Posted on 08/28/2019 7:30:38 AM PDT by ChicagoConservative27
The controversial way America elects presidents is barreling toward a crisis point. A federal court ruling has spotlighted the confounding nature of the system, which twice in the last five elections put presidents into office against the wishes of the majority of American voters.
Under the Constitution, the voters who select a president every four years are, in fact, picking a party-chosen slate of electors pledged to that candidate. The presidential candidate who wins a state’s popular vote gets all its electors — except in Nebraska and Maine, which split the electors by Congressional districts. These electors formally select the president after Election Day passes. This mechanism solved two problems of 1789’s America that no longer plague the nation.
Mass, instant communication — of news, commentary and campaign rhetoric — means voters have no need to designate others to make informed choices, which was the argument Alexander Hamilton made in support of the Electoral College. The system also induced southern slave states to join the union by giving them power at a time when the more populous north would have dominated a national popular election.
(Excerpt) Read more at seattletimes.com ...
From the city who can’t figure out how to get human feces off of their streets.
Eliminate 2A and Electoral College and America as founded is eliminated. That is the goal of the left. They will never give up.
This whole argument that the rules should be changed because some recent elections would have been different if the rules were different is fallacious. If the rules were different, the campaigns would have been different. Trump would have campaigned heavily in NY and CA, and likely swayed or at least inspired a lot more to vote for him in those states where many simply didn’t vote because they knew it didn’t matter. No one knows what the result would have been under different rules.
A distant cousin (whom I never met) was one of the Missouri electors in 1948. Since he was a lawyer I’m sure that wasn’t his only college experience.
And it had nothing to do with slave states having less population. All the states, save Pa, allowed slavery, and at the time of the Constitutional Convention slavery was waning. It had already been banned north of the Ohio by the NW Ordinance which was passed unanimously by the Confederation Congress. Slavery’s rebirth came from Whitney’s cotton gin and Slater’s textile mill. Both events post convention. As for population, until large scale immigration after 1830 the north and south were roughly equal and contrary to what has long been taught in schools, the Missouri Compromise’s requirement of an equal number of free and slave states came from a fear that slave state populations might outnumber the North. How else is Mass’s wiilingness to allow Maine to separate from it to become a state to keep the balance equal if the House, based on population was supposedly safely in Free state hands.
That would give the states with fewer non-citizens more power in the Electoral College.
-PJ
Democrats hate the electoral college it’s to hard to jimmy but keep working at it.
So then, that just shows that nobody got a majority of the vote.
I live in seattle (well, nearby) and I don’t want SeattLunatics choosing my president either!
The states elect the president. This is another attempt to make turn the United States into the Feudal States.
The Federal income tax and the direct election of Senators neutered the States. Now they are trying to finish the job.
... twice in the last five elections put presidents into office against the wishes of the majority of American voters.
False.
I believe that would be the safe bet.
The only reform we need is to stop counting non-citizens for representational and electoral purposes. If we did this, the blue state cabal would lose 20%-30% of their political and electoral clout.
There is nothing stopping individual states from awarding their electors in any manner they wish.
The disparity of population between states is still a very relevant problem. The Seattle Times is full of sheepdip.
They will likely succeed in the next generation or two, unless there is a literal revival of understanding our history, what is in our constitution and why it's in there and that we must always fight to protect it. There is no time off.
...A republic, if you can keep it.
Now we see the harm done by the Supreme Court when it agreed to hear Bush v. Gore, a nonjusticeable political question if ever there was one.
The whole POINT of the Electoral College architecture was to make sure that the national government had no role in choosing their own replacements.
ELECTORS choose the President. Voters have NOTHING TO DO WITH IT, except as their State Legislatures allow.
Electors are State officials, appointed by their States. They are not accountable to the Executive Branch. They are not accountable to Congress except as provided in the Constitution. And they are not accountable to Article III courts.
The only way to bringing in some sort of legally binding "national popular vote" is to create a national authority to supervise, tabulate, and authenticate a result, which is EXCATLY what the Electoral College was designed to prevent.
There is no role for the public in the Constitutional system of choosing a President.
Even if that's true, so what?
"American voters" are not supposed to pick the President.
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