One person, one vote. Each vote is weighted equally and the candidate that receives the most votes wins the election. That argument put forth that the electoral college system gives the Rhode Island voter somehow getting more importance assigned to their vote than someone in California due to the is bunk.

The main reason that the electoral college was initiated was due to the days when 3 or 4 strong candidates were running and they wanted to establish a threshold of votes required to be considered a mandate for election.

If you haven't noticed candidates do pander to and only pay frequent visits to certain states . . . You know -- the so-called 'battleground states' we hear about ad nauseum throughout the campaign. None of them spend a lot of time in Rhode Island or North Dakota. By the way, the two major parties drill down even further into nooks and crannies of the country and the marginal influential issues that will swing that 7 to 10% of the voters in their favor and possibly win the electoral college votes in a state.

One person, one vote. That's the way a representative republic democracy was designed. Why complicate the system with an electoral college standing between the electorate and the actual election?

Last edited by Rongone (11/13/2016 9:18 am)

TheLagerLad wrote:

Obviously there's more to say on this, but here's my initial thought.....

Our country is too big and too diverse and not designed to let a local or regional lockstep voting bloc dominate everyone else.

Also, the issue of popular vote going to one candidate and the electoral college to another is the exception to the rule in our history.

Our system of electing presidents is fine. 

Nothing to see here then?





Or, to put it another way, I think we've identified several problems with the system.
Hey, so what if twice in 16 years the person who won didn't win.
What possible consequences could it have? (Except maybe the biggest foreign policy disaster since Vietnam).

The electoral college was designed as a restraint to unfettered democracy.
Time for it to go, or for the votes to be allotted proportionally.
 

I think you are way off on that statement.
My opposition to the electoral college is longstanding.

AND I have not reviewed whether my idea of awarding votes proportionally would have changed the outcome of this last election.

Fred brought this up in the "issues only"  area and I have tried to respect that.
I don't think that Fred has tried to tie it to the last election either.

Sure, discussion of the EC come up at 4 year intervals. That's the only time we notice it. And when the popular vote and electoral vote come to different ends, isn't some questioning entirely appropriate?

Hey, you run  for dogcatcher, whoever gets the most votes wins. You run for Congress, whoever gets the most votes wins. you run for Senate, whoever gets the most votes wins.

You run for president?
well, we got this thing

Last edited by Goose (11/13/2016 1:02 pm)

Support or opposition to the EC may come down to ones opinion of federalism.
Whether you see The United States,
Or These United States

To build on my previous post



The Democrats and their supporters need to figure out how to be a better party if they want to make real change in the country.