[quote]Tiribulus wrote:
Rainjack makes a good point too. I go back and forth on the electoral college as a concept, but think I’d prefer a straight up vote. I don’t like the tendency for the liberal corners of the country in our case to force their “progress” on the rest of us.
Of course some will argue that the major population centers should carry that influence and maybe so, but I don’t like it.
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I had thought it was the opposite, that the Electoral College was intended to and continues to protect the interests of the smaller states.
On a direct, grand-total-national vote, racking up huge vote totals in the big states would render votes in the smaller states fairly meaningless.
With the Electoral College, candidates can afford to neglect none of the states, no matter how small, that they have any chance in at all.
And they have no need to bend over utterly backwards to an extreme end of the spectrum for purposes of racking up giant vote totals in states already ideologically aligned with them -
- the Electoral College causes a candidate’s chances to be better if he is acceptable to most states rather than just getting giant percentages in a few large states.
Should a candidate win who loses the great majority of the states by a 35/65 margin, but wins a few big states by 80/20 or whatever?
Under a direct-vote / national-grand-total system, such a candidate would win the Presidency. Under the Electoral College system, they would not.
And what happens if the election comes out extremely close and it’s not just one state that has to be recounted, but the entire country?
That would make the let’s-keep-changing-the-method-of-counting-till-Gore-wins-and-then-and-only-then-stop / nope-enough-is-enough-he-lost-by-the-rules-in-3-straight-counts Florida mess of 2000 seem like the smoothest of sailing.