Reply to What is the best reason for keeping the Electoral College?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Something better than "this is how our founding fathers wanted it."

We are in the end ONE COUNTRY.  Presidential campaigns should be nation-wide, not focused on a few key states and writing off large swaths of the country.

All votes should matter equally.[/quote]

Okay - It requires that candidates pay attention to wider geographical areas of the country (city, suburb, and rural). The only reason it focuses on a few key states is that we've isolated ourselves geographically from each other into coastal and interior[/quote]

+1.

OP, the onus is on you. Why should we change, and precisely now, what has been working well for 200+ years?

You wouldnt try to change the fabric of our country for partisan reasons, would you?[/quote]

We don't need to get rid of the Electoral College or change the Constitution at all. Electors can vote for whoever they want. Take it from the man who created the system:

"most of the nation’s founders were actually rather afraid of democracy, and wanted an extra layer beyond the direct election of the president. As Alexander Hamilton writes in “The Federalist Papers,”[b] the Constitution is designed to ensure “that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.” The point of the Electoral College is to preserve “the sense of the people,” while at the same time ensuring that a president is chosen “by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice.”[/b][/quote]

Go read a book on the evolution of the electoral college. The EC is rooted in racism and fear of the uneducated mass. The southern politicians found a way to match up with the bigger population of the north without giving the blacks their vote using the EC. The Northern politician wanted to keep the EC as a check on the southern/idiot becoming president.

But Hamilton's check on the stupid mass electing a dangerous man has failed twice in 16 years. The Electoral College is not doing its supposed job of preventing an unqualified man from becoming the president, as envisioned by Hamilton. Trump is unqualified, much more than Bush, but the EC is going to rubber stamp him as president. So the very reason for EC is questionable. EC has disenfranchised over 1 Million votes. How is this fair to the disenfranchised voters? And for what reason?

[/quote]

The fault does not lie with the Electoral College but with the Electors who vote in lockstep with the popular vote in their state. Forget Bush/Gore --- it would have been hard to argue that Bush was unqualified in the same sense that Trump is. The Electors need to do their constitutionally mandated duty.[/quote]

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