10-24-2011, 08:48 PM
$tevie wrote:
[quote=Ted King]
Can anyone provide a good argument for retaining the Electoral College?
The argument is that we are not a democracy, but a Constitutional Republic, which the Founding Fathers created on purpose in an effort to have small low population areas have at least some of the clout of large highly populated areas. Also, as billb pointed out, to make an election taking place in multiple states manageable.
"Hence it is that democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general have been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths... A republic, by which I mean a government in which a scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect and promises the cure for which we are seeking." ~~James Madison
Essentially all of these "arguments" say that it was a good idea at the beginning so we should keep doing it. Well, they came to a compromise allowing slave states to count each slave as 3/5's of a person for purposes of giving slave states more Electoral College votes even though slaves couldn't vote. That lasted 90 years. I guess 90 years isn't long enough to become sacrosanct. Women didn't have the right to vote originally either. That lasted 140 years. I guess that wasn't long enough to become sacrosanct either. Maybe if the misogynists could have held on for just another 10 years, then maybe 150 years would have been enough to make women not voting a sacrosanct part of the Constitution.
Can anyone name one example in the last 150 years where having the Electoral College resulted in the U.S. having a clearly better person elected president than the person who would have been president under a "plurality of the popular vote wins the presidency" way of doing things? (I can definitely think of an example within the last 11 years where we ended up with someone worse as president because of the Electoral College.)