The recent election results have brought out many cries for the elimination of the Electoral College. Many of these people calling for a purely popular vote claim it thwarts our Democracy from best representing the will of the people. Now these are generally college educated people sometimes even professors and Phds. It makes me wonder what we are teaching in our schools. We are not now nor have we ever been a democracy, the U.S.A. is a republic.
There can be grave consequences to pure democracy without a complete restructuring of our government and society. Many of the more populous states are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy California, Illinois, and New York have state pension plans in worse shape than social security. Will of the people is just a sure way of making sure those of us in fiscally more stable states will have to bail out the free spending states.
Pure democracy is a recipe for Bread and Circuses and collapse.
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You are absolutely right about majority rule. I do have questions about whether or not the electoral college is working towards the purpose it was intended to serve, and I do have some issues with sparsely-populated states having so much more proportional influence than more densely populated states. I also can't help but see bias when this has happened 5 times in our history -4 of which have occurred since the Democratic came into existence- and every single time since there's been a Democratic party this system has benefited the Republican party at the expense of the Democrats. That's a consistency that shouldn't be overlooked.The system could do with some tweaking.
ReplyDeleteA sparsely populated state doesn't have more influence than the densely populated states. That would only happen if electoral votes were partitioned equally among the states. The bias against the Democrats is another issue and has more to do with the demographics of urban high population areas. Cities tend to draw like minded people to a certain extent and cause an increased concentration generally of Democrats
Deletehe sparsely populated states do have more influence in the electoral college. California has 705,454 citizen votes for each electoral college vote. Wyoming only has 194,717 per electoral college vote. That makes each Wyoming vote worth 362% what a vote in California is worth in terms of electoral college. The sparsely populated states wield more influence in terms of more electoral college votes per individual voter.
DeleteWyoming,Alaska,Rhode Island and others are at the bare minimum for electors the 3 electoral votes amounts to basically no influence.The thing that hurts states like California more in relation to influence is the fact that the outcome is predetermined by the lopsided Dem to Rep vote.
ReplyDeleteI understand that. The fact remains that a single electoral college vote in California represents a huge number of individual voters, while a single electoral college vote in Wyoming represents many fewer. The reasons our system was set up this way might be worth re-visiting and the electoral college altered in how it works to avoid this problem. The concern I have that the Republican candidate has -in every case since there's been a Democratic party- benefited at the expense of the Democratic candidate seems a problem. Such a system seems inherently biased if one party always benefits at the expense of the other. And California is not always Democratic. That changes through history.
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