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> There are also a lot of good philosophical and practical arguments to giving a majority power. I'm not sure if the Founding Fathers didn't create the whole e

> There are also a lot of good philosophical and practical arguments to giving a majority power. I'm not sure if the Founding Fathers didn't create the whole electoral college explicitly to prevent this simple rule of the majority, from being a thing? After all "we" know better than "them" - with "we" being whatever group thinks they're morally superior/better/richer/more religously righteous etc. etc.

roenxi 3y ago
Between the sarcasm and the double negatives, I don't understand your question or your point.
- orwin 3y ago
  I don't think it's sarcasm, I think his point is that the electoral college might there to avoid a simple 'majority rule' and to correct the majority if mistaken (I think it happened once in the US)
- idoubtit 3y ago
  I had no problem understanding the grandparent's comment. Adding an intermediate layer into elections is a well-known method to introduce bias. If you control the way the vote is partitioned or aggregated, it's easy to rig the output. Two examples in the recent US history: the gerrymandering tradition, and the president that was elected with less votes than his opponent. By the way, I wondered a bit if there was sarcasm in "I don't think there is a debate to be had that modern elections are using an optimal process." Which kind of modern election? The USA have a plethora of systems, and so do many countries. And some organisations have innovative vote systems, like Debian and its Condorcet method.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    > Which kind of modern election? Funny you should mention that in the same paragraph as Condorcet (doubly funny that the Condorcet method is considered an innovation after 250 years). Basically anything after the French Revolution although most of the interesting research seems to have clustered in the last century (eg, Arrow's Theorem which proved that for a some reasonable definitions an elections can't be optimal - apparently only came up in 1950).
InitialLastName 3y ago
The framers created the electoral college because they were designing a power structure whose goal was to re-weight electoral power relative to population as opposed to voting population (because multiple significant stakeholder states wanted electoral credit for the large numbers of humans they treated as property).
- hnuser847 3y ago
  That's not why the electoral college was created. The three fifths compromise was appended to the electoral college system, but it was not the reason for it being created in the first place. The reason why we have an electoral college system, according to James Madison in the Federalist papers, is because the United States is intended to be a mixture of state-based and population-based government. States within the US are not meant to be mere provinces; they are intended to be mini-countries with their own laws and customs under a broader federal umbrella. The electoral college system allows the states to cast the votes for President, instead of the majority of citizens voting directly. It's sort of like how an HOA works, where each unit has one vote. The units themselves comprise the voting body, not the individual people living in each unit. The individuals in each unit might have different opinions and preferences, but at the end of the day they must submit a single vote representing their unit. The electoral college system works the same way, with the caveat that the number of votes apportioned to each state is relative to the size of the population.
  - TheCoelacanth 3y ago
    Is it any surprise that someone who personally owned more than 100 slaves would try to manufacture some other justification?
    - ETH_start 3y ago
      The justification is far too well-constructed to be a pretense
uxp8u61q 3y ago
Try to venture outside the USA, the constitution that your country drafted a few centuries ago isn't considered to be the gold standard of anything related to democracy. And we don't regard your "founding fathers" as messianic creatures, either.

roenxi 3y ago

Between the sarcasm and the double negatives, I don't understand your question or your point.

orwin 3y ago
I don't think it's sarcasm, I think his point is that the electoral college might there to avoid a simple 'majority rule' and to correct the majority if mistaken (I think it happened once in the US)
idoubtit 3y ago
I had no problem understanding the grandparent's comment. Adding an intermediate layer into elections is a well-known method to introduce bias. If you control the way the vote is partitioned or aggregated, it's easy to rig the output. Two examples in the recent US history: the gerrymandering tradition, and the president that was elected with less votes than his opponent. By the way, I wondered a bit if there was sarcasm in "I don't think there is a debate to be had that modern elections are using an optimal process." Which kind of modern election? The USA have a plethora of systems, and so do many countries. And some organisations have innovative vote systems, like Debian and its Condorcet method.
- roenxi 3y ago
  > Which kind of modern election? Funny you should mention that in the same paragraph as Condorcet (doubly funny that the Condorcet method is considered an innovation after 250 years). Basically anything after the French Revolution although most of the interesting research seems to have clustered in the last century (eg, Arrow's Theorem which proved that for a some reasonable definitions an elections can't be optimal - apparently only came up in 1950).

InitialLastName 3y ago

The framers created the electoral college because they were designing a power structure whose goal was to re-weight electoral power relative to population as opposed to voting population (because multiple significant stakeholder states wanted electoral credit for the large numbers of humans they treated as property).

hnuser847 3y ago
That's not why the electoral college was created. The three fifths compromise was appended to the electoral college system, but it was not the reason for it being created in the first place. The reason why we have an electoral college system, according to James Madison in the Federalist papers, is because the United States is intended to be a mixture of state-based and population-based government. States within the US are not meant to be mere provinces; they are intended to be mini-countries with their own laws and customs under a broader federal umbrella. The electoral college system allows the states to cast the votes for President, instead of the majority of citizens voting directly. It's sort of like how an HOA works, where each unit has one vote. The units themselves comprise the voting body, not the individual people living in each unit. The individuals in each unit might have different opinions and preferences, but at the end of the day they must submit a single vote representing their unit. The electoral college system works the same way, with the caveat that the number of votes apportioned to each state is relative to the size of the population.
- TheCoelacanth 3y ago
  Is it any surprise that someone who personally owned more than 100 slaves would try to manufacture some other justification?
  - ETH_start 3y ago
    The justification is far too well-constructed to be a pretense

uxp8u61q 3y ago

Try to venture outside the USA, the constitution that your country drafted a few centuries ago isn't considered to be the gold standard of anything related to democracy. And we don't regard your "founding fathers" as messianic creatures, either.