4 ms·
Why does the mechanism of election for the head of the federal executive branch matter so much? Because the federal government has so much relevance to the mat
by throwaway0a5e 5y ago
Why does the mechanism of election for the head of the federal executive branch matter so much? Because the federal government has so much relevance to the matters of the individuals living in the states.
The founders didn't care that much about maximizing fairness per person. They were trying to maximize fairness per state. The electoral college works fine for a federal government that's mostly confined to managing the states themselves which is what the founders were trying to build.
- tptacek 5y agoThis stuff has been discussed in immense detail on AskHistorians, with citations to various historians (often with background on those historians for context), and the best you can likely say here about the electoral college is that it was a janky hack created to resolve an interminable squabble about apportionment. It had supporters among anti-slavery politicians and was uniformly supported by pro-slavery politicians, because it worked synergistically with the overt pro-slavery clauses in the constitution to tilt political power to the slave states.