Elections and The Electoral College
 

I'd say about 95% of people living in the US have heard or are aware of this THING called the electoral college. However, its shocking how little people really know about how this systems for presidential electing actually works, and the general ignorance of its methods in the public at large seem disturbingly prevelent.

I'll simply start out by saying that I personally understand the reasons why the electoral college exists, and I understand the reasons why it should be abolished. I am neutral on the issue because I also, most importantly, understand that I don't know enough information to decide my final opinion on the matter.

What I do know is that generally about one year before the election campaigns start, states will begin their own individual methods of selecting an elite group. This small group might be 3 people, it might be 50 or more people, but this group will become the electoral voters. States have varrying methods of deciding these voters, the point is that they are chosen.

Then the campaigns start and the mudslinging doesn't stop until each candidate is covered is just slightly less mud than his opponent, or the funding runs out.

Come election night, millions of americans cast their votes, and, infinately more importantly, so do the electoral voters.

Whatever the electoral voters decide is the way that state votes.

That is the system. While the popular vote is undoubtedly important to the process, the fact is that the popular vote is also, in truth, completely disconnected to the actual election of anything or anyone.

I just wanted to get opinions from other people on how they feel about the electoral college or the election process in general. This is not a thread designed for promoting/bashing any of the candidates, only for wholesome discussion of the process itself, and its pros and cons.

I've always hated the EC. When it works, it does nothing; when it doesn't, it screws the public.

The idea of voting for a person who may or may not vote for who you told them to irks me. There have been historical cases where the machine purposefully screwed the voters. I believe it was in Virginia, where they got together a bunch of people to vote for a certain candidate, who then won the popular vote of the state by a landslide, only for them all to turn around and vote for the other candidate, who then won. They'd planned it all in advance.

Really, if we'd had control of the vote in recent times, and I mean real control, Gore would have won office by a respectable margin, and Kerry may have had a chance against Bush (he conceded because it was made out to him that he had no chance of winning, but it turned out a lot closer than they'd like to admit once the votes were recounted).

The distorting effect of the electoral college is something I feel it's actually really hard to overstate. Above and beyond its capacity for outright reversing the outcome of a popular vote, its structural bias in favor of the electoral majority in sparsely-populated states warps our entire electoral process in the manner of the proverbial ball on the rubber sheet. In a presidential election the vote of a South Carolinan is worth more than that of a Californian which skews election results in favor of candidates who appeal to South Carolinans which skews the kind of candidates who get nominated in favor of South Carolinans which skews the kind of candidates who get into the election in the first place in favor of South Carolinans.

To be honest, I'm totally amazed that the electoral college system is still standing. It's a byproduct of a time when no-one was saw that democracy was going to work and it was a safety measure.
The world has come past that and democracies can survive on the wieght of popular sentiment alone.
I don't know why Americans haven't protested against it, tried to get it overturned and removed as it is an active subversion of the principles of democracy and favours a little oligarchic system.
I've taken to refusing to refer to America as a democratic country mainly because the people's vote has such little weight.
So I guess my real question is why doesn't anybody do anything about it?

People tend to complain about it when an election year rolls around, but by the time anyone would actually do anything about it, the election is already over and people resign themselves to complaining about whoever got into office.

You know I have my own qualms with the Canadian way of doing things, but from an outsider's perspective, this sounds about as messed up as an insider's perspective.

You guys really need to get some massive protests going. Like Bibical scale protests.

But I mean if you don't do anything about it you can't really complain about it.
That's kind of the point of democracy. Rights and responsibilities.
In such a large country it would be quite hard to organise something like that but that's generally what forms of oppression rely upon, apathy of the populace.

Even if the electoral college is considered to be a good idea, it still needs to be overhauled. Right now it's totally "jury-rigged;" it functions nothing like its original intention (which it fails at constantly) and has a bunch of extraneous and potentially damaging mechanisms left over. Like this whole idea where you vote for a person whose name isn't even on the ballot, who might then not even go on to execute your will. Why have such people? Why not automate the process?

We unfortunately have an apathetic populace because we realize we DON'T have any power to change it. The only power we have is the ability to not re-elect our local Congresspeople if they don't get something in the works, but that also takes organization and the masses tend not to organize because they figure what we've got is good enough without messing things up. You gotta realize, most of our representatives make a career out of getting shoved through the door and shipped back to DC every term. Half of them don't even have opponents to worry about losing votes over. It's literally their name on the ballot with a write-in section for the opposition in case anyone is stupid enough to think it will matter. And without an opponent, it really doesn't matter how much of the masses they piss off so long as they have a few rich people to give them a few votes just for a positive number to keep the ball rolling.

Even with Nixon. There was a big protest in Washington DC. Nixon asked a staffer how many people were swarming outside the White House. Staffer sputters some seemingly big number (roughly 100,000?). Nixon turns around and says "No worries, then. That means there are [the rest of the population] people in the country who agree with me."

The elections for president should be determined by both the popular vote and the total number of states each candidate wins in - preventing someone from winning only a handful of states with massive populations and getting into the White House, and hopefully means that the candidates would have to fight for each individual state. I don't know how to balance the two mechanisms, surely someone who's gone though some political/legal courses in college could work through the legalese required for this.

Of course, right now Wigmund be tired and no think straight, so he not sure if this rational or completely redundant.