65% of U.S. adults say the way the president is elected should be changed so that the winner of the popular vote nationwide wins the presidency.
65% of U.S. adults say the way the president is elected should be changed so that the winner of the popular vote nationwide wins the presidency.
The “founding fathers” would be against the electoral college today too. The electoral college was an idea to try to get the people to directly vote for the president.
The electoral college was necessary because it would have been logistically impossible for people living in 18th and 19th century America to be able to participate in a single-day one person one vote election, given their level of technology at the time.
We live in the 21st century. We have instantaneous means of communication via the internet making designating an elector to travel to Washington unnecessary, a greatly expanded infrastructure via roads and mass transit for people to travel to polling places in a reasonable amount of time in a day, computers that can tally the ballots many hundreds of times faster than a human being can, and vastly expanded capacity for handling the logistics of running a nationwide election including a complex bureaucracy dedicated to oversight and enforcement of voting laws and regulations.
The electoral college is an archaic system whose only purpose has been completely supplanted by modern technology. Any notion of rogue electors defending the republic from authoritarians and populists is not only historically false, but given the fact that they failed to prevent exactly that situation from happening once already, laughably ineffective.
That had nothing to do with it. It would have been extremely easy for people in each state to count the votes for that state, then bring those vote totals to the capital where those state-totals are added together to get the final country-wide count. The problem is that that kind of simple, one-person one-vote system means that each vote would be weighted equally, and in some states there was a large portion of the population that couldn’t vote but the state’s decision-makers still wanted that portion to affect how much say that state had in choosing the President.
So basically, the Electoral College is there because of slavery.
You are correct, of course. Based on the writings of the founders at the time they established the system, it was clear that the system was never intended to be a democratic one in the first place. They didn’t trust each other and they certainly didn’t trust uneducated rural Americans with the power to select the chief executive.
The fact that they couldn’t agree on whether or not to count a slave as a full person for the purposes of counting population is all the more reason the system should have been swept away ages ago.
They could, however, agree that a tax on tea-smugglers was worth starting a war and killing thousands over.
The election is not and has never been a single day affair. People like Trump are just trying to make it into one because it gives them a better chance at winning.
I didn’t mean to imply it was. Just that before America was well developed with sophisticated infrastructure, it would have been a tall ask to have voters in rural areas show up at a specific location at a specific time to vote. It would have taken counties several days to collect all of the ballots, tally them, and hand them off to someone who then had to report those results to the state, and then after all the counties reported in the state would appointed an elector to go to Washington on horseback to deliver the results in person. Electors made sense at the time - it funneled the communications down to a single official entity, rather than trying to organize the election centrally and delivering ballots from the far corners of the United States delivered to Washington DC to be counted and certified.
We could cut out the electoral college and very little about our voting process would change, it would just eliminate an archaic and historically anti-democratic system that works behind the scenes to contribute nothing of value in our current society, aside from being a very tantalizing point of failure that has already been targeted by election fraudsters.
Also, there have been times where electors got the names wrong lol. Imagine losing because somebody put your name wrong. I mean I guess there’s precedent for the supreme Court picking a winner already. God I hate this country.
The electoral college exists because the founding fathers didn’t want normal people voting for president. The whole point is to isolate people from directly choosing a president.
There was also the little problem of logistics back then.
Which is why there’s still a ton of delay in the process. There’s about a month between voting for electors and them voting, and several months before the president was inaugurated.
And it worked better before information was so easy to obtain.
I don’t think this is true. The commonly cited reference is James Madison’s Federalist Paper No. 10, I’ll provide the relevant excerpt and a Wikipedia link, though I’ll urge caution as they aren’t authoritative sources by any means. Bolding is mine.
Preamble
Cherry-picked quote cited by Garry Wills
EDIT: Here’s where I first heard of the argument that the US is not a democracy (in the sense it’s thought of by everyday use, as opposed to the Greek which involves the concept of demos. He’s a Marxist, thought it might be relevant and wouldn’t want to waste your time only to figure it out later.
EDIT EDIT: I didn’t even make my point, whoops. I think the founding fathers were not unaware of the current state of affairs of the electoral college being probsble, rather it was included by design.