I'd like to open a slightly different topic here which stems though from the elections of the past 20 years. Wouldn't be a big take away now the reform of the Elector College and the shift to a direct vote from the people ?
As a nonUS citizen from a country in which the head of state is being elected directly from the people, I find it very unsettling that there have been cases in which the president in US elections was running behind in popular votes and by a big amount of votes, which almost happened here. I've tried to research it a bit but I couldn't still understand why especially since the House and Senate members are elected by popular vote already
The Constitution of the United States is a document written to preserve co-equal sovereignty of a bunch of states that wanted to be closer to nations than provinces, while avoiding the then-very-apparent risk of centralized absolute governing authority.
The framers of the Constitution didn't get everything right, but it's very useful to keep that perspective in mind when trying to understand the form of the US government.
If you take the perspective of states as sovereign, with federation between them, then the Electoral College starts to make a lot more sense. The goal was to preserve the power of a state in the federal government, as much as to represent the collection of people from all states - both concepts were critical. The idea is that people from the nation deserve representation and that each state (and the people from that state as a sub-population) deserve representation.
If federation of states is a core concept of the subdivision of governing responsibility, then it makes sense to build a system that ensures each state has meaningful weight in the governance of that federation.
None of this is an argument for or against the Electoral College, nor should it be interpreted as arguing for the correctness/effectiveness/righteousness/morality of the institution. It is simply an attempt to share perspective to help understand why the system is the way it is.
As originally defined, the House of Representatives was the only piece of the federal government intended to directly represent the people of the nation. Senators were originally chosen by state legislatures. The Senate was intended to represent the states, not the people directly.
The Electoral College was an intermediary to represent both the states and the people - as a compromise, it has many failings that seem obvious today. There is no federal mandate as to how a state's electors choose to cast their votes. Each state is responsible for regulating its own voting - this includes how people vote and how electors are chosen and how those electors vote. It is mere happenstance that the majority of states have a winner-takes-all allotment strategy for their electors. Maine and Nebraska notably assign their electors proportionally.
It is also interesting to note that the tie-breaking mechanism for an Electoral College tie devolves to the House, not with one vote per representative, but with one vote per state. This is another example of the concept that states are a concept deserving of representation.
The US is not and was never supposed to be a popular vote democracy. The founding fathers recognized the dangers of populism and subsequently made sure that the government is a republic.
Michael Barbaro: So this winner-take-all system, this is not something envisioned by the framers. It seems like it kind of came to us in a pretty haphazard way.
Jesse Wegman: Right. People like to imagine that the system that we used today was handed down to us from the framers. And in fact, the framers didn’t talk at all about the winner-take-all rule. It didn’t come up at the convention. And when they saw it start to be adopted in the states in the early 1800s, they were horrified. James Madison, the man we think of as the father of the Constitution, tried to pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting the use of winner-take-all rule because he saw how corrosive it was to erase up to half of voters in the state.
Trump, for all his bluster, is not really a populist in any serious sense of the word. True populism doesn't exist in a state with a balance of powers. For example, Caesar was a populist (Populares).
Your metaphor cuts both ways.
Electoral college is like 3 lambs and 2 wolves voting for what's for dinner. Lambs live in one state and wolves live in two states. Wolves win even though they are numerically the minority.
Your metaphor simply exposes a risk of any sort of majority rules, it's not specific to popular vote systems.
The System didn't anticipate the maturation of the political landscape into a steady-state of two enormously wealthy parties that exclude any disrupters, and thereby between them decide what's selectable for dinner from a menu of two choices. Do you want that lamb with mint sauce or without?
Not once on electoral coverage did I see votes for independent or third-party candidates listed.
Do not be mistaken, popular vote was one of the options considered at the beginning of the USA. It was not due to the potential for fraud. So even today, the electoral college serves as a safeguard when there is reason to believe the popular vote has been tainted. The current media narrative is there is no hard evidence, but what other evidence other than video, sworn affidavits is required? Do not be too quick to call it for Biden, not withstanding the popular vote, this probably will drag on until December despite the media attempts to end it quickly.
The electoral college had nothing to do with fraud. It was a check against a misinformed populace, or a candidate that died. Both of those things have been made irrelevant by faithless elector laws. It now serves basically only as a bias towards republicans, as the founders of this country chose to value land over people.
As a nonUS citizen from a country in which the head of state is being elected directly from the people, I find it very unsettling that there have been cases in which the president in US elections was running behind in popular votes and by a big amount of votes, which almost happened here. I've tried to research it a bit but I couldn't still understand why especially since the House and Senate members are elected by popular vote already
I'd appreciate any insights here