Sandydragon wrote:Mikey Brown wrote:Sandydragon wrote:
Whats the point of the electoral college? Serious question and does it still serve a purpose today given the population changes from what was originally drawn up?
Given its a straight race to be president without any constituency concerns, why shouldn't it be a straight count of the actual votes cast and bypass the EC all together? There was an American academic on the BBC arguing for this earlier and I absolutely see where he is coming from.
I'm not saying I agree with it or how it's implemented, I just meant that of course the results are going to be different.
I'm not sure what you mean "without any constituency concerns". Isn't that the whole issue? You live your life in a certain way in a particular portion of the country, and the choice of nation-wide leadership is disproportionately weighted towards people in what may as well be an entirely different country. Obviously you can apply that to basically any country in the world, but the US is so massive and has such absurd disparities in standards of living.
Just get rid of the US is essentially what I'm saying.
I was referring to our system where we of course vote for a local MP and the government is the. Decided on the Humber of MPs each party has. For this election, it’s a straight fight for a small number of people to one office. Whilst each state needs to run its own system, it should be possible for them to return the number of votes in each state and for that to be tallied. We need our MPs for the system to function but that isn’t true of the EC.
Put another way, why should a voter in one state have proportionately more power than in another! Why do Texas and California have such different EC numbers when population wise it’s not that much difference?
As with all things in the founding of America, it's about racism and classism. It was set up on the basis that the proletariat was too thick to be allowed to choose a leader all by themselves, so they were allowed to vote for a bunch of people to represent them (their electors) and those electors then chose who the president would be (in the Electoral College). That, shockingly enough, is why the first few presidents were all colleagues from the same circles. This has of course, over time, metamorphosed into electors generally having to accept the popular vote in that state, although they are mostly still at liberty to vote for whomever they like. So, even if Biden wins the Electoral College, the electors could still decide to name Trump the next President, if they wanted to.
The numbers of electors for each state were set initially on population, but with the fun caveat that slaves counted as 5/8ths of a person when it came to the calculations. Not that slaves could vote, but their owners in sparsely-white populated southern states wanted to make sure that their influence as human being owners was properly reflected.
It's been nearly abolished on several occasions over the last 200 years, by both sides, with the last effort being the 1960s where removing it had the support of most politicians and Nixon but, because it's part of the almighty precious perfect constitution, it requires a lot of votes to be removed and it got filibustered down. And now, of course, it'll never go, because it benefits the Republicans too much to ditch it.
Puja
