Wasn't the EC created to protect slave owners?

a very fair question. my opinion, it’s working exactly how it was intended to work, votes in small states matter a bit more. here in my state of CT which is very blue, sometimes i feel
like my vote is meaningless.

No fix required in my opinion, candidates obviously need to be aware that they need to campaign there.
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that’s the latest from those willing to revise history.
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Some claim that the founding fathers chose the Electoral College over direct election in order to balance the interests of high-population and low-population states. But the deepest political divisions in America have always run not between big and small states, but between the north and the south, and between the coasts and the interior.

One Founding-era argument for the Electoral College stemmed from the fact that ordinary Americans across a vast continent would lack sufficient information to choose directly and intelligently among leading presidential candidates.

Enter the 12th Amendment, which allowed each party to designate one candidate for president and a separate candidate for vice president. The amendment’s modifications of the electoral process transformed the Framers’ framework, enabling future presidential elections to be openly populist and partisan affairs featuring two competing tickets. It is the 12th Amendment’s Electoral College system, not the Philadelphia Framers’, that remains in place today. If the general citizenry’s lack of knowledge had been the real reason for the Electoral College, this problem was largely solved by 1800. So why wasn’t the entire Electoral College contraption scrapped at that point?

Standard civics-class accounts of the Electoral College rarely mention the real demon dooming direct national election in 1787 and 1803: slavery.

At the Philadelphia convention, the visionary Pennsylvanian James Wilson proposed direct national election of the president. But the savvy Virginian James Madison responded that such a system would prove unacceptable to the South: “The right of suffrage was much more diffusive [i.e., extensive] in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes.” In other words, in a direct election system, the North would outnumber the South, whose many slaves (more than half a million in all) of course could not vote. But the Electoral College—a prototype of which Madison proposed in this same speech—instead let each southern state count its slaves, albeit with a two-fifths discount, in computing its share of the overall count.
Virginia emerged as the big winner—the California of the Founding era—with 12 out of a total of 91 electoral votes allocated by the Philadelphia Constitution, more than a quarter of the 46 needed to win an election in the first round. After the 1800 census, Wilson’s free state of Pennsylvania had 10% more free persons than Virginia, but got 20% fewer electoral votes. Perversely, the more slaves Virginia (or any other slave state) bought or bred, the more electoral votes it would receive. Were a slave state to free any blacks who then moved North, the state could actually lose electoral votes.

If the system’s pro-slavery tilt was not overwhelmingly obvious when the Constitution was ratified, it quickly became so. For 32 of the Constitution’s first 36 years, a white slaveholding Virginian occupied the presidency.

Southerner Thomas Jefferson, for example, won the election of 1800-01 against Northerner John Adams in a race where the slavery-skew of the electoral college was the decisive margin of victory: without the extra electoral college votes generated by slavery, the mostly southern states that supported Jefferson would not have sufficed to give him a majority. As pointed observers remarked at the time, Thomas Jefferson metaphorically rode into the executive mansion on the backs of slaves.

The 1796 contest between Adams and Jefferson had featured an even sharper division between northern states and southern states. Thus, at the time the Twelfth Amendment tinkered with the Electoral College system rather than tossing it, the system’s pro-slavery bias was hardly a secret. Indeed, in the floor debate over the amendment in late 1803, Massachusetts Congressman Samuel Thatcher complained that “The representation of slaves adds thirteen members to this House in the present Congress, and eighteen Electors of President and Vice President at the next election.” But Thatcher’s complaint went unredressed. Once again, the North caved to the South by refusing to insist on direct national election.

In light of this more complete (if less flattering) account of the electoral college in the late 18th and early 19th century, Americans should ask themselves whether we want to maintain this odd—dare I say peculiar?—institution in the 21st century.

Cry me a River Petey.
Nobody cares. But hey, it keeps YOU busy.
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Wyoming) has as much as four times the voting power of California. not sure how thats overly Democratic

And here i thought the right didn't like welfare

Blue in a red state or red in a blue state has nothing to do with the electoral college or why we have it. But in mass we have a Rhino as governor if you talk to a Trump supporter

Funny in America we have changed dramatically in our history and have managed but many still dont want the Constitution to evolve to reflect modern day realities that our founders in all their wisdoms could never have foreseen. Change is needed .. leave the college allow a legitimate 3rd party to break the log jam. no isnt a defense
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Oscar, go crawl back in your can, obviously a number of people here are just blindly reciting baloney they have heard or read.
I realize that history and education are antithetical to belief in Trump, but I still have hope for America.

you’d really, really benefit from civics 101. it’s not welfare. It's states rights. A state is a sovereign entity, and the founding fathers wanted that sovereignty to be meaningful. i think it was brilliant, and not just because it helped trump. if not for that, no candidate would ever visit the midwest.


