Why the Elecotoral College
 

This is a not too long presentation of the importance of the Electoral College as opposed to the popular vote. The first 14 or so minutes is introduction and a brief look at the Constitution, then the rest of the 25 minutes or so on the Electoral College and the importance of state power vs federal power.

It is not wonkish, but a plain language and engaging discussion. Please watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUR9UIscLGU

And if for a minute ifYou think Republicans wouldn't take issue to winning the popular vote and losing 2 presidential elections. Your a partisan hack.

Wyoming has three electoral votes and a population of 586,107, while California has 55 electoral votes and 39,144,818 residents. Distributing the electoral vote evenly among each state’s residents suggests that individual votes from Wyoming carry 3.6 times more influence, or weight, than those from California

Ya ok thats what the framers had in mind when it was written
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If you think it needed reform before this last election then maybe it wouldn’t come off as sour grapes. But we both know that is not the case.
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Well, yeah, it is.
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fake news

Not really. The more populous states have more members in the House and so their votes carry more weight in the legislation that Congress passes. The one check that is constitutionally left (since the 17A created election of Senators by popular vote instead of appointment by state legislators) to smaller states from being tyrannized by larger ones is the Electoral College. Otherwise, what is the necessity for the existence of different states. Do you believe that states are necessary?

it’s precisely, exactly what they had in mind. State’s rights.
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Keeps the big states from eating the little states :hee:
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the snowflakes are saying the electoral college was implemented because of racism and slavery. Nothing like revising history to fit your narrative, next they’ll say it was all hitlers idea.
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Of course, voter suppression of slaves was a big concern in the late 1700’s :rolleyes:
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you can’t talk to these people...
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it's pretty funny that the left and media have now decided anyone that disagrees with them is a trump "cult" member as they run around squawking their daily talking points over and over like little zombies :eek:

That is dumb

no it’s not. i’ve said a hundred times Trump is a morally bankrupt jerk, but i’m called a kool aid drinking Trumplican, because I admit that the economy is doing well and I like the judges he’s appointing.

He’s doing some good things. A lot of people are better off.m today than when he took office. We get to decide next year, if his antics are worth the benefit. That’s how it’s supposed to work.

When you have a very senior level FBI agent who is leading both Hilary’s email investigation and Trumps Russian connections who texts “we’ll stop him” from becoming president, that should worry all of us.
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It's a joke you idiot. Scott knows why I did it and that is why it didn't bother him

did what?

beats me, I’m an idiot.
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post that is dumb.

This is something new?
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As I said earlier - you are a vile person.

Big hugs for you 🤷🏽#^&♂️
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waiting for one of them to call it the electrical college :nopain:

Hey, wdmso, I asked you earlier in this thread if you believe that our separate states are necessary. That is not an idle question. It is critical to the type of government we have. It is an essential element that differentiates whether we are a constitutional republic or a Progressive democracy.

I have asked this question a few times before and never gotten a response. You seem quite willing and unafraid to respond to just about any question or opinion. What is your opinion? Is it necessary for our country to have and be divided by separate states?

he won’t answer, he can’t. he doesn’t want to say we don’t need states, but if he admits we need states, he justifies the electoral college. it was a perfect question. perfect.
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Haveing states? Who said anything about. Not having states ? Or if they are nessary?
Define your question nessary for What?

Or are you suggesting with out the college states will no longer exist?

Electoral College votes gives citizens in less populated states (e.g. Wyoming) as much as four times the voting power as those in more populous states (e.g. California) i cant help if you dont see this as an issue..

Or that any candidate need not go to any other state other than swing state and appeal to this limited audience
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if it wasn’t for the electoral
college, no candidate would
ever go to the midwest. Obviously i wouldn’t like the results if the electoral college were giving wins to the democrats. but it was a brilliant and necessary move by the founding fathers. And if enough people agree with you, there is a mechanism to change it.
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if only someone had bothered to tell Hilary that, maybe she wouldn’t have spent all her time getting hugged in CA and NY, and maybe she would have won.
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I agree ,, but whats the fix? not looking to abolish anything clearly things need a tune up
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Not really
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Only half the country thinks it is broken.
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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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