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I would like to see a "historical justification" in writing. A source showing the Founders being concerned over distance and time of travel. This sounds like yo
by talmand 14y ago
I would like to see a "historical justification" in writing. A source showing the Founders being concerned over distance and time of travel. This sounds like your reasoning for the creation of the EC.
It seems you are assuming that today's voter is more educated in terms of governance and voting systems than the one's of yesterday. Academics are certainly more up-to-speed in such theories but that doesn't make them right. Any voting system that avoids majority rules is going to have problems and errors inherent in the system. I'd rather take the risk of the occasional error over mob rule. If there are justifications that electors are no longer required, when they represent people that wish them to vote a certain way, then there's an argument that any representative is no longer needed. Unfortunately the U.S. has a representative government, in an effort to avoid true democracy. Gerrymandering is more of a problem for the House of Representatives than the EC, because the Republicans control most of the gerrymandering right now and it didn't seem to help Romney. But I have no problem discussing ways of eliminating that power from the hands of state legislatures. For one, I'm not aware of anything in the Constitution giving such power anyway, it mostly speaks of how many Representatives per state.
But again, I asked for examples of problems that were acceptable two hundred years ago but are no longer acceptable now. I didn't see any in your statement.
I would say that many decisions made in the creation of the government, including the EC, did revolve around the fear of a more populous state dominating less populous states. I say this because they, as you point out, had a fear of an all-powerful Federal government. Just because the problems did not exist at the time doesn't mean they weren't foreseen nor being prepared for. Amendments are ratified by the states so they get equal votes on those regardless, but that's another step they took to avoid a popular vote problem. But since many laws on the Federal level are written, passed, and signed without regard to the Constitution it would stand the reason that the fairness of the amendment process is irrelevant.
What you say about swing states is true, except that they tend to vary from election to election so I fail to see how Congress can get favor from them via entitlements. But Congress can lavish the gifts upon their state strongholds just to be sure they keep them as much as providing something to swing states to get them to vote their way. Technically, according to the Constitution, they shouldn't be doing that in the first place to any state regardless of its political leanings. You say that large states are left to fester which is an outcome that possibly the system is supposed to do something about. I would say that the original intentions was that the Federal government shouldn't have been involved in the first place. Most of the problems you lay out are there, sure, but most of them have been created by people who wish to tinker or game the system. Therefore the problems lay in the people running the system, not the system itself. But even with these problems and roughly a 5% error rate, as I said before, I would choose that over mob rule any day.