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The electoral college achieves one very useful function thats ignored by everyone calling for its abolition in favour of the popular vote: it produces a clear w
by cletus 7y ago
The electoral college achieves one very useful function thats ignored by everyone calling for its abolition in favour of the popular vote: it produces a clear winner and contains the contagion of litigating and delegitimizing the outcome of an election.
Think about this: there are a number of elections that have a very small popular vote margin. What if this gets less than, say, 20,000? That's entirely possible. In a strictly popular vote election, what's to stop each side from scrounging up votes or invalidating votes in every county in the country?
The most contentious and litigated election is probably the 2000 election. The electoral college contained those shenanigans to Florida alone (and largely to Miami-Dade and Broward countries, specifically).
There are four main problems with the US election system as I see it:
1. Voting needs to be mandatory. Americans who love "freedom" chafe against this but optional voting undermines democracy. You can see this in the organized efforts to suppress voting and disqualify voters by US political parties.
2. The US needs preferential voting. Third-party votes are otherwise largely a waste.
3. Paper ballots with optical recognition only. No punch cards, certainly no electronic voting. You need the paper trail of actual ballots. This could be filling in a ballot and validating it with a machine or using a machine to print out a ballot. These have an exceptionally low error rate.
4. Stop politicizing the election process. Like, why is the supervisor for elections an elected political position? This is the case in Florida, for example. Likewise, you have the Senate majority holding up election reform because of there is suspicion this will help the Democrats in the House who passed it. Seriously, Mitch McConnell needs to go to jail.
5. I'm fine with states being represented in the US system. The problem is that this system was designed at a time when populations were rural and cities were small. I don't think anyone predicted the disparity between ~40M people in California and ~150k people in Vermont having 2 Senators each.
You'll note that none of these are having the popular vote. IMHO that's fixing the wrong problem.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago> Stop politicizing the election process. Like, why is the supervisor for elections an elected political position? The alternative is that it's an appointed position. That won't be less political.
- cletus 7y agoPatenntly false. Chairman of the Federal Reserve is largely apolitical. Judges have philosophies that tend to reflect the wishes of the President who nominated them but other than that are largely independent. Look at how other countries handle election. In Australia the Australian Electoral Commission ("AEC") is responsible for running elections and I can tell you that none of the problems with politicized elections that exist in the US exist in Australia.
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoVery well. Appointed people are not always political. I bet that an appointed election supervisor would be political at least some of the time, though. (Source: human nature.)
- illvm 7y agoOr it's a random selection from a vetted pool of individuals. Or it's an elected position from a selection of random individuals. There are other alternatives than just elected vs appointed.
- nilkn 7y agoFor (5), I'm pretty sure they not only foresaw it but specifically designed the system this way. This is why they created both the Senate and the House. CA has 53x as many representatives as Vermont.
- DenseComet 7y agoThe electoral college doesn't necessarily help the voting process produce a clear winner, nor does it necessarily stop each side from scrounging votes. As you mentioned, in the 2000 election, the outcome came down to Florida, specifically two counties. The electoral college helps create situations like this. The officials and what happened that election in those two counties essentially set the pace of America for the next decade. If they did fudge the numbers, the electoral college did not do anything to make the vote safer. The electoral college causes there to be very specific places that can be targeted to swing the entire election. Those places must be secured, but in the end, it makes more sense to take the secure voting practices and apply them everywhere, not just to the places the electoral causes the votes to matter.