Which system of electing the US president do you favour?
The electoral college system
Most votes wins
Another option (please specify)
0voters
I understand the origins of the electoral college system - my question is: is it still relevant? What are the justifications for keeping it in place (other than “that’s how we’ve always done it”)?
I don’t have an opinion one way or the other on this - it has been to the advantage of presidents of both stripes, I believe. I assume here the alternative would be a straightforward tally of votes - most votes overall wins.
The electoral college should be reconfigured to give preferences to minority voters like Eskimos, amputees, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the transgendered, and so on.
[quote=“Chris”]The electoral college gives too much weight to tiny states, who are already well-represented in the Senate.
In my opinion the US President should be directly elected by the people as the sole representative of all the people.[/quote]
The electoral college also gives too much weight to big states. You can’t win without winning either California, Texas, or New York. It’s ridiculous that even in the vote in California is 49%-51%, all 55 of California’s votes go to the guy with 51%. So you could theoretically end up with a situation where a guy who wins the popular vote loses the electoral college -
oh wait, that’s not so theoretical, is it?
Another problem is that if unless you live in a swing state, your vote is basically wasted. Everybody knows that Masachussetts is Dem and South Carolina is Repub. Voters from the minority party in those states might as well stay at home; their votes aren’t going to change anything. That’s the excuse many Nader voters gave for not voting for Gore - “Hey, I live in California, the vote was already decided in my state for Gore, so I might as well throw my symbolic vote away on the candidate I really liked, not the one I wanted to win.”
It also makes oligarchical situations like the 1960 election, where the Mafia basically rigged the election for Kennedy via the political machines in Alabama and Illinois, much easier. Much harder to buy an election with the unpredictability and uncountability of a nationwide popular vote. Much easier when all you have to do is swing a state here or there…all you have to do is focus on a couple of counties in, say, Florida (just theoretically speaking, ahem) to rig the vote.
Considering that people no longer think of the states as the “true sovereign” and that the political conflicts these days are more likely to break down along rural/urban or conservative/liberal lines than they are large state/small state or north/south, the electoral college is largely out of date.
The electoral college is very out of date. Time to move on to either something else, but more representative of all people, or throw it away all together and use the popular vote instead. Of course, one advantage of the electoral system is if you have a close race and need to do recounts, that recount is limited to only a state or two instead of the whole nation.
One easy way to make it a little more representative would be if electoral reps simply used their votes proportionately to how their state voted (which was not unusual at one time). Unfortunately, though, the reasoning now is that the state should maximize its power by voting entirely for one candidate.
