Electoral College

[Anonymous]

You guys dont get it, the electoral college is not about representing the people, it about protecting the people and giving them a more informed vote.

You see with the EC, a canidate gets that state's votes if they have the majority. Let's take a fictional 10million voter state. 70% votes democrat. The other 30% goes republican. If this was a majority vote rules election, the democrats could employ force and intimidation at voting stations and force the republicans to vote the other way, thus getting or negating votes.

Example? When blacks got a limited right to vote in the 1870s in the south, they were intimidated from voting by the KKK.

The EC encourages the canidates to try to win votes in places where they dont have the majority. For example, if bush tried to win votes in Texas, he would be wasting his time. That gives him major incentive to visit other parts of the country.

Also, it prevents the whole recount thing in the 2000 election. With the EC, you recount one state. In a majority rules, you would have to recount ALL THE STATES.

The US uses the electoral college because majority rules has too many problems associated with it.

[SotN]

Uh, that was me.

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[Burning_Cyclope]

I think the electoral college is the most un-democratic way to elect a president ever.

Why?

Because it IGNORES people's votes.

For example:

State A has 5k votes for candidate A, and 8K votes for candidate B.
Well, 5k votes are counted, but as soon as candidate B gets more votes than candidate A, (assuming the polls are officially closed in state A), that's 8k-5k votes that aren't going to count towards shit. So that's 3K votes hat aren't going to count, 3 thousand people whose opinion is compeltely ignored.
What the fuck kind of government doesn't listen to the public's desires? Not a democratic one, that's for sure.

[AlbinoLime]

The electoral college was made way back when the country was first developing its presidential system. The EC was made to protect the people of the US, like what SotN said. But back in the 1700's most people were pretty uneducated, thats why the EC was made. We have not really changed the system much, if at all. The way the electoral college works (at leat the way i was told) was a state representative votes for the people, and there are a certain ammount of representatives in each state (goes by population or density or something). The representatives vote for the candidates, and whichever party wins the vote gets all of the votes equal to the number of representatives in that state. The representatives vote for who they think the people who put them into office wants, even if its not who the population really wants. The EC is very outdated and I think we should just go by the popular votes, otherwise the popular votes is just for show. This country needs to use a new voting system, not the same thing we have been using for the last 300 years.

edit: nice SotN, you have 1337 posts!

[ultima301]

The electoral college is stupid. LIke AlbinoLime said it was devised back in the beginning of elections..but not just for protection. We just lacked the technology to count every vote in the country..we didn't have computers or anything..so they just counted up the votes in each state and gave it a number based on its representatives. Today we obviously have enough technology to count every vote in the US..and it's a lot fairer that way. The electoral college basically makes some citizen's opinions more critical in the election than others..for example a voter in New York has a lot more power since if their state wins the candidate they voted for gets a lot more credit than another person in Alaska. Not only is that not fair, but it discourages voting in some regions. A person in Alaska might say "yes I could vote..but even if I do whats the difference, my entire state would have to win the majority..and even if it does we only get a lousy 2 electoral votes." The electoral college, to sum it up, basically says that the voices of people in New York are more important than voices of people in Alaska. If we truely believe that "all men are created equal" then we should just go for an election where the majority of votes win.

[VxDx]

SO MUCH IDIOCY. electoral votes per state are based on the population, thus, though alaska gets less electoral votes, a single person's vote is more meaningful, so the ratio of people to electoral votes stays about the same.

Edit: What burning cyclope said is even worse. Saying that would be like saying that everyone who votes for the loser may as well not vote, so what kind of a democracy doesn't make EVERY SINGLE CITIZEN happy? Well, the answer is the kind that functions as a government.

[SotN]

The electoral college is stupid. LIke AlbinoLime said it was devised back in the beginning of elections..but not just for protection. We just lacked the technology to count every vote in the country..we didn't have computers or anything..so they just counted up the votes in each state and gave it a number based on its representatives. Today we obviously have enough technology to count every vote in the US..and it's a lot fairer that way.

In case you havent noticed, we STILL lack the technology to count every vote in the country fairly. Electronic voting? It's a joke right now, all voting software used so far has contained a console that can be accessed by a voter with the right know how and another one to revert the machine back to default settings (the physical sealing and certifying of the booths does nothing, its a software thing, and those booths are ridiculously complicated with code). They were put in by programmers who were paid off by not-so-honest organizations that want their puppet in office.

Voting over the internet is worse. You know how elections have been fixed by using dead people's social security numbers to vote? Well, the internet makes that a billion times easier.

That leaves simple machines and a physical ballot, they may not be the cutting edge of technology, but they make it alot harder to fix an election.