F... US voting bureaucracy

[Daseal]

FRPLG: I doubt our founding fathers had this insight. The electoral college was created because of poor communication and very long travel times. It was the best solution to a rather spread out country.

FRPLG -- any way you cut it, the candidates would be campaigning to the majority. Not the minority of folks, but the majority of people.

I definitely think tweaks are in order, but I really don't understand why people complain about the campaigning in small markets. It's not like candidates spend a long time in those states anyhow once the presidential election comes. They're still going to go and campaign there during the primaries.

[FRPLG]

Originally Posted by Daseal

FRPLG: I doubt our founding fathers had this insight. The electoral college was created because of poor communication and very long travel times. It was the best solution to a rather spread out country.

FRPLG -- any way you cut it, the candidates would be campaigning to the majority. Not the minority of folks, but the majority of people.

I definitely think tweaks are in order, but I really don't understand why people complain about the campaigning in small markets. It's not like candidates spend a long time in those states anyhow once the presidential election comes. They're still going to go and campaign there during the primaries.

Again I don't think the campaigning has much to do with it anymore. It did in the past due the relative difficulties it took to coomunicate accross a large nation but now it really comes down to not leaving people out of the system completely. Economically it can be proven that almost 90% of country would become irrelevant to the process of gov't if their voices weren't artificially strengthened.

Essentially what the electoral college seems to do is weaken the relative voice of people in hig population densitys while strengthening the voices in the opposite. Without this type of system it is possible and maybe even likely that high density areas would have ALL the voice and low density would have NONE or close to it. So either way isn't perfect but one seems better than the other to me because it still lets everyone have a voice.

I get that it makes complete logical sense to elect via a majority but that isn't the only variable to the equation. What matters is that every vote counts for something and that everyone has a voice. If a straight popular vote within the context of a large geographical area with high density areas actually achieves the opposite of "one vote one voice" then it really isn't a popular vote at all.

[70Chip]

Originally Posted by Daseal

FRPLG: I doubt our founding fathers had this insight. The electoral college was created because of poor communication and very long travel times. It was the best solution to a rather spread out country.

This was one reason. I think the main reason was that the founders thought most people were not capable of responsibly carrying out their civic duties. When I see Jay Leno do that quiz thing he does, I tend to see their point.

Also, the the likelihood of someone winning the popular vote and losing in the electoral college is fairly remote. It's unlikely to happen again in any of our lifetimes. It really shouldn't have happened in 2000. It's very rare that a man has such a distasteful persona that he loses his home state. I mean, even Mondale won Minnesota.