1168
Majority of Americans continue to favor moving away from Electoral College
(www.pewresearch.org)
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
1168 points (98.2% liked)
News
23259 readers
3374 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The electoral college was necessary because it would have been logistically impossible for people living in 18th and 19th century America to be able to participate in a single-day one person one vote election, given their level of technology at the time.
We live in the 21st century. We have instantaneous means of communication via the internet making designating an elector to travel to Washington unnecessary, a greatly expanded infrastructure via roads and mass transit for people to travel to polling places in a reasonable amount of time in a day, computers that can tally the ballots many hundreds of times faster than a human being can, and vastly expanded capacity for handling the logistics of running a nationwide election including a complex bureaucracy dedicated to oversight and enforcement of voting laws and regulations.
The electoral college is an archaic system whose only purpose has been completely supplanted by modern technology. Any notion of rogue electors defending the republic from authoritarians and populists is not only historically false, but given the fact that they failed to prevent exactly that situation from happening once already, laughably ineffective.
That had nothing to do with it. It would have been extremely easy for people in each state to count the votes for that state, then bring those vote totals to the capital where those state-totals are added together to get the final country-wide count. The problem is that that kind of simple, one-person one-vote system means that each vote would be weighted equally, and in some states there was a large portion of the population that couldn't vote but the state's decision-makers still wanted that portion to affect how much say that state had in choosing the President.
So basically, the Electoral College is there because of slavery.
You are correct, of course. Based on the writings of the founders at the time they established the system, it was clear that the system was never intended to be a democratic one in the first place. They didn't trust each other and they certainly didn't trust uneducated rural Americans with the power to select the chief executive.
The fact that they couldn't agree on whether or not to count a slave as a full person for the purposes of counting population is all the more reason the system should have been swept away ages ago.
They could, however, agree that a tax on tea-smugglers was worth starting a war and killing thousands over.
Also, there have been times where electors got the names wrong lol. Imagine losing because somebody put your name wrong. I mean I guess there's precedent for the supreme Court picking a winner already. God I hate this country.
The election is not and has never been a single day affair. People like Trump are just trying to make it into one because it gives them a better chance at winning.
I didn't mean to imply it was. Just that before America was well developed with sophisticated infrastructure, it would have been a tall ask to have voters in rural areas show up at a specific location at a specific time to vote. It would have taken counties several days to collect all of the ballots, tally them, and hand them off to someone who then had to report those results to the state, and then after all the counties reported in the state would appointed an elector to go to Washington on horseback to deliver the results in person. Electors made sense at the time - it funneled the communications down to a single official entity, rather than trying to organize the election centrally and delivering ballots from the far corners of the United States delivered to Washington DC to be counted and certified.
We could cut out the electoral college and very little about our voting process would change, it would just eliminate an archaic and historically anti-democratic system that works behind the scenes to contribute nothing of value in our current society, aside from being a very tantalizing point of failure that has already been targeted by election fraudsters.