You really need to listen with an open mind sometimes, to people
on the other side. that’s why i’m in favor of gay marriage and opposed to the death penalty. no one side is right 100% of the time.
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a tad ironic you of all people, would complain about that of all things.

A trump bashing article? better post it!
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53% of American are in favor of a constitutional amendment to require a popular vote, compared to 43% who agree with maintaining the Electoral College

71%
The percentage of Americans who think global warming is happening,

survey finds that 89 percent of Americans favor expanded background checks for gun purchasers; 76 percent support "red flag" laws to identify dangerous persons and deny them guns, and 75 percent favor a voluntary buyback program in which the government would purchase firearms from current owners. Sixty-two percent of Americans favor a ban on the sale of semi-automatic weapons.

Talk to a Republican its a lie.. then they create alternative facts to support the lie..
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Well now . . . this certainly shows that we do not need states, nor the electoral college. Just get things done by polls and surveys. Brilliant.

What I posted had zero to do with Floridaman
But with you it’s all about defending him and claiming you don’t really like him.
Sort of like a beaten wife saying it’s not his fault.
You just keep believing, your children will pay for your obedience.
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Liberal fool with liberal views🤡🤡🤡
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It is not particularly funny how we have dramatically changed the relationship of the states to the national government. You say vague things like " we have changed dramatically in our history," but WE have not changed. We are the same human species that have the same essential desires and needs. We humans have instituted various kinds of governments, not, for the most part in the history of nation states, because of essential needs of WE the people. WE were usually the afterthought, the grist, the labor for the benefit of various ruling governments, ruling classes. Our founding was a unique flipping of that order--the creation of government being for the benefit of WE.

And the essential feature of our constitutional republic was not the power of the national, central, government, but the power of local and state government and the necessity of WE ultimately governing ourselves.

Nothing has changed in our nature, in who we are since then. Size of nation, of the world, technological advancement, whatever, nothing has changed the nature of what we are. The dichotomy still exists. Is the government close to home that we can more personally affect and control the one that suites us, or is it the distant one size fits all government that we can barely touch yet in actuality has near total control of our lives the one we desire. That is a simple question with volumes of debate to consider.

Thank you for at least responding to the question that went so long unanswered. But you didn't actually answer it. The undeniable fact is the national government has grown immensely in power over the states. And that is not an accident. Progressive government thrives on central power, on government's ability to do what its experts consider the good and the right without impediments like being restricted to a few enumerated powers. The constitutional order of divided government closer to the hands of the people is in the process of being flipped back to the previous old order of the nation state governed totally by centralized control which is more and more serving, as that old order required, the needs of the powerful few.

In light of all that, I'll ask again, are states necessary?

I think that if it is the Progressive notion of government that you prefer, then you would not actually see the need for impediments to unhampered power of government by things like different states and cities with their competing laws and statutes and populations who vote for their local self-interest against the national rules which would more efficiently bind us to the rule of those who supposedly know best. And so, also, how you would prefer that every election would be by popular vote--how you would prefer a Progressive pure democracy to a constitutional republic. In spite of the lessons of history which tell us what such democracies ultimately become.

it's because the democraps are sooooo much worse...not that complicated really...you are as crazed and obsessed as they are....you only needed to watch those three loons they rolled out as "experts" the other morning...the left has completely lost it and can't be trusted with ANYTHING

i think climate change is happening. i’m in favor of more background checks for guns. I agree with you. fair enough?

You’re the one, not me, who can’t ever disagree with his side. Never, as far as I can tell.

I don’t doubt a majority of
people in CA and NY want the electoral college abandoned. Which is precisely why we need it. And it’s exactly why the founding fathers said that to amend the constitution, you need a minimum number of states to agree to it, not a minimum number of overall voters.

You want a pure democracy. The founding fathers sought specifically to avoid that, which is why we are a Republic instead. They wanted to avoid sectionalism, they wanted to
avoid the tyranny of the majority.

States are sovereign entities. In your vision, they’d be nothing but miniaturized versions of the federal government.
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I did not defend trump, i said it’s funny that youd tease someone else for the act of repeatedly posting articles that serve their agenda, when no one does that nearly as much as you.

On this forum i have defended trump and criticized him. Because i’m rational and fair.

My children will be fine. Don’t worry yourself. One of the reasons they will be fine, is because of the ridiculous market gains i’ve realized in the last three years. if i was a paranoid thoughtless Trump hater like you, id have converted everything i had to cash the day after the election, and me and my kids would have missed out on the gravy train.

I see things as they are, not only as I wish they were. Trump is a repulsive individual who in my opinion based on a rational review of everything he has done, happens to be making life better for most of us. Id say the same thing about Bill Clinton. Trumps overt cockiness and bluster are just words. The Supreme Court has struck him down when he had overreached as they do with every administration. We’re no closer to a dictatorship then we were in 2016. All the checks and balances are still in place. Thank God. Your side never stops shrieking that hes a threat to our democratic institutions, there’s exactly zero evidence of that. Zip.

