Popular vote. One person one vote. It isn't hard, people. The electoral college is an answer to a problem that no longer exists
this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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"But I want them city people to only count as 3/5 of a person"
Problem never existed in the first place. Remember that the US was the first modern democracy, and it had to figure a bunch of stuff out. Its critics were mostly people who supported landed gentry to some degree or another. Some of them were leaning into more liberal ideas than others, but they thought full democracy was too far. Their argument was that letting the rabble vote for their government representatives would lead to a bunch of clowns in charge who could stir up popular support, but have no idea how to govern.
Which is why you get this in the Federalist Paper number 68:
The process of election affords a moral certainty, 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. Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States. It will not be too strong to say, that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue.
Which sure sounds like it could be talking about keeping Trump out. Wind back the clock to late 2016; if Originalists need an Originalist reason for having the electoral college break for Hillary over the rules as written, here it is.
And it's not just 2016. The electoral college has split with the popular vote four times:
- Donald Trump in 2016
- George W. Bush in 2000
- Benjamin Harrison in 1888
- Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876
Bush and Trump are easily the best arguments against it; their Administrations were disastrous. Hell, the GOP doesn't even want to claim Bush for themselves anymore, pretending that it was all Hillary's fault. Plenty of the GOP also knows exactly how terrible Trump is, but are too cowardly to do anything about it. Don't want to end up like Liz Cheney.
Harrison and Hayes are more debatable, but Hayes, in particular, was the first one to order federal troops to break up a union strike. So that's nice.
We're working with limited datapoints, here, but we have four splits in the decision over the course of 235 years since the modern US Constitution was in place. At least two of them seem to be exactly the people the electoral college should have stopped. These splits don't happen often, and it's far from guaranteed that it does any good when they do.
It's a problem for a current answer for sure
Alright, well, I'm probably going to show my midwest US public school slacker ignorance here, but it was my understanding that the electoral college was implemented because the country was already large and communication was by horse or rail. Hypothetically if one of the candidates murdered someone right before the election people far away might not hear about it for months, so a delegate was granted the power to say "You know what? In light of recent events, I feel confident that most people in my state would prefer the other guy"
Any answer to why the EC was ok definitely is because of issues we don't face. Maybe that's one of them. If it was, not an issue. If it's because of land or slavery, old things.
People should all have the same voting power
There are obvious ways to cheat the system though. Did you hear the conspiracy about an election and the death of E.A. Poe?
Sorry, that was a little before my time
If it were not before your time I would be even more interested in speaking with you.
Conservatism is the party of cowardice and hypocrisy. So expect nothing less from any of them.
This is great. The other day some magat kept trying to tell me that Trump and all Republican leaders engineering a way to stop a valid election had an equivalent for Democrats because some nobody professor in Pennsylvania said that Hillary appeared to have been cheated out of her win in 2016
And that nobody professor probably has more evidence. If nothing else, the electoral college split from the popular vote.
Hah, true enough. If he spent 4 minutes digging into what happened that's more than the entire republican Senate and Congress combined
Thanks. You taught me something. Unrelated: how do block quotations work?
Is it just markdown?
It is just markdown. Thank you all for your patience.
The dems are not left wing, not even a little bit.
It's the best we've got. I mean, what, do you want us to refer to them as the mild right and the super right?
Edit: meant to ask this to the person that responded to you, but it works here as well I suppose.
Yeah saying "the left" in regard to Democrats is the cringiest shit. "Left" would be people like Bernie Sanders or AOC (even though most "leftist" US politicians like them aren't actually left on the world stage, in most of the developed world they'd just be center or center-right)
I was once asked to point out a moderate republican so they could vote for them, as if Biden wasn’t already on the ballot
Left vs Right is always a relative term... Etymologically it refers to the physical left-right split of parliamentary seats an hemicycle, from progressive to conservative in most (all?) of Western parliamentary tradition.
If members of a group/party always sit on the left side of the hemicycle, that party is, by definition, left wing. Sure, the same party in Belgium might sit on the other side, but that's hardly relevant in a local context, because that party doesn't vote in Belgian elections now does it? (And thank god for that, we've got our own insanity to deal with).
Now of course this linear classification has very obvious limitations and cannot possibly describe the entire nuance of each party (or even person)'s politics. But saying "literally everybody except maybe ten people I agree with are on on the other side of the center" robs the left/right distinction of all meaning it still holds. Placing the center "just right of my personal politics" will not make the conservatives magically go away, it just makes political analysis less meaningful because everybody's got their own idea of the center now rather than using the median congressperson as a handy reference point.
Don't both sides do this 😂
oh boo fucking hoo. keep pointing fingers at the 'other guy'. neither side takes responsibility for the shit shows they produce. stop voting for the big two.
Everything Democrats accuse Republicans of is true.
Everything Republicans accuse Democrats of is true.
Biden is bad.
Trump was bad.
Obama was bad.
Bush was bad.
Clinton was bad.
"At least he did X" is not the right thing to focus on.
"But Y was/would have been worse" is not the right thing to focus on.
We call this the false equivalence fallacy. If Bob tripped me, and Mike murdered my wife, kids, and 8 EMTs, then Bob and Mike are not just as bad because "they both did bad things".
Of course not, but that's not what Bob and Mike did. Bob and Mike are nearly indistinguishable in terms of military spending, conducting wars abroad, allowing our economy to be plundered, and generally doing jack shit to help ordinary American citizens who are suffering worse and worse as a result.
So yeah. Every single one of them did very bad things, and any differences you can point out are not nearly substantial enough to make any of them worth defending.
Okay, end metaphor since you're not incapable of logic, you're just ill-informed.
Democrats have always supported net neutrality. Republicans have not. Democrats have worked to invent ways of protecting the climate. Republicans actively oppose it. Democrats support bodily autonomy, and letting pregnant women do whatever they'd like to their own bodies. While base abortion rights are a debate, Republicans have blocked abortions even to mothers that required them to survive a miscarriage. Democrats have shown support for BLM, an organization that forces attention on racial inequity in the justice system. And, they're in support of student loan forgiveness - among other programs to further American education, a necessity to keep our job force competent (and help people make better decisions in elections).
So no, I do not agree they're the same, even when the individual things you listed may be true.