count. If it were a popular vote then your vote goes towards the total. A democrat would campaign more in the south and in places that are traditionally republican strong grounds because he could convince those people that there votes now actually matter and will help and the same would go for the republicans in the traditionally strong democrat areas.

Nope, not true. Check out my other post about this to see why that is.

Kane, how's shit going man? Haven't talked to you in about 7 years

I'm good. it has been a long time. I wasn't sure if you were still around. What have you been doing?

That's the way it should be.

I think we should do away with the electoral college as well. We don't need backwards, uneducated hick rural folk fucking up our elections with thier ill informed votes. Only major metropolitan areas should decide our leadership, which rightly will only represent their interests. Fuck a farmer. Right in the ass.

Right?

Dumbass conservatives.

aw fuck it nevermind

Fuck it, cage match, last man standing.

Seriously though popular vote seems like the way to go.

voting ... lol

its all bullshit

How is majority rule not a good idea in a democracy?

The electoral college is archaic. It was necessary at the time when we didn't have telegraph, telephones, air travel, radio, television, etc etc etc.
At the time the constitution was written it would have been impossible for the average person anywhere in the country to know who the presidential candidates were. So instead they voted for local people whom they knew, to go to Washington and vote for them (kind of the way congress works)

In this day and age it isn't necessary and is, if anything, UN-democratic. Hopefully it'll be done away with at some point.

I can't find it right now, but there was some essay that showed that someone could technically win the Presidency with something like 25% of the vote while his opponent got 75%. Basically if they won just 11 states by 1 vote, then didn't get a single vote in the other 39 states, they could win theoretically win the election.

The States rights arguments can be saved for 1850. This country just doesn't run that way anymore and never will. It's absolutely remarkable that our country boasts about democracy to the world yet doesn't allow its own people to elect their President.

That was actually based on how many people voted in particular states on average.

Technically, if a candidate won 11 states 1-0, then lost every single other vote. He could theoretically win an election with 11 votes against 50,000,000+. That means in this country, someone can be President with .0000000001% of the popular vote.