a) There is a structural imbalance in how the electorate is represented, especially considering congressional district gerrymandering (not directly related to the race for President, I know, and ...
b) People are in shock that a racist and a demagogue has been elected as President and searching for confirmation that a majority of our fellow citizens do not in fact believe in the reprehensible and Un-American values which Donald Trump and his rise to power represent.
The more the Electoral College diverges from the popular vote, the better case you can make for changing the system. And on the other side, if somehow the counts were wrong and the popular vote did favor Trump, that would greatly undermine the argument for reform.
If I live in California, I'm less incentivized to show up for the election because I think of it as a lock. Obviously I should still show up to vote elsewhere on the ballot, but I may not because I won't influence the election.
If we were measuring by popular vote, turnout would be a lot higher and the outcome would, likely, be a better representation of the country.
The electoral college distribute power, to some degree, based on geography. Geography is correlated with a large number of other "diversities" of American culture, from race, population density, to industry, to global warming risk, etc... Switching it to a straight majority would take power away from all of these subsets of society.
This election, it seems, it was "white rust belt" Americans that decided the election. In Gore vs Bush, it was Florida. Next time, it will be something else. It's all highly imperfect and somewhat random, but I see danger in solidifying power in what essentially will be people who live in cities.
In Gore vs Bush, it was Florida.
The US was created to be something like the EU: a confederation of states.
Everyone intuitively understands that Luxembourg and Malta need to have protections in the EU so that Germany and France don't always get their way. The only way to achieve this is to have some disproportionate representation for the smaller member states.
In the US we have become much more centralized since WWII and FDR and now we seem more like a regular country with a unified power structure. But the system we're built upon is still designed for a group of largely autonomous states.
The electoral college was indeed intended to ensure representation for all of the states, but it is definitely not working the way it was originally designed.
The original design assumed that the voters would vote for electors by name (i.e. the electors' names would be on the ballot, not the candidates' names), and the chosen electors would exercise independent judgment and vote for the candidate they thought would be the best president. We know this is the original intention, because the people who designed the electoral college wrote about this at length.
When some states started putting the names of the presidential candidates on the ballots instead of the names of the electors, James Madison and the other people who designed the electoral college were very unhappy about it. They felt so strongly about it that they proposed amending the constitution to require that ballots contain the electors' names rather than the candidates' names.
When electors are bound to vote for a certain candidate, it's clear that the electoral college is not working as it was originally designed.
Well, as much as is possible given the 13th, 14th, 15th, and 24th Amendments. But they also need to understand that the Electoral College was designed to reward disenfranchisement (which it still does) and protect slavery (which, at least in formal terms, it no longer does.)
If the elecrotates choose Trump, the electoral college will have failed its final test.
Agreed. For most of us who wish to change or abolish the electoral college, the fact that people feel (mostly accurately) that their vote doesn't matter, and therefore don't participate in the electoral process, is the primary problem we would like to address.
To me, it seems that the people that should be pissed are the ones in swing states, since the winner-take-all nature of the EC means half of those states are completely un-represented.
Chesterton's fence strikes again.[0]
The electoral college addresses a real issue, and "the electoral college is a ridiculous system" is not an argument for removing/replacing it.
If you want to see the electoral college replaced or reformed, you need to at least demonstrate that you understand why it exists in the first place.
Hint: it's not because they weren't aware of the simpler "winner takes all" approach with the popular vote.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence
The real issue it (along with the 3/5 compromise, the structure of the Senate, and the limited term explicit protection of the slave trade in the original Constitution) addressed is that, in the early US, slavery wasn't all that popular in the states that were more urbanized and had economies and value systems that supported growth in the enfranchised population, so the system had to be skewed to protect the masters in the disenfranchising states for theme to feel secure in their "peculiar institution", even if that meant sacrificing the ideal of equality even among the enfranchised citizenry.
The 3/5 compromise was used to calculate the population-based component of governance, and at any rate, is no longer used so completely irrelevant today.
I gave more details is this response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12969671
The electoral college was created as a part of the three fifths compromise. In order to get southern states on board, the framers needed to find a clever way to count slaves as population without letting them vote. Three-fifths plus the electoral college let them do that. It's an ugly hack that should be patched.
And don't give me any of that "republic" crap. As if anyone has any idea who their electors are, or cares. No voter honestly thinks they are selecting an elector qualified to relay popular opinion to the government. They're voting for the president.
The EC was imagined in an era where people thought the government would be more a federation of states than a central government. That is not what we have today. The system does not make sense in the current context.
Maybe you'll play the "regional interests" card. Sure. Is it any more fair that a minority candidate can be elected by the less populous states, rather than having a majority candidate elected by the more populous states? No. It's a facile argument that falls apart with any examination.
Given the poor modern justification for the EC, and all of the negative externalities it causes (election of less popular candidates, voter suppression and apathy in partisan states, etc.), it deserves to be abolished.
The electoral college is not racist, either. The 3/5 compromise of course came into any situation where population was considered (including the electoral college), as the country still had slavery at the time. We no longer have that compromise: blacks, women, men without land, etc. can all vote in 2016.
Abandoning the electoral college would just weaken the States, and if that's the plan, we might as well abolish the Senate too—it exists because of the exact same principle.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_Stat...
> In Federalist No. 39, Madison argued the Constitution was designed to be a mixture of state-based and population-based government. Congress would have two houses: the state-based Senate and the population-based House of Representatives. Meanwhile, the president would be elected by a mixture of the two modes.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution,
nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively,
or to the people.
Can someone point me out as why Americans differentiate republic from direct democracy? I reckon than in most of the world these words don't mean opposites. Republic means just "not a monarchy/aristocracy" where I live, and I reckon in most of the world.
(This is a genuine question, maybe there is a reason for the American usage of the term)
No, if there's an elected representative government, it's generally a representative democracy. Even when (as in the case of the UK) it's also a Constitutional monarchy, and so not a republic of any kind.
A direct democracy is one where voters vote directly on issues rather than representatives who make decisions on issues; basically no one thinks the US is like this, though many individual states in the US incorporate some degree of direct democracy via initiative and referendum.
I think it would be more accurate than your formulation to say "We are a federal republic with a very loose approximation of representative democracy, but most people think we are, or at least should be, a representative democracy (which would still be a federal republic, but also a democratic republic.)"
Abraham Lincoln with 39.8%.[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
> when in fact, more people wanted the other person
And Trump does have a mandate. The system is at it is - it has been like that since the very beginning of this country. I may not agree personally, but he won, and I really don't see any positive point in attempts that try to reinterpret the result. Remember, some day the roles may be switched.
Obviously it's too late for any change to the electoral college to affect this election. But we could know this in the future. You make what you measure and we're measuring the wrong thing.