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> "Tyranny of the minority" gets this issue exactly backwards. The problem the Electoral College was designed to mitigate is a tyranny of the majority. States

> "Tyranny of the minority" gets this issue exactly backwards. The problem the Electoral College was designed to mitigate is a tyranny of the majority. States have representation, done universally by popular vote within those states for their representatives in Congress. (if you know any states that are an exception, feel free to add). Most of the country, and the world, experiences elections by popular vote except for a single particular position. The Electoral College is only for the appointment of 1 person for the office of the President. It is an aberration. Even when looking at the President's ability to appoint people, many other popular vote elected representatives have the ability to appoint people too. This aberration was from a time when the non-slave population of the United States was 1 million people, completely coastal (although those states had widely different boundaries back then which stretched deep into Appalachia), and in some of those states only the land owners could vote. The purpose of the Electoral College was a compromise, not part of the grand wisdom and design. A compromise that has been merely tolerable and now has been stretched to its limits. The democracy we exported throughout the whole world for the next 200 years looked at our older iteration and said "no, we'll patch that". US Electoral College has reached its peak of tolerance, and the inability to amend it is maintained by the states that are the very reason why the electoral college is intolerable.

pdonis 7y ago
> Most of the country, and the world, experiences elections by popular vote Actually, as someone else remarked upthread, in most parliamentary democracies the Prime Minister is elected by the parliament, not by popular vote.
- rolltiide 7y ago
  "experiences elections", like the surrounding part of my comment, was referring to how every other position that electors get to weigh in on are by popular vote only. I specifically was not referring to positions that are not. If we want to talk about Head of State selection processes, I am a fan of Switzerland's Federal Council which contains 7 heads of state that act together but represent the interests of the constituent parties, while one acts as a frontman for diplomatic purposes with other nations. It maintains professional tact privately and publicly - concept only rarely strained in Switzerland's Federal Council history - and more importantly maintains representation. A brief civil war between that collection of small counties and cities was needed to get those reforms and other forms of direct representation into their constitution.
tastygreenapple 7y ago
We're actually in an abberation right now with respect to how states select Senators. Originally, state legislatures selected senators, not popular votes. Direct election of senators has only happened since the 1970s, and imo the senate is functionally gridlocked unless one party has a super majority or decides to lower the threshold for getting things one to a simple majority. I wonder if we would be in a better place if we retained the old system.

pdonis 7y ago

> Most of the country, and the world, experiences elections by popular vote Actually, as someone else remarked upthread, in most parliamentary democracies the Prime Minister is elected by the parliament, not by popular vote.

rolltiide 7y ago
"experiences elections", like the surrounding part of my comment, was referring to how every other position that electors get to weigh in on are by popular vote only. I specifically was not referring to positions that are not. If we want to talk about Head of State selection processes, I am a fan of Switzerland's Federal Council which contains 7 heads of state that act together but represent the interests of the constituent parties, while one acts as a frontman for diplomatic purposes with other nations. It maintains professional tact privately and publicly - concept only rarely strained in Switzerland's Federal Council history - and more importantly maintains representation. A brief civil war between that collection of small counties and cities was needed to get those reforms and other forms of direct representation into their constitution.

tastygreenapple 7y ago

We're actually in an abberation right now with respect to how states select Senators. Originally, state legislatures selected senators, not popular votes. Direct election of senators has only happened since the 1970s, and imo the senate is functionally gridlocked unless one party has a super majority or decides to lower the threshold for getting things one to a simple majority. I wonder if we would be in a better place if we retained the old system.