10-24-2011, 09:13 PM
rjmacs wrote:
[quote=Ted King]
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?
Why limit us to the last 150 years?
Oh, right - because if you go back much further you have to say that John Quincy Adams ought to have lost to Andrew Jackson.
No. Unless someone wants to argue that the Constitution was perfect at the beginning, then there comes a time when what made sense then doesn't make sense any more. I had just mentioned the 150 year number just prior and it sounded like a good number of years away from the beginning where there was presumably a good rationale for what ended up in the Constitution but also a good number of years from the present so that people wouldn't think I'm trying to advocate something based strictly on recent history. Besides, do you really think that Andrew Jackson would have been significantly worse as a president if elected then? And that election happened over 180 years ago anyway.