Because each state is a sovereign political entity.
Just look at what has happened to the senate and states since we started electing senators by statewide popular vote.
States with GOP super majorities still have democrat senators who do whatever the national party tells them to do.
The same reason the Senators are supposed to be picked by the States, to off set the publics House.
Thanks for the article. Thank God for the Electoral College I say. The only improvement I possibly would make on it would be to award the winner of the popular vote in each Congressional District with 1 electoral vote and the winner of the popular vote in each state 2 electoral votes.
The Electoral College diffuses and decentralizes power.
The electoral college is brilliant.
However, the Dems have even beat that by targeting distinct districts....something you can do only when you have the huge population of our country. Philly is a good example.
The early voting and all the other "how to cheat" methods help.
I agree... The electoral college does a great service of slightly diminishing the power of large population centers, and slightly exaggerating the impact of smaller less populated states. It changes the way campaigns are waged and strategized. It’s also why any notion of a national “popular vote” is spurious. There’s no such thing. If we had only a popular vote then the campaigns and the voting and the turnout would have been different too.
I use the analogy of the World Series. The Series is not won by counting all the runs across all seven games. The Series is batched into individual games each with its own strategy, and score, and a winner and loser. Then the team with the most winning games out of seven, wins the series.
It’s entirely possible that the loser of the World Series may have scored more runs in the whole series than the winner did, but it’s a meaningless statistic. That’s not the objective that the teams were playing for. If it was, the whole strategy and play of the games would have been radically different to suit.
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.
How many times is the word Democracy used in the US Constitution?
Electoral College was to further note that the states are not subordinate to the national government. The principle that it was “We the People” of the several states that created the federal government, and not the other way around.
Why in the heck do we want a federal government?
Without it we would become a democracy, the worst form of government ever devised!
Thank you for referencing that article gitmo.
As evidenced by the misguided interest in the electoral college, the only reason that ordinary citizens are concerned about who’s in the Oval Office these days is because of the wrongly perceived powers of the federal government, the Oval Office wrongly regarded by many as the most powerful office in the land.
And the reason for the federal government’s wrongly perceived powers is the following. Parents, for many generations, have not been making sure that their children are being taught about the federal government’s constitutionally limited powers, particularly Section 8 of Article I, the way that the Founding States had intended for those powers to be understood.
Otherwise, since one of the few thing the states have actually authorized Congress to regulate within a state’s borders that can affect citizens on an almost daily basis is the US Mail Service (Clause 7 of Section 8 of Article I), people would probably have to guess who the current president is if the federal government was actually respecting its constitutionally limited powers.
IMO, it would work much better if nailed down to the County level, not stopping at the state level. Make it on how many counties you win, not how many states.
3-4 counties in a state carries the whole state.
The EC, as it was originally intended to function, died almost before it was born.
It was intended to be an assemblage of eminent men, who would quite unconstrained choose a President. The careful description of how Congress would choose among the vote leaders when nobody got an actual majority in the EC implies that the Founders expected that to be the common way of electing the President.
The EC almost immediately became a rather awkward way of filtering the popular vote through a somewhat federalized second stage.
It still has virtues and there’s no particular reason to throw it under the bus, but the original idea of how it was to function vanished over 200 years ago.
The Founders put in place many brilliant innovations in governmental structure. The EC is one of their ideas that just never worked as intended.
Without question....
Because we don’t want the more populated port cities making all the decisions for everyone else. They have different economies, and different issues.
With the Electoral College and federalism, the Founding Fathers meant to empower the states to pursue their own interests within the confines of the Constitution. The National Popular Vote is an exercise of that power.
Unable to agree on any particular method, the Founding Fathers left the choice of method for selecting presidential electors exclusively to the states by adopting the language contained in section 1 of Article II of the U.S. Constitution— “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors . . .” The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly characterized the authority of the state legislatures over the manner of awarding their electoral votes as “plenary” and “exclusive.”
The Electoral College is now the set of 538 dedicated party activists who vote as rubberstamps for their party’s presidential candidate. That is not what the Founders intended.
During the course of campaigns, candidates are educated and campaign about the local, regional, and state issues most important to the handful of battleground states they need to win. They take this knowledge and prioritization with them once they are elected. Candidates need to be educated and care about all of our states.
The current state-by-state winner-take-all method of awarding electoral votes (not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but since enacted by 48 states), under which all of a state’s electoral votes are awarded to the candidate who gets the most votes in each separate state, ensures that the candidates, after the conventions, in 2012 did not reach out to about 80% of the states and their voters. 10 of the original 13 states are ignored now. Candidates had no reason to poll, visit, advertise, organize, campaign, or care about the voter concerns in the dozens of states where they were safely ahead or hopelessly behind.
80% of the states and people were just spectators to the presidential election. That’s more than 85 million voters, 200 million Americans.
Policies important to the citizens of non-battleground states are not as highly prioritized as policies important to ‘battleground’ states when it comes to governing.
States have the responsibility and power to make all of their voters relevant in every presidential election and beyond.
Since World War II, a shift of a few thousand votes in one or two states would have elected the second-place candidate in 4 of the 15 presidential elections
The National Popular Vote bill preserves the Electoral College and state control of elections. It changes the way electoral votes are awarded in the Electoral College.
Under National Popular Vote, every vote, everywhere, would be politically relevant and equal in every presidential election. Every vote would be included in the state counts and national count.
When states with a combined total of at least 270 Electoral College votes enact the bill, the candidate with the most popular votes in all 50 states and DC would get the needed majority of 270+ Electoral College votes from the enacting states. The bill would thus guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes.
Current federal law (Title 3, chapter 1, section 6 of the United States Code) requires the states to report the November popular vote numbers (the “canvas”) in what is called a “Certificate of Ascertainment.” They list the electors and the number of votes cast for each. You can see the Certificates of Ascertainment for all 50 states and the District of Columbia containing the official count of the popular vote at the NARA web site.
National Popular Vote has nothing to do with pure democracy. Pure democracy is a form of government in which people vote on policy initiatives directly. With National Popular Vote, the United States would still be a republic, in which citizens continue to elect the President by a majority of Electoral College votes by states, to represent us and conduct the business of government.
Federalism concerns the allocation of power between state governments and the national government. The National Popular Vote bill concerns how votes are tallied, not how much power state governments possess relative to the national government. The powers of state governments are neither increased nor decreased based on whether presidential electors are selected along the state boundary lines, or national lines (as with the National Popular Vote).
Democracy
Little Johnny brings a kitten in for show and tell, when asked is it a boy or a girl, little johnny cannot answer... teacher says she knows ... let us vote, majority rules!
Vote is taken ... majority says it is a female kitten!
When the little Tomcat grows up it has Govt. subsidized gender awareness therapy, is castrated and finally agrees with the majority = Democracy.
TT
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