The left never saw his victory coming ( neither did I), and they just can’t accept it. That’s all this is, a temper tantrum from a bunch of spoiled brats who have zero ability to cope with disappointment.
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That was really pathetic on wednesday. one of the scholarly experts once admitted that she went out of her way to cross the street rather than walk in front of a Trump hotel. That’s not krazy, nope. So i’m supposed to believe her opinion on impeachment is a neutral review of the facts?

Keep bleating like he sheep you are lefties, orange man baaaaaaaad.
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You guys are clueless and regurgitating talking points ingnoring what was said and attcking witness its all you guys can do .. because⁰ Trump hasnt given anyting to use as a defense. Except to say he didnt do it ( hes a serial lier)

The 4 are not jurors. their Task was based on the testimony can he be impeached

3 yes 1 who criticize the process, just like the Republicans

Jim look around you your surrounded by sheep. Just Republicans ones

When the emperors clothes come off . Where will all those who blindly followed Trump go.

Cuz this isn't going to stop. ( Trumps) behavior is going to go into overdrive once the Senate publicly show their fealty to Trump. any independence they had is gone
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i’m not clueless. What i said is true. One of the legal experts the democrats asked to testify if he should be impeached, is so deranged with trump hatred that she admitted she crossed the street rather than walk on the sidewalk in front of a building that has his name on it. That is beyond crazy, and she is the one they asked to testify? She also had that pathetic, rehearsed applause line about Trumps son, hardy har har.

Trumps defense, as you said is that he didn’t do it, nor did anyone provide any direct evidence that he did it. I think he probably did it, but in any event, Biden also used quid pro quo, and senate democrats also asked a foreign power to investigate a political rival, and no one is/was asking for them to be impeached. So it's fairly clear there’s a double standard.

“their task was based on testimony can he be impeached.”. Agreed. But who gives a damn about how someone answers that question, who hates Trump so much that she won’t walk on the sidewalk in front of a building with his name on it? She’s not impartial, not even close.

You’re right it’s not going to stop. Trump isn’t going to behave, and thanks in part to your sides inability to nominate anyone to the right of Pol Pot, he’s very possibly going to get re elected. So a good chance of 4 more years of listening to liberal bratty temper tantrums.

Obama liked to say, elections have consequences. Suck it up like i did from 2009-2016.

There are plenty of sheep
on the right. I’m not one of them. Not even close.
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Gosh, another thread disintegrating into talking about Trump. Who'd of thought that would happen?

The thread is about the electoral college. States are the reason for the electoral college.

wdmso--is it necessary for America to have 50 separate units of government with different constitutions, various different laws, different educational concepts, different tax structures, different economic conditions and needs, differences that often are obstacles that the national government has to overcome, and the only reason for the cumbersome problem that you want to eliminate--the electoral college?

Wouldn't it be more efficient and cheaper if we were the United State of America rather than the United States of America? There certainly would be no need of something like the electoral college. And we could easily, basically unopposed, have the purely democratic popular vote that you want.

Yeah, it looks like Scott and Jim started talking about Trump and the Dotard starting talking specifically about the last election.

Do you think hanging on to the old perhaps outdated notion of 50 different sovereign states is a good idea, a necessary one for us to move on towards the Progressive notion of government that suits our new and future times? Or would it be better to just consolidate the whole mess into one efficient and less expensive model of a unitary state?

never said abolish said tweak but all you hear is abolish shocking

Jim it appears in your mind only you and republicans can walk and chew gum at the same time

it's lame that you and republicans think that..
if you ever gave money to a democrat or voted for 1 you are unable to pass legal judgment on a republican .. this crying of Bias only works in your victimized world you and republicans have created to a point where it ends and reality starts , is so blurry you can't tell ...


you'll insist this not True the republicans will insist this is not true , but yours and theirs written words and spoken words .. tell a different storie altogether .. even when faced with this record in the future


Trump his supporters now portray experts as untrustworthy and contemptuous elites out to subvert the will of ordinary Americans.

And the base it dumb enough to believe it ..

:conf:

"it's lame that you and republicans think that..
if you ever gave money to a democrat or voted for 1 you are unable to pass legal judgment on a republican '

Who said that? I have voted for democrats...

"Trump his supporters now portray experts as untrustworthy "

Why not get someone who doesn't obviously hate Trump? She's obviously deranged with hate. Plenty of legal scholars out there. Why did they select her, do you think?

the democrat "experts" clearly are

best they could do...and some are still in their safe spaces

Maybe Trump sent the rest of them to death camps already.